Rule of thumb: avoid insulting that which you have not read

None of us ever fully lives up to our standards of kindness and charity--not always, anyway.*

Last year I wrote a post titled "Polls and Desires." The topic of that piece is rather ancillary here--I was exploring the yawning gap between the conclusions we draw from polls and what polls are actually able to tell us. That reflection was inspired by a highly critical book review published in The American Conservative. In my post, I said some rather unkind things about the book under review--a book I had not read, whose contents I insulted secondhand.

You can imagine my surprise when I came home the other day to find in my inbox an email from Donald Lazere, the author of that book. Professor Lazere's email was unfailingly gracious. He has granted me permission to excerpt it here:

Your analysis of the “unmarked norms” of capitalism and consumerism was right on the mark (or the unmarked) and confirmed that this dimension of political attitudes is almost never directly addressed in either mainstream politics, media or scholarship. In fact, your arguments are much the same as mine throughout the section discussed and the rest of the book, in which I try scrupulously to counter-act the tendentiousness and false dilemmas of most polemics. 

Why, then, did you ridicule and say you didn’t intend to read the book? Weren’t you prejudging it? Why not give it a try?

After receiving his email, I went back and reread my original post. In hindsight, I'm taken aback by the strong language with which I dismissed the book in question--Why Higher Education Should Have a Leftist Bias. Of course, I'm unlikely to agree with the premise of a book with that title, and Jonathan Marks' review reinforced that presupposition.

But I had no business dismissing a book I hadn't read in such a cavalier manner. (It's probably a good rule of thumb not to dismiss anything you haven't read or seen, right?)

After I wrote my post on "Polls and Desires," Professor Lazere responded in the American Conservative to Professor Marks' review, which prompted a somewhat combative conversation between the two. In the comments of the response, I noted that, based on the book's table of contents,

I do get the sense that [Lazere's] book may have a wider range and more compelling points than Marks’ review indicated. Dr. Marks may have engaged in some caricaturing of Lazere’s book to make it seem more ridiculous.

At that point I should have amended my original post or written some kind of follow-up pointing to the discussion between Marks and Lazere. I did not do so and instead let my unfair and presumptuous characterization stand. For that I apologize to Professor Lazere.

In any case, it may be worth your time to read the full exchange--Marks' review and then Lazere's response and the ensuing discussion (which carried into the comments section). Should you find yourself interested in Professor Lazere's book but turned off by the price (which is pretty standard for academic publication these days), do know that Palgrave Macmillan will soon be publishing Why Higher Education Should Have a Leftist Bias in a (presumably more affordable) paperback edition.

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*Some of us, of course, have no such standards in the first place. Those whose standards are scorn, indifference, and cruelty seem to do a better job of actualizing them.

Polls and Desires

UPDATE: In response to a gracious email from Professor Lazere, I've apologized for my presumptuous and uncharitable characterization of a book I have not read. You can read my apology here.

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Yesterday, the American Conservative published Jonathan Marks' review of the not-so-subtly titled Why Higher Education Should Have a Leftist Bias. That book, written by Donald Lazere, sounds about as dull, self-satisfied, and yawningly archaic as you might expect. Consequently, Marks' review takedown manages to be moderately amusing and also kind of pointless. Both book and review are dispatches to the congregation of the already converted.

Why, then, this post? This response to an unnecessary review of an assuredly inane book?

This part right here:

Recall that Lazere thinks that capitalism is our “unmarked norm,” which students blindly adopt. [...] But the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press tracks how people react to politically loaded terms, including capitalism and socialism. Among 18-29 year olds in 2011, 46 percent of respondents reacted favorably to the word “capitalism,” while 47 percent reacted unfavorably.

The rest of the essay is, as I say, rather unremarkable. It's perfectly reasonable and even entertaining--particularly when Marks wryly runs through the predictable and numbing "vexed questions" Lazere encourages courageous "critical teachers" to tackle unflinchingly. What I'm interested in, however, is Marks' implied premises about what polls and surveys can and can't do.

Marks presents a poll tracking "how people react to politically loaded terms" as sufficient to disprove Lazere's assertion about students' "unmarked norm." I find that remarkable.

A poll of young people's favorable or unfavorable reactions to the term “capitalism” has, at best, a highly tenuous connection to the question at hand--whether capitalism is college students’ “unmarked norm.” I haven't read Lazere's book--a situation I do not intend to rectify--but I imagine that his use of "unmarked" implies a certain lack of conscious thinking. I would think Lazere means that his students have inculcated and adopted practices and beliefs--ways of being in and seeing the world--that incline them to embrace capitalistic norms unthinkingly. Such a student might react unfavorably to the term "capitalism" while nevertheless carrying around and living out most of its premises and values.

For such a poll to have any relevance to Lazere's assumption, at least two things have to be true of the respondent. First, the respondent has to know what capitalism is and isn’t. My sense is that most of us--educated or not, old or young--have only a shaky grasp of what really defines and distinguishes capitalism. Otherwise, the respondent could wholeheartedly embrace the tenets of capitalism even while rejecting the word itself.

But let's assume I'm wrong on that count. Let's assume most people have a clear, coherent, and accurate understanding of capitalism. Even in that case, the poll would only be relevant if the respondent also understands his or her own deeply held beliefs, assumptions and desires--and how those premises relate to global capitalism. I find it unlikely that the respondents all firmly understand capitalism. I find it downright impossible that most of us--myself included--have an accurate picture of the ways that our desires and pursuits and loves either reflect or reject the norms of capitalism. I believe the vast majority of us walk around with myriad unexamined assumptions, desires, and beliefs. Unmarked norms, if you will.

To take a different example, I suspect that most young adults would react unfavorably to the term "consumerism," even though almost all Americans are neck-deep in consumerist habits, behaviors, and practices.

Polls don't tell us much about "unmarked norms" or closely held beliefs or motivating desires. They can predict elections and votes and other essentially multiple-choice decisions, but they can't tell us much about the depth of someone's passion. They can't really tell us anything about unexamined assumptions. They don't, in other words, have much to say about the deepest aspects of our humanity.