Do you know The Other?
"When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then, Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church"
presumably, the person who said this is telling us that one does not have to be a Jew to fight against the injustices that the Jews faced in Nazi Germany, nor does one have to be a homosexual to fight for equal rights of homosexuals nor one need to be a black to fight for the civil liberties of the blacks.
however, to misconstrue this statement and think that one does not need experience with the groups of people that you are helping (for want of better word) is a gross mistake.
true. you need not have lived in abject poverty to fight for the abolishment of poverty. but one needs to have an in-depth understanding of the causes and effects of poverty. one needs, almost, to be able to empathise with those who are poor. i would therefore suggest that if one is indeed serious about doing something for the poor (or indeed for any group of disadvantaged and/or marginalised people), one should get to know them, not just through books, but have intimate contact with them, truly understanding as many aspects of their lives as possible and seeing issues from as many different perspectives as possible. in short, one should conduct got down on the ground and do some fieldwork.
otherwise, if one is to try to help these groups of people just based on theory, cloistered up in the ivory tower of academia, one's efforts may just bring more harm than good as in the fiascos of IMF in Latin America and Indonesia. in otherwords, commenting without doing fieldwork is irresponsible and will do more harm than good.
posted by rench00 at 10:20 AM
7 Comments:
I'd like to know which bunch of academics don't do fieldwork in order to build up their theories.
Economists, presumably?
6:34 PM
Well, for a start, people who do "science studies" usually know neither science nor scientists. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have taken root here. But it's a very prevalent movement in the West.
7:05 PM
ha... philosophers don't either. and few political scientists have actually been politicians. and then there are all the philosophers... who talk about morality and humanity without really knowing how the whole spectrum of humanity lives...
12:32 AM
That's a very comfortingly anti-intellectualism you're subscribing to.
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre... don't know the whole spectrum of human lives. Hence the entire field of philosophy is irrelevant.
Karl Popper, David Hume, Paul Feyeraband, Thomas Kuhn weren't scientists. Hence the entire field of the philosophy of science is irrelevant?
9:18 AM
well... no... that is not what i meant. let me rephrase.
i don't mean that what philosophers, political scientists, economists, etc have nothing to offer nor do i mean that all that the theories these people give us are useless and irrelevant.
my point was that if we want to actually do anything, effect any change, then we should go beyond the theories and go down, get our hands dirty and do some fieldwork.
this is because i think all theories and philosphies that we can ever come up with are all gross simplifications that can only be a rough guide to what life really is. so the fieldwork is important to know which philosophie and theory (or combinations of) is relevant and which are not. only with that, are we in the position to do something.
so... i hope that clears things up. i am not anti-intellectualism.
11:34 AM
=D
But coming from sociology, political science, and even history (so you know my training), it seems rather astounding that people can basically pull theories out of their asses without any fieldwork.
Simplifications are sometimes necessary in theory formation (see "ideal types") as well.
Except for those economists, of course! *grins*
Btw, who was the politician whose speech on education you excerpted? I'm guessing it's either an early Minister from the first cabinet or the current one...
3:38 PM
>Karl Popper, David Hume, Paul Feyeraband, Thomas Kuhn weren't scientists. Hence the entire field of the philosophy of science is irrelevant?
Actually, yes it is in the sense that few working scientists need any knowledge of the philosophy of science. Worse, Kuhn's "paradigm shift" model completely discounts the hard science scientist's ability and need to hold multiple competing viewpoints in jhis head pending evidence, and is thus faulty, and Feyerabend's discussions of the philosophy of science is based on false science.
Luce Ingeray's condemnation of fluid dynamics' inability to solve turbulent flow is based on an argument that is ridiculous if you know the subject, Sandra Harding's description of the Principia beggars belief, and so on.
Any kind of knowledge of physics and maths would have prevented Social Text from happily pulling Sokal's Trojan into their walls and blowing themselves down.
For full details, I recommend picking up a copy of Higher Superstition by Gross and Levitt, Postmodernism Disrobed by Richard Dawkins (you can find it online), Weinberg's dissection of Kuhn's Paradigm shift model in Facing Up, and also "The Flight from Science and Reason", edited by Gross and Levitt and being the annals of a science conference dedicated to the gross misrepresentations of science in "science studies".
5:26 PM
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