Bag of Worms Yet Words

123. Marc Hauser, Harvard, Found Guilty of Misuse of Data and Use of Bogus Data

Hauser is a leading proponent of the scientific theory that basic maxims of morality, e.g., fairness, are structrually inborn in humans and present in the primate descendents of our common primate ancestors. Research assistants and a graduate student alleged to the university administration that he used bogus data. Professor Hauser is on leave. Scientific articles in professional journals in which the faulty data were used are being corrected or withdrawn.

I have briefly corresponded with Hauser regarding his book, Moral Minds, which I reviewed on the Web and which has been cited in this blog.

Tom Bartlett, "Harvard Find Psychology Researcher 'Solely Responsible' for Scientific Misconduct," Chronicle of Higher Education, August 20, 2010.

Gideon Gil, "Hauser found "responsible' for eight instances of misconduct", Boston Globe, August 20, 2010. Dean Michael Smith's letter to the faculty, announcing the findings of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Committee on Professional Conduct that investigated the allegations, is reprinted in the article.

Carolyn Y. Johnson, "Harvard to recify journal works", Boston.com, August 13, 2010. 

88. Monarch Butterfly Navigate With Antennal Clocks

Scientists continue to discover new animal mechanisms for migratory navigation. Birds and insects use perception of the Sun's position in the sky to guide their paths. If they followed the sun exactly, however, the movement of the sun across the sky would misdirect them. They correct their direction by adjusting the sun's position with an internal biochemical clock, the circadian, or daily, rhythm. Recent research shows that in butterflies the navigation mechanism is located in their antannae, not their brains.

The complexity of astronomical navigation in insects and animals, coordinating biochemical clocks in their bodies with the movement of the major astronomical bodies, with major features of the landscape over which they travel, and possibly magnetic compasses based on alignment of iron particles in brain cells, provide an evolutionary platform by which we can understand early human navigational tools.

Early humans obviously utilized second-hand animal-based navigation by following and learning from migrating animals, such as herds of deer; but we should not doubt that humans also utilized an astronomical event calendar that was preconscious long before they could think about it with self-awareness.

The valuated phenomenal world of early humans included stationary landscape features, such as cairns and paths; astronomical time-duration events, such as the diurnal motion of the sun, the monthly phases of the moon, and change of seasons; and cosmic time-duration events, such as the motion of the constellations and planets. These events were coordinated with human perception of time motion, involving at least two separate time calculation brain mechanisms, circadian cycles, and human life course events, such as onset of puberty and women's menstrual cycle. Such complicated time-calculation would have long preceded the building of megalithic astronomical calculators, such as Stonehenge. 

From Science (vol. 325, 25 September 2009, p. 1596), "Butterfly Navigation":

"Monarch butterflies emigrate to Mexico from varioius parts of North America in the fall and navigate with the aid of Sun compass. This navigational mechanism, also employed by migratory birds, uses the circadian clock to compensate for the positional change of the Sun in the sky throughout the day. This mechanism behind time-compensated Sun compass orientation has remained obscure. [Scientsts] now provide comprehensive data showing that the mechanism resides in the antannae of the butterflies, rather than the brain, as previously thought. The 'antennal clocks' found in the monarchs probably provide the primary timing mecnanism for Sun compass orientation. These findings reveal a further function for the antannae--a function that may extend widely to other insects that use this orientation mechanism."

The longer article is Charaloambos P. Kyriacou, "Unraveling Traveling," Science, vol. 325, 25 September 2009, p. 1629 ff.

Marc Hauser's "Moral Minds" and Postmodernism

Postmodern ideology has been wearing out its welcome for decades, but lingers for want of a decisive blow. That blow has at last been applied. Marc Hauser's work, Moral Minds, creates a new paradigm for the central Western discipline of moral philosophy. It is an intellectual revolution. Hauser claims that all human beings possess the same inborn moral faculty that generates our basic moral decisions and actions. The faculty's dictates are innate and beyond critical conscious reach. He claims that the faculty exists in the same way as, and by analogy to, the inborn language faculty that the MIT language philosopher, Noam Chomsky, believes generates human languages. Here is a summary in Hauser's words, put together from the "Prologue" and "Epilogue".

"The central idea of this book is simple: we evolved a moral instinct, a capacity that natural grows within each child, designed to generate rapid judgments about what is morally right or wrong based on an unconscious grammar of action. Part of this machinery was designed by the blind hand of Darwinian selection millions of years before our species evolved; other parts were added or upgraded over the evolutionary history of our species, and  are unique to humans and to our moral psychology. These ideas draw on insights from another instinct: language. (P. xviii.)

"Our expressed languages differ, but we generate each one on the basis of a universal set of principles. Our artistic expressions vary wildly, but the biology that underpins our aesthetics generates universal preferences for symmetry in the visual arts and consonance in music. The idea I have ... is that we should think of morality in the same way. Underlying the extensive cross-cultural variation we observe in our expressed social norms is a universal moral grammar that enables each child to grow a narrow range of possible moral systems. When we judge an action as morally right or wrong, we do so instinctively, tapping a system of unconsciously operative and inaccessible moral knowledge." (Pp. 419-420.)

Postmodernism

I will discuss how Hauser approaches his subject in a moment; but first I wish to point to the consequences of his thesis. Hauser narrowly limits his discussion of the implications of his thesis to three leading (Western) theories of moral philosophy (Hume, Kant, and Rawls) and his own discipline of psychology (relating to developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and comparative and evolutionary psychology). My assessment of its ramifications are my own. I address the strongest version of postmodern ideology. The strongest version has provoked wide public debate since the 1940s (marking the popular appearance of postmodern philosophy with existentialism). Fundamentally, Hauser's work strikes against three basic postulates of postmodernism.

(1) The strongest version of postmodernism asserts that human nature does not exist. Rather than human nature, all human beings share the human condition, which is created by similar circumstances shared historically and anthropologically by all human beings. The chief circumstances are material scarcity and social cooperation. Human beings have never been able to find enough food and shelter and sufficient assets of reproduction to guarantee the survival of all persons. Many persons die before their time. To survive, we humans have had to band together in social arrangements. Social arrangements create (through material dialectic and social dialogue) human personality, which is the fundamental reality of human beings--more fundamental than human biology and gender. Rather than human beings, we should speak of human persons. Since circumstances  of scarcity and social life are shared by all, they generate many similar responses in people and societies. Observers have misidentified these similar responses as the result of a universal human nature, rather being produced by similar circumstances.

Social arrangements differentiate from one another and develop a phenomenal reality for their members that we call "culture." Human reality, based in human personality, is therefore grounded in specific cultures, differentiated (mostly) by language. This situation is called cultural relativity. There is no fundamental human similarity shared across cultures. This is the strong version of the anthropological theory, called cultural relativity. (For background, see my discussion of cultural relativity.)

(2) Postmodern ideology also asserts that human mentation is not grounded in universal, shared mental faculties. This claim follows from the primary claim that there is no such thing as a "human nature" shared by all human beings. We can subdivide the claim into several propositions. (a) There is no universal faculty of reason (i.e., no universal set of faculties of reasoning); (b) there is no single ground of rationality upon which all persons of different cultures could find common agreement; and (c) all human reasoning begins in arbitrary and unprovable grounds.

Put differently, there is no universal rationality shared by all persons regardless of their gender, race, culture, and society. This implication means that there is no fundamental "truth" and no single method of correctly reasoning that could be discovered by any one person or group. All the different methods of reasoning by different societies are equally true, valid, and valuable, because they spring out of an irrational "decision" made at some historical or anthropological state of cultural development. Postmodernists use the term, decision, to refer to the specific basis of a mode of reasoning, because it nicely connotes the material and social circumstances that must have compelled some ancestors to posit a method of thinking that worked for them. The implication of this postmodernist position is that there is no transcendental standpoint from which to say that one such decision is true or valid and other decisions false or invalid.

Hard line postmodernists would also say there is no transcendental standpoint from which to judge one decision by one culture as better or more successful than a decision by another culture; they are only different. The putative cultural relativity of human mental activity is the basis for the postmodernist celebration of cultural and social diversity and for the assertion that European mental activity (as in modern science and mathematics) is not uniquely true and valid. In this way, postmodern ideology suited the post-1945 era of European de-colonization. It is the source of ethno-mathematics and ethno-science (e.g., ethno-botany).

(3) The final claim of postmodernism, that I wish to mention, is that discursive narration, generated in social conversation, also called "discourse", is the original and ultimate form of reasoning. All other modes, such as deductive logic and the scientific experimental method, for instance, are but versions of narrative reasoning. (It is easy to understand why postmodern ideology became so popular in academic literature and language departments!) Further, all categories that appear in narratives, such as good and bad, right and wrong, appearance and reality, natural and supernatural, etc., are products of the narrative; the narrative is not structured by them. Historical narrative, broadly conceived, is the only mode of explanation that we, human persons, comprehend as rational. All other forms of reasoning are versions of narrative that are rationally comprehensible to the extent they borrow the narrative form.

The Moral Faculty

The three postmodern claims have dominated the intellectual life of the US and Europe for two generations. Hauser's revolutionary thesis provides strong evidence against all of them. Now it is time to look at what Hauser does. We will conclude by returning to the postmodern ideology and showing how Hauser's theory works against it's broadest ideological claims.

Hauser describes his theory as a "radical rethinking" of moral philosophy. He places the radicalism in drastically curtailing the scope of moral behavior that he is to explain; but more is radical in the theory than that. He is radical in postulating a common organic source of moral decisions expressed by all human beings, rather than accepting the prevailing methods of comparative anthropology or ethnology. His problem is that no organic center, or integrated set of organic centers, has been identified in the brain as the seat from which the moral instinct operates. Such a center is, in his theory, therefore, a hypothetical entity. For shorthand, let us call such a hypothecated organic system, of brain centers, neurological integration, and operation of an inborn moral grammar, the moral faculty, as Hauser sometimes does (pp. 53-54). Hauser is in the same situation as Chomsky and supporters of the notion that there is a language center. The theory of a syntax central is widely supported, but as yet, after a half-century of trying, no one has conclusively identified a brain system that spits out the same grammatical structure for hundreds of different human languages. So Hauser's theory of a moral faculty shall be controversial for the same reason that Chomsky's language theory remains controversial.

That Hauser's moral faculty is hypothetical does not make it non-scientific. Hauser is emphatic that his method is the same method as that of Galileo (p. xviii); indeed, we will refer to some of the intriguing experimental evidence for his theory. Science is filled with hypothetical entities, forces, and substances. Astronomers and cosmologists, for instance, believe in the existence of "dark matter". Dark matter has never been directly observed. Its existence has been deduced from observations of the deformations of patterns of observed matters under the influence of conventional gravitational forces, per general relativity theory. The deformations are assumed to the result of the presence of unobserved masses, hence "dark" matter. The existence of the planet Neptune was similarly discovered by noting the deformations of paths of other planets, caused by the effect of its mass. Eventually, Neptune was observed. Hauser is within his scientific rights, so to speak, to believe that eventually the moral faculty will be observed with conventional tools of brain mapping, such as MRI.

To make his existence of his moral faculty credible, Hauser must demonstrate that the results of its operation could not be explained by environment or culture of the moral actor. Hauser's method is taken from Chomsky's method of arguing in favor of a grammatical faculty. Hauser outlines four steps of inference to the existence of the moral faculty:

"1. Identify a particular piece of knowledge in mature individuals.
"2. Identify what kind of input is necessary or indispensable [sic] for the learner to acquire this piece of knowledge.
"3. Demonstrate that this piece of knowledge is not present or available from the environment [including culture known to the learner].
"4. Show that the knowledge is nonetheless available and present in the child, at the earliest possible age, prior to any relevant input." (P. 66.)

What are some of the "pieces of knowledge" of morality, identified by Hauser, possessed by adults and by children before they are (presumably) old enough to have received them from their environment and culture? They are elementary categories and distinctions related to violence. Such categories and distinctions include: harming/helping, intended/accidental, intended-foreseen/unintended-foreseen. Relating to justice, a piece of knowledge identified by Hauser related to fairness of distribution of goods: one person (or group or class) gets all/other(s) get nothing.

To analyze these categories and distinctions, Hauser utilizes moral thought experiments conducted on thousands of adults and children. Here is one such experiment. Imagine a railroad train driving down a railroad track. Ahead of the hurtling train is a switch in the track. Beyond the switch, walking on the main track, are five persons. On the switching track is a single person. You are an observer near the switch. You see the train coming. You realize that if the train stays on the main track it will hit and kill the five persons walking on the track. If you can switch the train to the switch track, the train will hit and kill  only the one person walking on the switch track. Should you switch the train to the switching track, saving the lives of the five persons but killing one person on the switching track? That is, would you be morally wrong to sacrifice the one person to save five persons (i.e., is it permissible to sacrifice the one person)?

Resolution of the dilemma is the same for adults and children across cultures. Resolution requires distinguishing between intended, foreseen consequences and unintended and foreseen consequences. Every one states that the observer would not be morally culpable for the unintended killing of the person walking on the switch track. That death is not in the same category of moral responsibility as would be the intended killing of five persons on the main track by your refusal to switch the train to the switching track.

Here is an example of a "piece of knowledge" used in the morality of fairness. Two persons are involved in the experiment (but there could be more). A sum of money is given to one of the two persons to distribute or not to distribute as he/she arbitrarily decides to others. When this experiment is given to adults and children, uniformly across cultures, they reject as unfair that the person, to whom the money is given, keeping all the money for himself or herself. It would be fair to keep most of the money, as much as 60 or 70 percent of it; but it is seen as unfair to keep all of it.

How does a grammar of morality work with regard to such categories and distinctions? The grammar of morality provides a structure of variables, with each variable containing categories and distinctions. The variables are "agent", "action", "receiver [of action]", "consequence", "moral evaluation".

The variable, "action", contains the category of intentionality with the distinction, "intentional/unintentional". The receiver contains such distinctions as "someone related by blood to me/someone not related by blood to me" and "someone located physically next to me/someone located far away from me". The variable, "moral evaluation", contains the distinction "right/wrong" or "permissible action/acceptable action/forbidden action", and "fair/unfair".

The moral grammar does not specify what particular agents, actions, receivers, consequences, and evaluations are to fit into the each category.  It is not oriented to particular actions, or intentions, or consequences in the stream of a person's experiences and expectations. The particulars will be as diverse and unique as there are diverse humans in diverse and unique environments and cultures. Rather, it provides a scheme whereby particular actions, intents, and outcomes are organized so as to make moral evaluation possible. (Pp. 36-38, 44-50.)

Hauser assesses three models for explaining how the moral grammar works, based on the moral philosophy of David Hume (Humean model), Immanuel Kant (Kantian model), and John Rawls (Rawlsian model). The Humean model explains the moral evaluation as driven by emotion. Though eclipsed by the Kantian model for two centuries, the Humean model has recently come back into favor through recognition of the role of empathy in moral evaluation and the discovery of mirror neurons in the brain. Mirror neurons reflect the emotion of a person being observed. If an observer is observing a sad person, for instance, the mirror neurons fire up sadness in the observer. Because of mirror neurons, we can feel what another person is feeling, i.e., empathize with them. The Kantian model sees moral evaluation as driven by rational judgment. The agent compares the intended action to a moral principle and acts or aborts action according to whether the intended action would be ethical. In the Rawlsian model, a moral judgment is made (by the innate moral faculty), then reasons and emotions are brought into play to motivate the agent to go through with the act called for by the judgment. Hauser thinks the Rawlsian model is now the moral faculty works.

As a scientist, Hauser must provide a naturalistic explanation of the existence of the moral faculty, as well as its operation. Much of the book is devoted to demonstrating that precursors of the moral grammar are present in how infants structure expectation about events in the world. Hauser draws upon a host of fascinating experiments in child psychology to show that the structure of the moral grammar (agent, action, receiver, consequence, evaluation) is present nearly from birth in the infant's interaction with the world, for example, in infant perception of continuity of action.

He must also make sense of the moral faculty in terms of Darwinian evolution and natural selection. The existence of a moral faculty would not be credible if it could not be explained as a product of human evolution by natural selection. As a result, Hauser brings forward research in primate psychology to demonstrate that some primates have the precursors to a moral grammar, in, for instance, behavior expressing reciprocity and fairness.

The evolutionary appearance of the moral faculty is tied to the rise of primate and human social behavior. Human survival (in the hunter-gatherer stage of evolution) has clearly required social cooperation. Social cooperation requires fairness, mutual aid, and arrangements to detect and punish cheaters and liars. The moral faculty is, as Hauser observes it in action, especially attuned to social cooperation of small groups of kin-related individuals. It is precisely the kind of mental agency that we would expect to be selected under survival pressure. Darwin himself (Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872) and later Darwinians saw social morality evolving to make social organization possible under the horrible circumstances imposed on early humans by competition and scarcity. Hauser's work is in this tradition of Darwinian explanation. The evidence that Hauser brings forward to place the moral faculty in this tradition makes his theory strongly credible.

Connecting the theory of the Moral Faculty to Postmodernism

We began this essay by looking at three fundamental assumptions of postmodern ideology. Hauser's theory contravenes all three. Let's see how. Postmodernism asserts that a human nature does not exist. The socially formed personality is the basic unit of humanness. This assertion falls immediately, because the moral faculty pre-exists both conversation and the formation of personality. It provides a structure of evaluation, categories, and distinctions within which language, conversation, and social interaction occur. It is a structure of human nature.

The second postmodern principle we examined is that there is no universal rationality shared by all human persons. This principle also clearly falls before the theory of the moral faculty. Moral judgments are a major part of human mental activity. The moral grammar is shared by all human beings, as part of their Darwinian biological heritage. It provides a signature of humanity. All human beings can recognize all other human beings by their possession of the moral faculty.

The strong version of cultural relativity also collapses in front of the moral faculty. The culture line is not an absolute boundary between kinds of human persons. All humans are within the circle described by possession of the moral faculty. What Hauser's theory does is to provide support for the historical, soft version the notion of cultural relativity. The moral grammar provides the structure and variables (which Hauser calls "switches") for generation of moral judgments; local culture provides settings (or values) for the variables. Indeed, Hauser's theory provides a new paradigm for cultural research by ethnologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists--to examine how the local values of local culture fit into the moral grammar, that is, how the moral faculty operates in local culture.

The third postmodern principle we examined is the notion that narrative is the basic form of human reasoning. This principle, too, collapses before Hauser's moral faculty. The structures observed within narration, such as agent, action, receiver, etc., and moral categories, are not generated by and within the narrative, but pre-exist the narrative. Discursive narration is a mode (and but one mode) of reasoning. It develops upon the structure provided by the moral faculty (and the language faculty, if one accepts Chomsky).

There is much to celebrate about Hauser's work. His work decisively shatters postmodern theory of human beings. It does not do this needed chore by itself, as I have written elsewhere; but it delivers the coup de grâce in postmodernism's most sensitive spot--the moral understanding of humankind.

*Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universe Sense of Right and Wrong (New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 2006; hardbound 489 pages).

(Corrections, December 20, 2006. )

The Insidiousness of Sociological Explanation

I am reading Harvey Cox, Fire From Heaven (1995), an account and explanation of the Pentecostal movement that began in the Azusa Street church revival of Black preacher, William Seymour, in 1906, in Los Angeles. Pentecostalism is considered today (Cox reports in 1995) the fastest growing religious affiliation around the world, numbering between 500 million and one billion members. Harvey Cox is Professor of Religion at the Harvard Divinity School. He is an esteemed member of the Judeo-Christian-Northeastern interfaith elite that the acts as the intelligentsia for the Blue States. He is the author of several influential studies of the place of religion in contemporary society. He considers himself a student of the great existentialist Lutheran theologian, Paul Tillich (a man whose ideas I also greatly respect). I think that Cox fits into the category of a postmodern religious thinker.

Cox did not study Pentecostalism from the inside or as a believer. He developed out of a Quaker family background, with apostasy on one side--an uncle slipped into the Baptist Church and occasionally brought young Harvey Cox along with him. From the quietist perspective of the Quakers, reinforced by the solitary intellectual life of the academic scholar, Cox was unsympathetic to the vivid expressionism and primitive qualities of Pentecostal worship and prayer. His study of the movement did not convince him of Pentecostalism, but it begrudgingly earned his judgment that something was going on in Pentecostalism.

The question is, what was (is) going on in Pentecostalism? I knew, after reading the first few chapters, that Cox was going to have a hard time understanding what was going on because of the approaches he takes to the phenomenon. First, Cox is intrigued by the sociological characteristics of the early members of the Pentecostal movement. Men and women, Black and white, Pentecostals are from the lowest rungs of American society. They are, to use a word that Cox does not use, members of the proletariat. From the start, Cox explains the Pentecostals, as much as he describes them.  Explanation is a distancing maneuver typical of social science. It turns the subjects into objects, though it does not dehumanize them. So Cox sees membership in Pentecostalism as a product of working class alienation from the insecurities of modern capitalist society. Capitalism has alienated the workers from society; it has alienated them from  themselves. To overcome this alienation, workers join the Pentecostal movement, because Pentecostalism is a religion of experience (rather than creed or doctrine). It is primitive. It emphasizes wholeness of emotion.

This kind of explanation of social commitment was developed by the Frankfurt School, an influential band of German scholars in the 1920s and 1930s, who fused Marxism and Freudian analysis in an effort to understand the rise of the Nazi movement. Cox is intimating that Pentecostalism is a kind of fascism.

Second, Cox uses a Marxist scheme of categories to describe the Pentecostals. Not only are the members proletarians; proletarianism is a fundamental unitary category. It is more basic, as a unit of society and as a category of sociological analysis, than race or gender. Indeed, race and gender would be (from a Marxist/postmodern perspective) socially constructed categories imposed onto proletarianism. Cox sees something admirable in this characteristic of Pentecostalism. Pentecostalism has been an inter-racial movement with integrated congregations. Pentecostalism had the potential to overcome the division (and opposition) between Black and white that capitalism has created.

This sociological analysis is a kind of naturalism; it is a naturalistic description and explains Pentecostalism in debunking way. For Harvey, Pentecostalism is not necessarily false religion. He sees it as "primal" or "primitive" religious expression. This description of "primal" in connection with Pentecostalism's African American origin is, unintentionally perhaps, an embarrassing racialism. Whatever it is, Pentecostalism is not "true". Whatever the writhings, weeping, singing, ecstatic emotionalism of a Pentecostal prayer might be, it is not genuinely the result of God's spirit pouring into the congregation.  Indeed, given the naturalist approach Harvey uses, he could arrive at no other conclusion. Conveniently, to discover that Pentecostalism is not true protects as true Cox's elite brand of Christianity.

There are different approaches to understanding Pentecostalism that Cox might have taken, but did not. He  might have taken a phenomenological approach. I think that phenomenology can be a dangerous technique, especially as, for instance, Heidegger used it; but it is useful for recovering the reality of religious experience.

A phenomenological approach would have given Cox the means to appreciate what was genuine and real in the Pentecostal experience. We might say, for instance, that the working class origins of Pentecostals did not alienate them or push them, in the sense of cause them, to become members of Pentecostalism, where they had their interesting primal  experiences. Rather, being of the working class created an opening in their lives in which genuinely novel experience could happen (the Pentecostal person is authentic, to use the existential language). As working class persons, they were not encumbered with the learned naturalistic ideology that prohibits Cox, for instance, from experiencing God's Holy Spirit. Within this opening, they are receptive to the Holy Spirit. I suppose this way of expressing the Pentecostal situation might be parallel to the doctrine of Grace. The sinner cannot receive God's Grace until she has situated herself and disowned the pride that blocks Grace.

What Cox's approach prevents him from seeing and from saying is, the Pentecostals really are experiencing God. God is not what they think they are experiencing. God is actually what, in the Pentecostals' experiences, the Pentecostals are experiencing. It is Cox, not the Pentecostal, who is alienated.

Values (8) Collapsing the Fact-Value Distinction

Existentialism collapses the fact-value distinction. Building on a philosophy called phenomenology, existential philosophers, led by Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre in the twentieth century, argued that facts cannot be distinguished from moral values or moral values from facts in an absolute way. Facts are always saturated with values; indeed, they are inseparable.

The existentialists attack the fact-value distinction from several directions. First, arguing as phenomenologists, they claim that all knowledge we possess, whether of facts, values, or anything else, is contained within consciousness as structured by intentionality. We can have no knowledge derived from any other source. We cannot step outside our consciousness to compare our ideas with anything else. We cannot experience our consciousness independently of intentionality. Second, they claim that the consciousness of each of person is situated, rather than existing independently. A situation is a intentional act (or action) taken by a person in her relationship with other persons and in the midst of nature, as she experiences them. Third, the existentialists maintain that our understanding of our situation is embedded in conversational language. We are continually engaged in discussions or dialogues with other persons - what they call called "discourse". When we say that something "makes sense", making sense derives from our participation in dialogues.

A fact and a value do not arise separately within our experience. Fact and value arise together. (Indeed, they arise together with a lot of other contents of our mind.) They assume each other and shape each other. They are relative to the situations we are in and to the language we know and use to talk about our experience. For instance, we never experience the killing of one person by another person simply as a "fact". We see it occur, recognize that it takes place, organize our observations of it in our totality of experience, and take action regarding it, because we have values about killing. In addition to values as moral standards, we have feelings, commitments, and disinclinations that automatically put us in a posture of approval, disapproval, or temporary neutrality, or some other attitude, as the event occurs. If we experience a killing as "an objective, value-free observation", it is because of the situation we are in, not because the killing actually has an objective, value-free existence. When, for example, a sociologist studies killings through the instrument of statistical surveys, the value-free objectivity experienced by the sociologist is simply a pose constructed by the situation of being a scientist in the computer lab. When that same person is home with her family and sees a killing occur outside her home, she condemns it, is angry toward the killer, is roused to physical action, and quickly moves to protect her family from the killer. In this situation, she is no longer a "social scientist"; she is a "mother" and "wife" and the fact of killing is not value-free, to say the least!  A different way of stating this point is that, in the phenomenological-existentialist tradition, there are no "facts"; everything is values.

It is possible, by and large, to ignore the technical arguments of philosophers, as long as their arguments stay within the professional province of academic philosophy. We can get along in ordinary life with common sense without knowing anything that philosophers say. Even when philosophy gets picked up by literature and the arts, which have wider audiences than philosophy, it is still possible in ordinary life to ignore philosophical ideas. In this case, however, the phenomenologist-existentialist assault on the fact-value distinction did not stay within its technical professional province. It made its way into academic history and philosophy of science, a dry and arcane study. Reaching out from the history and philosophy of science, it profoundly influenced general conceptions of the nature of science. Since science is the most pervasive and important intellectual activity of the West, the changing conception of science had a large general impact on Western thought and society.

The American historian and philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,* brought the phenomenological understanding of fact and value to our understanding of science. Kuhn claimed that scientists work within social-intellectual communities. Each community is built on the scientists' acceptance of an approach to doing scientific work that he called a paradigm. Controversially, Kuhn asserted that scientists are committed to their paradigm in a way that it cannot be disproved for them. Scientific paradigms are consigned to the dustbin of history only when outside scientists, who are not committed to a paradigm, believe the tests disproving it, socially organize themselves to get rid of it, and create a new paradigm to replace it.

Kuhn's theory of how science works is controversial, because he claimed that scientists are ultimately ruled by their values, that is, by their commitments. Their values are so strong that they will not even recognize disproof of their theory when it happens. We can restate this claim in terms of the fact-value discussion we have been having. The scientists' values shape their facts.

For the opponents of Kuhn, it seems as if Kuhn subjected science to politics, political ideology, and subjective emotions. By erasing the fact-value distinction as a large framework within which  science takes place, Kuhn destroyed the objectivity of science as objectivity was traditionally understood. In a certain sense, the critics are correct. I have only briefly characterized Kuhn's work, however. I have not explained how (according to Kuhn) paradigms works and how paradigm replacement occurs intellectually. Kuhn recovers objectivity within the paradigm (unlikely as that sounds, given what I have said above) and in the shift from one paradigm to another. It is beyond the purpose of this discussion to explain how he makes this recovery; but limited objectivity and a limited applicability of the fact-value distinction is obtained within the paradigm. Within the paradigm, science looks a lot like it was traditionally supposed to look.

Today at the outset of the twenty-first century, the collapse of the fact-value distinction stands and the implications of the collapse grow. Post-modern advocates of the phenomenological-existentialist philosophy are pushing to reinterpret other areas of Western thought, such as law, in terms of it. Certainly, the collapse has affected political and foreign policy discussions in the U.S., where its consequences for how we view our nation's friends and enemies seem momentous. If the fact-value distinction is to be resurrected, if values are to be set in their own intellectual realm, much work needs to be done.

Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Definitions Not Used
• 3. Popular Definition
• 4. Social Science Definitions
• 5. Philosophical Definition: Existentialism
• 6. Cultural Relativism
• 7. The Fact-Value Distinction
• 8. Collapsing the Fact-Value Distinction

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* Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962;revised 1970). A useful opposing view, focusing on values, is provided by Larry Laudan, Science and Values: The Aims of Science and Their Role in Scientific Debate (1984).

Values (7) The Fact-Value Distinction

Let us briefly review the fact-value distinction itself, then turn to its collapse. The fact-value distinction arises in Western philosophy of ethics.* It is invoked to avoid committing the naturalistic fallacy in argument. A fact is a true statement of an existing or past state of affairs in nature or in society. The statement, "Objects with mass fall from rest with an accelerated motion equal to [(1*g*t^2)/2] to the surface of the earth in earth's gravitational field", is a fact. The statement, "The living room of the house at 35 Riverdale Street, Trenton, New Jersey, contained two stuffed chairs on August 17, 1984", is a fact, if true. A value in ethics is a statement of moral obligation. The statements, "It is wrong to kill another human being", is a verbal statement of the moral value prohibiting murder.

Since the rise of modern science, four hundred years ago, many thinkers believed that increasing scientific knowledge would help humanity become more morally enlightened. Hope burgeoned in the nineteenth century, because Darwin's work helped us to understand better the role of our animal nature in our human behavior. Such hope assumes there is a connection between factual knowledge and moral obligation. The fact-value distinction, as employed by philosophers, denies such a connection, in at least one sense. It states that a fact cannot logically entail a moral obligation. An obligation cannot be deduced from a statement of fact. An "'ought' statement" cannot be deduced from an "'is' statement". You cannot deduce, because a statement of fact is true, that you are obligated do anything.

Here is an example. Suppose sociologists and anthropologists do a study that proves that killing of children is common in all human societies. They prove that infanticide is a universal human social trait. Can we infer any moral obligation from this fact? Could we infer, for instance, that it is okay to kill children? Could we infer that we ought to kill children, or at least some children? Could we infer that you or I, specifically, should go out and kill a child and it would be morally right for us to do so? Most of us would immediately say, no; the existence of infanticide does not obligate us to commit infanticide and does not make infanticide right.

When we deduce a value from a fact we make a particular kind of logical mistake that philosophers call the "naturalistic fallacy". We can turn the mistake around. It is equally a mistake to deduce a fact from a value. To continue the example above, suppose that sociologists and anthropologists prove that all human societies on earth, even isolated and remote groups, hold the value that killing a person is morally wrong. Could we deduce from the universal injunction against murder that no murders (as a fact) ever occur? Of course not.

The fact-value distinction is important, because it protect ethics and science from each other. The distinction places ethics in an intellectual and social realm where we can imagine an ideal world and debate about it. Our values are not simple reflections of our behavior. We can criticize our behavior, as we factually understand it, and try to make it better to meet moral standards we recognize. Science is also protected. Scientific investigation is logically free from distortion by the moral values of scientists and anyone else. The distinction prevents wishful moral thinking from clouding our study of how nature and society really are.

Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Definitions Not Used
• 3. Popular Definition
• 4. Social Science Definitions
• 5. Philosophical Definition: Existentialism
• 6. Cultural Relativism
• 7. The Fact-Value Distinction
• 8. Collapsing the Fact-Value Distinction

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With a introductory survey knowledge of the history of Western philosophy, the Wikipedia article on the fact-value distinction is useful; but it over-emphasizes the importance of Nietzsche and does not adequately cover twentieth century developments. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact-value_distinction

Values (6) Cultural Relativism

The concept of values and the role of values in social life and morality are controversial today, I believe, for two main reasons. The first reason is the widespread acceptance of the social science principle of cultural relativism.* The second reason is the collapse of the philosophical distinction between fact and value. These ideas undercut today's popular understanding of values. The concepts of cultural relativism (or relativity) and the fact-value distinction originated in Europe in the nineteenth century as intellectual strategies in the ideological, philosophical, and scientific disputes of that time. Cultural relativism was deployed against religion, scientism, racism, and ethno-nationalism. The concept of the fact-value distinction was a response to Darwinian naturalism. The collapse of the distinction between facts and values, beginning in the 1970s, and the concept of cultural relativism are central to post-modernist ideology that became popular in academia.

In the following discussion of cultural relativism, a complicated principle, we focus only on questions of values. The fact-value distinction will be discussed in a later article. I label cultural relativism a principle, rather than a fact, because it has not been universally verified. Rather, it appears as an operative procedure of anthropological investigation with significant empirical support. Cultural relativism is also widely accepted in other social science disciplines.

The concept of cultural relativism claims that all values arise individually within specific cultures and that no values are universally shared across cultures (except by borrowing). This claim means that a prominent value in Western culture, for example, that is shared with passionate commitment among its members might be unknown in another culture, such as an Amazon River basin native people. For instance, one society might strongly value individualism and reward unique achievement; but a different society might have collective values and enforce conformity. The claim also means that people share notions of what is good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, for example, only within their culture. There is no idea of good and bad that meaningfully transcends all cultures and is shared in the same way with the same meaning by all peoples irrespective of their cultures. For example, what is murder in one culture is not murder in another culture, but, perhaps, demonstration of group leadership potential. What is rape in one society is not rape in another, but, perhaps, courtship. What is genital mutilation in one society is not genital mutilation in another, but perhaps a spiritual ritual demonstrating holiness.

Cultural relativism implies a judicial principle: Values and behavior of one culture cannot be judged from the perspective of the values and behavior of a different culture. For example, in one society, for a man to kill his father's oldest brother might be an acceptable means of establishing tribal leadership and draw much admiration; it cannot be condemned as murder simply because in a different culture such an act would be murder.

The claims of cultural relativism rests upon two assumptions. The first assumption is that there no common human nature shared by all human beings. By human nature is meant a substantive constitution of mind and body that is uniform in all humans across racial, ethnic, cultural, and political groupings. If human nature were to exist, some values would arise out of it, as humans operationalized their human nature in living in diverse conditions; and these values would the same for all humans. This notion is denied by the principle of cultural relativism. 

The concept of human nature lies behind the opposition of the anthropologist, Clyde Kluckhohn, to cultural relativity, as expressed in this quotation:

"Contrary to the statements of ... exponents of extreme cultural relativity, standards and values are not completely relative to the cultures from which they derive. Some values are as much givens in human life as the fact that bodies of certain densities fall under specified conditions. These are founded, in part, upon the fundamental biological similarities of all human beings. They arise also out of the circumstance that human existence is invariably a social existence. No society has ever approved suffering as a a good thing in itself. As a means to an end (purification or self-discipline), yes; as punishment--as a means to the ends of society, yes. But for itself--no. No culture fails to put a negative valuation upon killing, indiscriminate lying, and stealing within the in-group. There are important variations, to be sure, in the conception of the extent of the in-group and in the limits of toleration of lying and stealing under certain conditions.  But in the core notion of the desirable and nondesirable is constant across all cultures. Nor need we dispute the universality of the conception that rape or any achievement of sexuality by violent means is disapproved. This is a fact of observation as much as the fact that different materials have different specific gravities."**

The second assumption concerns language.  Advocates of cultural relativism claim that the human ability to use language, create abstract symbols, and construct meanings is not determined by human biology or brain structure. All humans freely invent the mental world in which their consciousness lives (so to speak). All the phenomenological contents of consciousness, such as values, are completely enveloped in the freely invented mental world. This mental world is  "culture."  Humans shape their culture to meet their needs according to whatever intentions and goals they have. As a result of this freedom, human beings are divided into many groups, each sharing a unique culture. The enormous number and diversity of human languages and sublanguages are proof of the diversity of cultures and strong support for the notion of cultural relativism.

Advocates of cultural relativism believe that the capacity to create culture is equally shared among all humans. Regardless of the level of technological or political evolution of their societies, all cultures are equally complex and equally innovative adaptations to the environments in which their constituent societies must exist.

In the 1940s and 1950s, many social scientists refused to follow advocates of cultural relativism in arguing that no values transcended cultures, that is, that there are no universal values. The Kluckhohn quotation (above) makes it clear that the notion of human nature is crucial to the scientific credibility of universality of values, or at least some values. (We are not discussing religious concepts of human nature.) In the 1970s and following decades, advocates of post-modernism strongly attacked the concept of human nature. From their point of view, because culture is a language-construct, it is logically and as a matter of fact free from human biology.

A second attack on the notion of human nature and universalism of values was provided by the existentialists, notably Heidegger and Sartre, whom we have briefly discussed in our previous article. The philosophy of these thinkers greatly influenced the literary theorists who promulgated post-modernism. For both philosophers, values are produced within the context of social negotiation and verbal dialog between persons. Sartre called this context a "situation". Situations are not dependent upon human biology. It is the "human condition", or "human situation", not human nature, to which all values are relative.

Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Definitions Not Used
• 3. Popular Definition
• 4. Social Science Definitions
• 5. Philosophical Definition: Existentialism
• 6. Cultural Relativism
• 7. The Fact-Value Distinction
• 8. Collapsing the Fact-Value Distinction

-------

* Wikipedia discusses the anthropological principle of cultural relativism in a useful article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_relativism) with references.

** P. 418, Parsons and Shils, eds., Toward a General Theory of Action.

Values (4) Social Science Definitions

American Social Science

The concept of values became the center of social theory in American social science in the 1940s and 1950s. The struggles against fascism and communism convinced social scientists - along with the rest of Americans - that the basic values of those totalitarian societies were fundamentally different from the values of America. In the context of World War Two and the early Cold War, values were of life and death importance. Scientists carefully studied values empirically. They discussed the meaning of values in social relations. Values, as they defined them, were the basis of our free society.

After the mid-twentieth century, the interest of social scientists shifted away from the study of values. This shift in interest resulted largely from the rise of post-modernist theory in the 1970s and 1980s, which held an extreme position on cultural relativity. In post-modern theory, all values were completely relative to the cultures which held them. Values were seen to be the products of social processes, such as mythmaking, and ideologies. Values were not fundamental entities; they were, consequently, less important to study.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the leading social theorist of values was the Harvard sociologist, Talcott Parsons. In 1951, Parsons and Edward Shils, of the University of Chicago, published a theory of sociology{1} in which values held center place. We will approach the social science concept of values through their theory.

Before I discuss the social science definition of values, I shall briefly discuss the social science approach to the study of values. Social scientists - like all scientists - can study only observables they can describe and measure. They can study behavior, including social behavior, because they can observe it; but they cannot study consciousness, because they cannot (directly) observe states of awareness. This is one reason social science is sometimes called behavioral science. When studying values, therefore, the social scientists can study only the behavior that expresses values, but not the experience of values in the minds of persons. As a result, the way in which social scientists discuss values will seem to the nonscientists somewhat indirect and stilted. With that preface, let's look at some definitions.

The Parsons and Shils text provides several definitions that are useful. Here is the simplest, by Harvard anthropologist, Clyde Kluckhohn:

"A value is a conception, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influences the selection [of behavior] from available modes, means, and ends of action."{2}

Let's take this definition apart, starting with the notion of social behavior.

Individual persons behave in social situations, that is, in situations of relationships with other persons. Behavior is functional and goal-directed. We act to acquire something or solve a problem. All social behavior involves choosing one behavior or one path of behaviors from a range of alternatives. The Kluckhohn definition starts with what can be observed by the scientist, which is the behavior of a person or a group. Behaviors that are repeated are a pattern of behavior, representing a pattern of choices. The concept of values explains, for the social scientist, why one behavior is selected from the range of possible behaviors. A "value" is the idea in the mind of the person of what is desirable that guides that person to select one behavior and reject other behaviors.

Clearly, in this case, the value in the mind of the person (or in the minds of persons in a group exhibiting a common pattern of choices) cannot be directly observed by the scientist. From the scientist's point of view, the "value" is a hypothetical entity. The scientist can, however, interview the person, who might testify to the existence of what the person herself might called her "values"; this would prove the evidence of the hypothetical entity that the scientist calls a "value". By inference,therefore, the scientist is confident that a "value" does exist as an idea in the mind of the person.

The social scientists also invented and used the concept, "value-orientation". They employ this concept to identify, label, and explain a feature of value-based behavior that they had observed. "Values" implied that a certain behavior ought to be selected. A value was not simply a desirable choice, it was a choice that should be taken. Persons felt compelled to make a particular choice. What compelled them? Commitment.

Parsons stated the definition this way:

"Value-orientation refers to those aspects of the actor's orientation which commit him to the observance of certain norms, standards, criteria of selection, whenever he is in a contingent situation which allows (and requires) him to make a choice."{3}

Parsons identified three patterns (modes) of value-orientation; that is, he identified three kinds of commitments that persons feel that are involved in making choices of how to behave{4}. These three modes of value-orientation are:

Cognitive mode of value-orientation: commitment to standards of truth;

Appreciative mode of value-orientation: commitment to standards of gratification (Parsons' example, taste in music);

Moral mode of value-orientation: commitment to standards of right and wrong (in Parson's language, standards of assessing social behavior).

Parson's concept of the "moral mode of value-orientation", despite being stilted professional terminology, is very close to the popular definition of values that I discussed in my previous article.

For Parsons and other social scientists of this era, the commitment to standards (i.e., values) was the glue that held culture and society together. Values answered the question, why does a society work voluntarily, cooperatively, and peacefully? A society does so work, because its members hold values that produce patterns of voluntary, cooperative, peaceful behavior.

To these social scientists, free society based on values was obviously distinguished from totalitarian society. In totalitarian society, people behaved in certain ways because they were coerced to do so. In the police state, everyone is required to register themselves and carry identity papers. The state compels certain behaviors - whom you work for and what work you do, whom you can marry and associate with, what you can own, where you can travel, and so on. Police and secret police monitor and enforce prescribed and proscribed behaviors. You do not select behavior based on your values. You behave as you are told to do so.

This definition and discussion of values seems so sensible that one wonders how anyone could disagree with it? How, we might ask, could social science wander away from this common sense to the post-modernist notion that values are fantasies of no basic importance? We will answer this question in two steps. First, we will discuss the concept of values in existentialist philosophy; then we will turn to the concept of cultural relativity, heavily influenced by existential philosophy, which is the source of the post-modernist drift.

Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Definitions Not Used
• 3. Popular Definition
• 4. Social Science Definitions
• 5. Philosophical Definition: Existentialism
• 6. Cultural Relativism
• 7. The Fact-Value Distinction
• 8. Collapsing the Fact-Value Distinction

------
1. Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils, editors, Toward a General Theory of Action, with contributions by Edward C. Tolman, Gordon W. Allport, Clyde Kluckhohn, Henry A. Murray, Robert R. Sears, Richard C. Sheldon, Samuel A. Stouffer (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1951; reprint edition, Harper Torchbook, New York, Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, 1962).

2. Clyde Kluckhohn [Harvard University] and Others, "Values and Value-Orientations in the Theory of Action: An Exploration in Definition and Classification," ibid., p. 395.

3. Talcott Parsons, "Categories of the Orientation and Organization of Action," ibid., p. 59.

4. Ibid., p. 50, and pp. 159-189 passim.

Values (1) Introduction

I recall a conversation with a young mother some years ago. I did not know her well; we ran into each other when walking our young children to elementary school. We talked about how we were raising our children.  She said she was going to take her daughter out of public school and send her to private school. I was surprised. I was then committed to public schools. Why? I asked. Because I want, she answered without any hesitation, my child to have values.

I did not initially understand what she meant. I thought - in social scientist mode - that she had no alternative but to raise her daughter according to her values. Later, I thought I figured out what she meant. She wanted her daughter raised according to her Christian beliefs. That realization raised further questions in my mind. Did she think that she would have no values if she were a secular humanist?

I never had the opportunity to discuss my acquaintance's views on values. She soon enrolled her child in private school. Our routes to school were different. Years later, my sympathy for the concerns of that young woman has grown. I became more conservative. Moving closer to the world she occupied, I obtained a new understanding of her values and her philosophy of values. I think now that what she wanted for her daughter was an education in absolute, universalistic values about right and wrong and what is valuable and what is worthless. She wanted her child to grow up in a school that offered what her home offered; that is, a structured world of absolute values.

The young woman's concern about the values in our society was a response to the great shift in values that America and Western society in general have undergone in the past 150 years. In an earlier era, our values were (and we thought they were) absolute and universalistic. We assumed that, for instance, right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, and worthiness and worthlessness were objective features of the world that did not change over time, were shared by - or were at least true of and appropriate to - all societies, and were understandable by everyone.

What a revolution we have gone through! Today, throughout secular Western society, values are understood to be culturally relative. What is right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, valuable and worthless in one society will be different in another society. We think it is right and justified for the state to execute serial killers; other societies do not. We think (or at least we used to think) that physical mutilation of the body by scarring was ugly and unhealthful; in other societies, men and women adorn themselves with intricate scarrings and think themselves beautiful.

For us today, all decisions to do right or wrong are made in social situations. Right is right and wrong is wrong relative to the situation. We believe that different societies with contradictory values are both right and justified each in their values. We have made cultural relativity central to emancipatory liberalism, justifying in turn racial integration, sexual liberation, feminism, and homosexual life style.

The shift of official culture from universal, absolute values to cultural relativity is, I submit, the most important, fundamental shift Western society has undergone. The shift relegated value absolutism to the social niches of religious minorities. It trivialized the importance of values in social beliefs and social cohesion, in favor of raw utilitarianism. It undermined Western self-assurance. Western cultural self-confidence is so weak today that official elites are unable to voice a vigorous defense of the West against the vicious, totalitarian threat of radical Islam.

In this series of articles, I shall examine values - what they are, where they come from, how they work, how we might change them. I cannot promise that my presentation of this theme will be linear and predictable. While I am looking at some ideas I already know, I am mostly exploring. I start out with a conservative orientation of which I am aware, but I do not know what conclusions I will reach. My postings might not be regular, because I will be reading as I go along. "Values" are a large, involved topic, of interest to all social science disciplines, as well as religious culture and popular culture. (There is even a philosophical specialty that studies values in general, called axiology.) We will start, of course, by making definitions.

Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Definitions Not Used
• 3. Popular Definition
• 4. Social Science Definitions
• 5. Philosophical Definition: Existentialism
• 6. Cultural Relativism
• 7. The Fact-Value Distinction
• 8. Collapsing the Fact-Value Distinction

Total Schools (6)

Conclusion:
The Sensitive Teacher and The Totalitarian School

I would like to conclude my discussion of Kozol's Death At An Early Age by looking at the issue of teacher sensitivity. Kozol repeats endlessly that the teacher's most important quality for effective teaching is to be sensitive to the student's own feelings. The requirement of sensitivity follows directly from the mental hygienist approach to education. Sensitivity is mentioned in the White House Midcentury Report, which we have previously examined as the immediate social science background to the Brown v. Board decision.

In discussing the school and the emotional life of the student, the Conference Report* states unambiguously:

"For if satisfaction and increasing control are to result, integration in terms of ego strength must be always augmenting. And this entails emotional supports in relationship with others--for the child and young person, primarily with adults who may stand as counterparts for the once all-powerful and all-enveloping parents.

"Some teachers have always been able to lend some such support through their acute, sympathetic sensitivity to people and to what children, in particular, are feeling and contending with. Now they and others less sensitive are offered a clearer comprehension of what is involved, and so a more adequate conception of their own role in furthering the kind of integration of the personality required for robust living and social effectiveness."(Midcentury Report, p. 252.)

Kozol contrasts the need for sensitivity to the insistence of the insensitive teachers of the segregated school where he substitute taught that the traditional intellectual discipline was most important. These teachers expressed the importance of the discipline, in part, by maintaining an emotional distance between themselves and their pupils.

The Reading Teacher, for instance, refused to associate with her pupils out of the classroom.

"...about what she had been saying I found I was still puzzled. 'Would you have Negroes come and visit you or come and have dinner with you in the evening?'

"And to that the answer was clear and elucidating and exact: 'They could come and visit if I invited them to come but not as you could come to see me. They could not feel free to just drop in on me. I would have to draw the line at that.'"(Kozol, p. 23.)

Kozol interpreted the separation of teacher and student as maintaining a racial color line separating Black students from white teachers.(Kozol, p. 25).

The lesson about avoiding social relationships with the students came to Kozol formally as an injunction:

"To have any friendly relationship with a student outside the classroom would make teaching him impossible or, at the least, substantially more difficulty. To know him as he is and to allow him to know you in any ordinary vulnerable light is likely to affect adversely both the way in winch you think of him and the way in which he thinks of you."(Kozol, p. 114.)

Sensitivity to the student required the belief by the teacher that the teacher had much to learn from the student. The student was "worth listening to and even learning from."(Kozol, p. 157.)

Kozol was, in his self-congratulatory account, an effective teacher, because he was sensitive to the students. "The real reason that I was able to get on with those children in the state in which I found them is that I came into that room knowing myself to be absolutely on their side."(Kozol, pp. 161-162.)

Kozol's work epitomizes the most extreme development of the progressive, child-centered tradition of American pedagogy. It was also, in a sense, an official publication of the academic elite in the social sciences and education that prepared the social science statement submitted to the Supreme Court for the Brown v. Board decision. Not only was Kozol a product of Harvard, the home of many members of this elite, but portions of the book were published in the Harvard Educational Review and the Atlantic Monthly magazine before they appeared in book form. Dr. Robert Coles, an influential Harvard child psychiatrist wrote a preface for Kozol's book. Harvard educators eventually became the advisors to the busing program that courts imposed on Boston in an effort to end the city's de facto school segregation.

Let's close our analysis by asking a question. What kind of schools, as public institutions, are likely to result from the educational philosophy expressed by the Midcentury Report, the Supreme Court in the Brown v. Board decision, and Kozol's journalism?

The school must be an institution that takes over the role of the family of the students, in which the teacher's influence extends outside the school and school hours, that places medical administration of the students' emotional maturation at the center of its program, and that denigrates the teaching of critical intellectual skills that would enable the students to criticize the educational and social policies that created such an institution.

That such schools should be public, state-run institutions constituted a vast expansion of the role of the state in the lives of citizens. It dramatically shifted the line between private and public, so as to diminish private lives and expand the reach of public power. The Midcentury Conference report candidly and honestly referred to the "total school program". We may cast the social science agenda somewhat differently by saying that the educational pedagogy demanded by Kozol and the elites he represented required totalitarian schools.

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* Helen L. Witmer and Ruth Kotinksy, editors, Personality in the Making: The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, reprint edition ([1952, Harper & Brothers] Science and Behavior Books, Inc, Palo Alto, California, n.d.).