"Indifference" and the restlessness

 An article by Mark Lilla in the new journal Liberties (only available in print, alas) solidified some of my thinking on the restlessness. He talks about the concept of "indifferent" acts in ethics and theology. Do all of our actions carry inevitable moral weight? Is it possible to engage in some small activity without being good or bad, or is even a small act of leisure a sin? What if that act of leisure promotes morality? We see this all the time in modern lefty discourse, with endless articles about how "problematic" something or other is. One needn't be amoral or nihilist to recognize that you'll go crazy if you agonize over the ethics of every small deed. But people do that nonetheless. Just a few hours ago I was scolded over some small joke, because even though the person I told it to totally got it, some outside observer might lack context and think I was doing something bad. Lilla goes through the history of indifference in theology and philosophy, and I won't attempt to rehash it here. But I will note that the modern scolds of political correctness are searching for sin everywhere, and the modern restless educators feel like we must keep trying to further purify everything.

Next book: The Cult of Smart by Freddie deBoer

I haven't felt like blogging much lately, but my latest read, The Cult of Smart by Freddie deBoer, has some choice quotes that I want to blog so I won't forget. Freddie argues simultaneously that education isn't and shouldn't be everything, AND that it's OK to recognize that some kids are smarter than others, some kids will benefit from being in more advanced tracks in school, etc. We don't need to push college on everyone, but we can recognize that some kids are probably better cut out for it than others, and that's OK.  Some key quotes:

1) On page 7:

For decades our educational politics have obsessed over between-group variation, that is, gaps between black students and white, between girls and boys, between rich and poor. But to me the more interesting, more essential, insights lie in the nature of within-group variation. Take any identifiable academic demographic group you'd like--poor black inner-city charter school students, first-generation Asian immigrants in Los Angeles public schools, poor rural white girls in the Ozard Mountains. There are indeed systematic differences in outcomes between these various groups. But what's more telling and more interesting is the variation within these groups. In any such groups, you will find students who excel at the highest levels and students who fail again and again.

Freddie goes on to argue that so much policy is aimed at getting everyone to the same target, which is insane.

2) On page 12, regarding the idea that effort is everything (which he has encountered in many teaching jobs):

The cruelty of that idea--that we are all so equal in ability that only effort and character can keep us from success--was apparent. The evidence was sitting at a desk in front of me, weeping real tears.

I've said repeatedly that a theory of success needn't be a theory of failure, but certainly they go together closely. Saying why people succeed says nothing about why people don't do what is required for success--maybe a cruel society has discouraged them from trying. Nonetheless, there's a strong implication that if they disregard a cruel society they'll succeed, and however well-intentioned that belief might be, it won't really help a kid who just isn't cut out for something.

3) Page 17, regarding "weed-out" intro courses in science and engineering:

And I grew to think that rather than representing a failure of educators to do their jobs, these classes that screened out students performed a necessary if unfortunate function for institutions dedicated to training young people for their futures.

There's nothing wrong with saying to people that if this is hard the next thing will be even harder, so the time to make a good decision is now, when changing course is still easy.

4) On page 20, an interesting indictment of "positive thinking" and related notions:

Everywhere I turned as a teacher I seemed to find the same empty talk of excellence (without the necessary corollary of failure), innovation (without any sense of what we should be innovating toward), and positive thinking (even while its acolytes accused everyone else of having failed).

The negativity and implicit judgmentalism of the "positive thinking" types is an important point. He's also getting at The Restlessness that I often talk about here. We need to be constantly innovating toward, um, something. The achievement of an impossible goal, I guess.

5) On page 64:

We of course should equalize the environment of all children by giving them safe, stable, happy homes in which to grow and learn. We should do so as an end, not as a means to achieving educational equality.

Amen to that. Children deserve good childhoods because they are people, and particularly vulnerable people at that. While we shouldn't be short-sighted, we also shouldn't subordinate everything to super-long-term planning either. Something can be good in the moment because this moment has value and a person deserves good.

More thoughts on the restlessness

My main goal is to understand why the people around me want to confer credentials on everyone possible without regard to whether the recipients need, deserve, or, upon introspection, even want what is being thrust upon them. Some of it is the self-interest of credential-givers who need to remain employed, but there are ways to structure our work that would profitably focus on a different balance of quality vs quantity. I read an interesting interview this morning with a bunch of ideas in it, some of which are abhorrent, and thus I will not link to it. But sometimes the people outside of your own value system see things that you cannot see as easily, and this guy said that in the 60's the WASP elites lost their confidence in their own rule. Separate from that, I read some commentary recently on how China and Iran see themselves as civilizations, not mere countries, and something became clear to me about how unworkable America is, and how profoundly sad that is.

The basic problem of human nature is that people can often get ahead if they don't cooperate, so they don't cooperate.  Nobody knows this better than real communists, i.e. people who have actually implemented communism. They try cooperation for about two nanoseconds, then everyone grabs at the same thing rather than waiting for the planner to decide who gets what, so the communists promptly implement a brutal system of control. If you want people following plans rather than pursuing their own agendas within a system of incentives or disincentives, you'll need to control them.

Free market types have an obvious answer: Instead of planners, just base everything on voluntary exchange. You only get what someone is willing to trade with you for. Instead of force there are market incentives. Sounds great, but there's one problem: Somebody will show up and steal. OK, well, then we'll have enforceable property rights.  So force is wrong except when countering wrongful force. Great idea, and I largely agree, but then we run into the problem that two people can't agree on who the rightful owner of something is. Maybe they don't have a clear property deed or undisputed transaction record, or the prior owner died and the will was never clearly written out. Or maybe one of them is just plain lying. So you need an arbitrator to decide which one is right to grab the thing away from the other while pointing a gun and saying "You can't have it!" (Or, God help us, actually squeezing the trigger on the gun.)

So you wind up with authorities and rules, and these things can be used well and sparingly, or be used poorly and frequently, or even used sparingly but poorly. So you need to figure out who should be the authority. And no matter how you dress it up, you're ultimately deciding who has the right to decide when to point guns at someone, when to say "Yep, this guy was right to point a gun", and when to say "Nope, that guy was wrong to point a gun, let's punish him." Of course, "right to decide when..." just begs the question of where the right comes from. Great philosophers and political thinkers have said far more about this than I could hope to say well, but that's the basic problem. The best you can probably hope for is a situation where most people see a benefit in trading without pointing guns or swords or whatever, and the people who carry guns and lock other people up only do so when somebody else really did start the violence or really did steal.

Of course, no system gets it perfectly right. Even the best cops screw up at times, but you hope that the errors are few and far between, and are of the honest sort ("The guy who actually did it looked just like the guy we locked up. I feel terrible about this.") rather than the malicious sort ("My buddy said this guy is a punk so I roughed him up. He had it coming."). So you try to inculcate a sense of duty and honor in the people doing this.

It gets worse: Some of the rules are inevitably going to enrich somebody to somebody else's detriment. Even a simple rule like "The person who owns property upstream can't dump crap into the river because it hurts people downstream" has stakes for both parties, especially since the actual rule will be more like "You can't dump more than X amount of this kind of crap each day." So now there's some calibrated tradeoff between the interests of the person upstream and the person downstream, and there are stakes in that rule no matter where you strike the balance. Or you have a rule like "You can only stable horses in this part of town but not that part" because the horse manure causes sanitation problems. How you zone the horse and no-horse sections of towns has stakes for property owners and renters alike.

So everyone wants to be in charge. It's really good to be king, and it's pretty good to be one of the king's officials. And you have to figure out who gets these positions. And hence we come to the problem of elites and confidence. Everything I said so far was pretty elementary political philosophy: You'll have a hierarchy whether you like it or not. Now we get to the specifics of a particular hierarchy in a particular society.

Historically, the people in charge needed to satisfy 3 basic requirements: Keep the loyalty of the people with swords, strike deals with the people who have enough money to cause trouble or prevent trouble, and keep the public happy enough that they would rather not riot. Many societies have tried many ways to do this, but universal equality has rarely been a problem for them. Sometimes the people of a particular class would see themselves as equal citizens, but the masses rarely enjoyed that level of citizenship.

In a modern western democracy, alas, that's not good enough. So we have democracy. Everyone can vote, and while most of them won't, they elect people who allegedly represent their wishes. (God help us.) Of course, gaining those offices requires campaigning, which requires resources and endorsements, which means intrigue, and where you start off in life affects how likely you are to succeed at that.  Even worse, it doesn't just affect your chances of reaching elected office, it affects your chances of rising to positions of respect and responsibility in the structures of society.  (Duh.) Well, if everyone's supposed to be equal, this is a problem.

In the 60's the WASP elites lost confidence. Ironically, they lost it around the time that they were racking up political and legal victories over the white southern elites.  If anything should legitimize the WASP elites it's a victory over the racists of the south, except that the egalitarian logic called ALL hierarchy into question. And we don't have a good answer for that. We can accept the necessity of decision-makers, but nobody (myself included) wants accidents of birth to be determinative.  Of course, I also don't want southern California to have a fire season, but I don't get to have what I want. We can sand off the rough edges of birth accidents, but we can never completely erase them. Everyone knows this.

But there's a lot of room between "Accept every accident of birth as a fait accompli" and "Work tirelessly to completely erase all effects of birth." How far do you go between those extremes?  How far is enough? Nobody has an answer.  There's no obviously right place to draw a line. And so you eventually get to the point where it's considered grossly politically incorrect for me to say that if you have a bunch of kids with sucky SAT math scores, most of them will probably not do well in physics, even with considerable hand-holding. Yes, yes, there's always "This one person" who defied the odds, but the whole point of odds is that they involve probabilities and averages, and just as some people will be above average some will be below average. The existence of non-zero variance hardly refutes statistical reality.

We lack any ability to say what sort of deviation from perfect equality is acceptable, even in the short-term. It would be one thing if we could say "Look, we should try to lift up people so that even if they themselves can't go as far as they hoped, their kids can." That would frame equality as a journey, not a destination, let alone an instant destination. I would love a goal of "Let's help most people do better than their parents" rather than "Let's help everyone do the same as everyone else."

I'm framing things in extreme forms to get at principles.  Everyone will say that universal A grades are not the goal. But the fact remains that there are some stark realities that people around me deny. We cannot get everyone with a shitty SAT math score to be an accomplished physics student.  Sorry, can't happen. We can get an exceptional subset of them, but we can't make everyone an exception.

But as long as we regard accidents of birth as utterly unacceptable, we have to try the impossible, even if the consequences are predictable.

China and Iran have no such compunctions, and not just because they are ostensibly a People's Republic and an Islamic Republic. Communism is a recent aberration for China. They're proud of being China, which was old when Marx was an infant. And according to the Iranians whom I know, Islam is a "recent" phenomenon in their society, a product of Arab invasions. Their memory goes back much farther than that. Both societies have made great strides in educating their populations, but not because of any modern notions.  While we Americans have lamentably held the descendants of illiterate Scots-Irish border raiders in high esteem (seriously, why?), the Chinese and Iranians have long traditions of learning. They don't need to take in any modern baggage with education, so they don't need to try the impossible.  They just need to build up human capacity, which is a distinct project. 

And while Iran is far more democratic than Americans think, whatever loyalty they have to their far from perfect system is not rooted solely in the extent to which it respects democratic equality.  They desire it, of course, but it's not their sole basis for loyalty. They are a civilization with ancient roots and accomplishments, while we're a society framed around a handful of English cultural strains. I say that with no notion of Anglo-Saxon supremacy; I think England is a perfectly fine civilization by global standards, but far from the top of the heap in a world that has China, Japan, Egypt, Iran, Greece, Rome, Anatolia, Iraq, Syria, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Israel, Mexico, India, etc. The fact is that as much as our gene and skin tones are diverse, we Americans are rooted in English colonists. That's the society our ancestors assimilated into. The Puritans and Quakers were great, but the Cavaliers and Scots-Irish were mistakes.  I feel sorry for the Scots-Irish, but the Cavaliers were beyond contemptible.

We've done a lot since then--rock and roll, moon landings, the internet--but we're still a flash in the pan. We have a sinful past, and while other societies are perfectly capable of shrugging at their sinful pasts (God knows Iran and China have sinned) we don't know how to merely shrug. We either deny it (which inevitably leads people to double down on the racist mistakes), or else we self-flagellate endlessly. It's our Christian nature to do so. Christianity is a great basis for personal growth and redemption, but a society that takes it too far will either sink into denial or self-abuse. I feel terrible writing this, because I am too inquisitive and Christian for denial, too proud of learning to follow the egalitarian project to its utmost absurdity, and too Christian to escape guilt. 

I don't know what will become of us. We've done amazing things, and we will no doubt do more. But I question our stability, because we lack a proper way of answering our guilt or rationalizing our hierarchy. We can never completely undo the sins of history, but we cannot live with them either. But we will do some great things until we finally become undone in one way or another. Our egalitarian commitments will never enable us to accept the inevitability of hierarchy and elites' ability to secure advantages for their offspring. So I will have to continue to hand physics degrees to kids who can't do algebra, to try to wipe away the stain of a past that can never be erased.

Latest book: 'A Dream Deferred' by Shelby Steele

I recently read A Dream Deferred by Shelby Steele, a book which argues that post-60's liberalism has focused on social policy as a means of redemption from shame. His basic thesis is that once white Americans fully came to grips with the enormity of America's racial crimes, they sought redemption and hence lowered standards for African-Americans.  He critiques welfare and affirmative action, both of which have changed between 1998 (the publication date of his book) and 2020. Welfare is no longer the open-ended subsistence bestowed in the 1990's (Clinton and Gingrich passed welfare reform), and while diversity programs run as strong as ever, explicit quotas and set-asides are mostly gone. Implicit, hidden quotas, fudged evaluations, etc., all of these things still exist, more than ever. But good luck getting somebody to lay it out in a document that could be subpoenaed.

Steele says that this is all about white people seeking redemption from shame. He says that this is why educators lurch from one fad to another, because they desperately need to be seen doing something. It is less important that African Americans improve than that white people be seen trying. As a black conservative, he despises this, both for what it does to black people (it forces them into dependent roles so that white liberals can feel better) and for what it doesn't do (it doesn't actually raise performance).  I think he over-simplifies somewhat, but that's inevitable in a book that's 180 pages.  Either you should state your thesis in a more succinct essay, or write a tome of nuance and documentation.  He's an excellent writer, and packs in as much nuance as 180 pages will allow (his prose is magnificent, and I doubt I could ever write an essay as good as his), but it's still light on documentation.  (Then again, he came up as a literary scholar, not a social scientist.)

Lest you think he's too harsh on his own people, he has no shortage of praise for his culture. He praises areas of African-American endeavor, and argues that they have been most successful in areas (art, literature, music, entertainment, sports) where competition cannot be easily manipulated by do-gooders. Of course, reality is more complex than that, but he brings an important consideration to the table.

He keeps revisiting the point about unbearable shame, and I think that does explain the restlessness I see among educators. We have been told that we are THE solution to the unbearable shame, and when it doesn't puff us up with pride it fills us with desperation to fix something that we cannot fix on our own, neither for the benefit of the intended recipients (an underclass) nor the desperately guilty upper class. We can only do our part, but we need to be seen doing as much as possible, lest we be called to account by either the underclass (who will tell us we did too little) or the upper class (who will tell us that we failed to discharge the guilt that they transferred to us).

One thing I wonder about is why Germany doesn't display the same restlessness, despite having a terrible crime on their record.  I suspect it's 4 things:
1) I'm too far removed to see it clearly.
2) The descendants of their victims mostly live elsewhere, so they don't need to discharge their debt via domestic social policy.
3) Their crime, as terrible as it was, was one episode in a much longer history, so it doesn't stain every single thing in the way that racism stains our entire history. (Indeed, their neighbors have plenty of pogroms on their own ledgers.)
4) After WWII they immediately confronted a new problem (division between two outside powers, and the oppression of half of their people by one of those powers) so they had a different set of considerations.

Anyway, I'm off to read some books that I'm currently not motivated to blog.  Maybe that will change.

Bright-Sided, First few chapters

This book is largely a history of "positive thinking" and various movements to get people to be irrationally optimistic on the premise that it will yield dividends.  I don't have it in me to blog every detail, but there's one bit that stands out:

Apparently a lot of the enthusiasts for various "positive thinking" remedies, whether pushed by religion, psychologists, or business consultants, are sales people.  On one level this seems like an utterly obvious and unremarkable observation.  Salesmen and saleswomen are cheerful and personable.  Of course they're upbeat!  However, Ehrenreich points to interviews in which salespeople (and the "positive thinking" enthusiasts who shill to them) often find it difficult to project that persona.  They buy these books because they need constant infusions of kool-aid to keep up the appearance.  In private, many of them are unhappy with their lonely lives on the road, surrounded only by people whom they want things from, and who in turn want only free samples and low prices.  That frankly sounds like a hellish life.

When I think more about the people in my profession who are most publicly adamant about various "positive thinking" approaches (even if not in so many words), I realize that some of them wish they weren't professors, or at least that they weren't in STEM fields.  I won't use a public blog to identify them or say why I think they regret their choice of field, but I've seen enough to make me quite certain that they wish for something else and don't know how to escape.  For myself, I hate many things about the current direction of my profession and institution, but I am quite certain that I want to teach physics and do research in physics.  So I pity them, and I start to understand why they are desperate for the quick fixes peddled in pop psychology.  And I see the overlap between their restlessness and that of the people who buy self-help books and attend motivational seminars.

More on America's elites and The Restlessness

This article on political correctness and activism at Yale argues that the problem is not about speech, but about a loss of confidence by America's elites.  The writer (Natasha Dashan) starts by noting that the effectiveness of student protests were a symptom of loss of confidence:

But the appearance of bottom-up protest politics is always a bit of a false narrative.  It would be one thing if the students were polled and a majority said they wanted the name changed, or some other process was used. At least the university could say that it was making decisions based on some objective democratic process, and wasn’t just being pushed around. But this is not what happened. No polls were taken. There was no authoritative process. The school said no for a few months, then caved. If the school were actually confident in its position to resist, it could have easily pushed back on the protests.

I admit that on some level I don't understand why America's elites have lost confidence.  Yes, America has lots of problems, I disagree with its elites on lots of things, and I think they've made a lot of mistake.  But isn't that true of every era?  There's a whole lot that America does right, and a whole lot that it could still set right with sustained effort.  And plenty of other places and times have seen elites who did worse.

Maybe the problem is that America's elites know that they aren't really in charge.  I mean, yes, they control so many institutions, but they no longer control the government.  That may seem laughable on one level, with the Supreme Court being packed with Yale grads and plenty of Ivy Leaguers, rich people, etc. in Congress.  Not to mention the Ivy Leaguers packing the top of executive agencies and Congressional staff positions, i.e. the people who REALLY run the government and always have in every country ever.

On another level, consider the most intractable problem in American government:  The deficit.  You simply cannot have tax rates that are acceptable to Americans AND have the massive military that we have (and all the commitments that come with it) AND do something substantial about healthcare.  You can do any two of those, but not all three.  This isn't a matter of political ideology but rather arithmetic.  Nonetheless, it is impossible to raise taxes, impossible to cut the military, and impossible to do anything about healthcare that might threaten the bottom lines of entrenched interests.  There are too many different players with too much at stake.  And they can get the masses to vote with them.

OK, maybe all of those defense contractor executives and healthcare executives and upper-income taxpayers are elites, but (1) there are so many of them that the word "elite" gets stretched to something broader than "Top Ivy Grads", (2) they aren't the forward-thinking elites who know that some things can't go on forever (i.e. the sorts of people who are smart enough to rise to the top at Yale), and (3) these things wouldn't be politically impossible if the elites couldn't win elections while adhering to these stances, and lose elections by substantially straying from them. The people who benefit from these unsustainable contradictions have a critical mass of, well, the masses on their side. Something has slipped loose and is no longer under the control of smart old guys from New England.  It's not democracy, but it's also not an elite that's coherent enough to act together and accept short-term pain with the assurance that they know the other guys and can keep them from cheating.

Dashan seems to know this.  She says (emphasis added):

Western elites are not comfortable with their place in society and the responsibilities that come with it, and realize that there are deep structural problems with the old systems of coordination. But lacking the capacity for an orderly restructuring, or even a diagnosis of problems and needs, we dive deeper into a chaotic ideological mode of coordination that sweeps away the old structures. 

When you live with this mindset, what you end up with is not an establishment where a woke upper class rallies and advocates for the rights of minorities, the poor, and underprivileged groups. What you have is a blind and self-righteous upper class that becomes structurally unable to take coordinated responsibility. You get stuck in an ideological mode of coordination, where no one can speak the truth to correct collective mistakes and overreaches without losing position. 

This ideology is promulgated and advertised by universities, but it doesn’t start or stop at universities. All the fundraisers. All the corporate events. The Oscars. Let’s take down the Man. They say this in front of their PowerPoints. They clink champagne glasses. Let’s take down the Man! But there is no real spirit of revolution in these words. It is all in the language they understand—polite and clean, because it isn’t really real. It is a performative spectacle about their own morale and guilt.

I've written before about comfortable, well-dressed people sitting in conference rooms and nodding enthusiastically while people about them discuss TRANSFORMATION AND DISRUPTION!!!  It's not just about the federal budget.  In education the problem is the unsustainability of expanding access while preserving some modicum of excellence.  But denying access is simply not an option.  So everyone tries to look for too-good-to-be-true solutions, or at least tries to look like they're looking for them, so that they can look like they are the side of righteousness.  Because there's no politically feasible way to get off this train.  So they're all eating this shit up like it's pita chips and humus from Trader Joe's.

And then a reality TV star with a Twitter account and more loyalty to Moscow than Main Street wins the Presidency and half the country freaks out while the other half jumps on the bandwagon.  Because our elites don't know what to do.  Yeah, he's a rich guy (sort of) and a businessman, but just about all of the business elite would have preferred a more competent rich guy to sign their tax cuts and appoint people who will deregulate.  And the old-school elites, who could think long-term, would have preferred somebody with a bit more discipline.

The elites lack confidence because nobody is in charge, or at least nobody can coordinate the people who are collectively in charge.  God help us, we're sort of a democracy.

Demon in Democracy: Intro

I've read the short introductory section of The Demon in Democracy.  He starts from the observation that after Communism the people who fared best were mostly Communist administrators.  He notes some obvious explanations:  They knew how to work in administrative bureaucracies, and the Western victors of the Cold War wanted to be gracious to defeated foes, lest still-powerful people feel left out of the new order and lash out.  But Legutko sees more at play, namely that Communism and "liberal-democracy" (he makes much of the hyphenation, to identify it as a very particular manifestation, rather than just any system that is liberal and democratic) were both "modernization projects" aimed at improving people and undoing older orders, or the "natural" orders to which people might default either because of tradition, inertia, etc.  In short, he sees both of them as technocratic systems.

I sort of sympathize.  No, more than "sort of."  I sympathize a great deal.  He's touching on a real thing.  What he calls "liberal-democracy" I would call "technocratic", and more left-wing critics might call "neoliberalism", while more right-wing critics might call it "social engineering" or "the administrative state."  It defies left-right distinctions, having things to offer for some of the rich, some of the poor, and some of the middle class.  It is more socially progressive than most of its detractors, but it can make plenty of room for people who are socially cautious (up to a point, at least).  It's a large, broad sympathy that I cannot adequately describe.  It can bring together progressive educators and the national security state and corporate interests.  It can be restless in its search for The Next Big Thing, yet it also seeks order.

Is it really such a comfortable thing for Communists?  Well, I guess it depends on the definition of a Communist, and not just in the usefully idiotic formulation of "No, see, we just haven't had REAL Communism!"  Some of the usefully idiotic intellectuals could embrace technocracy as a more sane, less impoverishing and less bloody alternative that still promises endless improvement.  Some of them would hate it because it is more sane and often (not always) promises improvement of a less rapid and revolutionary sort.  (There is always hype, but there are plenty of technocrats who have no illusion that the hype will work out as promised.)  As to the actually-existing Communist administrators, the hard-core blood-spilling Stalinists would hate this modern era because it (often but not always) likes a velvet glove (at least when dealing with people who are culturally similar to the denizens of the capital city), but the ones who wanted to keep the system going on in some vaguely stable form subsequent to Stalin's welcome death could (and often did) make their peace with more modern technocracy after the fall of Communism.

Legutko freely admits that modern technocracy has enabled billions of people to live better than Communism did, with greater prosperity and greater freedom.  But he also sees something unpleasant in it, and I often concur.  I work in a bureaucracy that is determined to lie to itself and everyone nearby about human improvement, and it is painful.  I suspect that Legutko will sympathize, but he is reported to also be quite socially conservative in ways that I would NOT embrace.  Again, in many ways I value the old and traditional, but surely there are ways to be decent to many people who were rejected in the past while still retaining many great things from the past.  Alas, modern technocracy desperately needs bigots as enemies, because non-bigoted enemies would be a far greater threat.  Pushing back on bigots and including people whom older traditions tried to marginalize are among the greatest accomplishments of modern technocrats (though the technocrats are not solely responsible, and many failed to cover themselves in glory on these matters).  I am mostly quite cynical, but I still have enough idealism to believe that there are ways to be inclusive (at least by some notions of the word) while adhering to the best of what tradition has to offer.

So far I am fascinated by this book, but I suspect that I will soon be frustrated.

P.S. One thing that frustrates me already is the short shrift he gives to the idea that bureaucratic skills are transferable.  To him it's all about the alleged idealism of the systems.  He is underplaying the transferability of education and professionalization.

Next book: Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche.

My next read will be Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche, largely because of a recent op-ed that I read, which argued that Nietzsche wrote about how people search for meaning in a world that has lost religion.  I think this has much relevance to academic life and the restlessness I see.

The restlessness (cont.)

I can't find a link to it (it seems to only be in the print edition) but this morning's LA Times ran an op-ed by Sue Prideaux, who was explaining how the far right has taken Nietzsche out of context.  I am not qualified to evaluate that argument, but I was fascinated when she said that Nietzsche's famous "God is dead" quote refers to the problem of humans seeking meaning and order in the world when they no longer have belief in God as a source of authority.  I think this is part of why people are so desperate to derive "ought" from "is", because they have no higher authority than material facts.