Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

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[Chap]

You think the Indians were excluded from the British civil service because they didn't read Greek poetry at Oxford? No, I'm sorry, that's not the explanation for their exclusion. They were excluded because they were Indian and the British politicians were racists who considered them inferior.

It wasn't quite as simple as that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ci ... nd_setting

From 1853 onwards, entry to the élite Indian Civil Service was made open to all British subjects, regardless of race. But the (highly competitive) examination was initially only held in London, thereby greatly limiting the entry of Indians. By the 1920s there were also a range of means of entry from India, and the proportion of Indians increased considerably. Later, as independence movements grew, there was an understandable reluctance on the part of qualified Indians to enter the imperial service.

In discussing the ICS, we are talking of a quite small corps of high level administrators. The great bulk of the administrative personnel who made the wheels of Indian government turn were Indian.

The issue of racism was always present; there was however also the countervailing pressure of the long-term aim of incorporating Indians into the higher machinery of empire so as to increase its perceived legitimacy as a 'beneficent' transnational order. Hence this statement in a government report of 1918:

If a responsible government is to be established in India, there will be a far greater need than is even dreamt of at present for persons to take part in public affairs in the legislative assemblies and elsewhere and for this reason the more Indians we can employ in the public service the better. Moreover, it would lessen the burden of Imperial responsibilities if a body of capable Indian administrators could be produced..

[Physics Guy]

I quite agree that the Raj was staffed by Oxbridge graduates because the British authorities were racist. My point is that their excuse for racism was to claim that it was merely an insistence on competence. Sure there are some reasonably bright Indians, they might admit, but from the Universities we are getting the absolute cream of the human gene pool. These people can cap any Greek quotation. What Indian can touch that?

I'm afraid the attitude hasn't died yet in dear old England. I regularly read the BBC news website and just yesterday I skimmed its obituary for Max Mosley, which kept repeating over and over, to a bizarre degree, how terribly brilliant he was. His brilliance apparently consisted in readiness with sophistical arguments: a skill not only unhelpful in running an international sport, but outright detrimental. Only a few people master it, though, so it impresses some Brits.

Likewise with Calhoun and the mob he championed. Of course they were bald-faced in-your-face racists, but the story to which they stuck was that Black people were naturally and divinely ordained to be slaves because they were inherently incompetent to direct even their own lives, let alone hold any power over others. Racism isn't just my-subgroup-right-or-wrong clannism. There has to be an excuse.

The claim that the oppressed groups are incompetent isn't just another in the heap of insults cast upon the oppressed. It's the mainstay justification for oppression. Even skinheads with 14-word tattoos like to pose as technocrats in that way, and insist that their particular slice of humanity is objectively better. They point to performance on various tasks to support that assertion. Who wrote this, who built that, who landed what rocket where?

In a sense it might be best and most right to attack that whole attitude and say that no amount of competence entitles anyone to an unfair share of rewards and privileges. I find that a disappointing strategy, though. The meek may inherit the Earth but not its mineral rights. It's too easy to just sneer and call that attitude unrealistic, and paint Ayn Rand fantasies of how the whole world will collapse if the competent few are not given their due.

I'd rather accept battle on the offered field of competence and say Fine, forget justice, let the most capable do what they can. When the actually meaningful tasks are in question, millions of years of evolution have made all humans equal on average. Nothing beats a broad talent pool. The stupid reliance on inaccurate proxy tests of ability is an inefficiency that artificially narrows the pool and that holds us all back.

So we need to stop relying on arbitrary shibboleths to screen out leadership candidates, job candidates, candidates for anything important. Shibboleths like the right kind of firm handshakes, the right kind of eye contact, interrupting to finish someone else's sentence at the right time ... or even the right punctuation and grammar. These are all proxy tests that get taken to represent more meaningful things.

[dastardly stem]

I was struck, however, by the way one particularly strident participant kept calling this person a "fascist" over and over again. I found this both odd and off-putting because this person never struck me as a "fascist" and the idea that all challenges to fashionable political opinion on the extreme Left must be fascist seems dubious to me.

This is a terrible problem we're facing, no doubt, labelling each other, name-calling all due to political differences.

One problem with Theory, and therefore as it's used in critical race theory, is it doesn't leave room for criticism. This is not the world of critical but the realm of cynicism it seems to me. And as applied to race, as John McWhorter began noticing years back, it is a fanatical but odd type of religion, demanding all concessions, at the consequence of naming all unbelievers as something evil like "fascist". As it is, on that, what you've observed seems to fit with what's been happening all over the place. Disagreeing with what we term the woke side of things, seems to be seen as far more an attack on good and decency then as an attack on the lack of its reasoning.

[Chap]

... Sure there are some reasonably bright Indians, they might admit, but from the Universities we are getting the absolute cream of the human gene pool. These people can cap any Greek quotation. What Indian can touch that?...

After reading my post, you still prefer to reduce the issue to a simple caricature like that? As I said, racism was unsurprisingly always a factor. But so was the wish to co-opt Indians into the imperial structure, and to take the measures that would make that possible.

But fine. I give up.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

There's a conservative fear that letting previously excluded people into power means giving power to incompetent people. This fear assumes that the traditional barriers are simply standards of competence.

That's hardly ever true for the most important kinds of power, though. The most important kinds of power are those given for dealing with rare and terrible circumstances. We want a chief executive who can lead a nation through a disaster, for instance, but we don't stage annual disasters just to score candidates for high office. We rely on tests of other kinds of competence and hope that they work as proxies for the kind of competence we actually want.

How well a proxy test works depends on a lot of background circumstances, though. In its heyday the British Empire effectively chose its senior colonial administrators based on academic performance at Oxford and Cambridge, which meant that expertise in Ancient Greek was being used as a proxy for skill in governing India. And up to a certain point it might have worked (though not to a high enough point to make me happy if I were an Indian living under it), because enough people were trying to get good jobs in government by scoring well on Classics exams that the Classics exams served to some extent as tests of general intelligence.

Ancient Greek verse was still pretty damn irrelevant in itself to governing modern India. Plenty of people who could have done a much better job in government were in no position to study Classics at Oxford—most Indians, for example. The talent recruitment system was systematically excluding them, for no good reason at all, and the government of India suffered a lot. It got some talented people, no doubt, but it could easily have had many much more talented people, if it hadn't stuck to this clumsy proxy test.

US Senator John C. Calhoun famously declared that he would only recognize a Black person as human if they could "do a problem in Euclid or parse a Greek verb". Even apart from the basic error of conceiving humanity as a competence to be tested, this was another idiotically clumsy proxy test for competence. No doubt Calhoun's own social circle consisted of people who had all been dragged through Greek and Euclid in school, and those who coped better with them tended to be those who were talented at abstract thinking in general, and at learning alternative ways to express ideas. So even though Calhoun himself didn't actually spend much of his time parsing verbs or proving triangles congruent, within his social circle knowledge of Greek and Euclid may well have been an effective proxy test for the kinds of competence Calhoun cared about. If the world consisted only of classically educated Southern gentlemen then Calhoun's criterion might have been defensible as a standard of competence. It was an idiotically lousy test for the kinds of competence that actually mattered, even to Calhoun, when it was applied outside Calhoun's circle of classically educated Southern gentlemen.

Insisting on clumsy proxy tests as standards of competence is a silly fallacy. It's a shame that the Classics in particular seem to have been abused this way.

The fallacy of blind faith in bad proxies for competence isn't necessarily restricted to conservatives. Liberals sometimes seem to behave as though they thought that certain expressions of noble intention were tests of competence. It's good to check whether a candidate's intentions are good, but that doesn't necessarily prove that they're competent.

What a great post. Excellent.

- Doc

[Physics Guy]

Concerning language use training versus math and science: if I ever said that people don't need much training in use of language, I recant. It's super important. What I do feel is that precisely because it is so generally important, communication skill can be learned using almost any subject matter as a medium. One could learn to write clearly by reading and writing business plans or technical manuals instead of canonical literature.

Studying famous literature would still offer valuable things that one could not get from corporate memos, but one should not give literature credit for the things that one can get from memos—especially if one is justifying an English degree as training that will enable one to write clear and persuasive memos.

On another and totally unrelated message board years ago I followed that point with a claim that physics was different, and was promptly skewered by another physics graduate who pointed out that the internal structure of stars has no closer relation to human technology than Sanskrit verse has to business memos. A lot of natural science is indeed unrelated to most people's practical tasks. Even in engineering what people learn in college is usually pretty removed from what they are doing a few years after graduation. You can point to transferable skills that were learned and transferred, but you can do that with famous old literature just as well.

So okay, ancient Greek and quantum mechanics are pretty much in the same boat. There isn't really any qualitative difference in practical relevance.

I do still think that there is a certain preponderance. It may be out of date but I think of C.P. Snow's two criteria from "The Two Cultures": "Can you define acceleration?" is the counterpart question to, "Can you read?" and the counterpart question to, "Have you ever read a play by Shakespeare?" is, "Can you explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics?" Practically every scientist I've ever met has read some Shakespeare, even if they weren't educated in English. Quite a few scholars in the humanities have also had a clear grasp of thermodynamics—but not as large a proportion.

Math and science are alien to human nature in a way that nothing in the humanities or social sciences is. I think it makes sense to push people harder to learn a bit of them, in much the same way that people all over the world are all pushed to learn English. You can't afford to ignore it and it's a weird enough language, for the majority of humans that don't speak any related languages natively, that you can't just pick it up in passing. Soon we'll all be saying the same thing about Mandarin and Hindi and Swahili: hasten the day.

Math and science do get a lot of weight in education nowadays, and I'm not saying they need more. Maybe they even have a bit too much. I don't think we can just dial that right back, though. A certain push is appropriate because this stuff is unnatural.

[Physics Guy]

After reading my post, you still prefer to reduce the issue to a simple caricature like that? As I said, racism was unsurprisingly always a factor. But so was the wish to co-opt Indians into the imperial structure, and to take the measures that would make that possible.

It was not after reading your post. I had spent so long composing my post in reply to Symmachus that I just sent it and only read yours after.

I have in fact read one thick book on Indian history with a chapter about precisely this issue. That's not enough to make me an expert, or even to have stuck much in my mind, but it was enough for me to recognise that your post was probably right, and certainly more detailed than mine.

I didn't then go back and edit my post—and I won't do it now because I'm writing this instead—because although what you wrote was a good antidote to an impression that my post undoubtedly gave, it didn't really bear on what I intended to say. There was indeed a significant movement in British colonialism to empower local people. That was after all only the logical implication of all that White Man's Burden stuff that everybody liked: if the Raj was all about spreading the objective benefits of British civilisation, then certainly any native Indians who had mastered those British arts would be as well qualified as anyone to administer their country. And some Indians did rise, to some degree, in that service. I may have given the other impression but I was not actually trying to say that the whole British empire was uniformly dedicated to keeping the natives down.

What my book says, though, is that there was too much resistance from racist reaction. The cooption of Indians into the imperial structure never got far enough for India to just evolve gradually into autonomy the way Canada did. What I think—and here I have to admit that I'm reading between the lines of my one single book—is that the argument in favour of Indianisation was always hamstrung by its acceptance of too many inefficient proxy standards that arbitrarily handicapped Indians. So the pool of Indians who could jump through all the ICS hoops was too small for the overwhelming size of the population to make the impact it should have made. That let the racists get away with resistance, by claiming that only a negligible fraction of Indians would ever really be good enough to run their country, so things would always have to be left in British hands.

I'm not trying to say that the entire British empire was monolithically racist. It had a racist majority, like all contemporary societies, and the machinery of talent recognition that it employed systematically supported racism, in spite of some efforts against that.

[Lem]

Math and science are alien to human nature in a way that nothing in the humanities or social sciences is.

If by "to human nature" you mean many or possibly even most humans, I would agree. But to say they are "alien to human nature" unfortunately seems to imply that a significant minority of humans are alien.

Not a big issue, and I'm sure you didn't mean it to be as non-inclusive as I am reading it, but it still warrants a clarification, in my opinion.

Math and science do get a lot of weight in education nowadays, and I'm not saying they need more. Maybe they even have a bit too much. I don't think we can just dial that right back, though. A certain push is appropriate because this stuff is unnatural.

Not to all. To some it's a godsend.