The Federalist Papers were tedious. I read the first 30 in detail, then skimmed the next 30, then read about the Electoral College and then gave up. There are common themes, but they are tediously developed.
Now I'm reading Open Letters, a collection of writings by former Czech playwright, anti-communist dissident, and eventual Czech President Vaclav Havel. It's kind of eerie how some of his critiques of communism could also be critiques of capitalism. For instance, in his 1975 letter to Gustav Husak, the leader of Czechoslovakia, he notes that after a moment of freedom in 1968 (swiftly crushed by Soviet tanks), the Communist Party focused on economic development in order to appease people, while not easing up on political and social oppression:
Yet these same authorities obsessively justify themselves with their revolutionary ideology, in which the ideal of man's total liberation has a central place! But what, in fact, has happened to the concept of human personality, and its many-sided, harmonious, and authentic growth? Of man liberated from the clutches of an alienating social machinery, from a mythical hierarchy of values, formalized freedoms, from the dictatorship of property, the fetish and the might of money? What has happened to the idea that people should live in full enjoyment of social and legal justice, have a creative share in economic and political power, be elevated in human dignity and become truly free themselves? Instead of a free share in economic decision making, free participation in political life, and free intellectual advancement, all people are actually offered is a chance freely to choose which washing machine or refrigerator they want to buy.
Is he talking about communism, or about the ways that conformity is enforced in any society? The grand ideals of failed communism don't sound so different from the grand ideals of any other reformist movement. Yes, central economic planning enforced by secret police is a particularly stupid and destructive approach to "reform", and I don't want to sound like I'm trivializing it by equating it to other reformist projects. I'm glad that modern reformists have (mostly) given up on that stupid idea. Still, they haven't lost whatever it was that drove privileged kids to read Marx in the first place. They still think they can free society if you just put them in charge. Technocrats and techno-utopians are still self-servingly stupid.
An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.
I am generally skeptical of technocrats, yet zeal for firm and efficient administration are pretty technocratic things. On the other hand, the technocrats I deal with always claim to be promoting scalable Best Practices for achieving some egalitarian goal. Perhaps it's egalitarian demagoguery under a mask of dry technocracy.
For all the problems of technocrats, I'll take the real ones over demagogues any day of the week.
My next book will be the Federalist Papers. I'm reading this edition, because I like to read things on paper, but you can get them for free online. This is a departure from the usual genre of books that I read, but I'm fascinated by the American civic religion. I spend a lot of time reading about the unique secular religions of American academics (progressive pedagogy, Diversity And Inclusion, etc.), and it would be nice to compare with a very different strand of secular religion. (Though the secularism of the religion around the Constitution is sometimes tenuous; at least one American-born religion considers the Constitution a divinely-inspired document.)
Points I'm particularly interested in:
1) How a product of messy compromise was somehow sold as a seamless garment to clothe a new Republic.
2) How Americans persuaded themselves that the form of government outlined in the Constitution is the only way to maintain a stable, prosperous, and liberal representative democracy. A quick look around the world should show that there are plenty of parliamentary systems that do just fine despite not sharing our notions about separation of powers.
3) How people persuaded themselves that the most important cleavages in America are large states versus small states. Vermont, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Nevada all have very different social, political, and economic interests, yet we preach the importance of protecting "small states." This becomes especially salient when (as has happened twice in this century) a President takes office despite losing the popular vote.
4) Are there seeds of the strangely American idea that the military isn't "Big Government"? I know that many of the Founders were skeptical of standing armies, yet the people who revere the Founders most loudly also loudly proclaim their love of a large standing army. Were there seeds of this even then?
One interesting thing I've learned just from the introduction is that the term "Federalist" for those who advocated ratifying the Constitution was something of a rhetorical coup. Federalism is a system of government where authorities of constituent units (states, territories, provinces, cantons, or whatever other name) retain substantial autonomy from the national government. Systems that aren't called "federalist" generally have much stronger central governments (and correspondingly less autonomy for the lower levels) than those called "federalist." Yes, a political scientist could add quite a bit to that definition, but it's at least a decent starting point. The US Constitution provided a stronger central government than the previously-operating Articles of Confederation had, so the strongest objections to the Constitution should have been the ones called "Federalists." However, Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay stole the word "Federalist" for themselves, forcing the opponents of the Constitutions (and advocates for a looser confederation) to call themselves anti-Federalist. Whoever lays the first successful claim to a potent word will enjoy a potent advantage.
Via this article in Science, I see that we now have two new acronyms: STEMM (just like STEM, but the second M stands for Medicine) and HACD (Humanities, Arts, Crafts, and Design). There are now official reports saying that we'll get better science if scientists are broadly educated.
Since I support the ideal of broad education, I suppose I should be glad of this. But I'm not, for three reasons. First and foremost, it's the same old Important People, releasing a report on Best Practices and sounding important. Also, I don't think that the measure of arts and crafts and whatever else is the extent to which they benefit STEM, it's the extent to which they benefit people in whatever endeavors. I don't know that unicycling and juggling and volunteer work in grad school helped me as a scientist, per se, but they kept me sane while I happened to be doing science. I don't know that writing science fiction makes me a better scientist, but as a person who works with people I enjoy writing about people.
Finally, as much as I will defend breadth, I will also defend STEM as such. STEM is broad in its own right. So what if a scientist gets their relaxation from math puzzles, or tinkering with their car, instead of painting or rock climbing? So what if a molecular biologist also loves to go on nature hikes and collect interesting rocks or insects? People should pursue their breadth wherever it is most fulfilling to them, and if that's both STEM and humanities, great, but if it's two different things within STEM, that's also great.
Everybody is searching for some magical formula, some perfect balance between the STEM...I mean, STEMM, on the pedestal and whatever else is currently in favor.
I read these edu-inspirations, and think about the ways concepts like learning styles, the marshmallow test, growth mindset, grit, and personalized learning take off and become policy and how an uncritical embrace of these “pseudo-ideas” makes the ground fertile for such behaviors.
They are no better than fads, the Pet Rock and Rubik’s Cube of education (or worse), and I see a link between our (very much including myself) willingness to embrace platitudes as long as they’re agreeable and suggest teaching and learning is something knowable, solvable, rather than an ongoing battle.
Yep. People want the quick fix rather than the ongoing battle.
My next book is Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society by Mario Vargas Llosa. It's a book about the ascendance of low-brow "culture" and the way it's crowding out high culture. The problem is not that high culture is limited to a small group (that's always been the case), but rather that the natural constituency for high culture is abandoning it, partly because of the attractions of low-brow spectacle and partly because of a commitment to democracy (or at least the appearance thereof). I'm part-way through the first chapter, and I lack the time to give a full analysis of what I've read thus far, but I want to quote two points from the intro and first chapter:
1) Page 3:
The naive idea that, through education, one can transmit culture to all of society is destroying 'higher culture', because the only way of achieving this universal democratization of culture is by impoverishing culture, making it ever more superficial.
It's not that Shakespeare and Homer and Gilgamesh will disappear--there will always be people who read them. But when we democratize education, on the margin we erode the education given to the broad middle, with real effects on the 50th to 75th percentile (who will not be pushed as far as they might have been) and devastating effects on the 75th to 90th percentile (who will be pushed away from the heights they might have soared to). Those above the 90th percentile will be fine, as they always were, and the more politically savvy among them will pat themselves on the back over what they did for those below the 50th percentile, but the good to great will be held back, to the detriment of all. Rather than pushing them to study Shakespeare more carefully than they otherwise might have, they will be encouraged to view the simpler fruits of pop culture as not merely good (because many of them are quite good) but as great and transcendent and equal to Gilgamesh. They'll be encouraged not to grapple with William F. Buckley (who was sharp, sophisticated, thoughtful, and often wrong) but to feel like they learned something after watching Colbert interview a politician.
(And, for the record, I think Colbert is a very smart and talented man. I also think that something is lost when politicians are only interviewed by smart people in the setting of a comedy show.)
2) On pages 32-33, Vargas Llosa notes that religion hasn't actually disappeared from the "educated" middle and upper-middle classes of the industrialized world. Catholicism and mainline Protestantism, with educated clergy who have studied the Bible in Greek and Hebrew, have declined in popularity, but vulgar fundamentalist sects proliferate, as do "New Age" religions. He describes upper-class Colombians who self-identify as atheist but attend ceremonies with shamans. It used to be that the educated found their alternatives to faith in science and philosophy; now they consider it more liberal (in every sense) to take the democratic route of pop-religion with the masses. Science and philosophy are hard, but consciousness-raising ceremonies with egalitarian roots (i.e. identification with indigenous culture) are easy, far less challenging.
For myself, I know on some level that religion is hard to defend. At the same time, it is just built into me. My mother and grandparents and Catholic grade school made me what I am, and the fact that I know how I was made does not change the fact that I was indeed made that way, and it is the core of me. To walk away from that would mean that I would cease to be me. I'd become somebody else. It would be psychological suicide. I am who I am, and I believe what I believe because it is built into me. I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, and I can no more walk away from that than I can cease to love my wife or give up on doing math in my head compulsively. That is how I understand whatever it is that is greater than humanity, and I cannot change that. A life understood through the lens of the Gospels, and particularly the passion of the Lamb of God, that is a good life. Christ's Passion may be seen as a fiction by some, but if it is fiction it is a profound drama offering us great insights, through the offering of bread, the betrayal, the challenges, the rejection by the mob, and the ultimate triumph in the face of a seeming end.
At the same time, I understand why others frame the problem of "What is greater?" quite differently. All that I can hope for them is that they find a hard answer and everything that it has to offer. If that answer be science, or philosophy, or Sophia, or an uneasy embrace of nothingness, I hope it brings them something.
Of course, if we're going to speak of what is easy, never forget that what I am doing here is easy. I am reading and opining, rather than reading exhaustively and analyzing deeply. It's no different from the ascendancy of cable news punditry over investigative reporting. Opinions are easy. They can be important, they can be valid (if informed), they can be insightful, but they are still easier than investigation. Never forget that.
Finally, lest I let my snobbery get the best of me, let me note that even the simple can be sublime. Consider this song, which is largely the repetition of the same line over and over, but it is delivered with soul and depth.
I'm an associate professor of physics at Cal Poly Pomona. My research interests are mostly in biomedical applications of optics (especially theoretical limits to superresolution, and also light scattering calculations), with some side interests in percolation theory.
I am using this blog to chronicle my responses to books that I'm reading, particularly books about higher education issues. It's a way to work out issues in my mind.
