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taking our lumps
Daniel A. Foss (DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU)
Thu, 10 Feb 1994 00:10:59 EST
John O'Brien writes:
>and simply lump everyone into the same building under the name of
>social and behavior scientists . . . might destroy lots of vested
John, I have mentioned in passing numerous times on this list that this
computer room is located in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Building. Yet
nationalism is fierce. Every little Department must have a floor of its own.
Has anyone ever called you a "generalist" to your face? It happened to me,
once. That was a terrible thing. Besides, you are flying in the face of the
central thrust of economic development. Bureaucracy, the Education Industry,
and the Explaining Industries, where the latter overlap considerably with the
bureaucracy and education industry but exhibit robust growth sectors outside
both such as the various, sundry, and assorted Consulting Industries, represent
in the aggregate society's self-monitoring activity. The whole glop also
accounts for over half all paid employment in the US, including the whole of
the public sector and a huge chunk of the private sector. How society makes
a living is keeping track of itself.
You damn straight, it'd destroy lots of vested interests. Both those who
push forward the frontiers of fragmentation and those who administer the
healthy corrective of the holistic overview would find their games ruined.
It is obvious to all informed persons that more information is necessary; and
a fortiori it is obvious to all knowledgeable people that hardly anything is
yet known and that more research is necessary. Blind faith is the condition
of survival; ye of little faith must believe, for agnosticism is
metholodologically unsound, which is far worse than heretical. The First
Amendment rights of free expression do not extend to the methodologically
unsound.
Onward, Soc Sci soldiers, marching as to war,
With the Cross-Cultural marching on before!
Daniel A. Foss
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