So much to blog, so little time

Things I would talk about at greater length and erudition if I were a man of independent means, rather than someone who supposedly works for a living. Also, today is my birthday; instructions on how to honor this auspicious occasion appear at the end of the post.

First, Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber has an eloquent article about academic blogging in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas.” The final paragraph sums it up:

Both group blogs and the many hundreds of individual academic blogs that have been created in the last three years are pioneering something new and exciting. They’re the seeds of a collective conversation, which draws together different disciplines (sometimes through vigorous argument, sometimes through friendly interaction), which doesn’t reproduce traditional academic distinctions of privilege and rank, and which connects academic debates to a broader arena of public discussion. It’s not entirely surprising that academic blogs have provoked some fear and hostility; they represent a serious challenge to well-established patterns of behavior in the academy. Some academics view them as an unbecoming occupation for junior (and senior) scholars; in the words of Alex Halavais of the State University of New York at Buffalo, they seem “threatening to those who are established in academia, to financial interests, and to … well, decorum.” Not exactly dignified; a little undisciplined; carnivalesque. Sometimes signal, sometimes noise. But exactly because of this, they provide a kind of space for the exuberant debate of ideas, for connecting scholarship to the outside world, which we haven’t had for a long while. We should embrace them wholeheartedly.

This business about certain academics viewing blogs as an unbecoming occupation is more true that I’d like to admit (although it is far from universal). And it extends to all kinds of pretentions to public-intellectual engagement, not just our daily interventions on the internets. Which is why it’s important to emphasize that true scholarship entails two tasks, both equally crucial: discovering new things about the world, and letting people know what it is we have discovered. The first is called “research,” while the second is sufficiently undervalued that we don’t even have a good name for it. Part of it is “education,” part is “outreach,” part is engaging in public debate. But whatever you want to call it, it is just as important as research itself. You might say that, without research, there wouldn’t be anything to outreach about. True, but if we never told anyone what we had learned, there wouldn’t be any reason to do research, at least not in intellectually-driven fields like cosmology and history and literary criticism. It’s like asking whether, in baseball, the bat or the ball is more important. Without either, the whole thing becomes kind of pointless.

Next, Abhay Parekh at 3quarksdaily asks what it is that makes people disbelieve in evolution. He points the finger of blame at the “decent with random modification” part of natural selection:

My explanation is simply this: Human beings have a strong visceral reaction to disbelieve any theory which injects uncertainty or chance into their world view. They will cling to some other “explanation” of the facts which does not depend on chance until provided with absolutely incontrovertible proof to the contrary.

I’m sure that’s part of it, although I suspect the truth is a complicated mess that varies from person to person. Others chime in: Lindsay at Majikthise thinks it’s about disenchantment and an absence of meaning in purely naturalistic theories of the universe; Amanda at Pandagon chalks it up to a need to feel superior to other species; PZ at Pharyngula points to the psychological drive to be part of something bigger. I think all of these are likely part of it, and would add another ingredient to the cocktail: resentment at being told what to think by arrogant elites. When people use “local choice” as an excuse to allow school boards to decide to teach all sorts of nonsense, defenders of evolution generally treat it as simply a tactic to further their religious agenda. For the Discovery Institute et al. that is no doubt correct; but for people on the streets who are speaking at the school board meetings, I suspect a lot of it it really is about local choice. They don’t like to be told by some mutiple-degreed Ivy League east-coast intellectual types that they should think this and not that. There is a particularly American cast to this kind of resentment, which helps explain why this poor country is so much more backward about these issues than our peers in Europe.

Finally, speaking of Lindsay, she has recently embarked on quite an adventure: inspired by the experience of reporting on-location in the aftermath of Katrina, she’s quit her regular job to become a full-time stringer. But she needs some help at the early stages, so this week she’s asking for donations in turn for by-request blogging! This sort of bottom-up structure is alien to us here at Cosmic Variance, where we figure we’ll write about what we think is best and you’ll like it, or learn to. But it’s an interesting experiment. And while you have your PayPal account handy, you could drop by to Shakespeare’s Sister, who was recently hit by a double whammy when she was laid off from her job and had her property taxes increased by 100%. She’s one of the most passionate and articulate bloggers we have, and if you like what you read there, don’t be shy about dropping off a couple of bucks.

That would make me a good birthday present.