KLG: The Commentariat – Why Naked Capitalism is Essential

By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health

Naked Capitalism as an island of good sense in a heaving sea of nonsense.  We have all learned much from the regular team of contributors – Yves Smith, Lambert Strether, Nick Corbishley, Conor Gallagher, plus “hoisted” comments from IM Doc and others – but just as essential to the vitality of NC is the Commentariat Essay-in-Parts.

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My first contribution to NC was a review of The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM)  The comments addressing EBM led us to a continuing discussion here of the corruption of Biomedical Science into what I have called “Biomedicine.”  From Ghost in the Machine:

I worked in biomedical research as a grad student, then post doc, then research faculty for just shy of 20 years. When I left, more colleagues were entering into agreements with companies for contract research. With NDAs of course. Most knew it was bad, but it was a matter of career survival. Also, the stories I heard from people coming back to academia from Pharma research. Ugh (A common question following the relaying of disappointing results to management: “Why are your experiments not working?”)

Their experiments are not working because scientists of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) generally cannot distinguish between Biomedical Science, the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and their performance as adjuncts of Biomedicine (Big Medicine plus Big Pharma).  Those NDA’s (Nondisclosure Agreements) are the tell.  A scientist has completely lost the plot when the research becomes “private intellectual property.”

The PMC was introduced to us by the late, great Barbara Ehrenreich (PhD in Cell Biology, Rockefeller University nearly fifty years ago and their growth as a “class” is described perfectly in Virtue Hoarders: the Case Against the Professional Managerial Class by Catherine Liu, a “little book” that repays re-reading.  The Commentariat Essay-in-Parts began with GG:

“Performative” is a key word throughout. The PMC isn’t so different from the aristocracy of feudal times, which anxiously validated their own position in society via performative means: “correct” dress, speech, comportment, etc….Today, you must perform at work and in life to justify your meritocratic privilege: from using the correct corporate buzzwords and methodologies du jour to having the correct progressive-yet-not-radical liberal beliefs on social issues…Your living itself is a performance. From how you raise your child to what leisure activities you do and how you present these performances to your audience via social media.

This Essay-in-Parts continued with PlutoniumKun, Michael Fiorillo, Thuto, Carla, ElViejito, Ignacio, and others on wokism and class:

I would add that my own personal theory of the rise of ‘wokism’ is that as the PMC now has more children trying to enter the PMC than there are jobs, there is now a frantic competition within that class to focus on insider class markers..

Wokism is a way to separate and elevate yourself, culturally and in terms of age, and advertise your special grooming, outlook and style of moral vanity.

[T]here is a technological dimension to this. First AI came for the factory floor jobs and the PMC were put by the ownership class at the coalface of culling labour as the proverbial bearers of bad news. Now the technological shift is thinning the ranks of the PMC…with the result that the anxiety the members of this class feels about the future and the creeping precarity they thought would never encroach on their “secure”…

The remainder of the PMC, their children now working as baristas and Amazon warehouse hustlers, may turn their gaze once again to cutting the ruling class down to size.

I think that “caste” is more precise than class. I have seen very few but good examples of company managers, general managers, that didn’t adjust to the PMC description.

This Commentariat Essay-in-Parts on our current predicament that was as lucid as anything anywhere on how being woke has obliterated any appreciation of class as the analytic construct that explains our world, despite the aversion of the PMC to the very notion of class.

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The modern distemper exemplified by Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin was the subject of a recent book that raised hackles among the usual suspects: Hannah Arendt & Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity by Kei Heruta of Aarhus University.  I was reminded of this recently when someone in The Spectator (naturally) started a piece with importance of Isaiah Berlin and his “negative freedom” that allows people to do as they please by justifying their social and political prejudices.

DJG, Reality Czar started the off the Commentariat Essay-in-Parts with:

Hannah Arendt makes one change one’s views. Maybe that was Berlin’s “issue.”

Arendt is remarkable for retaining a certain affection (if that’s the word) for humankind and for human needs. (Albert Camus, another nearly indispensable writer, shows the same affection for this fallen race.)…The Human Condition is worth reading–at times, it gets complicated…with many ideas in play: If I recall, there is wealth versus simply being rich, and work as opposed to labor. Among others.

Some discussion followed about whether CIA fronts paid Berlin and Arendt.  Granted proof of the matter, there is no doubt Isaiah Berlin, Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory and fellow of All Souls, knew the source of the money, as he lived his thoroughly connected life as a wit while Dr. Hannah Arendt lived by her wits as a sometime professor in US universities and on royalties.  The Commentariat Essay-in-Parts continued with Rob Urie, Cat Burglar, LifeLongLib, and JBird4049:

Both Arendt and Berlin were paid by the CIA to create their views.  They could have refused the money.

It is worth remembering that many of the CIA-adjacent intellectuals were ex-members of Marxist-Leninist groups, and veterans of bitter factional infighting…they saw taking the money as a way of continuing that fight…And the money must have been good, at a time when they felt few options existed.

“paid by the CIA to create their views”  Or to write what they were going to write anyway.  If they did know who was paying them they were probably laughing all the way to the bank.

Do not forget that the CIA did not advertise their support…as much as one should not accept payment from the enemy, small things like food, clothing, and shelter especially for one’s family can be very persuasive counterarguments.

Again, this is NC at its best, discussing contentious issues related to how Classical Liberalism led us directly to the Neoliberal crack in which we find ourselves today.

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Our Loss of Science in the 21^st Century and How to Get It Back is a broad discussion of the work of Nancy Cartwright, who is one of the few modern philosophers who “gets” science, in the sense of what scientists and scientific workers actually do on a daily basis in professional lives (compared with a Bruno Latour, for example).  As she notes: (1) There is no (one) scientific method, (2) Rigor is altogether the wrong notion as the sole virtue of science, and (3) The usual notion of objectivity – the correct application of pre-agreed procedures for pre-agreed ends – is not good enough for science.  Science is messy and contingent, but when properly practiced it does lead to an approximation of truth, but only in matters that are amenable to a natural scientific approach.

PlutoniumKun, Etrigan, funemployed, and others began the Commentariat Essay-in-Parts with:

One key topic that’s so often overlooked in science is just how radically different the perspective of different specialties can be, looking at the same problems.  This can be healthy, but it can also throw hidden biases within the scientific method into stark contrast.  Climate scientists, for example, often build in an assumption of linear climate processes, while geomorphologists are very familiar with evidence of extremely rapid and catastrophic climate changes within the Holocene – nobody who has studied lake sediment cores in northern climes can feel as relaxed about climate change as some physicists seem to be.

I have talked with scientist and engineer friends about this a lot…It has sometimes felt as if there is a large consensus…that this resistance to complexity is an alien force coming from supervisors, organizations, managers, and below the highest levels people have to grouse in private but play along or else.

As an intellectually inclined person born in the early 80’s, I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that true spirit of scientific inquiry is about the best way a person of my generation could ensure that we would never sniff a penny of actual research funding, and never get the apprenticeship and mentorship experiences that are utterly essential to learning the craft.

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Following PK here, it has always been clear that assumption of linear change in anything of the natural world is a fool’s game.  Are we seeing this with anthropogenic climate change/global warming right now?  Probably (linked here on August 23, 2024).  Perhaps it’s not just the weather, as a member of this community makes the case ahead of time once again.  The Rev Kev and others:

I am going out on a limb here and say that what really undercut science the past few years was when politicians weaponized “science” and told us to trust it. And that meant that science became faith-based and if you did not believe the latest pronouncements, (masks are dangerous, if you get vaccinated you will never get sick, etc.) that you were almost an unbeliever.

 

Finally, another example of the NC Commentariat being ahead of the curve from our discussion of local effects of climate change as an approach to making climate change real to people.  “Driftwood Beach” on Jekyll Island on the coast of Georgia is a popular tourist attraction.  But these trees are not driftwood.  They have been killed in situ by rising seawater on inundated land that was high ground forty years ago.  One may doubt that this is due to rising sea level, but that is not the way to go.  Clueless optimism is not a plan.

As Eclair notes in the Commentariat Essay-in-Parts, local effects are everywhere for those who will pay attention:

Chautauqua County New York, stretching from Lake Erie, south to the Pennsylvania border, covers four USDA Climate Zones. In the ten years since the 2012 zone list was published, each zone has bumped up into the next warmer zone. The two warmest zones run parallel to the shores of Lake Erie, always a prime area for grapes and cherries. The new zone there, 7a, eliminates the winter temps below zero degrees F. The Jamestown area has warmed from 5a in 1990, to 5b in 2012, to 6a in 2023. Last week, a conversation with an ‘oldest resident’ (94 and still going strong) family member, had them shaking their head and admitting that they just didn’t know when to plant the tomatoes anymore:

“Used to be we’d put them in after Memorial Day, but now, the neighbors are planting them in a coupla’ weeks earlier.”

 

Yet another member of this commentariat telling the truth as it exists on the ground, ahead of the experts, in clear prose that does not attack anyone or call anyone names.

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The original promise of the internet was that information would become available to anyone with a connection.  Despite its thorough crapification, this is still the promise.  Justin Early in his book The Common Rule: Habits of for an Age of Distraction, notes that one way to handle it is to cultivate practices of media curation by pointing out that “we don’t choose our stories as much as they choose us.  Should we do nothing, someone else’s stories will curate our lives for us.” (quoted from Deep Reading by Rachel B. Griffis, Julie Ooms, and Rachel M. DeSmith Roberts).  Maryanne Wolf in her Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, argues that “the way internet reading is designed assumes a distracted reader and thus provides few demands or opportunities for people truly to give themselves to a text and practice the kind of sustained attention required to ‘[Take} on the perspectives and feeling of others.”

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