Abolish education
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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I think you're reading a lot more into my earlier post than I intended—it was more of a "shrug, why not?".
The truth is, as a godless statist, I already lean towards your position, and you make a compelling case for it. But I'm still happy to hear the case for the alternative.
To continue with the devil's advocacy, do you completely reject pluralism? And if not, can you see how a pluralist approach might support decentralisation?
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| David wrote: | I think you're reading a lot more into my earlier post than I intended—it was more of a "shrug, why not?".
The truth is, as a godless statist, I already lean towards your position, and you make a compelling case for it. But I'm still happy to hear the case for the alternative.
To continue with the devil's advocacy, do you completely reject pluralism? And if not, can you see how a pluralist approach might support decentralisation? |
Sure I can see why they might, which is exactly why you don't let people with simplistic axioms and insufficient global knowledge govern you.
If more state power would improve things, I'd support it, but there's no way that will happen in Australia. The main divide in Australia is urban-rural, and that is already taken into account through electoral representation. If you emphasise further divides, all you will get is a rash of protective, incompatible legislation that will then be used as leverage by divisive whackos and corporate thieves at the state level to privatise education delivery and hold the rest of the nation hostage. The conservative dream of blocking other children from competing with their own fantasies of superiority will then be realised.
On centralisation/decentralisation, pretty much every classical dilemma that you spend hours entertaining yourself with (  ) has no axiomatic resolution by definition. Ducks might have the cognitive biology needed to solve them, but we don't.
Thus, for any complex question, an agile and adaptive checks-and-balances approach is all we're left to tinker with.
Libertarians simplify the world by hacking off the frontal lobe so they can postulate a world of psychotic loners. Collectivists simplify the world by suppressing desire to the point of postulating a world of meditating yoga gurus and Buddhist monks. The monied and aspirational classes simplify the world by bestowing the morality of Jesus on capital, and demonising non-capital. These simplifications are fanatical religious rubbish.
We are left to pick our way through things ad hoc and in context, as far as I can tell. And, in context, the further devolution of education to the states is a terrible idea.
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Tannin 
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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^What I mean is that the cities are all very similar, so the main special governance consideration is the rural/urban divide. Aside from that divide and special minority considerations, there's no logical reason why education from state-to-state should differ too much.
I don't mean there are no other divisions in the entire nation per se!
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Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| pietillidie wrote: | pretty much every classical dilemma that you spend hours entertaining yourself with ( ) has no axiomatic resolution by definition. Ducks might have the cognitive biology needed to solve them, but we don't.
Thus, for any complex question, an agile and adaptive checks-and-balances approach is all we're left to tinker with.
Libertarians simplify the world by hacking off the frontal lobe so they can postulate a world of psychotic loners. Collectivists simplify the world by suppressing desire to the point of postulating a world of meditating yoga gurus and Buddhist monks. The monied and aspirational classes simplify the world by bestowing the morality of Jesus on capital, and demonising non-capital. These simplifications are fanatical religious rubbish.
We are left to pick our way through things ad hoc and in context, as far as I can tell. |
When you talk about 'libertarians', 'collectivists' and 'monied and aspirational classes', you're not giving them much credit for independent thought or fact-based reasoning. True, fundamentalism proliferates amongst those groups (as it does in virtually any ideology), but to assert that no agile or adaptive reasoning is employed within them seems like a bit of a straw-man claim. Surely, as with all ideologies, you'll get a spectrum of thought ranging from the mindless slogans of dogmatists to intelligent critical interpretation of individual issues.
Conversely, can you be sure that you're not overestimating your own ability to weigh up each case on its own merits? Are you truly liberated from biases, ideological preconceptions and axiomatic reasoning? It seems to me that you make use of certain principles all the time, including here (e.g. devolution encourages corruption and privatisation) and certainly elsewhere (e.g. your views on competition, social equality, and even, dare I say it, the value of an agile and adaptive checks-and-balances approach as opposed to fundamentalism! ). So, what makes you so different?
To me, the way of thinking you describe sounds like something we should all be aspiring to intellectually, but something that very few of us get close to achieving. In the meantime, our cognitive limitations force us to fall back on certain axioms as a prism through which we view the world. Without them you'd be spruiking new age religion one day and national socialism the other.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| David wrote: | | pietillidie wrote: | pretty much every classical dilemma that you spend hours entertaining yourself with ( ) has no axiomatic resolution by definition. Ducks might have the cognitive biology needed to solve them, but we don't.
Thus, for any complex question, an agile and adaptive checks-and-balances approach is all we're left to tinker with.
Libertarians simplify the world by hacking off the frontal lobe so they can postulate a world of psychotic loners. Collectivists simplify the world by suppressing desire to the point of postulating a world of meditating yoga gurus and Buddhist monks. The monied and aspirational classes simplify the world by bestowing the morality of Jesus on capital, and demonising non-capital. These simplifications are fanatical religious rubbish.
We are left to pick our way through things ad hoc and in context, as far as I can tell. |
When you talk about 'libertarians', 'collectivists' and 'monied and aspirational classes', you're not giving them much credit for independent thought or fact-based reasoning. True, fundamentalism proliferates amongst those groups (as it does in virtually any ideology), but to assert that no agile or adaptive reasoning is employed within them seems like a bit of a straw-man claim. Surely, as with all ideologies, you'll get a spectrum of thought ranging from the mindless slogans of dogmatists to intelligent critical interpretation of individual issues.
Conversely, can you be sure that you're not overestimating your own ability to weigh up each case on its own merits? Are you truly liberated from biases, ideological preconceptions and axiomatic reasoning? It seems to me that you make use of certain principles all the time, including here (e.g. devolution encourages corruption and privatisation) and certainly elsewhere (e.g. your views on competition, social equality, and even, dare I say it, the value of an agile and adaptive checks-and-balances approach as opposed to fundamentalism! ). So, what makes you so different?
To me, the way of thinking you describe sounds like something we should all be aspiring to intellectually, but something that very few of us get close to achieving. In the meantime, our cognitive limitations force us to fall back on certain axioms as a prism through which we view the world. Without them you'd be spruiking new age religion one day and national socialism the other. |
Libertarians who don't start with the individual speak now or forever hold your peace! Of course that's what Libertarians do. And if they don't, by their own definition, they're not Libertarian. They're people who mistakenly think they're Libertarian or hang around with Libertarians or vote Libertarian. But they're not Libertarians with a capital "L". But next time I will write "Libertarians with a capital 'L'" or "serious Libertarians" for you, if that works. (Nonetheless, for the point of the exercise, you go out there and find two people who call themselves libertarians with a small "l" who don't start their moral analysis from the perspective of the individual).
Actually, I never said as a matter of principle "devolution encourages corruption"; I said the opposite is often held to be axiomatic. I argued that, in this instance, further devolution to the states is likely to be less transparent (and therefore more corrupt), and a wedge that Capital and two-tier ideologues will use in their efforts to bastardise education. There is no pre-existing axiom which leads me to believe that. My expectation is based on a compound of observations: US politics and the use of the states for that purpose there; the big-headed claims of WA politics prior to the commodities price crash; the influence of the Christian right in Queensland; people's inability to follow federal politics, let alone local politics; the fairly uniform nature of Australian society (aside from the urban-rural divide, as noted); the need for scale and centralisation in a country of such low and sparse population, etc.
Whether you agree or not, that is a claim based on evidence (roughly so, given it's not an academic essay); there's nothing axiomatic about it. On the other hand, the reflexive belief that devolution must be better certainly is a widely-held axiom—unless there is evidence that aliens are about to replace people's brains in the night with something that pays attention to state politics, in which case it might become a claim based on evidence.
Now, if we are talking about more direct participation, such as very frequent referenda, I'm very open to that, but not at the state level for the very same reasons. Without having thought about it too much, more direct participation would presumably make the nation much more engaged and agile.
You let me know which axioms I employ all the time and I will deal with them. Here are two for you.
One term I have admitted I need to discard, and which embodies an axiom of sorts, is the term "elites". Even though the term has a very clear technical definition in economics/international relations/development studies, the term "capital" would be a better one for my usage because it implies an active investment position, and I'm only talking about those who actively position hefty assets against "progress" (the second term—see below), and those who support them. "Capital and its minions" captures the concept I'm after because it also includes the support class of capital, including aspirationals, the media, authoritarians and other hangers on who actively support capital, whereas "elites", even in the technical sense, doesn't include many of those.
(Other terms such as "the racist hate vote", "the frightened elderly", "job sycophants", "the religious right", "the good-old-days fantasists", "the fear vote", "the nationalist vote", "the old imperialist vote", etc. variously capture the sub-groups of the right, so there are no real axioms behind that grouping except for the party they vote for).
Another axiom I rely on is captured in the term "progress". Of course, this has been mostly criticised by the far left as being linear and narrowly-defined (as a function of GDP growth), etc. The neutral version would simply be "change", but I'm willing to be called a "progressive fundamentalist" if you must. The very term sounds like an oxymoron though, which might say something about how much evidence there is for progress being a good idea. You could reduce "progress" to "increased access" or "decreased authority and hierarchy", or whatever, but they don't sound too bad either. The very fact there are no capital "P" progressives might also tell you that to be progressive is to be far less axiomatic.
One more term that comes to mind is "competitionist", but that is an overt deconstruction of "capitalist" more than anything (see below). When I write a book called The 7 Fundamentals of Competitionism, then start worrying about that one
In sum, claims and axioms are not the same thing. If you wanted to, you could question assumptions to the point of genuine anarchy or deconstruction, but by doing so you have eliminated "reality" and "will", and the case has already been made that those things are either "necessary illusions" or "biological constraints", even if not logically defensible.
Look at it through the analogy of physics. The illusion that allows communication is the shared assumption that Newtonian physics holds. Complex arguments involving evidence, brain strain, statistics, and so on, are Einsteinian relativity—hard to grasp, not intuitive to everyone, but graspable with some effort. Anarchy and deconstruction are the quantum physics of positions; they are there and we could go there, but thought and communication as we know it would cease.
Many poststructuralists actually seem to be assuming something like that. In their view, every discursive system holds within in itself enough holes that you can deconstruct it according to its own internal rules (i.e., contradictions). So, using the sciences of neurology and ecology, we can very easily deconstruct Libertarian individualism, even as (or precisely because) it expresses love and devotion to science, yet hasn't moved beyond a crude Darwinianism. But we can go further than that; using linear, positivist thought, we can deconstruct free will. In the first instance, we simply reject Libertarianism on the basis that it doesn't account for the evidence according to its own logic. In the second instance, we reject the deconstruction of free will not because there is no evidence according to the given positivist assumptions of linear cause and effect, but because we acknowledge we have reached the limits of our—or anyone's—capability.
So, I think we do have a way for dealing with deconstruction now that wasn't obvious when it first hit academia as a movement in the late 80s, and I think it's the death of the ghost in the machine through cognitive biology which has allowed that solution to surface (i.e., human cognition has physical boundaries). And note that solution is very different from saying "I don't know" and invoking a prime mover argument; there is increasing physical evidence for that boundary in our species, in the same way there is evidence for the limits of the brains of other species.
PS. You might want to use your powers of moderation to move this discussion to another thread!
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In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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