The Past Speaks

I’d like to respond quickly to a couple of things Christopher Moore has said  in response to my blog post on the Canadian census controversy. In my blog post, I had quoted some  histrionic statements about the census  by Stockwell Day, the Canadian government minister had earlier insinuated that Canadian census had “chilling” or Gestapo-like features. I had pointed out that Day, unlike most other politicians in national legislatures, did not attend a university.

I had then said: “one of the things the politicians who are hysterically opposed to the mandatory census have in common is that they did not attend or complete university.”

To this, Christopher responded:

Well…. I agree with him about the foolishness of this decision — and I love his Lincoln’s census entry illustration. But Andrew should maybe apply some of the empirical testing he advocates. Stephen Harper, who pushed for the decision, has a graduate degree in the social sciences (as Andrew indeed notes). Tony Clement, who implemented it, has degrees in political science and law. Maxime Bernier, its early advocate, has degrees in commerce and law. And so on.

I never said that the politicians named by Moore opposed the long-form census for irrational reasons. Moreover, the Prime Minister has yet to take a stand on the census policy of his subordinate ministers, for mysterious reasons which may become clear to future historians.  My post was about Day’s specific reasons for hating the long-form census. There are reasonable arguments to be made in favour of abolishing the long-form census or indeed the census in its entirety. Some of these reasons relate to technological obsolescence. However, suggesting that having a mandatory census has put Canada on a slippery slope to tyranny is outlandish. Comparing your opponents to Hitler or even hinting that they have evil, quasi-Hitlerian designs on the country’s Jewish population does nothing to increase one’s credibility.  It suggests paranoia and historical ignorance, since the Canadian federal government has been running the census since 1871 without the country sliding into dictatorship. Day’s comments are unpatriotic and an unjustified slander of several generations of Canadian legislators. More importantly, they are historically inaccurate.

There are plausible arguments to be made in favour of scrapping the census and there are absurd ones.  I would suggest that a university education would have helped Mr Day to tell the difference. This is why increasing the proportion of people who go to university would produce social benefits.

Christopher Moore wrote:
The argument that the only information society really needs is that provided by markets and prices is one that has thrived in universities. They don’t call it the Chicago School of economics because of deep-dish pizza and electric blues. It’s from the Economic Department of the University of Chicago. The policy engine of the Harper government comes from the Political Science department of the University of Calgary. The London School of Economics includes many acolytes of Friedrich Hayek. Unwise as it is, the Harper government’s hostility to governmental information gathering is something its leaders largely imbibed in university, not despite university.

It is true that members of the Austrian school of economics are skeptical of macro-economics and counting things more generally. However, the Austrian school is a fairly marginal movement in economics. This isn’t to say that they are necessarily wrong, just that they are unpopular. There are few if any Hayek acolytes at LSE nowadays, except insofar that some of Hayek’s ideas have become part of the social consensus. I know for a fact that LSE uses a textbook written by Paul Krugman, a left-of-centre New York Times contributing economist. LSE is not Hayek U. There are, however, social scientists at LSE who use census data or who help out with the IPCC. Consider the environmental economist Nicholas Stern. Moreover, I would imagine that even Hayek would have been in favour of the census, since he also supported socialized medicine and a limited amount of social housing.  Hayek is often misunderstood individual who was not nearly as right-wing as some people would make out. In any event,  as someone who left Austria in the 1930s for the country that invented the modern census, he probably understood the difference between tyranny and the normal activity of democratic government.

Christopher Moore wrote:

The idea that governments do not need to gather comprehensive statistical data is a bad one, but it’s not one that universities inoculate against. And of course universities shouldn’t inoculate against ideas, even unfashionable ones. When Andrew says, I believe that attacking statistical illiteracy through education will improve society in the long run, since it will encourage people to think more rationally. “rationally” seems to mean “as we do,” and that sounds disturbingly close to a faith that universities will make students will think like their professors and that all professors think alike. Fortunately universities are not unsuccessful at the first proposition and not very successful at the second.

Nobody would suggest that a professor ought to force his or her views or underlying values on students. That being said, universities and individual departments do tend to teach students to think alike, or rather to adopt common modes of reasoning and speaking. Each academic discipline has its own habits of thought. An older man who works in business once told me that a person’s undergraduate major influences their approach to management issues. He said that in board meetings he can spot the people who have degrees in history a mile away because they always ask so many damn questions about precedent. A typical comment from a former history major goes like this: “Why was this regional sales office established in the first place? Has anyone proposed closing it before? Let’s talk to the pension department to see if the executive who set up this regional office is still alive and available for consultation.”  Each of the other liberal arts disciplines has their own peculiar habits of thought that graduates bring into the workforce.

There are also certain habits of thought common to all disciplines taught at university. I would like to focus on those habits.

Whether a student is left-wing or right-wing is none of my business.  At secular universities, the religious views of the students are also irrelevant. The job of the university is to teach students to reason and to express their own values more effectively– to take inarticulate young conservatives, inarticulate young socialists, young Muslims, young atheists, etc.,  and to turn them into more eloquent spokesmen for their respective positions, whatever they may be.  I suppose that this involves teaching people to see which arguments in favour of a given position sound reasonable and which ones are outlandish or paranoid.

It is not the job of the university to teach a particular ideology, let alone loyalty to a particular political party. Inculcating certain habits of thought is a legitimate function of a university. One of these habits of thought, which has long been central to Canadian politics, is a commitment to moderation in politics and in political speech. I would say that set of attitudes, which are illustrated so brilliant by Mackenzie King’s 1942 plebiscite on conscription, played a crucial role in the success of Canada as a nation. My own pet theory/hunch is that this moderatist approach to politics stems ultimately from the influence of the Anglican Church and the Anglican version of the Reformation.

A few years ago, I overheard an undergraduate here say “I’m not going to vote for the Liberals, because their leader is a skinny environmentalist faggot.” Exact words. I didn’t say anything because I shouldn’t have been eavesdropping on their private conversation and was busy ordering my own coffee, but I wanted to intervene and say to this girl: “Listen, there are many reasons not to vote for the Liberals, but ones you have just given are absurd.”

I would like to think that the student on that occasion was in her first year. Contrary to what Moore says, universities do indeed change the way people think, which is why university graduates tend to think alike on many issues, even if they do not vote for the same political party.  Attending university changes a person’s vocabulary in a major way. It also alters their way of reasoning.  University graduates are more likely to use sentences that contain the word “however” or qualifying phrases such as “on balance” or “in general”.  Universities teach that “data” is not the plural of the word “anecdote”. So universities do cause people to think alike, at least in some ways. I would say that this is a good thing in a democracy.

University graduates are also more likely to vote and be involved in politics. There is hard data from a variety of countries to prove this point. University graduates are far less xenophobic than other people living in the same country– this is true in at least 40 countries, even when you factor income out of the equation. They are less likely to support people at the extremes of the political spectrum. University graduates have a wide variety of opinions on issues such as the  wisdom of invading Iraq or how to fight climate change, but as a group they are unlikely to think that 9-11 was an “inside job” or that the US government is hiding the Roswell flying saucer or that Obama is a Mulism terrorist sleeper. Based on my own experience, I would suspect that university graduates are also less likely than the average person to compare democratic politicians or minor authority figures, such as census takers, yellow school bus drivers, or store managers, to Adolf Hitler, the last three being Hitler comparisons I have heard over the years.

It seems to me that we should work for a society where the average person is a university graduate, rather than making a fetish of having a parliament that is representative of the general population is terms of socio-economic characteristics, a form of affirmative action that was once promoted by the Reform Party and which has resulted in a non-graduate, Mr Day, rising to high office.