A wonder Oscar Wilde ever permitted to enter America

Because unfettered and untutored 'genius' , of course, is what immigration guards (& academic review committees) are specifically hired to keep out ...

Blame OSSIAN, not Obama, for why American Skeptics deny Climate Change

Ossian, godfather of CLIMATE CHANGE !

Ossian ?!  A fake bard from 250 years ago ? What on earth , heaven and the multi-varient Universe does he have to with denying Global Warming  - you're barmy !

Ossian , son of Fingal, is albeit inadvertently , the only-begetter of the hatred thrown up against the revolutionary changes he directly brought in and against the general idea (that he also brought in) that things are always changing and always changing in unpredictable ways.

In this case the hatred is against climate change, but worry not, in time this eternal fear of un-certitudes and against the greys of reality will move on to new targets.

Ossian - if you still remember anything from high school or university  -is that 1760s fake creation from the otherwise-obscure James MacPherson that is generally agreed to have sparked the reaction against 18th century Classicalism that we now call 19th Century Romanticism.

If you were only half listening to your teachers you do recall the terms but deflate them to only referring to literature and , maybe, the visual arts.

Wrong, wrong, wrong !

They were not "just" art movements or even - slightly bigger - "political ideologies".

They were the ultimate biggies : all encompassing worldviews held - in their day - by most anybody who was anybody as just common sense, pure and simple.

Hegemonic hegemonies, in other words.

But then, by the 1850s, Romanticism lost much of its short lived hegemony and a highly self-conscious opposing movement emerged (counter-romanticism/pro-classicalism) and was called - by its critics - Late Victorian Scientism.

But it had to share the stage with Romanticism which had by then lost its self-conscious 'movement' nature and merged into simple common sense.

Today most all of us hold bits and pieces of both Romanticism and its Scientism critics inside of us, all in a glorious muddle.

Where we all differ - and all 7 billion of us do differ - is in the proportions of these two we hold inside us as the basis for all our other beliefs.

To Deny is to be anti-Romanticism

Deniers - it is fair to say - are highly un-Romantic , highly pro-Scientism , not withstanding their attacks on today's living, practising, scientists.

The rapid and rabid popularity of MacPherson's "beautiful poetic forgery" across all of Europe, alarming the powers-to-be everywhere.

Hard to imagine poetry doing that today - but think of alarms over Rap lyrics or the reaction against Pussy Riot, to see we scribblers still have the potential to alarm our barely-literate superiors every time we put pen to paper.

Ossian's poetry emerged in the extreme North West of Europe - as far away as possible from Europe's civilized roots in the extreme South East of the continent - Greece and Italy.

Add to this geographic affront to good taste and breeding , was the fact that this was the work not of Greek aristocrats with education and breeding , but of untutored peasants, living in dire poverty under harsh - not azure blue - skies.

Worst of all, the young everywhere - particularly those with the most education and breeding - loved the stuff , tossing aside their millennium old classic texts with disdain.

This Ossian stuff - they said - was the work of pure genius - pure untutored genius !

Genius - then being using for the first time in our modern day sense of the word, was bad enough.

But its association with untutoredness - no,  more than that - its association only with untutoredness, was literally Revolutionary, in the widest sense of that over used term.

For this poetry literally revolved - flipped - all previous values on their heads : day was now night, black was now white.

Rude, untutored, uneducated, genius (aka street smarts or native intelligence) was now set ahead of highly (highly expensively) educated people from old families of good breeding and manners.

Think of the same situation today - for very little has changed , at least on the untutored side.

When almost everybody today has to have a certificate of some sort to make a living (even ditch diggers need their heavy equipment operating papers ), some people still get fabulously rich, important and admired, without any sort of certificate.

They even make a point of flaunting their relative lack of professional education or institutional accreditation to account for their success.

They are the same people that arose to threat classicalism and the aristocracy in Ossian's day: entrepreneurs, inventors, writers and entertainers/artists.

Who hasn't seen one's friends, people with too much money and not enough self-honesty, sending their lazy dolts of children off to get highly expensive education to obtain a MBA,PhD, MA in creative writing, BJ or MFA because the kid - when pushed - pretends to a faint interest in 'doing' that sort of thing for a living.

From expensive pre-school, to expensive post doc living expenses subsidies, with expensive educational toys,summer camps, tutors and educational trips to Europe in between, modern parents spent a million 2012 dollars to give their kid 25 years of the best possible education of the old breeding and Grand Tours sort.

The only change is that starting in the 1850s, the need to know the classics to be considered a highly educated part of the natural aristocracy was gradually replaced by a need to know some form of science - say hard like chemistry or soft like economics.

Their kids now know everything that is already known about the past and present of their chosen field: and is not the past and present, a la Charles Lyell , a reliable guide to the future ?

(In reality, all this is really just a way to avoid heavy inheritance taxes on your death, by spending as much of it as possible - now - on your kids' education. You are hoping to ensure the family's wealth and influence moves forward in time via education rather than by inheritances.)

Today's professionals are yesterday's classical aristocracy in a new guise

These are the "heavily-tutored competent". Aka the professionals.

(For I think you could fairly abstract the whole point of this post as me claiming that yesterday's aristocracy: classicalism: professionalism: today's aristocracy.)

But then some uneducated immigrant with chutzpah and drive blasts well past your precious kid's MBA or a tiny garage and an lone inventor discovers what a university full of PhDs like your son could not, or a street kid's painting, writings or comic turn makes her a famous personality while your daughter puts her MFA to work teaching uncaring high school kids in some small city in the Mid West.

Those fracking, fracking, damn untutored geniuses - it just isn't fair !

These guys know nothing of the present or the past - thus leaving them open to make lots of mistakes - and to discover the future.

Bruce Springsteen, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson : all have recently blasted well past kids with 25 expensive years of good education.

They represent as much unplanned, unpredicted, uncertain, mercurial change as Ossian did yesterday or the Climate will for tomorrow - and they are all equally hated by well educated professional deniers cum competent nobodies * of every generation.....

* Our think tanks are just filled with the well breed well educated second rates of this world : little wonder they envy the sudden rises of those superstars of academia the climate scientist.

Professionalization is the ANTIDOTE to "Untutored Genius"

   Romanticism's finest rebuttal to the hubris of the Enlightenment Project was its counter-claim that 'there will always be dark mysterious unknowable regions, outside in Nature and inside the human brain'.

   This was best illustrated by The Age of Romanticism's most original idea: untutored, unfettered, un-peer-reviewed, genius. The genius, as it were, of  genius.

   Genius's biggest, darkest, deepest mystery, to a world raised for  centuries on the belief that one excelled only by learning the rules of one's elders and predecessors, was how exactly did they get all that caramel genius into that little chocolate-dark head, without 25 years of highly expensive schooling ?

   Genius's overwhelming superiority to both the ordinary and the highly educated individual posed the gravest threat yet to the ideology of Classical Enlightenment.
   Because beneath all of  Classical Enlightenment's brave talk of  'the democracy of thought' was its belief in a natural (aka Nature-authorized) aristocracy.
   Pre-Darwin social darwinism as it were.
   It was based ,ultimately,upon superior force and violence: might makes right, survival of the most violent and the biggest.

   The aristocracy, already in decline as its land-seized-through-violence-wealth dimmed in comparison to the new wealth obtainable through new ideas and new inventions, had to quickly reinvent itself, if its children and their children's children were to remain at the wealthy top of society.

   Hyper-professionalization, based on Scientism, would be the answer.

   Now to get to the top of the world of professionals - the tenured professor of basic research in a top-ranked university - would first require 25 years of the best formal and informal schooling that money could buy.

   Only the wealthiest and best connected of society could hope to  easily enter into such any expensive conversion of present day wealth and power into future wealth and power.

    So let the rare genius slip into popular prominence, virtually untutored - they could only do so as entrepreneurs.

 Because ultimate knowledge (public/aka formally peer-reviewed and published in a top-cited journal) would have been successfully re-defined as only something someone with a superior university position could present to the world.

   Academic genius failing to pass through this secular eye of the needle could and would be simply ignored.

   Hear them sing today : "If what he claims is true (Russia was at least as much as Germany to blame for WWI)  why isn't Sean McMeekin a tenured full professor at some university we have at least heard of like, Oxford or Columbia, eh ?"

   Steve Jobs can be a genius then - like Satchmo - as long as he agrees to go no nearer to a university than to write it an endowment cheque.

   Professionalization is an attempt to erect a filmy gauze of order and rules and proper procedures, over a Reality that knows of no such thing.

   Mental floss for those psychologies unable to handle uncertainty and loss of total control....

PEER-reviewed in the heyday of the EDINBURGH REVIEW

   In the 1830s, the heyday of the dreaded QUARTERLY REVIEWS, before the removal of Stamp Taxes on printed matter and before the Reform Acts, any new ideas - ideas of any sort, not just scientific ideas - were first peer-reviewed before reaching the reading public.
  No, make that PEER-reviewed. As in reviewed by members of the Peerage, members of the House of Lords.

   Real Peers, lords and such,  were the actual writers behind the semi-anonymous review-essays from all the powerful journals, such as the famous Edinburgh Review.
   The Reviews were so powerful in forming opinion it was said they caused the deaths of poets and others they did not like.
   This is true : it is well known from private letters and public comments that many of the educated people in Britain and its Empire placed these Reviews just behind the Word of God in the Bible for reliability.
   The Reviews divided the world in half - Tory versus Liberal - and customers bought the review that supported their world view.
   Bought them because while the reviews simply repeated their customers' existing opinions, they amplified them in such a witty and biting way that the reader got not just new ammunition and education out of them , but entertainment as well.
   Bile mostly - but such amusing bile !
   (Rather like ourselves entertaining and informing ourselves by reading just DENIER or DOOMER blogs.)
   So in this shiny new democratic Age of Romanticism, Peers still told Commoners what to think and how to act, in the best approved manner of the Classical Age.
   These Reviews were the start of the Counter Romantic Reaction.
  This reaction was against the threat to 'the aristocracy of rules and norms ' of the untutored, un-peer-reviewed  Genius, as thrown up by the Romantic theory.
   The Counter/Contra reaction that we now like to think of as the Age of Modernity.
  When it was actually the exact opposite : the 18th century in reprise, disguised in 20th century clothes .....

(Houses of) PEER REVIEW

   The House of Lords is a chamber of sober second thoughts, where men and women (Peers) (aged in visage and grey in hair) review proposed new ideas, from the vantage point of honored expertise and authority.
   This sounds a lot like the National Academy of Science (America's NAS)
which is a perpetually self-appointing/self-anointing body of aged scientists, much honored for their expertise and authority, pronouncing upon the gravest scientific questions facing the nation.
   Britain's Royal Society does much the same and most of the world's prominent scientific nations employ a similar model.
   "Peer" is such an ambiguous word.
   One is judged by a jury of one's peers, for example : bog-ordinary citizens like yourself, with no occupational or professional interest in crime or justice.
   But the aristocracy are Peers, peers with a capital "P" , and they are presumed to be anything but ordinary, in fact the very antithesis of ordinary.
   A scientist's proposed journal article, grant request or application for tenure is judged by "peer-review".
   In theory, it is via a jury of people very much like the scientist. In practice the jury is often made up of Peers - scientists much superior in ranking to the supplicant scientist.
   Top scientists, and the world's top professionals, are not just the aristocracy of their world.
   They are the aristocracy of our world : the aristocracy of the world's successful response to the trauma of the 1832 Reform Act and similar legislation.
    And to the rise of the Romantic Era, with its threat of the untutored,un-peer-reviewed, Genius and un-peer-reviewed self-made entrepreneur/celebrity....