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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Whiteness really isn’t vague at all. Europeans had a shared culture that was deeper and longer than any other race category. Look at the bio of some composers or monks, for instance, and you’ll find Poles copying British composers, Italian composers in Spanish courts, German composers in Hungarian courts, Irish monks in Italy, French leaders reading Scottish writers influenced by old Greek epics, and so on. This stretches at least 400 years. We don’t even have to bring up religion.

Also, is there hard evidence that Asian students do indeed perform better in regards to the purpose of education — becoming highly skilled and intellectually balanced? If they are not more likely, than the universities are correct to balance test scores with some other, even amorphous, metric.

Whiteness really isn’t vague at all. Europeans had a shared culture that was deeper and longer than any other race category. Look at the bio of some composers or monks, for instance, and you’ll find Poles copying British composers, Italian composers in Spanish courts, German composers in Hungarian courts, Irish monks in Italy, French leaders reading Scottish writers influenced by old Greek epics, and so on. This stretches at least 400 years. We don’t even have to bring up religion.

This seems an absurd overstatement on its face to me, and suggests an abject ignorance of world history. India and China both have cultural works/institutions (and in the case of China, actual records) that stretch farther than the Mycenaean collapse, let alone Archaic and Classical Greece, and China is well known to have used the Four Books and Five Classics (texts written in centuries BC) right up to the collapse of imperial China, as well as for having an uncommonly stable cultural and civilizational lineage in general.

India was not so unified for a single composer to be well known across the region, with compositions proliferated from one end to the other. Without monotheism, you did not have one monk travel from one end to the other and obtaining immediate employ in the Hindu culture. So no, in India there is no equivalent for a Brit and a German both listening to the same composer, or for a Spanish monk immediately working in hierarchy of the Vatican. The polytheistic Indian subcontinent may be the same religion in category, but the differences in regional worship means it is much more varied than Europe under Catholicism or even with the split between Catholics and Protestants. An Indian on one end of the subcontinent and one on the other would not be following the same liturgical calendar, listening to the same compositions, taking about the same novels and philosophers, or anything like that.

Even granting that (which I am loath to do but I think others can pick on it better than I), you have rather forgotten the other example I gave.

Edit: and that isn’t even noting that this is moving the goalposts amazingly far from the original statement…

Europeans had a shared culture that was deeper and longer than any other race category.

… or that the arbitrary criteria of “composers and books” doesn’t even necessarily get your preferred racial category up there.

My first impression is that "Asian American" is way more of a hyphenated identity than "White American" - the opposite of what you're saying. Most Asian people will identify primarily as Chinese-, Indian-, Filipino-American, etc., while a lot of white people in America don't even know their ancestry, or come from a mix of different European ethnicities. Is there a comparable amount of intermingling between different Asian groups? Is e.g. a Chinese-American any more likely to marry a Korean-American than a white or black person? (My guess is no, but I don't have any citations for this.) That would be an indicator of whether "Asian-American" is a real culture and not just a census checkbox.

Also, is there hard evidence that Asian students do indeed perform better in regards to the purpose of education — becoming highly skilled and intellectually balanced? If they are not more likely, than the universities are correct to balance test scores with some other, even amorphous, metric.

Hard disagree on that one. "Highly skilled" is evident in their grades and test scores. "Intellectually balanced" just screams "I arbitrarily invented this criterion to exclude you", you're the one that needs to provide hard evidence that they aren't "intellectually balanced" or universities can just say "well, it turns out it's black students who are the most intellectually balanced of all!".

Test scores do not carry over into music composition ability and ability to write important books, which are two of the most meritocratic domains we have. Certainly it would carry over if you’re an engineering academic or mathematician, but in the real world the problem sets are not “solve these clear instructions and do nothing else”. The importance of intellectual balance (which is not some ad hoc formulation but was found in European culture in its most dominant period) is that you want a programmer who can determine when his instructions are errant and convey this, or can follow the instructions with the greater goal in mind versus gunning for a promotion.

with the greater goal in mind versus gunning for a promotion.

There goes about half the workforce of google lol

Good, make space.

Test scores do not carry over into music composition ability and ability to write important books

Care to back this wild claim up? By what manner was this measured? Any chance you just made this up?

Test scores do not carry over into music composition ability and ability to write important books, which are two of the most meritocratic domains we have.

If they're actually meritocratic, you should be able to come up with a test that can judge that ability regardless of race, instead of coming up with ad-hoc adjustments.

Correct, the test is whether the most important books or compositions are from that group

Actually, the test is in depth of poetic tradition, in which case the Arabs and Iranians, at the very least, are strong contenders , while Chinese is the unrivalled hegemon of strictly metered poetry.

Obviously I’m not actually espousing that because that would be really really fucking stupid, but I don’t see why your criteria is any better. What “important books”? Are we discounting the Vedas and its effect on the Indian subcontinent, even taking opposite parts together? The entirety of the medieval Arabic literature? The Confucian canon, or the Records of the Grand Historian, which was studied extensively in the China and the Sinosphere, along with countless other texts? The Tale of Genji, a Japanese work, widely considered the first novel in the world? And why compositions, of all things? And how well versed are you in the traditional works of other civilizations, and what about them to yours? Is your “important works” mainly a result of your myopia than a realistic assessment?

It is true that European civilization, through genius and luck, produced a way of thought in the last few centuries that resulted in astonishing progress, and that culminated in hegemony over the world for two centuries. It may even be that there is some inherent superiority to European civilisation, though what you have written does less to substantiate this than to discredit it. But you would do well to remember that that was not the way of the world before, and it would be unwise to assume that the current superiority you see is, in fact, universal law.

You just said that. You haven't given any reason for anyone to think it's true. For all we know you could have made it up on the spot.

If you really got it from somewhere, tell us where it's from. If not, don't make things up.

Using this purely subjective criteria and having ideologically motivated DEI employees judge people based on it, what is the outcome?

Not to mention how very flexible "group" will become when motivated people use it. "Race is a social construct" when certain races might plausibly benefit. Awarding racial spoils is very important and in fact morally required when other races might benefit. The same person will effortlessly push for both points simultaneously without any sense of contradiction.

So I guess someone decided black people's books and composition are disproportionately more important, and affirmative action is not an issue after all!

I think the claim is that our methods of testing are inherently biased in favor of diligence over brilliance. Therefore, relying solely on test scores will tend reward the former too much and the latter too little. If true, then some kind of counterbalance may be desirable.

That is completely backwards. Our tests do a great job of noticing the smart kids with unexceptional grades, and inspiring despair in the dilligent-but-unexceptional.

Absolutely not. If you want to propose such a counterbalance you first have to come up with a reasonably objective way to test "brilliance", and only then can will you be able to decide how much counterbalance is necessary. But if you have such a test, you don't need a counterbalance at all, you can just use it as an admission criterion.

The objective test for brilliance is lifetime achievement, and it correlates with but is not the same as being good at academic tests.

Then I guess we have to wait until someone dies to admit them into a university.

I don’t think continuous cultural sharing is what’s key for identity, though, otherwise “Yugoslav” or “Balkan” would be a very strong identity. Identities tend to be forged oppositionally, eg precisely when a significant number of people you interact with semi-regularly don’t share your identity. That’s why the one circumstance in which Balkan or Scandinavian identities are most salient is when a Croat meets a Serb or a Norwegian meets a Finn in a third country, and also why living abroad is a great way to become more aware of your own national identity. With the exception of some Eastern Mediterranean and Balkan identities, the primary outgroup of most white European peoples has been other white European peoples, hence why whiteness doesn’t have much weight as an in-group identity. While that’s perhaps changing in the US now, I’d wager the same has been true for most American identities — due to the exclusion of black Americans from competition with whites until recently and the historically fairly low proportion of Hispanic Americans, the most salient identities have been things like Catholic/Protestant/Jewish or Irish/Italian/WASP/German. That’s why I don’t think “whiteness” is an identity with much force yet, although I’ll grant that’s changing over time.

As for the over/underperformance of Asian-Americans in education, my experience as a university lecturer in the US was that Asian-Americans were significantly over-represented among the absolute best-performing students in my classes by pretty much every metric (including things like participation and creativity, areas where some have doubted Asian-American performance). I will flag though that the same was not true of my Asian study-abroad students, especially Chinese students; in that case, there were many who just did not give a fuck about doing well in class, and this was the group where cheating was most rampant. There were some notable exceptions, but these tended to be the Chinese immigrants proper rather than the study-abroad crew.

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