The Little Red Blog

Friday Fragments

{Here and there on the WorldWideWeb...for once in my life, I will refrain, for the most part, from snarky comments.}

At Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson makes a sensible point: laws should apply equally to everyone, with no loopholes for anyone whose personal Lord and Savior says otherwise.  Or, as Robinson phrases it, “If a law should apply, it should apply regardless of how people feel about following it. If the law infringes on liberty, it should be repealed. All a religious exemption is at the end of the day is a rule that some people are allowed to violate laws because they believe they ought to be allowed to. Or rather, because they believe God told them they shouldn’t have to follow the law and should get to discriminate against people.” 

There Should Not Be “Religious Exemptions” To Laws ❧ Current Affairs

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Kerry McDonald, on the other hand, leader of the Foundation for Economic Education, would like to get rid of laws forcing kids to go to school. Yay, Kerry McDonald! Where were you when I needed you in 1965? Ms. McDonald argues as follows:

Compulsory school attendance laws terrorize parents and weaken families. Last week, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld a state law that allows parents of children who regularly miss school to be jailed. The case focused on two single mothers in Missouri who were given jail sentences when their children, who were in kindergarten and first grade, were each absent from school for roughly 15 days during the 2021/2022 academic year. 

We may see this criminalization of parents accelerate in the coming months as states and school districts try to find the allegedly “missing” children who have left district schools since the pandemic response began in 2020. It is likely to be low-income parents and those from historically marginalized groups who will be targeted for truancy.

Compulsory schooling is incompatible with freedom, as Thomas Jefferson himself recognized. While promoting broad educational offerings, free to the poor, and noting that a society could not be both free and ignorant, Jefferson opposed forced education. “It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father,” Jefferson wrote in 1817.

Instead of criminalizing parents whose children miss school, sometimes for heartbreaking reasons such as bullying, we should seek instead to eliminate compulsory schooling statutes and free families from the government’s coercive clutches. In the absence of these laws, a robust, diverse, and decentralized education ecosystem would emerge that would be grounded in consent over coercion and defined by variety over monopoly.

Compulsory Schooling Laws Have Got To Go - Foundation for Economic Education (fee.org)

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Lastly, educator Daniel Buck is very excited about a new college admissions test that, he says, will challenge the SAT and the ACT for prominence: it’s the CLT (Classical Learning Test), and it requires students to read Plato and Teresa of Avila!

Created in 2015, the CLT hopes to revive what we consider an education of old — logic, grammar, Shakespeare, Tolstoy. In format, it resembles its competitors, featuring passages with multiple choice questions. Yet students instead read the likes of Plato on tyrannical man or St. Teresa of Avila on the virtues of a humble life.

Hundreds of private colleges and universities now accept its scores. Last spring, Florida began funding its administration at the K-12 level, and high scores can even earn students Bright Futures Scholarships.

Especially as the classical education movement more broadly gains national momentum, there is both room and need for a challenger to incentivize the kind of education that cultivates wisdom, fosters virtue, inspires wonder, and crafts the soul.

A test to challenge the SAT | The Hill

Wednesday with Pascal: Hillsdale Explains It All!

{An exciting development: Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has enrolled in a free online course offered by Hillsdale College! The course, titled “The American Left: From Liberalism to Despotism,” is based on Professor Kevin Slack’s upcoming book, War on the American Republic; it consists of ten recorded lectures by Professor Slack, along with a brief introductory address by Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College. Although no college credits are awarded for completing the course, nonetheless, there will be quizzes! And grades! Pascal’s classwork will preclude him from posting on other subjects for a while, but he promises to keep us informed of his progress, should he make any.}

We are awash today in woke madness. A few examples will suffice:

• Did you know that, in California, gerbils are allowed to vote?
• Did you know that there is a university in Oregon where courses in “History,” having been previously retitled “Herstory,” are now listed as courses in “theirstories”?
• Did you know that in Germany, (and I have this on good authority) women are now allowed to swim topless in public pools—and so are men!
• Did you know that adolescents in River City are allowed to play pool in the local billiards parlor?

Such things are but the tip of the iceberg toward which the Titanic that is the United States of America is inexorably headed, which is the point made by President Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College in his video introductory to Professor Kevin Slack’s online course, “The American Left: From Liberalism to Despotism”. What we will learn in the course, promises President Arnn, is the history, nature, and purpose of “Post-Sixties Liberalism,” and (of course) the reasons to be afraid of it. We will learn too that the contemporary madness stems from our abandonment of Nature and Nature’s God, our insatiable lust for Power, and our ridiculous (if not Diabolical) belief in Progress.

Moreover, we will learn that postmodern Liberals have redefined Progress even as they worship it. “Progress” no longer means advancing toward a chosen destination; instead, it now means “a journey that changes us as it happens,” as if we are Huck Finn lazily drifting down the Mississippi on a raft! Or something. The point is, says President Arnn, Progress now happens to us, and we—that is, ordinary Americans—no longer have much to say about it.¹  

Is there a text in this class? Technically, no; but non-technically, students are encouraged to consult Kevin Slack’s soon-to-be-published The American Left: From Liberalism to Despotism. According to the publisher’s blurb, Slack’s book will explain how “Teddy Roosevelt’s Anglo-Protestant progressive social gospelers battled trusts and curbed immigration; Franklin Roosevelt’s and Lyndon Johnson’s secular liberals forged a government-business partnership and promoted a civil rights agenda; and the 1960s radicals protested corporate influence in the Great Society, liberal hypocrisy on race and gender, and the war in Vietnam.”

Each iteration of the Left went further, seeking “to overturn what came before.” Bad people filled with bad ideas did bad things. After the Sixties, “Radicals ensconced themselves in bureaucracy and academia to advance their vision of social justice for women and minorities, while neoliberal elites promoted monopoly finance, open borders, and the outsourcing of jobs to benefit consumers.” Eventually, “The neoliberals’ economic and military failures precipitated a crisis of legitimacy.”

Professor Slack’s book—and, I assume, his course—wends its way to a tragic finale.

“In the ‘great awokening’ that began under Barack Obama, neoliberal elites, including establishment conservatives, openly broke with the populist base of the Republican Party, embraced identity politics, and used COVID-19 and a myth of insurrection to strip away the rights of American citizens. Today, an incompetent kleptocracy is draining the wealthiest and most powerful people in history, thus eroding the foundations of its own empire.”

If today’s America exemplifies what it means to be “woke,” well, this existential Russian blue cat would prefer to go back to sleep. I will, however, wake up in time for Lecture #1, by Kevin Slack himself: “Liberalism’s Rejection of Progressivism”. That should be an eye-opener!

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Professor Kevin Slack’s CV: Kevin Slack - Hillsdale College

I should note that, on the popular website “Rate My Professors,” Professor Slack is unanimously praised; of his twelve reviews, eleven rate him as “Awesome” and one rates him as “Great”. The reviews are so fulsome, one might suspect Professor Slack of having written them himself (but he didn’t).

¹ One cannot help but think of Richard Weaver’s remark, which (because I cannot locate the quotation) I will paraphrase as: just because the river is at full flood and the current is carrying us downstream, we are not thereby obliged to sing hymns of praise to the river gods as we are swept away. Or something.

Education for the Eschaton

{Apropos of nothing, our quote for today is from Senator Rick Scott (R-FL): “Democrats want to destroy America.” Curses! How did he manage to decode our platform?}

I’ll make this quick: the time is short, the end is near, and we are doomed.

According to Molly Olmstead (at Slate), Christian publishers are currently churning out “survival guides, books about current events, and prayer manuals all oriented around a rapture, a second coming of Christ, or an otherwise cataclysmic event at the hands of God.” How does one account for “this spate of end-times books”? One consults an expert—in this case, “Tommy Ice, a retired theology professor and the executive director of the Pre-Trib Research Center.”

Professor Ice explains “the rising interest in end times”:

“The reason it’s happening is the totalitarianism in the United States. It’s because of the seemingly overnight decline of America, from our perspective. It’s a huge shift, the stealing of an election. When has that ever happened in the United States?”

For him, the “stolen presidential election”—along with, he believes, stolen elections in the two 2020 Senate races in Georgia—clarified the depths of the nation’s degeneracy. (All of the election fraud claims that Ice cited as signs of totalitarianism have been thoroughly debunked.) That, he said, was “lining up with what it is going to be like after the rapture of the church, where you have the Antichrist coming from Europe, who’s going to be the world ruler.”

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

The rapture, apocalypse, and end times are sweeping Christian books, with a Trump connection. (slate.com)

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At the Acton Institute Powerblog, Auguste Meyrat reflects on a new book, Don’t Go to College, in which co-authors “Michael J. Robillard and Timothy J. Gordon not only cover the familiar problems plaguing colleges but also perceive something deeper corrupting an institution that was so fundamental to Western civilization. The real problem is more than the financial cost, the coddling, or even the abuse the writers themselves suffered—it’s the philosophy stupid.”

It seems that a specter is haunting American universities: the specter of “neo-Marxism,” which, alas, Meyrat doesn’t bother defining or explaining. Instead, he simply quotes Robillard and Gordon: ‘[Traditional education] is meant to advance actual knowledge, neo-Marxism is meant to advance propaganda, which is true to Marx’s goal of putting change (revolution) above understanding (wisdom).’ Whereas one philosophical system espouses the intellect and reason, the other system emphasizes feeling and action. It’s no mystery which one is the easier sell to young adults.”

Meyrat goes on to explain that “ideas have consequences, and the damage done by the capture of neo-Marxism cannot be underestimated.” [He means “overestimated,” of course, unless he means “should not be underestimated”.] “Neo-Marxism has fundamentally warped the whole goal of college. According to Robillard and Gordon, students who are now charged with ‘changing the world’ have taken this to mean ‘changing mankind,’ which explains the current rush to embrace transhumanism. Citing more than a few authorities on this topic, the writers explain:

‘Transhumanists believe that human beings are reducible to data points; technology can deliver secular utopia; tech gurus should lead society (and globalist technocrats manage it); and depopulation, anti-natalism, extreme life extension, vegetarianism/veganism, alternative sexual lifestyles, New Age spiritualism (but not Christianity), wokeism, and new urbanist, “smart-city” living are all unquestionably good things.’ 

To paraphrase Richard Nixon, we are all transhumanists now, data points existing in virtual reality—at least, that’s how Robillard, Gordon, and Meyrat see things. I, on the other hand, have never met a transhumanist, an anti-natalist, or anyone who believed in a technological utopia; perhaps I have led a sheltered existence.

Auguste Meyrat’s only complaint about Don’t Go to College is that the authors offer no useful solutions; all they advise is either to become an autodidact (easier said than done) or to go to college and troll the woke professors and the sheeple who follow them. As Meyrat sees it, we should not throw out the baby of higher learning with the bathwater of neo-Marxist transhumanism. He agrees that the present situation is untenable; “bad education and bad philosophy,” after all, “ultimately lead to an unfulfilling, impotent kind of life. It’s no surprise that our society has decayed politically and culturally; this is the inevitable result of its having rejected the West’s, and Western education’s, founding principles.” Still, Meyrat does not want to bury the universities, only the woke faculty and the postmodern curricula. “It’s critical,” he concludes, “that we either restore the university from the ground up or design a plausible alternative, one that’s unafraid to recover the great books of the past and that can assist and inspire us in our lifelong pursuit of wisdom.”

As someone who dropped out of college as soon as the bursar's office cashed the tuition check from my parents, I am sympathetic to the "don't go to college" movement. However, there ought to be better reasons to quit school than woke faculty and transhumanist indoctrination. How about this: don't go to college because the eschaton is about to arrive, and you will either be Raptured into the clouds with Jesus or caught up in the battle against Antichrist here on earth?  

Does College Get in the Way of Education? – Acton Institute PowerBlog

       Either the end times have arrived, or Spring Break has gotten out of hand...

The Unbearable Sadness of Today's Conservatives

What are we unhappy about today? We are unhappy about many things--if, by "we," you mean American conservatives. Let us air a few of their grievances.

For one thing, conservatives are unhappy about DEI: that is, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. According to Nicholas Waddy, who teaches history at SUNY Alfred:

Higher education’s abject submission to the gods of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is now assured. Many colleges and universities are building into their hiring, promotion, and tenure schemes a requirement that candidates show “DEI competencies” in order to advance. What’s more, the rubrics assessing whether a candidate has hit the mark are saturated with the terminology of leftist identity politics. More importantly, they take for granted the central assumptions of modern cultural Marxism and critical race theory.

Professor Waddy’s concern isn’t limited to the halls of academe; it extends to the epidemic of “woke” corporations, corporations which were once the backbone of America but are now spineless, craven servants of Moloch (DEI):

Conservatives and Republicans should ask themselves: if every institution in modern society submits to cultural Marxism and identity politics—from education and entertainment to big business and even mainline Christianity—then what are the long-term prospects of a political movement that dares to dissent from such a pervasive orthodoxy?

If we once thought we could afford to scoff at the woke antics of professors, the looming conquest of the corporate world by the Left should be seen for the grave threat to America that it is. In the battle for corporate America’s soul, failure simply cannot be an option.

That is enough to make anyone, and not just Nicholas Waddy, unhappy.

DEI Will Be the Death of Us › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

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Also at American Greatness, where dissatisfaction with the status quo seems to run rampant, Robert Curry, a conservative, is unhappy with the Seventeenth Amendment (election of U.S. senators by popular vote), which, along with the rest of the Progressive agenda, pulled the rug out from under America's carefully constructed, perfectly balanced, and finely tuned system of federalism. “Today,” writes Curry, “the central government rides roughshod over the states and regulates the lives of every American citizen to an extent that would have horrified the founders.” Speed limits! Gun regulation! Voting by mail! Dire consequences for removing mattress tags! Pronoun indoctrination! Black people being paid for working! The Communist Manifesto being recited at gunpoint by schoolchildren!

Curry goes on to explain how this came about:

When exactly did America abandon federalism, and how were the states neutered? We can date the turn with startling precision. The United States abandoned federalism on April 8, 1913, the day the 17th Amendment was ratified. It provided for the popular election of senators by the people of the individual states, the system we have now. Up until that day, the two senators from each state were chosen by the state legislatures. Consequently, before April 8, 1913, because the legislatures of “the several States” controlled the Senate, they had some control over the federal government. 

Curry sets forth a commonsense agenda for American reform:

The states must be restored to their proper place in the federal system if we are to live again in the liberty at home and the peace abroad that the founders intended for us. Much will be required of us to accomplish that noble purpose. Not the least of our tasks will be the repeal of the 17th Amendment. Repealing that amendment, of course, will not be enough. What is required of us as a nation is re-dedicating ourselves to the American idea. Then all can be accomplished. We can restore the states to their rightful place in the American system of liberty and reclaim American liberty for ourselves.   

If that doesn’t bring you to your feet with tears in your eyes, well, you just might be a Progressive.

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Federalism in Name Only Undermines Liberty at Home and Peace Abroad › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

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Lastly, Adam Ellwanger, who teaches at the University of Houston, is unhappy that conservatives refuse to fully embrace their countercultural identity. Writing at The American Conservative, Ellwanger insists that “People on the right need to learn to relish being part of the counterculture, and to jettison the bad connotations that this term implies. Counterculture can be bad, but that depends on the virtue of the culture that it opposes. Our cause is just. In 2022, being vanilla is about the most transgressive identity you can inhabit. In a culture that openly opposes the very notion of virtue, counterculture becomes a moral obligation.”

The counterculture of the Sixties left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, Ellwanger concedes, but the truth is that, like it or not, “the countercultural left won. Their offensive against America’s traditional culture overwhelmed our defense, and now they sit in the seat of institutional power; meaning, traditionalists and conservatives are now the counterculture. It’s our job—if we care—to play offense and undermine the new culture wherever we can. We must understand that voting alone is insufficient as members of the counterculture. We need to be willing to openly live and express the norms that oppose the left’s cultural paradigm.”

Alas, too many on the Right have already surrendered:

Some conservatives are still trying to play defense. They don’t yet grasp that their enemies won the culture war on traditional American values. They rant and rave about violations of norms that are obsolete. Their values are not obsolete, but those values no longer operate as norms because the state and other institutions openly support the new norms (which only a few decades ago were the values of the left counterculture). Others on the right grasp that the old counterculture has become the new culture—that it now dictates the norms of our society. But many of them have not yet come to grips with the fact that this makes us the new counterculture. Some try to quietly maintain traditional values in their personal lives but pay lip service to the new culture when required at school, work, or elsewhere. These people are intellectually conquered. 

The challenge of openly living according to countercultural norms is daunting. It will require conservatives, for instance, to maintain their cisgender identities in public, regardless of the shaming they will endure; to use traditional pronouns for themselves, regardless of the confusion for which they will be blamed; to emerge from the heterosexual closet and admit their transgressive attraction to the opposite sex; to not have (or perform) abortions, even when infanticide has become a secular sacrament; to bring children up in accordance with their religious beliefs, even though atheists control the Deep State; to attend the church of their choice and to pray on their own time (and without state subsidy) to the god in whom they believe, despite godless secularists' constant attempts to prevent them from doing so.

Traditionalists are now the people their parents warned them against, or the people our parents wanted us to be, or something like that. Next thing you know, they'll be insisting on powdered wigs for our judges, government business to be transacted exclusively in Latin, and the return of bastinado for nonviolent offenders.

Worse, they might vote (again) for Donald Trump.

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Counterculture Warriors - The American Conservative

Bastinado for Dummies

 

Friday Frivolities

There is no easy way to say this: America has lost its mind (which is a terrible thing to waste). For a century now, our children has not been learning.

That, at least, is the considered opinion of John Peterson (not to be confused with Jordan Peterson), who, reviewing Pete Hegseth’s and David Goodwin’s Battle for the American Mind, observes that “Insofar as there ever was a battle for the American mind, it was lost a long time ago.” Peterson does not indict the usual suspects—"our suicidal obsessions with race and gender, or, in the 60’s and 70’s, with cultural Marxism or critical theory”; instead, like the authors of the book under review, Peterson blames the Progressivism of the early 20^th century, along with the docile “mainstream of America”  which inexplicably supported and furthered the progressive education agenda, “even though it was designed, from the beginning, to root Christianity and the Western tradition out of their schools.” Alas, Americans, including conservatives, traded their birthright for a mess of pottage, that is, “We traded a rich, life-giving inheritance, the education of a free people, for trinkets like skills- and jobs-training and the Pledge of Allegiance.” ^{1 & 2}

Clearly, Peterson agrees with the main thesis of Battle for the American Mind, which is, in Peterson’s summary, “Our schools are garbage.”  He does not, however, exactly shower the book with praise; instead, he writes that “It is clumsily executed, wildly inaccurate in many details, and lacking a consistent or coherent argument.” Moreover, he notes that one of the co-authors, Pete Hegseth, is “a television host” at Fox News (what a surprise!) “who, by his own admission, ‘write[s] like [he] speak[s],’ and has ‘read next to nothing’ of the canonical texts of the Western tradition, despite holding degrees from Princeton and Harvard.” In other words, Hegseth is an ignoramus with Ivy League degrees to prove it; given such exemplary credentials, it is no wonder that he required a co-author.

Among the book’s demerits, according to Peterson, is that it “regularly conflates Marxism and Progressivism,” an observation that should be shouted daily from the rooftops. Peterson also criticizes the authors’ insistence that “Charter schools cannot truly do classical education because they can teach nothing of transcendent truth, biblical revelation, or God, not to mention the truth system of Christianity.” Without Christianity, they say, “we cannot truly understand anything.” To which Peterson replies, “There can be no more anti-classical sentiment than this, and until conservative Christians are cured of this intellectual affliction, they can never have a workable battle plan for winning back education.”

Our schools may be “garbage,” but John Peterson seems to have emerged with his intellect intact from the various cesspools of mediocrity into which he was hurled. His review is almost certainly more worthwhile than the book which is its subject. Let us hope we never need to speak of Pete Hegseth again.     

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Battle for the American Mind - by Paul Weinhold (substack.com)

“John M. Peterson is Assistant Dean, Graduate Director of American Studies, and Sub-Director of Classical Education in the Braniff School of Liberal Arts at the University of Dallas.”

If you happen to be a glutton for punishment, by all means learn more about Pete Hegseth: Pete Hegseth - Wikipedia

¹ The wreck that is American public education inspired, among much else, the dirge-like folk ballad, “Hang Down Your Head, John Dewey”.

² Don’t blame me; as far back as 1965, I called the American educational system “a cesspool of mediocrity”.

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At Law & Liberty, Daniel Mahoney—self-described as “a conservative who appreciates that today the best of conservatism and classical liberalism stand or fall together”—teams up with Dan Klein—"a classical liberal open to conservative wisdom”—to take a stand on behalf of appreciating the best of both conservatism and classical liberalism. Their collaborative essay, “The Baby and the Bathwater,” amounts to an ideological “Can’t we all just get along?” It seems that, according to the Dans’ analysis, both sides of our ideological divide are “beset by overgeneralizations and simplistic representations of that which they reject. In each case, a baby is thrown out with the bathwater. But if the anti-religionists stopped throwing out the baby, the other group would be friendlier to the best currents of classical liberalism. And if the anti-liberals stopped throwing out the baby, the other group would be friendlier to religion. If one erred less, the impulse toward erring by the other would be less. They could better coalesce to common purpose and something truer.”

It is a variation of the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”; both sides would win if they could only trust each other to cooperate. What stands in the way of developing such trust? Well, for one thing, “classical liberals can be dogmatic and rationalistic, with a self-defeating subjectivism, an aversion to the supremacy of the good of the whole, a lack of appreciation for custom, tradition, and authority, a defective anthropology, and a thin understanding of virtue.” As for religious [read “Christian”] conservatives, they are imperfect as well: “Organized religions, religious practice, and religious fervor have sometimes led to what Machiavelli in The Prince called ‘pious cruelty.’ Religious groups can be fanatical or superstitious.”

Since “The Baby and the Bathwater” is a lengthy essay, allow me to jump ahead to its conclusion, which was telegraphed from the outset: in draining the swamp, be it liberal or conservative, make sure you preserve whatever in it is valuable. Do not, that is, in your haste, make the mistake which T-Bone Burnett accused the Sixties’ Baby Boomers of making: “Keep all the bad and destroy all the good.” ¹ The Dans put it this way:

Humans are imperfect, and each of us is bound to produce some dirty bathwater. Dirt is to be thrown out, but it must be separated from the health and wholeness that we love. Tocqueville proposed that the “spirit of liberty” and “the spirit of religion” stand or fall together. In throwing out the dirt in a baby’s bathtub, take care not to throw out the baby itself. Tocqueville was right: When either baby is thrown out, the other perishes as well. Bereft of the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion, the organic core of society is hollowed out. The void is filled with what Tocqueville tried to warn us against: tutelary despotism followed by massive degradation of the human spirit and slavery to lawless government. ² Mordor prevails if its adversaries do not coalesce.

In summary and in conclusion: do not throw out ideological babies, but do give them a thorough scrubbing from time to time.

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The Baby and the Bathwater – Daniel Klein & Daniel J. Mahoney (lawliberty.org)

¹ If Messrs. Klein and Mahoney can toss in references to Tocqueville and to Mordor, then I believe I am allowed to toss in T-Bone Burnett.

² Tutelary Despots would be a good name for a band.

Hang down your head, John Dewey; hang down your head and cry.

A Troika of Deplorables

(To be clear: the authors referenced below—William Lind, Michael Anton, Timothy Gordon, and Michael Robillard—may be fine, decent human beings. It is only their political/ideological views which I deplore.}

According to William Lind (at The American Conservative), modernity is, among many other flaws, terminally ugly:

A curious aspect of today’s America is its combination of wealth and ugliness. In the past, money usually led to beauty: to classical, baroque, and art deco buildings, to the music of Biber, C.P.E. Bach, and Boccherini, to the art of Michelangelo, Titian, and Gainsborough. Now, money buys decadent art, painful music, and alienating architecture. Most prominent architects belong to the “turd in the punchbowl” school; they delight in forcing something disharmonious into a previously charming neighborhood. America’s commercial districts, with their endless strip malls and parking lots, have to be among the ugliest ever built. A southern mayor, speaking at a Congress on the New Urbanism, showed a slide of one of his city’s main streets and said, “I call this our corridor of crap.”

One need not share Mr. Lind’s ideology to agree with his premise that a good deal of the American landscape has been uglified. The disagreement revolves around who, or what, is responsible for the uglification:

Three reasons why we are awash in ugliness stand out. The first is the abolition of the concept of beauty by relativism. There are no objective standards. Everyone’s opinion is of equal value, and there are nothing but opinions.

A second reason is a change in the means of cultural transmission. Today, electronic screens are the means of cultural transmission, and they drive morals, aesthetics, and culture ever lower. Why? Because money is to be made by appealing to the widest audience, which means the least educated, crassest, and most vulgar. Relativism having abolished all standards, there are no limits on how low taste dare go.

A third force promoting ugliness: ideology, specifically the ideology of cultural Marxism, currently parading itself in the Emperor’s clothes of “wokeism.” 

Good Christ, does anyone on the Right know anything about “cultural Marxism”?

Anyone who can discuss the uglification of America without mentioning the word “capitalism” is either disingenuous or obtuse.

The Ugliness of Everything - The American Conservative

Michael Anton is one of the Right’s intellectual lights, which gives you some idea of the darkness on that edge of town. Nevertheless, Anton is not wrong when he explains:

The “socialism” with which we are most familiar today—high and progressive taxation, a generous welfare state, nationalization of key services such as health care, an expansive list of state-guaranteed “rights,” combined with the retention of private property and private ownership of most means of production—Marx and Engels deride as “bourgeois socialism,” i.e., not only not the real thing but fundamentally closer to bourgeois capitalism than to true socialism, much less communism.

In short: bourgeois socialism is not true socialism, much less communism.

Now, if only Anton had the sense to realize, or the honesty to admit, that it is therefore preposterous to equate American liberals’ efforts to bolster the welfare state (social safety net) with Marxism or Bolshevism. Alas, despite his having spelled it out, neither Anton nor his conservative colleagues seem able to understand, or willing to recognize, the difference between Communism and what is called in much of the world “democratic Socialism”; and so, on they go, Anton and his ilk, prattling about gulags and tyranny, pretending to be persecuted, marginalized, and silenced while commanding impressive speaking fees, book contracts, and prestigious think-tank fellowships.

Socialism and the Great Reset - The American Mind

Finally, at The American Mind, Timothy Gordon and Michael Robillard do their utmost to convince young readers not to go to college. Their rationale is as simple as it is specious:

The modern university has succumbed, in the name of the triple-headed god of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), to the hegemonic ideology of woke intersectionality. All decisions about staffing, curriculum, and student life must be minutely inspected for their adherence to dismantling white supremacy and patriarchy. Despite an ever-growing list of instances of campus hysteria, cancellation of conservative voices, and violent harassment of heterodox university speakers, the unquestioned cultural narrative persists: One must go to college in order to flourish as a full person in society.

Nor is this calamitous situation limited to the humanities; “Even traditionally rigorous courses of study have been blighted. Woke university professors have declared mathematics “a field dominated by whiteness and racism.” At the University of Toronto, one can now take a “Liberating Mathematics” course which seeks to “re-imagine” mathematics, offering the mathematically incompetent a handy excuse in the form of a “daring critique” of math, allegedly delegitimizing it as having drawn predominantly from “the experiences and narratives of men.” In formal logic, scholars have declared “there is much more to be done–especially on decolonizing our curriculum.” 

The authors wax predictably grim over the prospect of academic decolonization:

This woke takeover of the hard sciences is reinforced by an entrenched set of professorial and administrative hiring quotas, overbearing and overbroad institutional incentives and disincentives, and an oppressive campus culture submerged in the now-unquestionable presuppositions of woke orthodoxy. All this has engendered a reinvigorated cult of scientism.

Gordon and Robillard then briefly discuss Stalinism and Lysenkoism, thus linking American universities to Stalinist atrocities. They conclude by urging, “We need to encourage STEM-inclined Zoomers to circumvent the college-industrial complex altogether, to marry young and learn a trade, and to get on with their lives in a world hopefully soon delivered from woke-mathematics and nature-hating scientism.”

The authors have a book due for release soon from Regnery Press, titled Don’t Go to College: A Case for Revolution. The spirit of the Sixties lives on, albeit in unexpected quarters: “tune in” to Fox News and Infowars, “turn on” the woke liberal elite and the nefarious Deep State, and “drop out” of modernity to find your own, doubtless very different, Benedict Option.

Welcome to the New Dark Ages. The cost of one admission is your mind.  

 The Triumph of Scientism - The American Mind

The Three Horses of the Woke Apocalypse

Wednesday with Pascal: Critical Pedagogy--Threat or Menace?

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat is currently in isolation after testing positive for COVID. In his absence—and rather than let Professor Arguendo continue his recent tirade—I offer the following.}

“There’s no such thing as neutral education. Education functions as an instrument to bring about either conformity or freedom.” (Paulo Freire)

“Is our children learning?” (George W. Bush)

Watch out, liberal elites: first, Christopher Rufo exposed your CRT and your grooming behaviors, and now Alexander Zubatov is spilling the beans on your “critical pedagogy”. “Left-wing elites,” he writes, “have every interest in concealing from the populace the content of many of the core texts constituting the kind of education they champion. Critical race theory is only a part of that picture. The far bigger fish that needs to be thrown back into the polluted stream from which it came is known as “critical pedagogy.”

Zubatov provides a quick primer on “critical theory” in general (hint: it’s “cultural Marxism” and it hates you) before tackling the pedagogical issue, which he does with evident gusto:

The explicitly educational branch of the “critical theory” movement, known as “critical pedagogy,” “views teaching,” in the words of Henry A. Giroux, one of its leading lights, “as an inherently political act,” that “reject[s] the neutrality of knowledge, and insist[s] that issues of social justice and democracy itself are not distinct from acts of teaching and learning.” As Wikipedia, echoing Giroux himself, tells us, critical pedagogy was “founded by the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire, who promoted it through his 1968 book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” 

One is not surprised to learn that Freire was a Marxist whose seminal book was laced with citations from “Marx, Lenin, Mao, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro, as well as the radical intellectuals Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and Georg Lukács.” ¹

Zubatov is surely correct when he says that Freire occupies a “canonical place within the American academic canon.” Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a classic, and it has indeed been highly influential, as Zubatov disapprovingly confirms:

In 2016, a Google Scholar analysis found Freire’s book to be the third most-widely cited publication within the social sciences. Just last year, Columbia University, home to Teachers College, one of the nation’s top schools of education, celebrated Freire’s centenary on September 19, 2021 by creating the Paolo Freire Initiative at Columbia University, with an annual birthday event open to the public, a “Freire Scholars program” to fund research into his work, a year-long series of lectures, an announcement describing Freire's work as "foundational" and "closely aligned to the mission of Columbia University and Teachers College”.

Theories of pedagogy aside—should we think of students as empty vessels to be filled or should we encourage them to be active participants in the pursuit of, and creation of, knowledge—Zubatov insists that “Freire’s true goal is not education at all; it is, rather, revolution. The ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ is no mere monkish exercise in the pursuit of erudition and the contemplation of higher things. Liberation is ‘the objective to be achieved.’ The student learns through ‘participation in the revolutionary process,’ as ‘the revolutionary process is eminently educational in character.’ What starts as dialogue with the oppressed transforms, before long, into ‘cultural revolution’ as ‘a necessary continuation of the dialogical cultural action which must be carried out before the revolution reaches power.’  

It never ceases to amaze me how frightened conservatives are of texts written by revolutionaries (or would-be revolutionaries) during revolutionary (or faux-revolutionary) times, as if such texts might not contain useful observations or ideas apart from their revolutionary fervor; or as if mere exposure to them guaranteed that the ideas they contain would be unquestioningly assimilated by students, taken as gospel, and pursued to their logical conclusion(s).

Whatever his intentions, Paulo Freire did not start a revolution with Pedagogy of the Oppressed or in the course of his subsequent (and distinguished) career. ² He did, however, give people a lot to think about; and Zubatov surely understands the danger of that. Once people start thinking for themselves, who knows what they'll come up with?

As is the norm for today’s political/ideological Right, Zubatov waxes hyberbolic, declaring America’s education situation “an emergency”.  He is exceptionally candid in his recommended response:

Whether masquerading under names like “social justice teaching,” “antiracist teaching,” “culturally responsive education” or “promoting diversity, equity and inclusion,” critical pedagogy, wheeling along its Trojan horse of Marxist revolution, has infiltrated our schools and our minds. Purging it and its practitioners from our midst is not an option; it is an emergency. ³

I am not sure why critical theory and critical pedagogy, pernicious as they may be, constitute an emergency right now; if Zubatov is correct, those doctrines have been force-fed to Americans since 1968. We have had, that is, over fifty years of Marxist indoctrination in our schools, and yet we are still not living either in a gulag or in a workers’ paradise.

_________________________________

Pedagogy of the Oppressors - The American Conservative

¹ I would not be surprised if Freire had also snuck in a reference or two to John Dewey and A.S. Neill.

² Paulo Freire - Wikipedia It is remarkable that Freire, a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist revolutionary and a clear and present danger to our way of life, received honors from such unlikely places as the University of Nebraska (Omaha), Claremont Graduate University, and the University of Illinois (Chicago); and that he and his wife were also formally recognized as “Outstanding Christian Educators”.

³ “Purging it and its practitioners from our midst”: this is cancel-culture on steroids.  

The most dangerous man in the world, next to Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse

We Have Met the Enemy, and It Is Teachers and Democracy

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

The President of Hillsdale College and the Governor of Tennessee walk into a private reception being held in their honor. Larry Arnn looks at Bill Lee and says,

“Teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country, and they are taught that they are going to go and do something to those kids. My wife is English, and she’s a gardener, and she doesn’t talk about what she is going to do to these plants. She talks about what they need, because if you give them what they need, they will grow. It’s not a manufacturing operation.”

Funny stuff, amirite? Kudos to the alert fan who recorded the hilarious exchange!

Now the usual snowflakes suspects (e.g., Nashville’s News Channel 5) are up in arms about Larry Arnn and his impolitic remarks, even though Joy Pullmann, writing at The Federalist, insists that “Teachers and research agree: educations schools are garbage.” Ms. Pullman is not just talking out of her, um, well, she knows what she’s talking about:

In 2006, 62 percent of teachers told researchers their training didn’t prepare them well for their jobs. In general, education colleges not only do not prepare teachers to succeed in the classroom; the teachers have been so thoroughly corrupted by cultural Marxism that what they learn in the typical preparation program actually degrades their skills. 

These are well-reinforced, longstanding empirical findings bolstered by many forms of evidence. As I wrote 10 years ago, “Teachers tend to have below-average SAT, ACT, LSAT, and GRE scores, and statistics show their college coursework is among the least challenging available. Education majors must take more remedial college coursework than their counterparts in humanities and social sciences. Traditional teacher preparation programs emphasize education and social theories, which research has demonstrated are ineffective teaching methods.”

No wonder Johnny and Janey can’t read! No wonder our kids is not learning! No wonder Hillsdale’s President Larry Arnn is lobbying Governor Lee to use (for free!) Hillsdale’s patented (and free!) “high-quality curricula” in Tennessee public schools. What part of “high-quality curricula” does Nashville’s News Channel 5 not understand?

Joy Pullmann concludes her report with the thoughtful, reasoned rhetoric for which The Federalist is famous: “Very powerful interests,” Pullman writes, “want to keep truth away from Americans, thereby keeping Tennessee’s children and teachers at their mental and institutional mercy. Liars like these can’t be trusted to watch your laptop when you go to the bathroom, not to mention to educate your child. Their hold on power must be broken.”

Such sophisticated argumentation is irresistible, especially coming from a woman who calls herself a “grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs,” a distinction Ms. Pullmann modestly chooses not to mention in her article.

Hillsdale President Tells Truth About Teacher Training, Media Goes Nuts (thefederalist.com)

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At In These Times, Hamilton Nolan ¹ explains that “when the world is burning,” pragmatism, caution, and prudence are for losers. “On a normal day,” writes Nolan, “you wouldn’t dive out of a fifth-floor window into the river below — but if your building was on fire, that would become the most reasonable choice.  Diving from that window into the river below sure seems terrifying, but not as terrifying as staying put and burning to death.” 

Scolding the political moderates, centrists, and “realists” among us, Nolan continues, “The failure to understand that solutions must match the scale and severity of our problems leaves us, inevitably, with problems that never get solved. Problems that never get solved, in these cases, translate to the mass immiseration of millions of people for generation after generation.”

Is that what you want, America? I should hope not, especially when the solution is so obvious: The obvious solution is to change the structures that are constricting our ability to build a functioning democracy. Obviously! Yet ​“structural reform” is perceived by the majority of people in power as a step too far. We can’t even get the filibuster out of the way with a Democratic Congress. Joe Biden has already proclaimed that he doesn’t favor expanding the Supreme Court. Despite the elections of both Bush and Trump, who lost the popular vote, there has not been any sustained push to scrap the Electoral College. And ​‘abolish the Senate’ is not even discussed enough to enter the pantheon of fringe positions. Recognition of the fact that our entire system was designed by humans and can be changed by humans and, furthermore, must be changed by humans remains mystifyingly absent from mainstream discourse. ² We are like the drivers of a car accelerating towards a brick wall, unwilling to take our foot off the gas pedal and hit the brakes, because we don’t want to disturb the passengers in the back seat.    

What a perfect description of our plight: trapped in a burning building, we are driving headlong towards a brick wall, trying not to disturb our passengers as we prepare to dive out the fifth-floor window into the river below.

Michael Anton himself (“The Flight 93 Election”) could not have said it better, or even Admiral David Farragut: Damn the backseat passengers, ditch the cumbersome ballast of democracy, and full speed ahead!  

____________________________

¹ Full disclosure: Hamilton Nolan describes the American founding thusly: “Nearly a quarter of a millennium ago, a small group of wealthy white men in a fledgling colonial nation wrote a constitution that seemed, to them, the best they could do, with their accumulated wisdom at the time, and in light of all of the necessary political compromises.” Nolan is clearly an unpatriotic fellow and not to be trusted.

² Re “our entire system was designed by humans”: please see footnote above for Nolan’s estimate of the humans who did the designing.

Radical Is Now Rational - In These Times

"Starving the Campus Beast" and "No Crying in Tennis"

Starving the Campus Beast

Writing at The American Conservative, Teresa Manning, a former professor at the Scalia Law School at George Mason University (motto: “Yes, George Mason owned slaves, but it’s complicated”), would like the terminally ill ivory tower that is higher education to be taken off federal life support. As she puts it:

“We cannot continue to fund the beast that is American “higher education,” which is unjustly enriching itself while impoverishing and culturally poisoning our young people even as it leaves them ignorant. Forget “defund the police.” Defund the colleges.”

I believe Ms. Manning underestimates our ability to walk and chew gum at the same time—we can simultaneously defund the police and the colleges!

Manning’s grievances include the absence of meaningful reforms that would prevent universities from producing “yet more ignorant and indebted youth. No action on student-loan forgiveness should happen,” she insists, “unless the American higher-education system is reformed from top to bottom.” In other words, for Ms. Manning, the perfect should be the enemy of the good; if we can’t fix everything, let’s not fix anything.

One specific reform Manning favors is to stop encouraging college attendance in the first place:

A sound domestic policy would not herd most of the nation’s young people into a system that takes their time, talent, and treasure to push resentment and radicalization, when they could be entering the workforce, earning money, contributing to society, and starting families.

Does Manning believe that resentment and radicalism did not exist before the Sixties, or that college campuses are the only environment that nurtures such phenomena? In any case, she insists that our emphasis on “higher education for all” is especially bad for women (says a woman who taught at George Mason University):

Society is making the one job that most women eventually want more difficult. Motherhood is also the job a country most needs to be done well; that is, with stable marriages and committed fathers. A truly pro-woman society would not put women on an educational and professional trajectory designed for men. Independent thinkers have suggested that women not be subject to time limits for degree completion. Fifty years of feminism, combined with 50 years of fall-out from the sexual revolution, like skyrocketing illegitimacy in both inner cities and rural America, has taught us the hard way that these ideologies lead to ruin.

Teresa Manning, who served in the Trump administration as Deputy Assistant for Population Affairs, should know something about the road to ruin, which is paved with both good intentions and federal dollars. She may be on to something, though; if ignorance is bliss, then maybe, if we defund enough colleges, our nation will be even more blissfully ignorant than it already is.       

Defund the Colleges - The American Conservative

There Is No Crying in Tennis

At American Mind (motto: “Not to have a mind is being very wasteful.”), Alexander Zubatov informs us that “America is in the midst of a nervous breakdown.” He has a pretty good idea what is behind this crisis:

Between the psychological damage caused by government-imposed lockdowns, the stress of an economy flirting with recession, and our increasingly acrimonious domestic politics—amplified by the social media panopticon—there is ample cause to question the state of the American psyche. In the past, our political and cultural leaders would call for toughness and stoicism in the face of adversity. Today, however, our ruling class dismisses and condemns these virtues as “toxic masculinity,” extolling, instead, displays of victimization and vulnerability.

Zubatov even provides a poster child for our current decline into woke madness (and no, it is not Tonya Harding):

Modern America is becoming increasingly defined by a burgeoning victimhood culture. Even athletes, once models of perseverance and resolve, are now celebrated for bowing out and choking under pressure. The champion in this event is Naomi Osaka, whose every unraveling is lauded by reporters as a bold act bringing attention to the issue of mental health in sports. A healthy society would have scorned Osaka into re-conformity with the expectations associated with her ostensible status as a world-class athlete and, in doing so, would have benefited both her and society itself.

Why can Ms. Osaka not display the grace under pressure of, say, a John McEnroe or a Jimmy Connors? Of course, encouraging the use of “scorn” as a tool to enforce conformity with social expectations would be easier if we all agreed on those expectations in the first place and if we all felt comfortable with scorning people who deviate from them. “Thou shalt scorn the nonconforming” is not on everyone’s list of commandments.

Zubatov turns to a classic 1966 book by Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, to bolster his case that Americans have gone soft:

It is the job of cultural elites, Rieff argues, to transmit a culture’s system of moral demands. When authority figures no longer have the stomach to exercise their authority, and when powerful institutions act to enable transgressors instead of punishing them, a culture is near or at the stage of collapse. Understood in this light, our crisis in mental health goes far deeper than Covid, social media, or any transitory political tremors, whether domestic or foreign. It goes to the very heart of our continued viability as a culture. It is not just individuals among us who have grown out of sync and have become afflicted by a psychic and spiritual malaise for which they can find no obvious cure. The damage is civilizational.

Should the reader not yet sense the urgency of the situation, Zubatov concludes on this note:

Turning back the clock on our creeping malaise is no easy task, but it is necessary if we hope to rescue the nation—and its children—from total disintegration. It must be possible to restore respect for authority without succumbing to authoritarianism and to instill a sense of cultural shame and standards without trying to model society on an imaginary Golden Age. It must begin with families and schools, with our silent majority — those who still believe in our longstanding ethos of dignity and stoicism in the face of adversity — to come together and respond with strength that commands respect in the face of our cultural elites’ insistence on absurd and sanctimonious displays of weakness threatening to bring us as individuals and as a society to our knees.

Zubatov’s plaints may be, for the most part, risible, but he does, citing Rieff, make one point worth taking seriously:

In most contemporary Western societies, a set of compelling cultural norms no longer binds us. Individuals are left to their own devices in seeking out remedies for their misery, alienation, and other psychological distress. “When so little can be taken for granted, and when the meaningfulness of social existence no longer grants an inner life at peace with itself, every man must become something of a genius about himself,” Rieff explains—no easy feat.

Any good existentialist can relate to that, and to this:

Even when a particular individual can master the Herculean task of finding his personal pathway to equanimity, there is no guarantee doing so will leave him in a harmonious relationship with his social environment. Freud’s radical innovation, Rieff argues, was to divorce an individual’s pursuit of well-being from the pursuit of any higher aim or larger communal purpose. Well-being, then, becomes an individual project and an end in itself.

Unlike Zubatov, I have no problem with emotional displays or with a softening of our “longstanding ethos of stoicism”. But I do agree with him, and with the late Philip Rieff, that modern individualism, while in some sense the opposite of stoicism, carries demands and burdens of its own to which even iconic public figures can succumb—in which case, I for one prefer responding with empathy rather than with scorn.

Freakout Nation - The American Mind

Friday Trifecta

{FYI: "trifecta" stems from the Latin prefix "tri-" (meaning "three") and the word "fecta" (meaning "fecta"). The term is most commonly used in the world of horse-race wagering, but it has a distinguished place in Christian theology beginning with the apostle Paul, who discovered (or invented?) the Trifecta God--the Father to win, the Son to place, and the Holy Spirit to show.}

In a lengthy essay, Caitlin Flanagan (at The Atlantic) reveals a shocking secret: “The god of private school is money.” While most of Ms. Flanagan’s essay skewers the elitist ethos of the exclusive private schools that serve as “feeders” for Ivy League and other prestigious universities, she also points out the basic social inequity:

In a just society, there wouldn’t be a need for these expensive schools, or for private wealth to subsidize something as fundamental as an education. We wouldn’t give rich kids and a tiny number of lottery winners an outstanding education while so many poor kids attend failing schools. In a just society, an education wouldn’t be a luxury item.

We have become a country with vanishingly few paths out of poverty, or even out of the working class. We’ve allowed the majority of our public schools to founder, while expensive private schools play an outsize role in determining who gets to claim a coveted spot in the winners’ circle. Many schools for the richest American kids have gates and security guards; the message is you are precious to us. Many schools for the poorest kids have metal detectors and police officers; the message is you are a threat to us.

Public-school education—the specific force that has helped generations of Americans transcend the circumstances of their birth—is profoundly, perhaps irreparably, broken. In my own state of California, only half of public-school students are at grade level in reading, and even fewer are in math. When a crisis goes on long enough, it no longer seems like a crisis. It is merely a fact.

Ms. Flanagan closes with a sensible question: “Shouldn’t the schools that serve poor children be the very best schools we have?”

Private Schools Are Indefensible - The Atlantic

Speaking of education: Joseph Knippenberg (at Real Clear Education), a Professor of Politics at Oglethorpe University in Georgia, claims to be “swimming against the tide of the times” when he proposes that “a good education is not one that simply affirms what students already know and feel, letting them stay where they were when they started.” I know of no educator—and no student, for that matter—who would disagree with Professor Knippenberg, so I have no idea what “tide” he feels himself to be swimming against. It can’t be the progressive/cultural Marxist/Critical Thought education paradigm; that tide is not about affirming students’ beliefs but about introducing students to new (or newish) intellectual trends, unsettling their youthful religious convictions, and converting them to “wokeism”—right?

In any case, Professor Knippenberg turns to the estimable W.E.B. DuBois and John Adams for examples of what education should be all about. “Adams and DuBois agree,” he writes, “in recognizing the limits of what DuBois calls the “commercial spirit of the age” and locating the dignity of our humanity in what we can understand and appreciate. For these great thinkers, an education in freedom is not merely an education in economic self-sufficiency, nor merely in political self-government, but ultimately one that facilitates human flourishing at its fullest – facilitated by, but not defined by, the economic and the political.”

Knippenberg adds that “the appropriate contemplation of the good, the true, and the beautiful is a matter neither of duty nor of compulsion. Rather,” he says, “it is the felicitous result of liberal education,” the sort of education that enables students “to appreciate both the needs of the moment and the dignified purposes of all human striving.” 

Do such sentiments really go against the tide of the times (and at Oglethorpe University in Georgia, of all places!)? I doubt it, but then, as Bill O’Reilly famously reminded us, “Tide comes in and tide goes out”; a rising tide, of course, lifts all strawmen (strawpersons? Strawfolx?). Professor Knippenberg is yet another brave conservative who thinks it an act of intellectual courage to defend entirely non-controversial observations and to pass them off as samizdat.     

John Adams and W.E.B. DuBois on What Is Education For | RealClearEducation

Speaking of brave conservative intellectuals: Arthur C. Brooks, former president of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute and author of, among other books, The Conservative Heart, has somehow managed to elude the “cancel culture” mob and to hold down a weekly column (“How to Build a Life”) at The Atlantic, ¹ from which he dispenses practical, rather than conventional, wisdom. Recently, Brooks turned to esteemed documentarian Ken Burns for a discussion of the enduring insights of Benjamin Franklin, the man who was, according to Burns, “America’s first happiness professor.” ²

Here is a sample of what Brooks offers his readers:

What did Franklin mean by happiness, I asked Burns? Pleasant feelings? Not even close: “For Franklin, happiness meant lifelong learning in the marketplace of ideas,” Burns told me. “In other words, self-improvement.”  This conception of happiness encompasses the great contradiction in American culture: individualistic in the focus on the self, yet communitarian in the reliance on a cooperative marketplace. Further, Franklin defines happiness as an endless journey, not a comforting destination. This journey could be an exciting adventure or a terrible curse, depending on your point of view.

Lifelong learning! Self-improvement! The journey and not the destination! A marketplace of ideas! ³ So many cliches, so little time; Polonius himself could not have done better.

What was “radical” about Franklin’s “theory of happiness”? Why, its egalitarian implications:

In Europe at the time, mainly aristocratic men with means would have been able to pursue lifelong learning in a formal sense. Franklin rejected this. He believed that “this pursuit was not the province of the upper classes,” Burns told me, “but rather for everyone, from the wealthy to the masses.” Burns hastened to add that this idea was nowhere near expansive enough in Franklin’s time—Franklin himself had slaves in his household, and equal rights for women were still far off—but this philosophy set the unique American aspiration in motion.

Franklin, like other American founders, talked a better equal-rights game than he played; but we can let that slide inasmuch as we have since achieved a country in which equal opportunities are afforded to all. The American playing field is level, and our pursuit of happiness is unencumbered by class, race, or gender. Benjamin Franklin would be proud, if not quite as smug about it as Arthur Brooks.   

Ben Franklin's Radical Theory of Happiness - The Atlantic

¹ Jordan Peterson must not have been available.

² A “happiness professor” is a life coach, a guru, or (like Jordan Peterson) a huckster selling trite aphorisms, mislabeled as brilliant insights, to the gullible masses. Like Benjamin Franklin, the sages of happiness are esteemed for their words rather than their actions, which latter generally fall short of the former.

³ Could the marketplace of ideas also be a bazaar of bizarre notions?