The Little Red Blog

Return of the Blinks

{As the probably non-existent God is my witness, I will get this blog up and running again...}

David Johnson, writing at Aeon, would like us all to stop sucking up to the rich, the powerful, and the inexplicably famous. In "Let Us Now Stop Praising Famous Men and Women," Johnson reminds us, in case we had forgotten, that "We live in an age of excessive praise for the wealthy and powerful." 

Do tell:

The upper echelons of society bathe in a sea of honours, awards and celebrity. We see it in the glossy magazines and at the so-called ideas festivals, where billionaires are fawned over for their bons mots. We applaud philanthropists for their largesse, even if their charity will do little ultimate good for society, and even if their conduct in acquiring their fortune was reprehensible. We commend them for dabbling in politics or pushing school reform, before we see any results, and even if we have reason to doubt the good that they will do.

Johnson dismisses the myth of meritocracy, as well as the "perverse incentives" he claims lead to "the smog of praise that permeates the upper echelons of society." In conclusion, he harrumphs:

If we want to foster a truly democratic society – a society in which we treat each other as equals – we must rein in such excessive praise and the perverse incentives that encourage it. We should aim for the opposite extreme, toward withholding praise and being more circumspect about the wealthy and powerful, to restore balance. As Justice Louis Brandeis, who witnessed our previous Gilded Age, might have said: ‘We may have democracy, or we may have praise showered on the heads of a few, but we can’t have both.’

As a society, we have opted for a fascination with, and a vicarious enjoyment of, "the lifestyles of the rich and famous," thereby rendering us increasing insensible to what Abraham Lincoln, in describing his early life, called "the short and simple annals of the poor". Every man-jack among us is a Jay Gatsby wannabe, hoping to hit the big time and praying no one finds out the truth about how we got there.

Scott Fitzgerald once sighed that the rich are different from the rest of us; yes, said Ernest Hemingway, they have more money. To that we can add: more fame, more respect, more admiration, and more skeletons in their closets. "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime," said Balzac; if we're going to pay attention to the rich and famous, let's do so not by fawning over them but by unmasking their pretensions and exposing their crimes. 

https://aeon.co/ideas/let-us-now-stop-praising-famous-men-and-women

Given that Bryan Caplan's THE CASE AGAINST EDUCATION came out over a year and a half ago, I'm not sure why Max Diamond, reviewing the book for Real Clear Books, calls it "new"; regardless, Diamond's interview with Caplan allows me to reiterate my own anti-education talking points while passing the blame for them to someone else.

Here's how Diamond opens his article:

In his controversial new book, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, economist Bryan Caplan argues that the primary function of American education is not to enhance students' actual skill but to signal and certify the qualities of a good, conformist employee. RealClearBooks recently interviewed Caplan about the rise of credentialism, useless degrees, and why we need to rethink our entire approach to education. 

Caplan's arguments should only be "controversial" to education professionals and to the minority of students (10% would be my guess) who take our current system seriously. Who else would argue when Caplan says:

People do learn some literacy and numeracy in school. But most of what you study in school predictably you’re not going to use after the final exam. You know that you’re not going to become a poet or a professional historian. And so, then there’s the puzzle about why exactly the study of irrelevant subjects would lead to a better career in fields where you don’t even use what you’re taught. And what I say is that most of this is what economists call “signaling.” You are jumping through hoops in order to impress employers. Even though it’s not directly relevant, still it’s a good way of convincing someone who might want to hire you that you’ve got the right stuff. The way I like to describe it is that to a large degree school isn’t really job training, instead it’s a passport to the real training which occurs on the job.

Those who argue that a traditional "liberal arts" education produces individuals who are culturally informed and who possess both depth and breadth in their approach to life certainly have a point--if only such an education were on offer for most students, and if only such individuals were valued in our society over against winners of the birth lottery and amoral sharpers (see above).  Still: are "better educated people" necessarily "better people"? There's not a scintilla of evidence for that. 

As Caplan explains, "credentialing" and "signaling" are the true functions of our current education system, along with keeping kids off the streets and (we hope) out of trouble. Our schools are notably deficient at what we might call "character formation," nor do they reward, as a rule, either the inquisitive mind or the non-conforming temperament; instead, they function primarily as youth detention centers and as ministries of social/cultural propaganda.

Part of the pleasure of reading Diamond's interview with Caplan is to witness the interviewer flailing, attempting to understand how the interviewee's thesis can possibly be correct. Imagine, if you will, the consequences of admitting our schools are mostly pointless.

Why do we persist in miseducating generation after generation of our youth? Caplan has an answer, or at least an informed surmise:

What I think is really going is what George Orwell called double-think. If you just talk to an individual about what they’ve seen I find that almost everyone agrees with me. But as soon as you switch gears to big social theory like what’s the best education system and what should our education policy be, this is where people forget everything they’ve seen with their own eyes and just start talking about how great education is, and how vital it is, and how incredibly useful it is and wonderful. And what I see as the problem is that politics just tends not to calm assessments of what you’ve really seen but to flowery ideas and feel good slogans and that kind of thing. One of my favorite things in all of psychology is what they all social desirability bias. That means that when the truth is ugly, people don’t want to believe it. They certainly don’t want to say it.

Yet truth, ugly as it may be, will set us free, or so it's been said. American schools under-perform not because we don't invest enough money in them and not because we don't have excellent and dedicated teachers; they do so because their mission, purpose, and methodologies are largely misguided. Young children and restless adolescents sitting indoors at desks for hours at a time, cut off from the outside world and from interaction with anyone but age-group peers and over-burdened teachers: there has to be a better way.

https://www.realclearbooks.com/articles/2019/09/09/the_case_against_education_18924.html

   

Pluralism and Its Discontents

Writing at The Week, Damon Linker, self-styled man of the political center, chides the Left, as represented by author Cory Robin, for what Linker calls its "myopic obsession with fairness". Citing Robin's book, THE REACTIONARY MIND, Linker observes: 

On Robin's telling, every single conservative, reactionary, or counterrevolutionary thinker or actor over the past 350 years, from Thomas Hobbes to Frederick Hayek, from Joseph de Maistre to Ronald Reagan, from John Adams to Ayn Rand, is united in opposing efforts of the "lower orders of society" to emancipate themselves by taking power and privileges away from some entrenched class. Robin notes many of the obvious differences among these political thinkers and actors, including the changing targets of their reactionary ire, but he insists on placing this single anti-egalitarian tendency at the dead center of his study and the conservative tradition he seeks to illuminate.   

It is not immediately obvious that the drive for equality—which is what egalitarianism seeks—is synonymous with an insistence on fairness, especially since the very nature of "fairness" (along with related terms like "justice") is much disputed. That aside, Linker is quick to say that he is not against fairness or equality, but that other values exist as well: 

Is egalitarian fairness an important political and moral ideal? Absolutely. But it's not the only one worth valorizing — and those who affirm other ideals should not be treated like moral and political pariahs...[Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has found] those on the left tend to focus on two aspects of moral experience: avoidance of harm toward others, and a concern for universal-egalitarian fairness. Conservatives affirm the importance of both of these as well, but they add three additional concerns that might be described as hierarchical or aspirational moral ideals: loyalty and the threat of its betrayal; deference to authority and fear of subversion; and the longing for sanctity or purity and aversion to degradation. (Religiously oriented conservatives place special emphasis on the last of these.) 

Jonathan Haidt's work (THE RIGHTEOUS MIND) is often cited (albeit tendentiously) by conservatives as proof that liberals are, as Linker says, too narrowly focused on equality and blind to other equally essential values. I have not read Haidt's book and am in no position to question either his methodology or his conclusions; and while I am skeptical of the claim that liberals do not value "loyalty," I can accept that their attitude towards authority is less deferential than conservatives and that "purity" would not be high on most liberals' hierarchy of values. 

That said, it's not that simple.  For instance, Linker writes: 

This requirement [for deference to authority] is woven into the fabric of social life, a product of the inequality of knowledge and wisdom within it. Just as we sensibly defer to the authority of doctors when seeking medical treatment and to pilots when boarding an airplane, so it is perfectly reasonable to recognize that some of our fellow citizens are more worthy than others of deference in political matters — and thoroughly unreasonable to think any political community can get away without such deference.  

And yet: Damon Linker knows very well that it is conservatives who currently refuse to defer to "experts" on subjects like climate change or Russian interference in our elections. It is conservatives who cry "fake news" on a regular basis, who claim the right to "alternative facts," who reject the authority of mainstream media and mainstream science, and who condemn as "elitist" anyone who believes that education and knowledge should trump (if you'll excuse the word) visceral rage and tribal loyalties. If deference to authority and to tradition is a conservative value, you'd never know it from the rhetoric and antics of today's Republicans.  

As for "purity," the word is usually associated, as Linker acknowledges, with religious conservatives whose revulsion is triggered mainly by sexual impurity (or "deviancy"); and it's true that the Left is not concerned about that sort of impurity. On the other hand, what is the Left's much reviled "political correctness" if not a desire for purity of a sort? "Hate speech" codes, for example, are easy to mock, and conservatives do so all the time; but such codes represent a fear of contamination—in this case, the contamination of either the private or public sphere by offensive rhetoric and ideology—or, to put it another way, a desire for purity.  You could, I suppose, consider such codes to be secular analogues of traditional (and religiously-based) blasphemy laws. I'm not defending either "hate speech" codes in general or even the impulse behind them; I'm suggesting that purity, like fairness, is in the eye of the beholder, and that the association of certain values with either liberals or conservatives depends a lot on how one defines those values.

Linker concludes by suggesting that liberals today have strayed from their own tradition. Classical liberalism, he writes, "Takes a different approach — favoring reforms to make public life more egalitarian while also leaving space within civil society for individuals and groups to uphold and perpetuate non-egalitarian, and even anti-egalitarian, moral ideals and ways of life. That kind of pluralistic harmonization of agonistic moral alternatives (some radical, others conservative) requires the careful practice of an intellectual art of balance."* Liberals need to learn, according to Linker, that "morality encompasses far more than any true [egalitarian] radical will be willing to concede or tolerate."

About that, he is no doubt correct; radicals--egalitarian or elitist, secular or religious, Left or Right--are notoriously loath to tolerate much with which they disagree. They are, in their own minds, agents of Righteousness, impatient with dialogue and with the sometimes glacial pace of change; the rest of us would do well to avoid falling into their grasp.   

http://theweek.com/articles/735841/lefts-myopic-obsession-fairness  

*The link provided for the "art of balance" goes to a book titled FACES OF MODERATION: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes". The book's Amazon blurb reads, in part: "The authors studied in this book defended pluralism of ideas, interests, and social forces, and sought to achieve a sound balance between them through political trimming. They shared a preoccupation with political evil and human dignity, but refused to see the world in Manichaean terms that divide it neatly into the forces of light and those of darkness. Faces of Moderation argues that moderation remains crucial for today's encounters with new forms of extremism and fundamentalism across the world."

At the risk of seeming argumentative (who, me?) or simply partisan, I would venture that political Manichaeanism is more prevalent today on the Right than on the Left.