{"id":56,"date":"2008-03-16T20:52:29","date_gmt":"2008-03-17T01:52:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/motivation\/2008\/03\/16\/geertz-on-science-and-ideology\/"},"modified":"2008-03-16T20:52:29","modified_gmt":"2008-03-17T01:52:29","slug":"geertz-on-science-and-ideology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/motivation\/2008\/03\/16\/geertz-on-science-and-ideology\/","title":{"rendered":"Geertz on Science and Ideology"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week\u2019s readings were refreshing\u2014not the sort of thing one typically says when studying ideology, but nonetheless true for me at least.  They addressed a long-felt need in our course, most recently and eloquently described by Jonathan in his <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/motivation\/2008\/03\/11\/wheres-ideology\/\">post last week<\/a>: how does ideology shape our understanding of 1) the literature we\u2019ve been reading and 2) motivation generally?<\/p>\n<p>Given the placement of these readings within the structure of our course, I found the short section in Geertz on the relationship between science and ideology particularly helpful (230-33).  Geertz sets up several binaries in this section, but the most interesting is that science is critical whereas ideology is justificatory.  This maps onto something Jeff said last week quite well: when the science tells you precisely the story you expected to hear beforehand, you question the validity of the science.  Indeed, our collective negative reactions to science have largely tracked the extent to which the studies have reinforced accepted wisdom.  When we learned that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Mars-Women-Venus-Communication-Relationships\/dp\/006016848X\">men enjoy punishment while women are empathetic<\/a>, or that men want to have many sexual partners while women want one long-term mate, we felt \u201cboxed-in.\u201d  This was not the case when we read the counterintuitive game theory literature early on.<\/p>\n<p>Given Geertz\u2019s definition, it\u2019s hard to call last week\u2019s reading science rather than ideology.  Geertz\u2019s description of Hitler\u2019s Nazism fits Buss\u2019s findings a bit too well: \u201che was merely objectifying [the German conscience]\u2014transforming a prevalent personal neurosis into a powerful social force.\u201d (232)  I think the problem with Buss\u2019s science is precisely that it is justificatory, which is why I was most annoyed by the implied reasoning from the adaptive to the natural to the good.  You might say that Buss justified the status quo by turning folk psychology into evolutionary advantage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week\u2019s readings were refreshing\u2014not the sort of thing one typically says when studying ideology, but nonetheless true for me at least. They addressed a long-felt need in our course, most recently and eloquently described by Jonathan in his post last week: how does ideology shape our understanding of 1) the literature we\u2019ve been reading [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1711,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/motivation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/motivation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/motivation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/motivation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1711"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/motivation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/motivation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/motivation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/motivation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/motivation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}