As you watch the video below please keep in mind that these protesters may reflect another lost generation, or, more accurately, a lost portion of another generation. We are breeding highly confidant, overly opinionated know-nothings. They are coming out of our comfortable homes and families and out of our resplendent public and private schools. Why? Below is my attempt to wrestle with an answer.
Fads infect nearly everything. Trendy grand theories takeover many fields. Academia and its professional appendage – teaching – are especially prone to it. I remember a conversation with a principal many years ago over the voguish pedagogy of HOTS, or “higher order thinking skills”. He believed that the idea held great promise. I was more skeptical. He saw it as a way to constrain the leftward bias in the schools. I viewed it as ongoing cover for more bias, just another rendering of the usual indoctrination with a new twist.
The notion of honing good “thinking” skills in the young, on first blush, has some appeal. But strip away the glossy veneer and you’ll find the same cognitive emptiness and ideological spin. For one, educators never established a good factual and conceptual basis for the students’ logic. A biased rendition of human experience and complete ignorance of history’s contrasting frames of reference makes the entire enterprise nonsensical.
The K-16 academic core – Science, Language Arts, Math, History – remain primers for the making of good little Progressives (maybe less so with Math, but the “experts” are making inroads). Reason or revelation; objective or relative truth; spontaneous human organization or central planning; the positive notion of human nature or a negative one; nature or nurture; humankind as animal or “in God’s image”; collectivism or ordered liberty; and the “scientific” or organic forms of human social development are some of the dichotomies that’ll be absent from their understanding. Chances are, the kids won’t be acquainted with them because the staff never was. The rot is preordained from college on down.
I maintained that the kids already “think” and have been doing it since they first mouthed “I want” to mom. If you doubt it, establish a dress code and watch them devise ways to subvert it. Kids are quite ingenious at playing hooky and avoiding homework. Ask any parent. It’s not that kids don’t “think”. We just don’t give them much to properly think about. And we aren’t about to accomplish that end when we smear “thinking skills” over a deep layer of half-witted indoctrination.
Add a dollop of narcissism in the form of a frenzy of self-esteem instruction and you’ll have all the makings for an opinionated ignoramus. They have opinions but are manifestly ignorant of much of everything outside the dogmas of the Left. They speak in empty rhetoric, so dialogue never happens. It deteriorates into a flinging of accusatory epithets. Insults that they mistake for deep thought are their stock-and-trade.
We brought this on ourselves. If the home is responsible, it’s child abuse. If the schools are liable, it’s child abuse. Either way, this is no way to rear a child. People don’t get this bad by accident.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R, Arkansas) and the New York Times.An NYPD police car burns as protesters clash with police during a march against the death of George Floyd in Brooklyn, N.Y., May 30, 2020. (photo: Jeenah Moon/Reuters)
Tom Cotton, Arkansas senator, recently ignited the younger scribblers in the New York Times’s newsroom into paroxysms of rage for daring to present a view that counters their settled and stunted worldview. What’s so outrageous in offering up the option of using troops to quell insurrection-style riots across the country? Then again, the young journos emanated from college, today’s colleges.
A sizeable portion of the populace is expected to go to college, but these places of “higher” (maybe “lower” or “lesser” are more accurate adjectives) learning have been petri dishes for years for the nurturing of skin color, genitalia, sex-changing, bedroom-mate, colonization hyper-sensitivities. Huge blocks of the college catalogue are more than just the inculcation of oppression, oppression everywhere. The newly minted oppression departments and their courses are considered by many a college dean to be replacements for the classics. The traditional academic core, for what remains of it, is no refuge since it is riddled with the oppression-palooza. There’s no escape once you step foot on the campus. The stuff seeps down to K-12.
As a 30-year veteran of the classroom, I can testify to the looniness of it all. Long ago, rigor was removed from the curriculum as race, sex, gender, class consciousness filled the void. Think of it as Marxism for hipsters.
I’m reminded of Hitler’s PR guy, Joseph Goebbels, and his big lie theory.
Undated photo of Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of propaganda, delivering a speech. (Bengt von zur Muehlen/Yad Vashem Photo Archive)
The idea has two parts: the often-repeated big lie itself and the necessity of suppressing dissenting views to preserve the lie. Here is the full Goebbels quote:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
So, the first part of the task is accomplished with the 80-year-long marination of the population in the fable of the unceasing oppression of workers, the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, women, and the whole host of the nondescript “other” – everyone LGBTQ and interracial and intersexual and intersectional and everywhere the twain shall meet – from age 5 to death. The second part of the Goebbels program is actively underway, and has been for quite some time. Try and present a word of caution and you’ll be inundated with the charge of racism. There will be no place left for you in polite company.
The smothering of free thought isn’t limited to the schools. Mandatory sheltering-in-place has made your home no refuge from the mental miasma. Speaking of a captured audience. You need not go to college to get the balderdash. Bazos and his Amazon Prime caliphate will bring to you Black Lives Matter dogmas with race-conscious banner offerings at the top of Amazon’s Prime’s home page under a title emblazoned with “Black Lives Matter”.
Big tech and its gazillions in cash and omnipresent reach are fully onboard as they penetrate into every hand and home. Lenin’s quip about rope-sellers (the rich will sell us the rope to hang them) comes to mind. Colleges go up in flames, and so do urban streets; the Fortune 500 is aiding and abetting; our media are the revolution’s propaganda arm; and law enforcement are dirty words.
What’s up with this? Well, we need to look no further than the prevalence of a fashionable philosophy. It’s a view of life with tentacles in a sea of demonstrable falsehoods, akin to Goebbels’s manufactured truth. The shoddy myth story surrounding Michael Brown and race-stats contorted into pseudo-scientific proof are invoked to make the unreal look real. Need everything boil down to the imaginings of identity-based oppression, oppression everywhere? Our world has gone insane as we are beset by a real virus and a pervasive, virus-like twisting of the mind. The old aphorism of education being the key to success is made into gibberish as education is no longer education, as commonly understood.
It’s interesting to speculate on the possible relationship between turning the population into 3-month shut-ins and the outbursts of violence in our cities. The tie is more complex than the easy task of disproving the nonsense coming out of the mouths of those running the show in the newest third world state – the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) – smack dab in the middle of Seattle. Heather McDonald’s myth-busting work on the subject has been stellar.
The Black Lives Matter/Antifa gang is predicated on a simple assumption: Blacks as a class are as oppressed today as they were in the days of slavery and Jim Crow. Trotted out as proof are numbers in relation to the target group’s proportion of the overall population. The media repeat the inanities over and over again. However, actual social conditions and behavior don’t correspond to the Census Bureau’s percentages for race and ethnicity. 13% of the population shouldn’t be expected to mean 13% of murders, 13% of robberies, 13% of dropouts, 13% of out-of-wedlock births, 13% of drug use, 13% of gang activity, 13% of single-parent families, 13% of …. According to the woke directorate coming out of our colleges and into our institutions, any upward deviation away from the norm is due to racism … or one of many other of the “isms” bouncing around.
Speaking of jumping to conclusions, this rivals Evel Knieval’s (stuntman extraordinaire, 1938-2007) anticipated-but-never-performed leap across the Grand Canyon.
Evel Knievel’s plan for his jump (unsuccessful) across the Snake River Canyon in Idaho, 1974.
It’s a fallacy bordering on self-delusion, a politically convenient self-delusion.
It’s like they put their heads in a box and prevent anything else from interfering with their tunnel vision. Take for example something as simple as traffic stops, leading to the banality of “driving while black”. No attempt is made to correlate stops with racial breakdowns of driving behavior and time of day on the road. Plus, at night when the charge of systemic police racism is mostly made, how can an officer determine race from behind and through tainted windows at 30 feet? The accusation won’t survive a sufficient degree of adult analysis.
And, for sure, those other social conditions aren’t hitched to the racial distributions either. Could those other social conditions – chaotic homes in the grip of out-of-wedlock births (75% of black births), single-parenthood, substance abuse, unstable and frequent romantic relationships in front of the kids, etc. – have greater explanatory power for inordinate black run-ins with the police than the charge of Klansmen in uniform? Race is not a determinant of behavior, but upbringing is. And upbringing stats don’t align with population proportionality.
These are hard truths than cannot be easily explained away. Nonetheless, we are expected by our so-called “enlightened betters” to function as a society on this mountain of deceit. Sadly, the real victims of this crusade into absurdity are the many upstanding black citizens who unfairly wear the stain of the underlying reality. They get lumped into the same category by seasoned cabbies of all races, and maybe too many cops of all races. The War on Poverty came to help but left in its wake the devastation of some of our most vulnerable: people who were chained into slavery, suffered under Jim Crow, endured the lynching epidemic, locked into perpetual serfdom, and then were enticed by the glitter of government mammon. To be fair, the allure has afflicted all groups. But the most impacted were the most historically victimized, and victimized in ways not emanating from the bullhorns of those manning the barricades of CHAZ.
A gathering on Wednesday in the Seattle neighborhood of Capitol Hill, where protesters have established an “autonomous zone.” (photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)
Indeed, we have created for ourselves a world without reason and are living the consequences.
Today’s movie recommendation: “The Rope” by Alfred Hitchcock, 1948, starring James Stewart. Two well-to-do young men, fresh from their elite colleges, both considered smart with above average IQ’s, committed a murder because they thought themselves to be above morality. Hitchcock probably got the idea from a famous 1924 murder case. The script and the reality are eerily similar.
A scene from the movie with the James Stewart character between the killers.
The reality: On May 21, 1924, Richard Loeb (age 19) and Nathan Leopold (age 20) planned and executed the killing of 14-year-old Bobby Franks as he as walking home from school. Loeb, the son of a millionaire Sears and Roebuck executive, and Leopold, the son of a millionaire founder of a box manufacturing company, would be legitimate Mensa Society members. Leopold was a scholar of botany and ornithology, mastered 10 languages, and translated classics from their original Greek and Latin. Loeb was the youngest graduate, at age 17, of the University of Michigan in 1921. They would reunite in a couple of years for their ultimate and horrifying stick-it-to-the-man caper.
Nathan Leopold (l) and Richard Loeb at their trial. Their kinship for each other developed into a sexual relationship.
Bobby Franks, age 14, shortly before his murder.
Both were fascinated with the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, in an extremely garbled fashion. They were attracted to Nietzsche’s notion of the rise of “supermen” after he predicted the fall of traditional institutions and norms, an idea that resonated with both National Socialists and the Bolsheviks: Lenin had his “vanguard elite” and Hitler his Aryan supermen.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It wouldn’t stop there. An emphasis on an elite of “smart” people with the appropriate college credentials would be a keystone of late 19th-century Progressivism. Progressives valued an unelected class of administrators and regulators – a technocratic elite – to govern society. The conceit is still with us in our expansive administrative state, and as Democrats parade about with their constant use of the term “expert” to nullify opposing views. Their proposals – The Green New Deal for instance – would fast-track the ongoing trend of transferring great power to their preferred class of elite college-credentialed overlords in ever-expanding agencies.
Have we been softened-up to accept this state of affairs? As a 30-year veteran of the classroom, I think so. In the movie, a prominent teacher (James Stewart) is presented as a powerful influence on the minds of the killers, until the teacher discovers too late the wayward extent that they took his classroom musings. The earlier pride in his clever mental gymnastics in the classroom is wiped off his face as he discovers the body later in the story. Then he comes to realize his huge mistake.
A similar corruption of the mind was noticed by CS Lewis in his famous tract “The Abolition of Man”. Lewis worried about the dehumanization of young minds occurring in British classrooms of the mid-20th century. In a chapter titled “Men Without Chests”, he wrote of the degradation of rampant subjectivism and relativism in English instruction. Out goes firm standards of good and evil, in comes the unrestrained individual.
CS Lewis
Progressivism performs a similar trick. Essential to their understanding is a denigration of the past as corrupt while the present is an improvement on the way to a better world. There’s not much veneration for the old and true. No wonder church attendance is down. Our schools and culture are depressing it.
How about some serious thought of what we are doing to ourselves? Watch the movie.
A sign calling for utility company PG&E to turn the power back on is seen on the side of the road during a statewide blackout in Calistoga, Ca., Oct. 10, 2019. (Photo by John Edelson/AFP)
In my mid-twenties, I was trying to find a way to turn my History/Religious Studies degree into meaningful employment to support what was to be a burgeoning family. While in grad school, and taking a cue from a friend, I explored two avenues of study for employment: urban planning and teaching. I ended up in teaching. It slowly began to dawn on me, though, that the education and training in these fields was a grand muddle. Delving into urban planning wasn’t really scholarship but indoctrination into an ideology. Teacher training courses were frequently excursions into Summer-of-Love hippiedom and John Dewey’s socialism – a socialism applied to the classroom.
Inside the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in its earliest days. The clinic opened on June 7, 1967. Many of these people would go into the college schools of education, the teachers of teachers.
Parents, beware, your schools are hip deep in the junk to an even greater extent today. The balderdash remains and accounts to some extent for our population of college snowflakes.
Muddling (i.e., the action or process of bringing something into a disordered or confusing state), in fact, is what we do. Take for instance the ideology/science muddle. It’s the essence of environmentalism, or the effort to stitch together science factoids in support of a political scheme – i.e., socialism. What happens in real life when a muddle is at the root of public policy? A mess!
No better example can be found than in the latest craze to sweep the hominid world: greenie (“sustainable”, “renewable”, etc.) energy. Toward that end, we have the crazy-quilt of “net metering”. What’s that? It’s a ploy to bilk one energy consumer to benefit another. How? Stay tuned.
I was reading about it this morning. 40 states plus DC have elaborate schemes to force utility companies to buy the extra and unreliable electricity from mostly rooftop solar panels of homeowners – net-metering. Sounds like a great gig for the soccer mom/dads of suburbia. Right? No, it falls into the too-good-to-be-true category.
The burlesque of net-metering.
The problem lies in the “unreliable” part of the ruse. No one wants to buy a good or service if it cannot be expected to be there when needed. It’s every bit as true when contracting for lawn-mowing service as it is for PG&E or, up here, Northern Lights. The sun doesn’t align itself to the wishes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). The utility must revamp it’s grid for the on-again/off-again nature of rooftop solar. The utility’s legal mandate to provide reliable 24/7 energy must be made to mesh with the unpredictable production of soccer mom/dad’s pigeon-shading solar panels. That’s expensive for the utility company to make work and maintain. It’ll show up in your bill, or in utility bankruptcy, or, also as in California, poorly maintained power poles going up in flames. The consequences of the muddling of “unreliable” with “reliable” will appear in many ways, many of them not good.
The alternative is simple. If you want the things, you pay and take full responsibility for them. Sounds like something that my dad told me when I was a teenager. Don’t try and get somebody else – the utility or the consumer who prizes simple reliability – to pay for your actions. But the allure of the seemingly something-for-nothing – either through tax rebates, subsidies, utility mandates, or all of the above – allows soccer mom/dad to delude themselves. The scheme is more productive of delusions than reliable energy.
For those attuned to the scam, the scheme is sold as a sacrifice for the good of the planet. Remember though, “sacrifice” is the very essence of utopia-mongering. You know, the ends-justify-means stuff. Or, as Nikolai Yezhov, head of Stain’s NKVD (Bolshevik secret police) would put it, “When you chop wood, chips fly.” AOC has interesting company.
Nikolai Yezhov, far right, next to Stalin.
Don’t buy into the racket. Furthering our descent into third-world status won’t alter India’s and China’s belching of CO2. The planet won’t be saved, our grid will resemble Venezuela’s, and we will have proven that a “smart” grid is essentially a “dumb” one. What does that say about us?
The Getty Fire burns near the Getty Center along the 405 freeway north of Los Angeles, California, U.S. October 28, 2019. (REUTERS/ Gene Blevins)
We aren’t well-served by the mass of our journalists or schools. Frequently as a simple reader or teacher I’ve come away from an article or textbook treatment of a topic with a lingering sense of bafflement. The stories don’t make much sense.
As a History teacher, for example, the common treatment of the Great Depression is awash in incoherence. Blame is placed on greed and “over-production”. What?! “Over-production” is everywhere present in an economy and is corrected by sell-offs with no hint of a depression, let alone a “great” one. As for “greed”, it’s been with us since Eve met the serpent, maybe before. It wasn’t invented by the 1920’s.
The New Deal’s answer for “overproduction” and the decline in agricultural prices.
Plus, the authors don’t attempt to explain why the thing lasted so long. The greed and over-production mantras are presented as a set-up for a love affair with FDR and all things New Deal. Interestingly the horror persisted and even worsened in ’36-’37. Textbooks and teacher training are composed of the long march of banalities, and we’re spreading the bunk to the youngins.
Ditto for news stories. Descriptions of today’s happenings are often muddled. Take for instance The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey in her piece, “California Is Becoming Unlivable”. The “unlivable” part of California is ascribed to the underlying factors of climate change and high housing costs. Both, according to Lowrey, led to California’s fires. The high cost of housing forced development into the wildland urban interface (WUI). Her answer is the totalitarian urge to herd people into apartment complexes, something the commissars in Sacramento have been trying to accomplish for at least a couple of decades. Could this have something to do with the high cost of housing? Something about the dementia of “doing the same thing and expecting a different result” comes to mind.
Could this be their vision for the future of California housing?
Mulberry Street, NYC, circa 1900.
Of course they won’t leave the topic without throwing the fire epidemic into the climate change vortex. But the climate change god doesn’t just pick on California. It’s a global phenomenon. What has turned California into matchsticks is a combination of its dry-summer climate, with its El Diablo winds, and the clowns in Sacramento. Wildland fire suppression tactics are so passé among the ruling class of lefties in Sacramento. Though, in the dry-summer chaparral biomes, it’s like playing with firecrackers in a refinery.
The clowns try to hide their incompetence behind a barrage of charges against the utility companies. They can only get away with it under conditions of collective amnesia. PG&E and the rest of the gang are under the PUC’s thumb and its lefty hobby horses. Hardening the grid in a dry-summer climate takes second fiddle to dreams of a greenie energy utopia. After piling up the firewood under the weakly-maintained power lines, the goofs are shocked that physics takes over. Astounding!
A power line goes up in flames along a hillside as the Cocos Fire continues to burn in San Marcos, California May 15, 2014. (REUTERS/Mike Blake)
Parents beware of the indoctrination of your kids. Additionally, you have to be leery of the network news and print and digital publications. I’m beginning to wonder about the benefits of ignorance when compared to propaganda. Mmmm, something to think about?
Below is a video from Mearns Academy, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, which went viral in June of 2019, of a teacher who removed a student for stating that there are only two genders.
In my mind, the remarkable thing about the incident was the teacher’s frequent reference to “policy”, as in the school’s and government’s policy of recognizing more than two genders settles the issue enough to squash dissent. It’s an approach that seems to be seeping into most areas of public life. In other words, be silent if you disagree with the powers-that-be on an issue that is inherently open to dispute.
Yes, open to dispute. Elementary logic makes it easy to challenge this most modern of contentions. Yet, the enthusiasts for 40 or so genders try to swamp opposing voices with, in essence, a politicized résumé. The tactic is to prepare a list of gullible Ph.D.’s – ones with prejudicial sympathies for the claims – make sure that they occupy powerful positions in the relevant professional associations who have an instinct for political adventurism, and have a fervent activist base – size doesn’t matter, approximation to political power does. In that way, logic and facts get overwhelmed by the loud volume of an intense few. Education is bedeviled by the technique, as I can attest from personal experience.
For an alternative view of transgenderism, go here.
What it comes down to is a person’s self-assertion that he or she (or whatever) is the opposite of his or her (or whatever) chromosomes. Rhetoric, verbal distinctions, and analytical procedures to identify “legitimate” claims are invented to bolster the new “science”. If the purpose of the process is to winnow out the dubious from the genuine, the filter has holes the size of railroad tunnels. If this is science, it is of the sham variety.
We’ve been down this road before with eugenics and racial purity. And we might have to add overwrought “climate change” to the list. So-called “science” is just as vulnerable to fanciful popular trends as hemlines and music.
At the end of the day, what have we done? As is usual in these kinds of things, it’s the young who pay the price for our impulsiveness. They are injected with pharmaceuticals at a young age in preparation for surgery later. The drugs will stunt their development and the surgery is irreversible. But by then, it’s too late. A change of heart just became meaningless. With transgenderism, you might as well repeal the Hippocratic oath.
The problems don’t stop there. Girls’ track, swimming, soccer, etc., or girl’s anything, will have been made nonsensical. The inherent advantage of the transgendered girl over those whose mental state aligns with their chromosomes means that past-boys will dominate present-girls. I wonder about the survival of the longstanding feminist push for sports equity when the boys-now-girls are harvesting the majority of girls’ sports scholarships and dominating the record books. We don’t have to much worry about the process working the other way.
This is what happens when government wades into a controversy in favor of the side obviously lacking in merit but nonetheless having proximity to power. Government diktat overwhelms debate and discourse, and helps to produce viral videos of public employees shaming dissenters even though the dissenters have the stronger case. Is this any way to run a citizen republic?
One evening I received a call from one of my students in my community college Physical Geography class. He was disappointed in his grade and begged for a higher one. This was his second time around but couldn’t show much improvement. I told him that I couldn’t in good conscience raise his grade as it would be unfair to the other students. He pleaded, “If I don’t get a higher grade, I won’t graduate and I won’t rise to anything in my life.” My heart sank after hearing this. I proceeded to dispel him of the crazy notion. It may be crazy but it is instilled in the young from pre-school on. How did we get to this place?
Somehow, going to college has become our society’s default path to personal advancement. Call it degree inflation. The relentless drumbeat of “college, college, college” has warped public policy with its plethora of taxpayer subsidized financial aid, degraded entry and instructional standards, and produced new “soft science” degree fields that have little bearing on real learning and improved abilities and does much to produce alienated and disgruntled students with a bent for political activism.
Oberlin College students protest a bakery for alleged racism. Later, the college incurred a $44 million judgment for defaming the owners and an employee.
And it fabricates a raft of “disparate impacts”, that old bugbear of civil rights warriors since the 1960’s. College degrees aren’t distributed evenly among social groups, and some groups have protected status in law and court decisions (the Civil Rights Acts and the Griggs decision). As the college degree becomes a de facto test for employment, the brunt will fall disproportionately upon these groups. A new college-industrial complex has taken shape to provide new barriers to job entry and advancement, whose relevance to work performance is more hypothetical than real. The case is laid out beautifully by Frederick M. Hess and J. Grant Addison in National Affairs, “Busting the College-Industrial Complex” (see here).
I suspect that a social bias is at work in this call of “college for all”. Most people making the push come from social strata who predominate in college admissions. It’s how they did it; it’s how their parents did it; it’s how everyone in their well-to-do neighborhood does it. When they get into positions of influence, it’s their preferred prescription for everyone to reach elevated levels of esteem. For them, anything else is for the hoi polloi.
Pres. Obama with daughter Malia, who attends Harvard, and Pres. and Mrs. Clinton with Chelsea who attended Stanford.
Illogic abounds in the process. On the one hand, they complain about the escalating cost of college; on the other, they push as many people as possible into it. It’s as if college advocates want to suspend the relationship between demand and price. You can’t, and when you try, the disjunction will show in other damaging ways.
To put it bluntly, college isn’t for everybody. Nor should it be. Anyway, the heralded thing is debased beyond recognition. Many of our young would be better served if they looked elsewhere for personal growth.
This has happened more than a few times in my 30-year teaching career. As part of a broader discussion, a kid will define a “conservative” as one who opposes change. That’s not the end of it. What follows is a train wreck of logic. Diving deeper, we find that the kid is hung up on the root “conserve”, which to the student means to stand athwart “change”. And “change” is synonymous with “reform”. And “reform” is “good”. That’s etymology, or a loose rendering of it. When did etymology become a substitute for philosophical reasoning? Somehow it has for the masses of the young passing through our schools into adulthood.
To set the record straight, “conservative” is one of many philosophies – in common usage, call them ideologies – that have bounced around our world for the past few centuries. Other modern examples would be “liberal”, “progressive”, and “Salafist Islam”. A philosophy/ideology is a simple set of judgments on how the world works.
The terms are also labels. What fits under the label can change over time. A “conservative” of 16th century England would support the aristocracy and a Catholic-style Church of England (High Churchmen in the parlance of the day). However, by the 19th into the 20th centuries, “conservative” came to be defined by the liberty agenda of Locke, Burke, Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, the now-defunct British Whig Party, and our founding fathers. Amazing as to what a few centuries can do.
If “conservative” can be defined by a liberty agenda, what of “liberal” and “progressive”? It’s easy to knock these two things out since they have morphed into the same thing. A “progressive” (or modern liberal) begins with an unexamined, unacknowledged, and unstated assumption about history. For them, the past is deficient, the present is an improvement, and the future is an advance on an inferior present. An appropriate progressive metaphor for the human experience would be a chairlift up a ski slope. It’s the unstated view of History curriculums in our schools, and part and parcel of the Obama rhetoric of being “on the right side of history”.
Some serious implications soon follow. For instance, who is the most capable of ferreting out the trajectory? Academics, of course. They, the knowledgeable, have the wherewithal to peer into the past and present and guide us onto the true path of human betterment. It’s the dawn of the administrative state and diminishment of the rough-and-tumble politics of popular sovereignty. Now, the way is laid open for an academically-trained civil service to guide and direct us. Say goodbye to the citizen republic, guns, and the spontaneous order of free markets. Life is reduced to the prescriptions of empowered social technicians.
The administrative state.
The Soviets tried to do the same thing on meth. It was called central planning.
“Science” is the buzzword. Science is, indeed, a great thing … but not when a little bit of it is extrapolated into airy historical predictions and social abstractions. Take for instance Marx’s “scientific socialism” and “dialectical materialism”. Take for instance the Green New Deal. At this point, “science” is no different from religious mysticism. The conclusions are no longer tethered to Earth’s gravity but have zoomed past the asteroid belt.
So, what do we have? We have one line of thought rooted in a firm grasp of human nature with all its flaws. Does the Old Testament sound familiar? Out of the idea comes the rule of law and constitutional republics as checks on the evil men and women can do. By contrast, the other reasoning means reform, reform, and more reform. Everything is turned topsy-turvy forever, and all under the direction of a set of planners with the latest zeitgeisty truths-of-the-moment. Be prepared to constantly queue up for shortages will be the afterbirth.
The Soviet Union in its latter days suffered from a birth dearth (and still does) and plague of alcoholism. I don’t think that the rule of dogmatic, degreed social managers comports well with our nature. The planners, as it turns out, have the same flaws as the rest of us. A social miasma will descend on life.
Steve Forbes in “Forbes” (April 30, 2019) reviewed Rich Karlgaard’s book, “Late Bloomers”. In the book, Karlgaard makes the point that there is no hard timetable for human flourishing. When we act as if there is one, we disfigure our kids and their future. We go further in creating a cult of youth and shuffling the old out to pasture. In the end, I can’t help but think that we are fashioning our young into future clients of the therapy and counseling industry, and increasingly dragging in the government as financier. Taxpayers, watch out, for the taxman cometh.
Evidence of the mauling is all around. Parents will stretch themselves into bankruptcy court to move into a “nicer” neighborhood for the so-called “good” schools. The schools aren’t better; the student body is just better dressed with better cars in the parking lot.
And the kids are more likely to do the homework. But what’s in the homework? It’s the same deficient curriculum for the most part.
Guess what? This is all about cosmetic resume-building. Make sure to get the AP on your high school transcripts; go to the right summer camp; crowd your kid into as many organized sports as possible; do a charity for the way it’ll look to the college admissions officer. When does the kid have the breathing space to simply be a kid?
The college entrance cheating scandals are a sign of the trend. Do all of the above, and if that doesn’t work, or if the kid hasn’t done it, cheat. We’re creating a world of facile and sterile expectations.
But where does wisdom fit into the grand plan? It doesn’t. In a world of only looking good, wisdom has no place. Wisdom doesn’t arise from a mad race to fill a resume. Life, family, and faith have a much greater bearing on personal resilience and true happiness. And for some, maybe most, that takes awhile.
A Stanford prof is quoted as saying that the incoming freshman are increasingly “brittle”. Indeed.
Students in Los Angeles protest the November 2016 election result.
Lesson: Fashionable ideas frequently fall into the category of “too good to be true”.
Compare Amy Harder’s Axiospiece from yesterday, “The key to unlocking wind and solar: Making it last”, and Michael Shellenberger’s Forbesarticle from 2018, “We Don’t Need Solar And Wind To Save The Climate — And It’s A Good Thing, Too”. The former is a puff piece about another alleged “breakthrough” for solar and wind energy. The latter is a healthy splash of cold water on the whole ploy. In today’s media, almost anything chic among the beautiful people, popular with the rulers in deep blue states, championed in thousands of public service ads, and exalted in high school science fairs, should be taken with a ton of salt.
Here’s a few takeaways from the analysis:
* Solar and wind, especially solar, have always been on the cusp of the next will-o’-the-wisp big breakthrough since the 19th century. Shellenberger recounts the history; Harder unwittingly provides another example.
* Solar and wind are expensive. They sound like a great idea since the sun shines and the wind blows without our help. Check out the electricity rates of countries who have bought into solar and wind.
* The environmental damage of wind and solar is immense. They use up and mar vast tracts of the landscape, disrupt and threaten the natural flora and fauna, and the production of their devices begets toxic wastes and land scarring.
* Nuclear is an obvious alternative but gets no mention in the rush to the solar-and-wind utopia. It’s better, more efficient, more cost effective, produces no CO2, and recycles much of its waste. What’s there not to like … if we can look away from the scowls of the beautiful people?
The China Syndrome (1979), directed by James Bridges. Shown from left: James Hampton, Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas.
The real world can’t be boiled down to Sierra Club talking points. I wish that our media would stop repeating them and our kids weren’t taught the baloney.
