CULTURAL STUDIES

Gary Gerstle, “Introduction,” American Crucible, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011,
http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i10915.pdf

“America is God’s Crucible, where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming!”
proclaims the protagonist in Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play, The Melting-Pot. “Germans,
Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God
is making the American.” With these words, Zangwill articulated a central and enduring myth
about the American nation—that the United States was a divine land where individuals from
every part of the world could leave behind their troubles, start life anew, and forge a proud,
accomplished, and unified people. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., writing eighty years later, endorsed the
same myth, locating the transformative power of the United States not in God but in the nation’s
core political ideals, in the American belief in the fundamental equality of all human beings, in
every individual’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and in a
democratic government that derives its legitimacy from the people’s consent. These beliefs
represent a kind of democratic universalism that can take root anywhere. But because they were
enshrined in the American nation’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and
Constitution, Schlesinger and others have argued that they have marked something distinctive
about the American people and their polity. In the 1940s Gunnar Myrdal bundled these civic
rights and principles together into a political faith that he called the “American Creed.” Although
I prefer to use the more generic term “civic nationalism,” which Michael Ignatieff and other
students of the contemporary nation employ to denote these beliefs, it is clear that their role in
promoting freedom and democracy in American history is indisputable.

Throughout its history, however, American civic nationalism has contended with another potent
ideological inheritance, a racial nationalism that conceives of America in ethnoracial terms, as a
people held together by common blood and skin color and by an inherited fitness for self-
government. This ideal, too, was inscribed in the Constitution (although not in the Declaration of
Independence), which endorsed the enslavement of Africans in the southern states, and it was
encoded in a key 1790 law limiting naturalization to “free white persons.” Although modified in
1870, this 1790 law remained in force until 1952, evidence that America’s yearning to be a white
republic survived African American emancipation by almost 100 years. As late as the 1920s,
members of the House of Representatives felt no shame in declaring on the House floor that the
American “pioneer race” was being replaced by “a mongrel one,” or in admiring a scientist who
told them that Americans “had been so imbued with the idea of democracy … that we have left
out of consideration the matter of blood [and] … heredity. No man who breeds pedigreed plants
and animals can afford to neglect this thing, as you know.” From the perspective of this
racialized ideal, Africans, Asians, nonwhite Latin Americans, and, in the 1920s, southern and
eastern Europeans did not belong in the republic and could never be accepted as full-fledged
members. They had to be expelled, segregated, or subordinated. The hold that this tradition
exercised over the national imagination helps us to understand the conviction that periodically
has surfaced among racial minorities, and especially among African Americans, that America
would never accept them as the equals of whites, that they would never be included in the
crucible celebrated by Zangwill, and that the economic and political opportunities identified by
Schlesinger would never be theirs to enjoy. In the words of Malcolm X, America was not a
dream; it was a nightmare.

… By the 1930s and 1940s, however, these eastern and southern European ethnics were
challenging this characterization of themselves as racially inferior and were winning recognition
for their worth as white Americans. Achieving inclusion did not mean that they were
undermining the tradition of racial nationalism, for other racial groups, such as blacks and
Asians, still found themselves on the outside looking in. The questions of why certain groups
were able to overcome allegations of racial inferiority and others not and how their struggles for
inclusion both challenged and reinforced the tradition of American racial nationalism form an
important part of the story that this book tells.

The history of civic nationalism in the United States displays a similar kind of complexity. The
promise of economic opportunity and political freedom to all citizens, irrespective of their racial,
religious, or cultural background, was a vital component of this tradition. For most of the
nineteenth century, it was thought that the mere removal of discriminatory laws would be
sufficient to make the promise of opportunity real. But in the early twentieth century, the rise of
the corporations transformed the economic and political landscape. The manufacture of new
products and the creation of new wealth generated hopes that a society of general affluence was
in reach, but the inability of millions to escape industrial poverty spread despair. Liberal
reformers began arguing that corporations were occluding individual opportunity for the masses
and that a regulatory state was now necessary to restore faith in America or in what the liberal
intellectual Herbert Croly called “the promise of American life.” Croly coined the term “New
Nationalism” to describe a civic nationalist state-building project that he outlined in 1909, and
Theodore Roosevelt made it the centerpiece of his progressivism.

… Both racial and civic nationalism, then, were complex traditions, simultaneously elastic and
exclusionary, capable of being altered in various ways to address new economic and political
problems as they arose. Together these two traditions imparted a clear, if paradoxical, shape to
what I call the Rooseveltian nation, a nation whose outlines are discernible in the first two
decades of the twentieth century and whose character would define American society from the
mid-1930s to the mid-1960s. The advocates of this nation espoused an expansive civic
nationalist creed: political and social equality for all, irrespective of race, ethnicity, or
nationality, and a regulated economy that would place economic opportunity and security within
the reach of everyone. Simultaneously, many of its supporters subscribed to the racial notion that
America, despite its civic creed, ought to maximize the opportunities for its “racial superiors”
and limit those of its “racial inferiors.” Finally, they were prepared to harshly discipline
immigrants, political radicals, and others who were thought to imperil the nation’s welfare. Such
disciplining was expected either to marginalize and punish the dissenters or to tame and
“Americanize” them, rendering them suitable for incorporation into the national community.
Disciplinary campaigns would lift up some, but not all, groups of racial inferiors into the
American mainstream.

The Rooseveltian nation flourished amid the swirl of these contradictory principles for thirty
years, commanding the respect of most people who lived within its borders. During its
midcentury heyday, and in the thirty years prior to then when it was taking shape, this nation
depended on war to achieve its aims: against the Spanish at the turn of the century, the Germans
in World War I, the Germans and Japanese in World War II, and the Soviets and their allies in
the Cold War. Wars provided opportunities to sharpen American national identity against
external enemies who threatened the nation’s existence, to transform millions of Americans
whose loyalty was uncertain into ardent patriots, to discipline those within the nation who were
deemed racially inferior or politically and culturally heterodox, and to engage in experiments in
state building that would have been considered illegitimate in peacetime. Americans do not
usually think of war as determinative of their nationhood, but in this book I argue that, at least
for the twentieth century, war has been decisive. Perhaps no figure illustrates the association of
war and the nation more than Theodore Roosevelt, which is why I have accorded him a pivotal
role in the story that I tell.

In the 1960s, the Rooseveltian nation fell apart. The trigger was the civil rights revolution that
began in the 1940s and reached its climax in the 1960s. … The black nationalist renunciation of
America was a stunning development. Once it occurred, the contradictions within the
Rooseveltian nation overwhelmed its capacity for imparting unity and purpose to a bitterly
fractured society. The rapid spread of black nationalist principles to a mostly white and middle-
class university population and, then, to far larger segments of white America, including
European ethnics often thought to be black power’s diehard opponents, accelerated this nation’s
collapse. I argue that the disastrous war in Vietnam was the decisive element in this diffusion, as
it made millions of whites receptive to a radical critique of state power, nationalist ideals, and
cultural assimilation in ways that most Americans had not been since the First World War. The
Vietnam War, alone among twentieth-century wars, could not be turned to nation-building
purposes. To the contrary, it tore apart the nation to which Theodore Roosevelt and World War I
had given birth. By 1970, neither the civic nor racial traditions of American nationalism retained
enough integrity to serve as rallying points for those who wished to put the nation back together.

The nation, of course, did not end with Vietnam. In an epilogue I explore the rise of
multiculturalism in the 1980s and its significance as an antiracist and anti-American ideology. I
also examine the determined efforts, first by Reaganite conservatives and then by Clintonian
liberals, to revive affection for the American nation and to launch new nation-building projects.

… Changes in the hiring and marketing practices and global orientation of big businesses formed
the third key spur to hard multiculturalism. As industries began diversifying their work forces in
response to affirmative action pressures, some large employers came to appreciate the revenues
that diversity could bring, especially as the global marketplace began to eclipse the national one
in their long-range plans. In a literal way, business revenues and prosperity began depending
more and more on corporations’ ability to handle culturally divergent groups of buyers and
sellers. For these purposes, having a culturally and racially varied work force began to make
good business sense. Within certain corporations deeply involved in global finance and
commerce, the commitment to diversity signified more than a banal celebration of the American
mosaic. It signified, too, a growing indifference to the physical and ideological borders of the
American nation. Robert Reich and Eric Hobsbawm have both argued that corporations have
outgrown the national economies that once suited them so well and that, as a result, they have
been shedding their economic and cultural loyalties to them. Fewer and fewer corporations
headquartered in the United States show any inclination to put the name “national” or
“American” in their names, as so many were eager to do in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.

Declarations such as that made by General Motors president and Secretary of Defense Charles
Erwin Wilson in the 1950s, that “what was good for our country was good for General Motors
and vice versa,” no longer inspire corporate leaders. Large corporations do not, of course,
partake of the Afrocentricity of a Molefi Asante or the anti-imperialism of a Janice Radway; but
in their dollars-and-cents indifference to the fate of the American nation, they have diminished
the authority and prestige of the nation-state and helped to generate intense interest in
postnational forms of associations. They have done this, too, by generating labor demands within
the United States that can only be satisfied through high-volume streams of immigration. The
country, as a result, harbors millions of recent immigrants who are living actively transnational
lives. In ways that Karl Marx would have well understood, the practices of multinational capital
constitute the materialist underpinnings of multiculturalist forms of imagining.

Adrijana Marcetic, After Comparative Literature, Institute for Literature and Art: Belgrade,
2018, 14-27

Previously uninterested in theory, American literary criticism underwent a fundamental

transformative shift in the 1970s and 1980s, effected by the displacement of literary analysis by
the dissemination of theory largely imported from Europe. Among the European constructs
imported to America, undoubtedly the most popular was deconstruction, which influential
thinkers at the time, like Jacques Derrida or Paul de Man, advanced in their works.
Deconstruction promoted the idea of the “other”, the marginal, the non-canonic as theoretically
central, and quickly proved to be influential in “new comparative literature”. In the United States
at that time, the “other” and “marginal” were also central to other influential theories, including
the revival of Marxist criticism in the post-structuralist literary and cultural criticism of Fredric
Jameson, as well as the postcolonial theory of Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Orientation towards the “other”, “subaltern”, and “alternative” led some comparatists to call into
question the literary canon, which was soon spoken of as being not just “Eurocentric”, but
hegemonic, elitist, and exclusionary. … In the wake of the decline of not just deconstruction but
literary theory in general, a period began in which comparative literature turned to praxis, in
other words, to the consideration of literature in a variety of non-literary contexts. It is as if
deconstruction, long after its fall, left a lasting legacy to comparative literature through the aim
to overthrow the traditional comparative “Eurocentric” canon and replace it with an alternative
canon.

… Among the various claimants to its legacy and vacancies in comparative literature
departments, the most vocal [advocates of supplanting the old comparatism] proved to be
representatives of two approaches, both emerging after 2000, closely tied to language studies and
translation.

Spivak formulated the first approach. Inspired by ideas Edward Said forwarded in his study
Orientalism (1978), and as a response to the crisis in comparative literature studies, she proposed
… a variation of postcolonial cultural studies and are more political than literary by nature: their
ostensible goal is to defeat American “monolingualism” and domination of the English language,
and to end all cultural monopolies founded on a concentration of economic, social, and political
power. Of all of the approaches of “new” or “other” comparative studies, Spivak’s approach is
the most methodologically radical because it implies a complete rejection of traditional
“Eurocentric” comparative studies in favor of “small” or insufficiently researched literatures and
cultures. In her thought, the crisis of comparative literature cannot be overcome by
supplementing the traditional comparative canon with “other” literatures… The old canon needs
to be completely rejected in favor of a new, alternative canon of subaltern languages and
literatures, and old comparative literature replaced with the new (Spivak 2012: 468-469).
[Spivak writes:] “The old postcolonial model – very much “India” plus the Sartrian ‘Fanon’ –
will not serve now as the master model for transnational to global cultural studies on the way to
planetarity. We are dealing with heterogeneity on a different scale...” (Spivak 2003: 84-85)

It is not difficult to see even from this short extract that the focus of “new comparative literature”
as a “trans-national global study” lies in political and not cultural or literary questions. Spivak
advocates the planetary propagation of comparative literature along a geopolitical path that, as
Didier Coste noted, is redolent of the path along which the American conquest of new markets
and economic resources is advancing. Apart from that, it is clear that Spivak grants a special
place to Islam – though it is not clear in which respect, whether as a religion or as a more general
cultural tradition – which is also in accordance with America’s current foreign policy.

…A conception that sees the literature of a nation as a self-contained organism, distinct from all
similar organisms of the same kind, is for Spivak, in the contemporary, globalized world,
outdated and unfounded: it is an expression of nationalism, intolerance, and ethnic exclusivity.
She proposes instead that world literature be viewed as a system that functions according to the
principle of “Creolity”, which is to say, the convergence and permeation of different cultural
identities.

Suggested further reading: Mark Twain’s “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” extracted here:
Excerpt taken from http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/sitting.html
DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION

Excerpted from John Dewey, "Democracy and Education," Problems of Men, Philosophical
Library: New York, 1946, 61.

I have emphasized in what precedes the importance of the effective release of intelligence in
connection with personal experience in the democratic way of living. I have done so purposely
because democracy is so often and so naturally associated in our minds with freedom of action,
forgetting the importance of freed intelligence which is necessary to direct and to warrant
freedom of action. Unless freedom of individual action has intelligence and informed conviction
back of it, its manifestation is almost sure to result in confusion and disorder. The democratic
idea of freedom is not the right of each individual to do as he pleases/ even if it be qualified by
adding "provided he does not interfere with the same freedom on the part of others." While the
idea is not always, not often enough, expressed in words, the basic freedom is that of freedom of
mind and of whatever degree of freedom of action and experience is necessary to produce
freedom of intelligence. The modes of freedom guaranteed in the Bill of Rights are all of this
nature: Freedom of belief and conscience, of expression of opinion, of assembly for discussion
and conference, of the press as an organ of communication. They are guaranteed because without
them individuals are not free to develop and society is deprived of what they might contribute.

The costs of “free speech”

By Sophie McBain Follow @@semcbain, newstatesman.com

In recent months, two of America’s most prestigious literary institutions have found themselves
embroiled in heated debates over the boundaries of acceptable speech. In early September, the
New Yorker announced that its editor David Remnick would interview Donald Trump’s former
chief strategist, the far-right agitator Steve Bannon, on stage at the magazine’s annual festival.
After facing harsh criticism from readers and several staff writers, Remnick quickly rescinded
the invitation. A fortnight later, the editor of the New York Review of Books Ian Buruma was
fired amid uproar over his publication of an essay by Jian Ghomeshi about how the former radio
host’s career was destroyed by accusations of sexual harassment. Ghomeshi’s essay was an
unedifying and unreflective exercise in self-pity in which he downplayed the nature of the
accusations against him and mischaracterised his legal case.

It’s understandable that readers were perplexed by the editorial decisions made at both
magazines. It was, after all, odd that of all the influential thinkers to headline its festival, the New
Yorker chose Bannon, and that of all the under-represented voices that could write with
intelligence and nuance about the #MeToo movement, the NYRB commissioned Ghomeshi. Yet
both incidents also raised broader questions over how publications should respond to social
media outrage over their coverage, and how America’s liberal establishment should handle
politically unpalatable views. What is the best way to probe and challenge right-wing thinking,
without over-amplifying marginal figures or normalising far-right rhetoric? How does the
mainstream media determine what viewpoints are too extreme or offensive to be published?

In the case of the NYRB debacle, it is clear that Buruma demonstrated a poor understanding of
the broader context of Ghomeshi’s story and it has been reported that he sidelined female
colleagues who might have helped him understand the article’s flaws. But it sets a troubling
precedent if editors risk being fired should they provoke (the wrong kind of) Twitter storm. Good
writing should sometimes make you feel uncomfortable, angry or offended. After all, many
markers of social progress such as gender equality and minority rights once offended mainstream
sensibilities.

There is evidence to suggest that younger people may be less tolerant than older generations of
speech they consider offensive or otherwise harmful. In recent years, the number of speakers
disinvited following campus protests has increased and critics say a culture of “safetyism” has
emerged in academia, in which students angrily shut down the discussion of unsettling ideas.

Two of the best-known proponents of the “safetyism” thesis are the first amendment lawyer Greg
Lukianoff and the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who in 2015 co-wrote a cover story for the
American magazine the Atlantic titled “The Coddling of the American Mind” that went viral.
They described professors struggling with how to teach students who demand trigger warnings
(an alert given ahead of potentially upsetting material, for instance, a caution might be given
before a discussion about rape because it is believed that victims of sexual violence might be
retraumatised) so that they can opt out of emotive or difficult discussions. They are concerned
that students’ preoccupation with calling out microaggressions (subtle and often inadvertent
actions or comments that cause offence or suggest underlying prejudice, such as asking an
Asian-American, “Where are you from?”) was creating an atmosphere in which some students
were afraid to speak their minds, for fear of unintentionally offending someone. They argued that
such trends are not just harming students’ intellectual development but also damaging their
mental health, by making them fearful and oversensitive.

In a book by the same name, the pair have expanded on these ideas. Lukianoff heads the
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a free-speech watchdog, and Haidt
teaches at New York University and is a member of the Heterodox Academy, a group of
professors seeking to expand intellectual diversity. Both therefore have an intimate knowledge of
campus culture, which they believe has become more intolerant and divisive, even in the past
three years.

Haidt and Lukianoff argue that students today have been led astray by “three great untruths”: that
what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, that you should always trust your feelings and that the
world is divided into good and bad people. Concepts such as “trauma” and “violence” are being
applied too broadly, they say. For some students, words can be a form of violence, a definition
that disrupts the common-sense distinction between, say, violent and non-violent crime. They
blame trends such as overprotective parenting, rising rates of anxiety and depression and
increased political polarisation for contributing to these unhealthy and distorted thinking
patterns.
A lot has changed since the publication of their 2015 essay, not least the election of Donald
Trump and the eruption of violent protests at several universities. The authors point to a 2017
Brookings Institute poll that found that one in five students believe it is sometimes acceptable to
use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking. That’s because when you begin to confuse
offensive speech with actual violence and harm, responding with physical violence can seem like
a proportionate response, the authors argue.

Such reasoning may in part explain some of the violence coming from the left, such as the
February 2017 Antifa (“anti-fascist”) demonstrators who caused $100,000 worth of damage at
the University of Berkeley, California, when they protested against a talk by the far-right troll
Milo Yiannopoulos. But you could draw very different lessons from right-wing violence. On 11
August last year, white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia campus in
Charlottesville. The following day, a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters,
killing 32-year-old paralegal Heather Heyer. The Trump presidency offers a devastating example
of how the normalisation of hate speech translates into real violence. The threat felt by
immigrants, people of colour or other minorities when they listen to far-right nationalists is not
imagined.

The authors approvingly quote the progressive activist Van Jones, who makes a distinction
between “good” safe spaces on campus, which offer protection from sexual harassment, physical
abuse or being personally targeted by hate speech, and the “horrible” idea that students require
ideological or emotional safety. This makes intuitive sense, but in practice the distinction
between the two definitions is blurry. While undocumented students face the imminent threat of
deportation, can we expect them to welcome speeches by the likes of Bannon? Can we expect
them to maintain an academic detachment when discussing his ideology?

Though Lukianoff and Haidt both describe themselves as centre-left, many of their arguments
about call-out culture are championed by the right. Lukianoff’s organisation FIRE receives
considerable funding from conservative groups. This makes sense: the ratio of progressive to
conservative professors has increased from 2:1 to 5:1 in the past three decades, and right-wing
speakers are much more likely than left-wing ones to be barred from campus. But it also serves
the American right to characterise campus culture wars as debates over free speech, when often
they are not. (…)

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up
a Generation for Failure
Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff
Allen Lane, 352pp, £20
CAPITALISM AND MANAGEMENT

Frederick Taylor Winslow, The Principles of Scientific Management, Harper & Brothers
Publishers: New York and London, 1919, 117-118 and 43-59.

Excerpt extracted from http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-3/frederick-winslow-

taylor-on-scientific-management

First. Find, say, ten or fifteen different men … who are especially skilful in doing the particular
work to be analysed.

Second. Study the exact series of elementary operations or motions which each of these men uses
in doing the work which is being investigated, as well as the implements each man uses.

Third. Study with a stop watch the time required to make each of these elementary movements
and then select the quickest way of doing each element of the work.

Fourth. Eliminate all false movements, slow movements and useless movements.

Fifth. After doing away with all unnecessary movements, collect into one series the quickest and
best movements.

When Taylor joined Bethlehem Iron Company, a large and successful military contractor in
Pennsylvania, the company was experiencing serious production bottlenecks. Taylor decided to
apply his methods to the work of the labourers. He performed his time and motion study,
eliminating ‘false’, ‘slow’ and ‘useless’ movements, and presented the results back to the
labourers. This is Taylor’s assistant, C.H. Buckley, describing the labourers’ response:

When he receives his instruction card, he glances at the time allowed for each operation and the
total time to finish the piece. He then begins a mental calculation based on his work experience
with similar work, the result of which is ‘Impossible!’ A very stupid observer can readily see this
stamped on his countenance.

Taylor would confront the man with a stopwatch the day after he had tried to match the times on
the card. The result was that the operation could be completed in the time. With the prospect of a
bonus, the instructions appeared more reasonable and achievable. Having put Taylor’s scientific
management system in place, large cost savings were made by the company. Seventy-five men
were working for Bethlehem, shifting pig-iron ingots off railroad cars. On average, each man
shifted 12.5 tons per day. Taylor studied the matter and decided that this should be 47 to 48 tons
per day:

Our first step was the scientific selection of the workman. In dealing with workmen under this
type of management, it is an inflexible rule to talk to and deal with only one man at a time …
[W]e selected one … to start with. He was a little Pennsylvania Dutchman … This man we shall
call Schmidt.
Schmidt was called out from among the gang of pig-iron handlers and talked to somewhat in this
way:

‘Schmidt, are you a high-priced man?’

‘Vell, I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Oh yes, you do. What I want to know is whether you are a high-priced man or not.’

‘Vell, I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Oh, come now, you answer my questions. What I want to find out is whether you are a high
priced man or one of these cheap fellows here. What I want to find out is whether you want to
earn $1.85 a day or whether you are satisfied with $1.15, just the same as all those cheap fellows
are getting.’

‘Did I vant $1.85 a day? Vas dot a high-priced man? Vell, yes, I vas a high-priced man.’

‘Oh, you are aggravating me. Of course you want $1.85 a day — every one wants it. You know
perfectly well that that has very little to do with your being a high-priced man. For goodness’
sake, answer my questions, and don’t waste any more of my time. Now, come over here. You see
that pile of pig iron?’

‘Yes.’

‘You see that car?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, if you are a high-priced man, you will load that pig iron on that car tomorrow for $1.85.
Now wake up and answer my question. Tell me whether you are a high-priced man or not…’

‘Vell, den, I was a high-priced man.’

‘Now, hold on, hold on. You know just as well as I do that a high-priced man has to do exactly
as he’s told from morning to night … Well, if you are a high-priced man, you will do exactly as
this man tells you to do to-morrow, from morning till night. When he tells you to pick up a pig
and walk, you walk, and when he tells you to sit down and rest, you sit down. You do that
straight through the day. And what’s more, no talk back.

This seems to be rather rough talk. And indeed it would be if applied to an educated mechanic, or
even an educated laborer. With a man of the mentally sluggish type of Schmidt it is appropriate
and not unkind, since it is appropriate in fixing his attention on the high wages which he wants
and away from what, if it were called to his attention, he would possibly consider impossibly
hard work … Now, one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a
regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles
in his mental make-up the ox than any other type … Therefore the workman who is best suited to
handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work. He is so
stupid that the word ‘percentage’ has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by
a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this
science before he can be successful … If Schmidt had been allowed to attack the pile of 47 tons
of pig iron without the guidance or direction of a man who understood the art, or science, of
handling pig iron, in his desire to earn high wages he would have tired himself out by 11 or 12
o’clock in the day.

More contemporary management principles (optional):

https://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/Ten-Lessons-I-Learned-from-Peter-
Drucker.html

Excerpt from show notes from WBUR podcast episode, “How Tracking And Selling Our
Data Became A Business Model”, https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2019/01/15/surveillance-
capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-facebook-data:

One explanation for surveillance capitalism’s many triumphs floats above them all: it is
unprecedented. The unprecedented is necessarily unrecognizable. When we encounter something
unprecedented, we automatically interpret it through the lenses of familiar categories, thereby
rendering invisible precisely that which is unprecedented. A classic example is the notion of the
“horseless carriage” to which people reverted when confronted with the unprecedented facts of
the automobile. A tragic illustration is the encounter between indigenous people and the first
Spanish conquerors. When the Taínos of the pre-Columbian Caribbean islands first laid eyes on
the sweating, bearded Spanish soldiers trudging across the sand in their brocade and armor,
how could they possibly have recognized the meaning and portent of that moment? Unable to
imagine their own destruction, they reckoned that those strange creatures were gods and
welcomed them with intricate rituals of hospitality. This is how the unprecedented reliably
confounds understanding; existing lenses illuminate the familiar, thus obscuring the original by
turning the unprecedented into an extension of the past. This contributes to the normalization of
the abnormal, which makes fighting the unprecedented even more of an uphill climb.

… What is crucial now is that we identify this new form of capitalism on its own terms and in its
own words. This pursuit necessarily returns us to Silicon Valley, where things move so fast that
few people know what just happened. It is the habitat for progress “at the speed of dreams,” as
one Google engineer vividly describes it. My aim here is to slow down the action in order to
enlarge the space for such debate and unmask the tendencies of these new creations as they
amplify inequality, intensify social hierarchy, exacerbate exclusion, usurp rights, and strip
personal life of whatever it is that makes it personal for you or for me. If the digital future is to
be our home, then it is we who must make it so. We will need to know. We will need to decide.
We will need to decide who decides. This is our fight for a human future.
Excerpted from THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM by Shoshana Zuboff. Republished
with permission of PublicAffairs, a division of Hachette Book Group. Copyright © Shoshana
Zuboff, 2019.

Washington Post: "Opinion: The Facebook scandal isn’t really about social media. It’s about
capitalism." — "As wizened consumers, we’ve learned to be cynical about the commodification
of our privacy at the hands of tech corporations. Still, it’s one thing to know in principle that
industry giants like Facebook are spying on practically everything we do and say; it’s quite
another to see it in action. But that’s just what we have, thanks to recent reporting by the New
York Times, which revealed how Mark Zuckerberg, who’s expected to act as the trusted
custodian of the personal information of more than 2 billion people, has allowed his company’s
partners — Netflix, Amazon and Spotify, among many others — access to users’ most intimate
communications.

“Some arrangements enabled Facebook’s partners to read and delete users’ private messages;
others had access to users’ friends and their data. In some cases, the deals appeared to be so
broad that Facebook’s partners claimed that they weren’t even aware that they had access to
certain data streams.

"The Times’ reporting offers a necessary window into the surveillance economy and the
emerging economic logic of 'surveillance capitalism.' We are beginning to see how the trade in
data — much of it done behind the scenes — is also an exchange of influence and power. We are
becoming aware of companies’ astonishing information appetites, according to which all data is
potentially useful. Even carmakers like Ford are beginning to tout consumer data as a major
revenue stream on par with the selling of automobiles. In other words, the Times’ reporting
doesn’t just implicate Facebook: It’s an indictment of the whole economic system in which we
participate today.”

A similar podcast can be found here: https://irlpodcast.org/season4/episode5/

IDENTITY POLITICS

1. History – will be discussed in class.

2. Define “epistemic bubble”

3. Consider the attempt to “reveal cultural biases and move past them” (Byron Kim) vs.
oversimplification through hashtags and memes.

4. Mark Lilla, excerpted from: https://iai.tv/articles/on-identity-politics-and-the-left-in-decline-

an-interview-with-mark-lilla-auid-1082

By claiming that a certain group, by virtue of colour or history or anything else, are not being
incorporated and enfranchised as citizens, you are appealing to the concept of citizenship. And
as a fellow citizen you ought to listen to their claims and respond. It’s another thing to say ‘we
have a story about America, a story about you and your ideas about me. And now you need to
get on your knees, confess your sins, and get ‘woke’’.

Such identity politics is not a political strategy, it is an evangelical strategy to change hearts and
minds.

… Given the new sort of economy we live in, we need a rhetoric of solidarity in order to actually
think through a solution.

For example, before we start thinking about how to protect our workers, we need to justify why
it is absolutely necessary that they are protected as citizens. That used to be obvious in the U.S.,
but with the rise of Reaganite economic libertarianism it no longer is. And that’s exactly what’s
missing on the Left: a general defense of solidarity based on a vision of the country’s future.

… Part of the problem is that we are in a genuinely new economic situation compared to that
time. No one really understands what’s going on. No one has done the work that Karl Marx
would have done of trying to understand the nexus between economics, politics, and culture
today, free from Marx’s own assumptions that no longer apply.

We also need to make it clear on what grounds we are calling on people to sacrifice for each
other. That’s what solidarity is about. From the 1930s until the 1980s it was natural in the U.S.
because we had gone through a depression and a world war. That gives you something to work
with. Once memories of those things disappear and people are able to live more independent,
individualistic lives, you have to find a new way of educating people so they feel that they have a
stake in their fellow citizens.

… In a classic understanding from Plato to Kant down, the only way to be free is to have
authority over yourself. Without self-control, without being able to set a goal and reach it, you
are not free but a slave to your passions or whims – or, as Rousseau would have said, you are a
slave to public opinion.
The primary question for Plato and Rousseau was how to exercise authority in education so that
people come out being able to be truly free. Meaning that they would be able to make wise
choices for themselves and control their passions and direct them in such a way that they can
reach the ends that they want. Authority is absolutely essential in education in order to produce
free people.

For people to get along with each other in a democratic society, we also need certain
authoritative norms. Things like toleration don’t come naturally to us, but are taught to us from
when we’re young. Once you think about norms – for instance, those that govern how a president
is supposed to behave – you realize how crucial and fragile they are. That’s because we only
realize we have taboos when they are violated and disappear.

Trump is a good example of someone who violates once authoritative taboos as a political leader
and we can see the consequences. So in general we need to think about what sort of authority
enhances our freedom but also enhances the human good.

… A lot of what’s going on now with respect to free speech and hate speech, is trying to
reconstitute some kinds of authoritative norms to bind what we do. We have in the past years
seen a lot of questioning of authority, breaking of taboos, suspicion of hierarchy, while on the
other hand we are discovering ways in which we need authority and are trying to reinstate norms
(for example, in the workplace).