Plutarch's Parallel Lives: First thoughts (mostly on Lycurgus)

I didn't find much of interest in his accounts of the Athenian Theseus and Roman Romulus.  Both men are either mythic or else real but grossly exaggerated, and their detailed exploits get tedious.  On the other hand, his examination of the social policies of Lycurgus, an apparently real (if exaggerated) leader of Sparta was absolutely fascinating.

I find the translated account hard to take at face value.  Plutarch attributes to Lycurgus the wholesale transformation of Sparta into a more or less Communist society in a single generation.  Lycurgus equalized the distribution of land, abolished silver and gold coins (replacing them with bulky iron that made commerce difficult), abolished all but the most practical manual arts and trades, completely overhauled the family unit, eschewed written laws, and turned the society into a martial one totally focused on raising warrior children.

Taken at face value, I don't believe it.  Communist dictators have never had nearly as much success as hoped for in redistributing wealth and overhauling society. Say what you will about how maybe people back then were different, but Communism has failed in every society where it's been tried, Eastern or Western, imperialist or post-colonial. However, I know that Sparta did function for many generations as a bizarre military cult.  Reading between a few lines, I can not the following:

1) Plutarch notes that his reign was preceded by considerable civic strife, and generations of back-and-forth whiplash between weak and overpowering rulers.  Strongmen always have more success when bringing stability after a long period of chaos.

2) Plutarch does note a coup attempt by the wealthy, and a restoration of Lycurgus on a populist tide.  It's not like this all went off without a hitch.

3) I know too little of Spartan social structure before (and after) Lycurgus, and the lives of people who weren't in the warrior caste. I suspect that a lot of what Plutarch is remarking on is the training and social structure of a warrior class/caste, not all of society.  There may have been parts of the economic structure that were run on some basis other than a warrior cult (though no doubt they lived under the rule of the warrior cult), and thus the social "reforms" of Lycurgus may have been focused on equalizing wealth among a warrior class that would be more amenable to military discipline than the average person.  Also, as Jane Jacobs noted in Systems of Survival, bad things happen when warrior classes get too tangled up in commerce.  You either wind up with feudalism, gangsterism, or rich and corrupt generals (e.g. Pakistan, Egypt, Russia, etc.).  (And it's debatable whether those 3 situations differ all that meaningfully from each other.)

4) Plutarch was writing centuries after Lycurgus, relying on sources written by the victors.  In all likelihood the transition to a strict military cult system was not the accomplishment of a single and mostly smooth generation (aside from the revolution, coup, and restoration), but what was ultimately cemented into place traces its roots to Lycurgus. Also, there were probably antecedents to his system, e.g. the 28 men who helped him in his first revolution, and he built on those antecedents rather than imposing an alien structure from scratch.

Read this way, as a summary of a system and the man who originated it, written centuries later without details, it makes more sense.

One interesting detail is that Plutarch dismisses Aristotle's contention that Spartan women enjoyed high status because the men were usually at war so the women had to run things.  Plutarch maintains that women enjoyed high status because Lycurgus believed that women must exhibit strength and athleticism so that they could raise warrior sons.  Obviously I wasn't there, but I don't see why there couldn't be elements of truth in both.  We know that in modern history women improved their status in the Western world in part because two successive generations saw their husbands and brothers mustered for war en masse, and had to step in and do things normally done by men.  It isn't crazy to think that Spartan women enjoyed some similar benefits from similar events.

Finally, I appreciate this rhetorical gem: "These public processions of the maidens, and their appearing naked in their exercises and dancings, were incitements to marriage, operating upon the young with the rigor and certainty, as Plato says, of love, if not of mathematics."

Onward to Numa Pompilius.

Next book: Plutarch's Lives

My next reading project will be Parallel Lives by Plutarch, a compilation of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans.  Because all of this has happened before and will happen again.

More thoughts on Ehrenreich's _Bright-Sided_

I've been skimming through Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided and it strikes me that positive psychology is just a tool with no factional preference.  She describes how conservatives of both the capitalist and Christian bents (groups that overlap frequently but far from always) embrace it, as do liberals of every bent.  Capitalists can believe that those who fail in our economy are simply not maintaining the right attitude--it's their fault!  Christians and other religious conservatives can believe that sin and misfortune are the inevitable consequences of not holding the proper mindset, i.e. the proper beliefs.  They tried, they preached the good news, and all who embraced it and felt good were lifted up, and those who didn't have the right attitude obviously hadn't embraced the right teachings and that's why they failed.

Liberals can believe that all of the social problems that they seek to remedy have easy solutions.  Reformers will have to work but not, you know, too hard.  They just need to impart the right attitude to kids, and if the attitudes don't solve problems then it's either because the kids didn't embrace it (if you're willing to go there) or, if you prefer not to go there, their parents and teachers didn't reinforce it, or the rest of society didn't see them through the same happy lens, or whatever.  Bottom line, if there's a problem, it's that somebody out there in this cold, cruel world just wasn't happy-shiny world wasn't nice enough and open enough and we just need to fix that and then it will be great.

As for me, I believe that there are no secret tricks, no correct politics.  Just liars and lunatics.

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.

Next book: Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich

My next reading/blogging project is Bright-Sided: How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America.  It's also by Barbara Ehrenreich, and apparently discusses the problems with pop psychology.  Maybe it will give me some insight into the kool-aid.

Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps

I'm reading Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time by Peter Galison.  It's about the preludes to the theory of relativity.  I won't blog the book in detail, but I want to record a few observations so I remember what I read.

Time and space measurements were a big deal in the 19th century.  Telegraphs enabled people to communicate rapidly, which both meant that people could exchange clock readings and that they'd want to (so that they could time-stamp communications).  Trains needed precise timing, so that if a schedule said you'd arrive at noon you knew if that meant when the sun was overhead at the arrival station or at some central hub where the schedules were being set.  And longitude measurements (which required determining the time when you observed a celestial object at a particular position in the sky) were crucial for navigation and also for treaties between colonial empires.  As a result, mathematician Henri Poincare (who was also an engineer involved in a lot of issues of timing and longitude) put a lot of thought into the notion of times and distances being the products of defined human procedures rather than immutable and absolute features of the universe.

On page 200 I learned that Poincare delivered a presentation at a 1900 philosophy conference and questioned whether the science of mechanics needs reformulation.  He questioned absolute time, absolute position, simultaneity, and even whether Euclidean geometry was just a linguistic convention.  As strange as the last one sounds, he was heavily involved with geometry on spherical surfaces (navigation and surveying) so he was used to the idea of very real problems of a very real world requiring geometry on curved surfaces.

Furthermore, he was in dialogues with Lorentz and others, who were questioning whether electromagnetism could be fixed by redefining space and time.  The Lorentz transformations were known before Einstein, but people used these formulas in a conceptual framework that distinguished between absolute time and the timing of things relative to the ether.  Einstein's leap was to do away with ether, not to invent these formulas de novo.  I was aware of this part previously, but the book fleshes out some of the timeline and correspondence.

There's also a lot of geopolitics that I can't bring myself to care about.

Ehrenreich, conclusions

I don't have much to say about Chapter 5.  It was mostly about the 80's, yuppies, and materialism.

Chapter 6 is her concluding analysis.  There are several points that I like:
1) The "New Class" was not actually the cause of hedonism, but the place where people argued over it.  One argument that people often make is that the comfortable people in word-driven occupations have the intellect, savings, and support network to afford a bit of foolishness, so they can dismiss traditional values in ways that others dare not.  This argument is often abused, and she has no sympathy for its abusers (nor do I), but I think it's one of those things that we should not just dismiss either.  Of course, I'd be more sympathetic to its proponents if they weren't standing behind a twice-divorced sexual assaulter.

2) She notes that economic inequality was growing in 1989, and 30 years of experience have seen no reversal of that trend.  She also notes the ways in which that trend has increased inequality within the "New Class" or the people in word-driven jobs.  It only got worse since then.  Information is cheap now, which has destroyed business models that supported writers and creators of various sorts.  In that sense, competition really is more fierce, and so cheap information and abundant competition can sometimes lead to a bifurcation rather than equalization of outcomes.

But bifurcated outcomes, while certainly possible in the real world, are not always the outcome of competition.  Econ 101 isn't everything, but it isn't nothing either.  There's rent-seeking to be found out there, if any journalists can be paid to seek for it.  De Tocqueville noted that competitive societies tend to become equal, and so I'm far from convinced that we're seeing fair competition.

I think we're definitely seeing a lot of competition in the more precarious segments of the upper-middle class, the segments that really do have to compete and spend considerable time "paying dues."  I've noted before that competition is a tough subject because too much of it makes people indistinguishable rather than bringing out variety, but too little leads to corruption and a choking of opportunity. I think we're seeing a split-level game, with those who have many advantages making everything of them (because, hey, who wouldn't?) while those with fewer (not the same as no) advantages really do compete viciously.

One irony is that the "New Class" now has to proclaim its commitment to bringing in more competition, i.e. expanding equity and opportunity, in order to show that they are virtuous enough to win the competition.  It's a strange thing.  A laudable thing in many ways, but a strange thing.

3) Ehrenreich ends by calling for a moral reform, a move away from consumerism.  In principle I agree, and I hope everyone uses their smart phone to like and share this blog post.  Of course, I think we've gotten one, but it isn't the one she called for.  She called for a revival of class consciousness in a country where most people want to think of themselves (accurately or otherwise) as middle-class.  Instead we've gotten identity-consciousness.  Let me tell you, there's nothing that a middle-class scholarship kid loves more than hearing an Ivy League legacy admit explain that our shared lack of melanin and estrogen makes us equally privileged.  (True story.)

4) She also calls for a revival of "professionalism" in an era where the knowledge-driven professionals of the "New Class" are now getting squeezed.  She makes the fascinating and compelling point that knowledge workers (many but not all of whom are in some segment of the broad "middle class", albeit usually the upper segment) actually like their work.  They do things that they find fascinating.  The rich might like their work but they tend to like their leisure more.  The poor might like some of what they do at work, but often they get treated badly and their jobs take a toll.  That is another sense in which the rich and poor resemble each other more than the middle class.  I need to think about that.

She sees professionalism as a cure for consumerism, treating the right kind of work as a satisfying thing in its own right rather than a means for more consumption.  I think this would be a nice thing, but I don't know how to change a society.

5) Of course, in the end she calls for an abolition of even the privileges of the "professional middle class" knowledge workers and professionals.  I think we're seeing more of that, but without the societal flattening that she hoped would accompany it.

That's all for this book.  I will eventually blog another book, but not sure when.

Fear of Falling, Chapter 4

This chapter focuses on the "New Class", a term originally coined by Marxists to refer to the technocratic class running Communist societies.  They weren't capitalists (by definition), but they also weren't workers.  It got appropriated to deride liberal technocrats in the West, and apparently in the 70's was applied to upper-middle-class people with degrees and desk jobs.  She highlights a few ironies that many others have noted as well, but in 1989 I think these were somewhat fresher insights:

1) Many of the conservative intellectuals critiquing this class were comfortable urban dwellers who wrote for a living and (politics aside) were remarkably similar to those they critiqued.  They were class traitors, in a way.

This is often noted when conservative pundits critique "liberal elite" culture.

2) Of course, the liberal technocrats were class traitors themselves, in that they support policies that required progressive taxation of people with upper incomes. This is inevitable if the project of modern policy is the improvement of society and remediation of social inequality.  It's a big, expensive project, and you can only fund big, expensive projects by taxing the people who actually have the money.

3) At the same time, these upper-class advocates for redistribution are disliked by the "working class".  Some of this is because of cultural differences (which also makes the situation of conservative pundits ironic), but not solely.  If you want to "fix" society and "fix" inequality then you will have to, at a minimum, do something about the poor.  Fears of moral hazard (sometimes justified, but not always) mean that you can't just hand out money.  And the systems in which people exist also matter, so beyond handing money to the poor you'd need to look at infrastructure, regulations, etc.  All of this means that you'll be addressing a certain stratum of society, and trying to engineer them.

If you hand enough largess to a certain stratum of society then maybe they'll accept your efforts to engineer them.  Maybe.  But this stratum is not perfectly demarcated from the "working class" that is not necessarily super-comfortable but at least doesn't feel an acute need for redistribution.  Because they are not perfectly demarcated, efforts to engineer the social conditions affecting the poor will also affect the "working class" or "lower-middle class."  They won't like that.

They'll like it even less if they're facing social engineering (with its downsides) while their taxes go into redistribution to others.  Some of those others might be objectively undeserving layabouts.  Many more will be perceived as such.  Some might be objectively deserving hard luck cases, but not all will see them as such.

An over-simplified view of the left and right in 21st century America is that the left is a coalition of the upper-middle class and the poor, while the right is a coalition of the lower-middle class and the rich.  This is very over-simplified, but it captures something:  The left has technocrats and the people they focus their efforts on, the right has plutocrats and the people that the technocrats look down on but don't give largess to.

4) She also talks about how the right critiqued liberal social policy as "permissiveness" while business needs a consumer culture that is all about avoiding self-restraint.  She references Daniel Bell's Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism here.

She also notes that the right blamed the government for "permissiveness" because they couldn't bring themselves to blame consumer culture and its enablers in the advertising industry.

Ehrenreich, start of Chp. 3

I've started chapter 3.  She's chronicling the way that the media "discovered" the "white working class" and "middle America" after Nixon's win in 1968.  It sounds a lot like the media's discovery of conservative whites after 2016.  Of course, the backlash against 60's liberals and hippies and civil rights and whatnot was broader than lower-income whites, there were plenty of affluent whites who were plenty reactionary, there were plenty of liberal and moderate white people with modest incomes, and there were plenty of non-white people who worked similar jobs and had similar lifestyles.  But the media became obsessed with a certain stereotype of working-class white men, and vacillated between treating them as distasteful and Authentic.  Sometimes the focus was on how to appease them, sometimes on why the Better Classes should never appease them, but they were definitely the focus.

All of this has happened before and will happen again.

Ehrenreich, Chp. 2

I don't have it in me to type out a complete summary of this chapter, but I will highlight some interesting points.

First, the academic and cultural establishments reacted so strongly to the student revolts of the 1960's because the university is in some sense the incubator of the professional middle class.  I suppose I am similarly reactionary in how I view the kids promoting political correctness, seeking safe spaces, etc.  One thing that I find interesting about my peers is how many of them are more defensive than reactionary, seeking to prove to the student radicals that they too seek Disruption, Transformation, etc.  It's like everyone believes that to be a good academic is to pursue the destruction and recreation of the academy.  Yes, there's a very important sense in which we have to pursue that in our research, seeking to uncover error and replace it with insight.  Still, in STEM you prolific researchers who speak of the need to Transform And Disrupt the very systems in which they thrive.  Of course, they never actually do that, but it's striking how they feel the need to say they're doing it.

Ehrenreich identifies an interesting tension in the middle class, and how it differs from both the rich and poor:  The middle class is kept in a state of unease and insecurity, with no guarantee of remaining as comfortable as your parents.

If you're born rich you'll usually remain rich.  You might not get on well with your family, you might not get or retain a good job in the family business empire, but you'll get your trust fund and if you aren't completely stupid with it you'll remain comfortable.  And if you are just moderately smart about what you do with your opportunities you'll do quite well.  Even if your career collapses in scandal, well, who ever heard of a disgraced financier living in a shitty apartment and eating from the local food pantry?  There's a safety net.

Likewise, if you're born poor to lower-middle class, you'll probably remain that way.  Yes, there are a few who rise, but most don't.  It isn't much comfort, but it's stable.  At the risk of romanticizing it, if you know that you'll remain in the same place, with the same people, struggling to survive in the same hustle, there may be a level of security.  You're used to shit, and you know who will be there beside you.  If the picture I pain seems romantic, it's because of the human capacity for adjustment to predictable conditions.

In the professional middle class, you could rise high (probably not to the top, but high) or fall low (probably not to the bottom, but certainly below your comfort zone).  You need to study hard, train hard, and "pay your dues" in jobs with long hours before you achieve some security in your profession.  There are far worse fates, but it's certainly a system that can induce anxiety.  If the question is whether the rest of the world should pity them, the answer is no, but if the question is "Why are they so neurotic?" well, there's your answer.

I feel like I've blogged before about the ways in which the rich and poor resemble each other more than the middle class, but I can't find them now.

She also discusses a tension in the characterizations of the counter-culture, and the ways in which it was and wasn't the apotheosis of consumer culture.  The desire to "do your own thing, man" was in some ways the ultimate consumer ethos:  You do what you want for your own fulfillment.  However, if "doing your own thing" should threaten corporate profits, if it should involve consuming less, that would hurt the consumer culture.  Today we have excellent systems for co-opting rebellion.  We have Woke Capitalists who will make sure that your consumer goods come packaged with whatever logos and symbols are favored by your socially just cause, and make certain that the stores in which they are sold use all the preferred pronouns of both the staff and customers...because that's easier than paying living wages or polluting less.  (Don't get me wrong, I'll use your preferred pronouns without objection, but I think it's a pretty small thing.  I'd like to also buy something less polluting.  Or, better yet, not buy as much cheap plastic crap.)

In the middle of the chapter, she talks a lot about the history of child-rearing, and manages to show that simplistic narratives are too simplistic.  What the middle class tells themselves about their parenting has fluctuated over the years.  Sometimes they boast about the structure and order that they give their kids.  Sometimes they boast about the freedom and exploration that they allow their kids to enjoy.  Sometimes they lament how the poor are harsher disciplinarians (so unsophisticated!).  Other times they lament how the poor let their kids run wild.  The truth, of course, is that parents of every social class are varied.  I'll let social scientists determine if some styles of parenting really are unevenly distributed among classes in ways that conform to narratives, but certainly it's messier than an era's favorite narrative would have us believe.

Finally, she talks about how prosperity gave teenagers identities as consumers, and also gave an extended adolescence that the rich and middle class enjoy (the rich with a bit more leisure, the middle class with more training and apprenticing).  The poor mostly work the same types of jobs as their parents once they reach a certain age, but the professional middle class goes to college, then "pays their dues" in jobs that are much lower on the ladder than their parents' jobs.

So far, so good.  But then she goes on about rock and roll and the values it allegedly reflected.  Eh, whatever.  Rock lyrics are varied.  She's trying to shoehorn them into a narrative.

On to chapter 3.

Fear of Falling, Chapter 1

This book is apparently about the attitudes of the "professional middle class" (comfortable middle class people who have nice office jobs, but not so much wealth as to truly have substantial individual influence in their communities).  She starts by recounting the ways that Good Respectable People talk about the aesthetics and lifestyles of the lower classes.  She's writing in 1989 but she could be talking about post-2016 hand-wringing over lower-income whites who voted for Trump.  From there she skips back a few decades, to the 50's, in order to chronicle the post-WWII journey to 1989.  She visits the sociology textbooks of the 50's, and I'm surprised by the condescension towards the poor.  Not because I'm surprised that people hold such attitudes (duh), but because I can't believe they'd write them so explicitly in textbooks.  I thought they were supposed to say those things indirectly.  Well, I guess some things really do change.

She describes 1950's pundits simultaneously celebrating the wealth of post-war America and also bemoaning materialism and consumerism as tacky symptoms of "affluence."  Things I like about her critique:

1. She notes the interesting shift from "wealth" to "affluence."  Critiquing wealth means you might go after the wealthy.  But affluence is a society-wide condition.  It's not so different from how the post-2016 critiques have focused on "working-class whites" while ignoring high-income Republicans who voted on the basis of tax policy.
2. She recognizes that post-WWII prosperity depended so much on the rest of the world being messed up and unable to compete.  Yes, the post-1950's economy in America is in part a product of choices by elites, but it's also in part an inevitable consequence of global competition.
3. She is ruthlessly economic in her critique of keeping middle-class women as housewives: It was a waste of educated minds.
4. She is also ruthlessly historical in noting that lower-class women never had the option of being housewives.  It was either something they did out of necessity (somebody had to care for the kids and do the in-home production of goods via sewing, scratch cooking, etc.) or didn't do out of necessity (they needed to work for money).  Choice had precious little to do with it.

I found it fascinating how elite commentary didn't "discover" poverty in America until the 1960's.  I need to read more about that.

Finally, she talks about patronizing attitudes towards the poor in 1960's commentary.  She notes that pundits regarded them as unworthy of trust with money.  Thing is, poverty is multi-faceted, and while I largely agree that most people can handle money, some people do make bad choices.  In fact, some choices are the products of poverty rather than the cause of poverty:  If you can't afford to buy reliable goods you buy unreliable goods and incur greater costs down the line.  If you keep facing emergencies that drain you, long-term plans are something you rationally avoid, because what's the point?

If poverty were all about unforced bad choices, the paternalists would be entirely right.  If poverty were all about forced bad choices, the libertarians would be entirely right.  And if poverty were about circumstances beyond the realm of choice, the leftists would be entirely right (or, um, left, I guess?).  But the real world is multi-faceted.  Still, the facets that she highlights here are important.

On to chapter 2, which addresses the 60's and counter-culture.

Next book: "Fear of Falling" by Barbara Ehrenreich

My next reading/blogging project will be Fear of Falling by Barbara Ehrenreich.  It supposedly explores the anxieties of middle-class professionals.  It seems relevant to academia...

Letter in the LA Times

FWIW, I recently had a letter in the LA Times, in which I critiqued a proposal to do away with standardized tests in college admissions.

The problem of ASSessment

This column at Inside Higher Ed elegantly summarizes the problem with assessment:

The faculty already have a language about teaching and learning. If you ask a math professor what students will learn in calculus, she may point you to the table of contents in the textbook, where dozens of topics are enumerated. If you ask how the class is going, you might hear that “they were fine with the derivative rules, but related rates problems are killing them.” This language is an integral part of teaching. 

The assessment bureaucracy -- those periodic checkboxy reports -- can only be justified if the formal learning outcome statements and their standardized assessments are superior to the native ways faculty know their students. Otherwise we could just ask faculty how the students are doing and use course registrations and grades for data. We could look at the table of contents to find the learning outcomes. 

These two worlds -- the report writing and the lived experience -- coexist, but not easily. While the assessment office depends on the informal channels of faculty knowledge to do meaningful work, in most regions of the country each program requires a formal report. These “cookie-cutter” reports fail miserably at generating new knowledge (something you couldn’t learn by just asking faculty members what they think) because they are based on faith in the special meaningfulness of the learning blurbs.

Exactly.  We already know how to talk to each other, and some of us also know how to talk to the people who hire our students.  What we don't know how to do is talk to people who need boxes checked so that they can justify their phoney baloney jobs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2oaTxPufOg

A couple quick links

I agree with the woman whose profile leads in this IHE article:  Many people want to read diversity statements that address delicate social issues in exactly the right jargon.  They are ideological filters.

Also, I echo this Areo article.  The public makes so many contradictory demands on k-12 that it makes no sense to speak of reforming k-12 until we figure out what we want from k-12.  As for me, I want two simple things from k-12:  I want them to send me students who can do high school algebra and write grammatically correct sentences.

"This One Student"

A popular genre of academic story involves This One Student.  This One Student defied all expectations, succeeding when you never would have imagined it.  Therefore, we should assume that everyone can totally succeed at whatever they're currently trying and we shouldn't discourage them.

Well, no.  While I do grant that most people can, with sufficient time and effort, do most things to at least some level of competence, it does not follow that a person with precious little preparation can succeed in the class in which they are currently enrolled.  Maybe they need to go back and make up deficiencies before attempting this course of study.  It's insane to think that they should be able to remedy any and all gaps on the fly.  There's a reason why courses have prerequisites.

If a student is showing fundamental weaknesses in, say, algebra, they can still learn physics, but they should probably spend a substantial amount of time first remedying those gaps in algebra knowledge.  Yes, yes, they passed a math placement test that was approved by people who answer to officials who need a certain level of throughput.  Yes, they passed an introductory calculus class taught (and, more importantly, graded) by somebody who has no job security and answers to a system that wants to see students pass classes.  That does not mean that they actually know high school algebra, as is demonstrated to me on a daily basis.  Most of these students will flounder for years, fail and repeat classes, and eventually rack up enough partial credit to pass and graduate.

Nonetheless, from time to time we see This One Student who starts off doing terribly in algebra but goes on to do remarkably well.  That's wonderful when it happens, but it's rare.  It is inhumane to think that everyone should be encouraged to invest prime years of their lives and take on substantial loan debt in the hopes that they'll replicate This One Student's success story.

Moreover, it is often the case that This One Student has some unique advantage or compensating factor that we cannot easily replicate.  Sometimes it's a special personal factor that couldn't help them with algebra but could help them succeed in an internship that gave them the motivation to push ahead.  Sometimes it's an extraordinary personality characteristic or raw talent.

I was recently talking to somebody who started telling the story of This One Student, and it turned out that the student had served in an elite military unit.  (I rarely believe claims that somebody served in an elite military unit, but the fact that This One Student pulled off an extraordinary feat suggests a level of self-discipline and work ethic consistent with their claimed military background.)  Well, your average student does not have that kind of dedication.  In fact, even your average soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine does not have that level of mental tenacity.

They also told the story of This One Other Student who had the immigrant work ethic required to spend half the year working full time in shitty jobs, saving money for college, then attending college full time during the other half of the year.  Well, most students do not have that immigrant work ethic.  Nor do they have the humility and self-knowledge required to accept that they'd be better off EITHER working full-time OR going to school full-time, rather splitting their time and failing at both.   You could say that it's my job as an older, wiser mentor to help them see that, but I can't even get most students to follow instructions regarding algebraic steps, let alone major life decisions.

There are few tales more destructive than the tale of This One Student.  It gives us endless optimism, which is the bane of useful advice.

We are so screwed.

The author of this essay "The Promise of Intellectual Joy" was accused of "white supremacist rhetoric" and subsequently fired.  For an essay that cites Hofstadter extensively and proclaims that every child can and should feel the thrill of intellectual challenge.

We are so screwed.

Meritocracy and predictability

There is nothing more predictable than a critique of meritocracy, and this article in the Chronicle is no exception:  It contains 10 critiques of meritocracy, most of them utterly predictable. Anybody who doesn't know how to critique meritocracy in the expected ways does not merit a place in educational decision-making.  However, it does have a nice opinion piece by Thomas Chatterton Williams, who knows how to say more than just what we expect to hear.

*Wink* *Wink* *Nudge* *Nudge*

The Chronicle has an article on how "nudges" haven't lived up to their promise for fixing massive social problems.  Who knew that humans were complicated beings who couldn't simply be steered into doing hard but important things with a few well-timed text messages?

Essay up at Arc Digital

I sold an essay to Arc Digital on the subject of "Why This Physics Professor Reads Old Books."  It summarizes a lot of the preoccupations of this blog.

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.

Admissions and Math: Yes, but...

The LA Times has an op-ed criticizing the CSU (California State University) system for instituting a requirement that all students who want admission take 4 years of high school math or other classes with heavy quantitative reasoning (e.g. physics, economics).  I actually agree with this part:

The proposal raises some big questions about what a college education ought to encompass in changing times. Are extra math classes in high school really necessary for all Cal State applicants — including those who want to major in, say, English literature, philosophy or theater?

Indeed. Andrew Hacker made much the same point in his book The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions.  However, we then come to this part:

It might make more sense, for example, for Cal State to require extra quantitative reasoning courses only of students who plan to major in STEM-related fields. They already are more likely to have taken a fourth-year math course before college. The university also should introduce any changes incrementally, checking to see whether the extra requirement makes enough of a difference to be worthwhile and considering other steps that might be at least as effective at raising graduation rates.

If we are going to admit people who are not ready to major in quantitative STEM fields then we should not be held accountable if they change their minds, decide to major in quantitative STEM fields, and then struggle to succeed.

Article in IHE

Yesterday I had an opinion piece published at Inside Higher Ed on the topic of diversity questions in faculty job interviews.  In short, I think that these essays are some mix of useless, counter-productive, and (as with most useless and counter-productive things) well-intentioned.

Three recent things on meritocracy

I noticed three recent things about meritocracy and related topics:
1) An essay in the Chronicle, written by Rita Koganzon, aka Miss Self-Important.  In short, she follows de Tocqueville's reasoning and argues that intense competition for top colleges is a sign of greater equality and less privilege, not more privilege and less equality.  I'm not sure that her analysis is applicable to all of society, but certainly the top tier is becoming more competitive rather than less.  It's possible, of course, that that bottom whatever percentage are more shut out than ever, but the top 0.1% or 1% or whatever now feel far more competition from the next few percentiles.

2) The movie "Yesterday", which is essentially a sci-fi love letter to the Beatles, inspired this hot take in Vox:

The problem is that people often don’t see the myth of meritocracy as a myth; they really believe in it. And when they do, it can have some unfortunate effects. The myth of meritocracy, according to Frank, can make us less willing to invest in the collective good. If you think that all it takes to gain renown is skill and effort, “you have a sense of entitlement to whatever comes your way,” he says.

The basic premise of the movie is that some weird sci-fi event happens and suddenly just about everyone on earth has forgotten the Beatles.  Their music disappears from the internet, their records disappear from people's collections, and when a struggling musician covers one of their songs for his friends are amazed by these songs that they'd never heard before.  He sees his chance to make it in the music industry and rises to stardom as the world marvels. The Vox writer's point is that it's naive to think that somebody got where they are just because they wrote great music.

On one level the writer is completely correct:  Success requires in a creative endeavor luck and hard work and people willing to help you promote whatever you've created.  It requires a creation that is not just good but also matched to the spirit of the time.  And it requires not just good creation but good performance.  Compare the first commercial recording of the song Wild Thing with the second.

First recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rxDOncgSrY
Second recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiqkcyLZrg4

The second is far better.

Nonetheless, the point of the movie was not to legitimize the social order that the Vox writer hopes to better fit into by critiquing it.  The point was to produce a romantic comedy about a guy who feels like he's a fraud, and play some fun music along the way.  The Vox writer knows, though, that they'll get more clicks with a hot take explaining that this movie is a problematic work that defends the evil meritocracy.  And in critiquing the current social order they'll paradoxically fit in better with the gatekeepers of respectable opinion.

3) This tweet by Cathy Young, a writer who grew up in the USSR before coming to the US in the late 70's or early 80's (I don't know her exact bio):

https://twitter.com/CathyYoung63/status/1136788880173215747

So there's a fine @NewYorker article by Alex Ross on the Mozart/Salieri myths & recent Salieri revival, and ....
This is starting to remind me of how every Soviet essay on art or literature had the obligatory graph on Marxism-Leninism & the class struggle

She's referring to this passage from a New Yorker article that is otherwise an account of Mozart and Salieri, not the allegedly problematic notion of genius:

The danger of the word “genius” is that it implies an almost biological category—an innately superior being, a superhero. It is probably no accident that the category of “genius,” an obsession of the nineteenth century, coincided with the emergence of the pseudoscience of race, which held that certain peoples were genetically fitter than others. At the same time, “genius” easily becomes a branding term used to streamline the selling of cultural goods. The perils of the term become clear when the authorship of a work is uncertain. In 1987, the musicologist John Spitzer published an amusing and edifying article about the Sinfonia Concertante for Winds, K. 297b, which was long thought to be by Mozart. In its heyday, the Sinfonia was said to be “truly Mozartean” and as “monumental as a palace courtyard.” Once uncertainty about the attribution set in, the piece was called “cheap and repetitive.” The notes themselves had not changed.

I'm not terribly knowledgeable about classical music, so I can't say if the rest of the article is any good, but this sudden diversion into a very peripheral issue of the modern zeitgeist is jarring.  It feels like an obvious attempt to suck up to a certain kind of liberal near the end of an article that is otherwise unrelated to the signature issues of certain kinds of liberals.

I mean, if they want to critique ideas of intelligence, merit, fairness, etc. then have at it.  Say something interesting.  Pick a jumping-off point and then make an interesting connection with the bigger topic(s).  But don't shoehorn it in so as to flatter a certain kind of liberal.  It just ruins the flow of the piece and feels jarring and forced.

Solve economic problems first, THEN education problems

I don't have time for a long post, but I like this article saying that maybe the solution to our educational problems in this country is economics, instead of the other way around.  I've said it many times and it's nice to be repeated in a venue of respectable opinion.

Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste

Clarissa has a heresy-ridden response to the College Board's decision to offer an "adversity score" to measure the disadvantage experienced by test-takers. I agree with everything she says here, but the critics of the SAT have two responses:

1) The SAT doesn't actually measure your vocabulary, math skills, etc.  It measures your ability to take this test, and privileged people do better on it. This assertion is not supported by any systematic data, but it is supported by the anecdotes we've all observed of people who do far better or far worse than their SAT scores would have predicted.  They don't get that statistical predictions just tell us averages and ranges, and some fraction of people will fall outside those ranges on either side.

2) OK, the SAT does measure vocabulary, math skills, etc., but colleges have a duty to "meet students where they're at."  On this I have a tiny amount of sympathy--I do think we need educational institutions that will help people who could go far but have not come out of high school well-prepared.  But that's a long road, it will take far more than 4 years of college (let alone 1-2 years of remedial coursework), and what they really need is a "high school do-over" BEFORE a 4-year degree.  (Some might say that that's what an Associate's Degree is for, but the AA/AS degree is supposed to roughly correspond to the first 2 years of a Bachelor's degree.)

If a Bachelor's degree is to be "accessible" to people who start the program with woefully inadequate preparation, and if we are to fit this into the confines of 4 years of courses on the typical academic schedule, then institutions whose Bachelor's degrees "meet students where they are at" will be conferring credentials that employers and graduate schools justifiably treat as different from those offered elsewhere.  And this will just amplify rather than mitigate the class divisions in higher ed.

Even worse, this will actually work against efforts to diversify the academy.  Everyone out there wants to diversify PhD and faculty ranks.  The schools that disproportionately teach people from under-represented backgrounds disproportionately get under-prepared students because disadvantage has consequences.  If such schools must "meet students where they are at" AND do so within the usual confines of 4 years and roughly 120 credits (give or take), then their degrees WILL mean less.  That is an unavoidable fact.  And why should PhD programs take students whose credentials mean less?  Unless those PhD programs must also "meet students where they are at."  Which will either mean that students take longer to finish (and PhD programs face pressures on this front, including but not limited to the financial pressures of supporting students for longer times) or that students come out less accomplished.

And then people who hire PhDs will have to decide how to evaluate accomplishments...

Legutko, Chapter 3

I'm almost done with this chapter.  Much of it is a critique of political correctness, cultural liberalism, etc.  I have bits of sympathy for some of it, but I reject his stances on rights of women, gays, minority groups, etc.  I might not like some of the speech norms around these topics, but that doesn't mean that I want to turn the clock back on rights.

Separate from my disagreement with his social agenda is the fact that his arguments are weak.  He's trying to link the spread of these causes, and elite acceptance of these causes, to the spread of liberal democracy.  If we take "liberal democracy" as simply a name rather than description, and use that name for some sort of consensus viewpoint, then by definition he is right. Elites agree with their own consensus.  However, if we look for the roots of these ideas, if we ask (1) why protection of minority rights has improved, (2) why it has sometimes been taken to the excesses of modern political correctness, and (3) why elites are so fervent about this, liberalism gets you only so far as an answer, and democracy gets you barely anywhere at all.  Yes, in democracies crucial political blocs have sympathized with minority rights, and they did so because they embrace liberal ideas.  However, democracy can be reactionary at least as often as it is progressive (indeed, majority tyranny is one of the most discussed dangers of democracy).  In most modern Western countries, majoritarianism would NOT lead to excesses of political correctness, nor even reasonably cautious protection of minority rights.  Elite intervention matters here, and it is by definition anti-democratic when protecting minorities more than majorities might favor.  He hasn't really addressed this.

He's on firmer ground when he says that an elite embrace of liberalism is at work, favoring liberation of individuals (and small groups of individuals) from tradition, popular prejudice, etc.  I think that's part of it.  However, why do elites favor liberation of small groups and enforcement of new norms on the majority at a level far exceeding "live and let live"?  Liberalism is part of it, but I get hints that he also sees a strategy of "divide and rule."  There are many ways to describe "divide and rule", but "liberal" isn't one of them.  Elites might believe that dividing and ruling is necessary to liberate minorities, but that belief is still a belief in the limits of liberalism, not unlimited liberalism.  He hasn't really dealt with that.  He has called them out for hypocrisy, but it's only hypocrisy if they believe what he thinks what they believe.  If they believe something else, they might be acting entirely in accord with their beliefs.  He doesn't explore this.

He makes an interesting comparison between campus freak-outs over offensive speech and the way that Communist societies responded to a dissident reading a poem in public.  The entire apparatus of the state would mobilize in a panic if somebody spoke out of turn in a Communist society.  There are indeed some fascinating parallels between the Communists freaking out and campus authorities freaking out.  However, there is one absolutely crucial difference:  The Communist authorities believed that if they left the speech unchecked a mob would form in support of the speaker.  Campus authorities believe that if they leave offensive speech unchecked a mob will form and demand that the campus authorities be fired for not punishing the speaker.  Yes, both sets of authorities fear the mob, but the relationship between the mob and the speaker, and the perceived public sympathies, are very different.

Legutko doesn't grapple with this.  He's pushing too far on the analogy without acknowledging its limitations, and blaming democracy without making his case.  There's a case to be made about democratic culture more than democracy itself, but he hasn't really explored those tensions enough.  He just wants to rail against feminism, gay rights, etc.

Legutko, Chp. 1-2

For much of the first 2 chapters, Legutko makes observations that I mostly find validity in. Liberal democracy, much like Marxism, does have its utopian side, at least in current ideology.  After the fall of the Soviety Union, some people did talk of an "End of History", i.e. a final stage of human political development.  Some people do have utopian aspirations for it.

I also like his observation that Westerners are remarkably comfortable with the orthodoxy because we have no obviously official propaganda organs.  We don't have kommissars firing people who refuse to recite the exact prescribed platitudes (for the most part).  Our ideology is enforced in much more subtle ways.  I've heard similar things from other people who grew up in Communist states of Eastern Europe, and not all of them are social conservatives like Legutko.  So there is something going on here, something visible from more than one ideological angle.

And he does acknowledge the unquestionable success of liberal and democratic societies in enabling the prosperity of capitalism.

He also talks about the desire of technocrats to transform and improve societies, and not always in ways that the citizens desire.  I have a certain amount of sympathy here. I've spent countless blog posts bemoaning the impossible social transformations that technocrats want higher education to deliver.  I may not share all of Legutko's bones of contention with technocrats, but I get his point.

And I completely agree with his observation that democracy often values equality to the point of mediocrity, a stance sharply at odds with excellence.  It praises the common and coarse over the high and refined.  It's one of the tensions between a democratic society and educational achievement.  While mass ignorance is hardly consistent with stable democracy, egalitarianism can weaken the best parts of a society.

Of course, he applies his critique at least as much to mass culture and norms of vulgar speech as to educational issues.  And, again, I see his point.  I don't fear pop culture as much as he does (I've noted before the commonalities between the Iliad and modern entertainment, and I think that soulful music celebrates emotion in ways that lift us up, not debase us), but I agree that there's no sharp line between such high popular art and vulgar popular art. (Indeed, vulgar and popular started as synonyms before acquiring different connotations.)

But his denunciation of the vulgar takes us to Trump, and we start to see his incoherence.  The book was published in 2016, so it can't address Trump to any great extent, but Trump is unquestionably vulgar. A reality TV star of gaudy rather than refined tastes, he exemplifies the rich man who still has common roots and low-class insecurities. (Which is ironic when you consider his pedigree.) Trump is, on the one hand, democracy personified in its most vulgar form.  On the other hand, he is the antithesis of what the elite managers of liberal democracies despise.

And it seems that Legutko himself is not always clear about which side of liberal democracy he's lamenting.  Is he lamenting the rule of technocratic elites or the celebration of the vulgar masses?  The technocratic elites definitely, desperately believe themselves to be advocates for the interests of the masses, but they often disagree with masses over what those interests are.  This makes the technocrats democratic in spirit but not always in practice, and liberal in their stated goals (liberation of people from the prejudices and limitations imposed by cultures) but not always in their methods (forced liberation).  Or, at least, they are contradicting themselves by certain definitions of these terms, but perhaps not by all.

He seems to know this.  He seems to be pointing at a contradiction, and I appreciate that. I don't always agree with him, e.g. on gay rights, but I get his point about contradictions. I get that even the blandest, most humble "live and let live" approach to minority rights will founder upon the obstacle of popular prejudice in public education, and the desperate search for a neutral curriculum. Sometimes you simply can't be neutral.  There's really no neutral ground between "This minority group is entitled to the same rights and protections as anyone else, and how they live their lives is none of your business" and "No, they are hurting society."  I say that compromise is impossible not because I want to be strident but because the demands are so fundamentally opposed.

I think he's driving at this, and I respect him for making the point.  I don't share his agenda, but the nature of democracy, its practicality and internal consistency, is a hard problem, and one that is not always easy to see if most people more-or-less agree on a few key fundamentals.  The problems only become apparent if you have a very stark disagreement.  You can't get at hard questions about democracy without some sharp disagreements to illuminate the issue, and that inevitably means hearing from people whose values are fundamentally at odds with yours.  In other words, that means hearing from people whose speech is not value-neutral, on topics where the feasibility of of reasoned disagreement is most in doubt.

If you want to argue from a values standpoint that you should not dignify such views by offering them the use of your (privately owned,, privately funded, etc.) platform, well, you may be right in many contexts.  But an academic department of political science pretty much has to consider such viewpoints to get at the hardest questions concerning the nature and limitations of democracy.  So I get why people at Middlebury invited him and wanted to discuss his ideas.  It's why I'm going to continue reading the rest of his book.

Two other issues come up:
1) Legutko doesn't just claim that liberal democracy has a hard time leaving non-conformists alone (e.g. concerning education of children), he also claims that this is a pathology shared with Marxism but not with all systems. How correct is he?  Maybe there are social orders in which the elites of the capitol city don't care much how parents raise children in the hinterlands, but is there any society in which parents can avoid getting flack for raising their children with values different from those of their neighbors?  Religious minorities throughout the ages have found it hard to raise their kids with their values and customs, and this is why they've tended to either cluster together or else disappear via conversion to the dominant religion.

2) On minority rights, it strikes me that their compatibility with democracy depends on how we construe the demos and its role in governance.  If the demos is merely to decide matters, then popularity will (in practice if not always in theory) be paramount and minorities will lose to majorities.  If, on the other hand, the demos is to be reflected in government, then it seems to me that there is room for protection of minority rights.  Minority representation in government, explicit protection of certain practices or beliefs, set-asides of state jobs, funding formulas that protect districts or provinces with minorities, we see these things implemented in many different systems around the world.  They are not always done with equal efficacy or compassion, and they are often window-dressing, but the very fact that he window-dressing is deemed necessary tells me that there are people who believe it enough that they need to see it to be appeased.

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: The Demon in Democracy

The next book that I'll blog about will be The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies by Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko.  I am reading it because a public lecture by Legutko was called off by Middlebury College in the face of protests (though he did eventually manage to give a guest lecture in a class).  The students stated that they were offended by, among other things, his homophobic views.  I don't know much about him, but if he is indeed a homophobe then I am also deeply offended by him.  Nonetheless, I'm also offended by people who try to shut down speech, so I will read one of his books as a counter-protest.  I have no idea if this book is any good, or if it addresses his views on gay rights, but a friend of a friend said something nice about the book, so let's see what it's about.  Maybe I'll love it, maybe I'll hate it, maybe I simply won't find much either way, but if somebody tries to get the speech canceled that's an easy way to get me to read the book.

Un-meditative

I found Aurelius' Meditations boring.  I'm glad that he was so reflective, but his observations on life just didn't appeal to me.  I guess I'm as bad as any other American in my inability to appreciate a philosopher-king.

New Book: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

My next book will be Meditations by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius.  Apparently it's a bunch of thoughts that he wrote down over two decades, rather than a unified treatise.  It's also said to be a work of Stoic philosophy.  I know very little about this.  Nonetheless, the concept of a philosopher-king is quite appealing right now, for abundantly obvious reasons, so let's find out what an actual philosopher-king had to say.

More thoughts on the Iliad

The Iliad is very much a tale of opulent wealth:  Heroes with magnificent weapons and jewelry and furs, constant sacrifices of cattle and sheep (a form of wealth) to the gods, and great feasts.  This is clearly absurd:  Real wars are fought by poor schmucks eating crappy food.

On the other hand, the idea of Greek politicians squandering most of their GDP on a land war in Asia (Troy was in Asia Minor) sounds like exactly the sort of thing that politicians of any era would do.  I dare say that the US Department of Defense could manage to squander at least as much money as any Argive king ever managed to squander, and for even more pointless ends.  At least the Greeks ultimately did sack Troy, which guarded the waterway connecting the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea.  WTF has the US DoD accomplished since WWII?

Latest Read: The Iliad

I'm reading the Iliad.  I'd only read excerpts before, and that was a long time ago. I won't post every thought I've had on it, but I have two big takeaways from the first 11 chapters:

First and foremost, the Iliad was basically an ancient TV series with an ensemble cast.  It arose from an oral performance tradition, and consists of 24 chapters of roughly equal length.  (No, not exactly equal, but within a factor of 2 of each other.)  Some chapters are very much about the bigger story, the constant back-and-forth between the Trojans and Achaeans, with the Gods wrapped up in the drama and the central characters (e.g. Hector, Achilles, Paris, Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus, Menelaeus, Nestor) making decisions that will shift the fortunes of war.  Other chapters are more episodic, from that part of the TV season where the writers want to focus on a few characters in side plots.  So you get chapter 10 ("Marauding through the night"), which focuses on an inept Trojan spy who folds as soon as he is caught, spills all of his info, and then gets a dishonorable death in spite of an earlier promise to not kill him.  Or chapter 11 ("Agamemnon's day of glory"), which is largely about a D&D party rescuing their healer after he's been wounded in battle.

Of course, the writers on a TV series can only do so many of these "side plot" episodes before the audience will expect a return to the main story.  So chapter 11 concludes with Patroclus realizing that the Achaeans desperately need help.  It's pretty clear that he'll rejoin the fight soon.  And all of this will lead up to heart-breaking deaths of main characters, and then an epic conclusion as the sun sets on doomed Troy.

In another parallel with TV, the Odyssey is basically a spinoff series about a supporting character who had his own die-hard fans. I can only assume that these parallels arise from ancient poets needing to keep an audience fixated over the long haul, coming back for more as they sang and chanted for their supper, just as modern TV writers need to keep an audience's attention in order to get paid.

Second, having noted analogies between the Iliad and modern popular entertainment, I was pretty astounded by some lines spoken by Achilles in chapter 9 (lines 383-391):

No, what lasting thanks in the long run
for warring with our enemies, on and on, no end?
One and the same lot for the man who hangs back
and the man who battles hard. The same honor waits
for the coward and the brave. They both go down to Death,
the fighter who shirks, the one who works to exhaustion.
And what's laid up for me, what pittance? Nothing—
and after suffering hardships, year in, year out,
staking my life on the mortal risks of war.

Compare with these lines from Ecclesiastes, in which the author questions the point of wisdom and labor, when the wise man will suffer the same death as the fool, and the wise man who works can take nothing with him, but must leave it behind to a man who may be a fool:

And I saw that wisdom has as much profit over folly as light has over darkness. 

   Wise people have eyes in their heads, but fools walk in darkness.

Yet I knew that the same lot befalls both. So I said in my heart, if the fool’s lot is to befall me also, why should I be wise? Where is the profit? And in my heart I decided that this too is vanity. The wise person will have no more abiding remembrance than the fool; for in days to come both will have been forgotten. How is it that the wise person dies like the fool! Therefore I detested life, since for me the work that is done under the sun is bad; for all is vanity and a chase after wind.

 And I detested all the fruits of my toil under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who is to come after me. And who knows whether that one will be wise or a fool? Yet that one will take control of all the fruits of my toil and wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity.

(Ecclesiastes 2:13-19)

Or these, in which he asks what the point of bravery is:

Again I saw under the sun that the race is not won by the swift, nor the battle by the valiant, nor a livelihood by the wise, nor riches by the shrewd, nor favor by the experts; for a time of misfortune comes to all alike. (Ecclesiastes 9:11)

Now, the Iliad was hardly the only ancient work in which a man questioned the point of valor, but it was an influential work in the Hellenistic world, and I understand that the author of Ecclesiastes had at least some exposure to that world.  So I'm left to wonder if these parallels with Achilles' speech were deliberate literary devices.  I understand that the extent of Hellenistic influences on Ecclesiastes are very much debated by people who know the original texts and background far better than I do, so I will merely note the common, resonant themes, but offer no further speculation on the extent (if any) of Homeric influence on Ecclesiastes.

A sign of my growing elitism

I don't normally read The Federalist, but I stumbled across this article while googling "constitutional monarchy."  As I become ever more elitist I've started to think that Americans need a monarchy.  Or maybe a di-archy with two co-kings/queens.  Americans are a desperately jingoistic bunch, all convinced of their exceptionalism (even the less visibly patriotic liberals mostly believe in American ideals, and want to see us live those out better than anyone else).  We need to give them symbols that they can swoon over and hold up as infallible, while a real human being runs the government.  So let's have a Prime Minister as Head of Government and two co-Royals as Head of State.

We need two so that liberals and conservatives both have somebody to swoon over.  The liberals can have a diverse NPR host with a best-selling book, while the conservatives can have a country singer or football player who served in the Marines.  The Royal Liberal will host vegan banquets, while the Royal Conservative will lead hunting parties and then roast whatever they kill.  And to make the centrists happy, whatever modest powers these heads of state wield can only be wielded by joint consent.  So most stuff will be done by a Prime Minister, but every now and then the two co-Royals will do something bipartisan and centrists will swoon.  Everybody's happy.

Seriously, it's better than giving actual executive power to a TV star.

Latest Book: First Class by Alison Stewart

I just read First Class by Alison Stewart, a history of what was once America's finest high school for African American students.  It is a rather tragic story:  During segregation, African American students in DC were limited to just a few high schools (the number depending on the era), and the "academic" school (to contrast with a nearby vocational school) was Dunbar high school.

Admission was selective, so only the best African American students got in, and the results were exactly what you'd expect when you have selective admission from a pool of students whose parents wanted them to be there:  Absolutely outstanding.  Over several decades, Dunbar's students frequently out-performed white kids (from a similarly selective high school) on academic measures. Dunbar alumni went to elite colleges, became doctors and lawyers and professors, broke barriers at military academies, and rose to the top of the arts.  In short, they proved that talent and motivation know no color, and that excellent students of any group can hold their own against any other group, even groups that enjoy substantial advantages.  It shows the cruel hollowness in systems of privilege, the way that such systems artificially elevate the mediocre while suppressing the excellence of human ability that is abundant in every group.

Perversely, Dunbar's excellence was destroyed at the same time that school segregation ended (thanks, in part, to lawyers who had graduated from Dunbar).  The problem was not desegregation, but rather an effort to circumvent desegregation:  Dunbar became a "neighborhood school."  Desegregating schools didn't desegregate housing, and most neighborhoods remained either primarily black or primarily white.  Consequently, making all schools serve their local neighborhood ensured that most schools would remain either primarily black or primarily white.  Had Dunbar (and its white counterpart) remained selective then talented students of all races could have mixed, to the benefit of all.

Instead, schools remained racially segregated in practice, and the only integration that actually occurred was integration of the motivated and unmotivated into the same classroom, to the downfall of excellence.  That's pretty much what you'd expect from the society that went on to make Donald Trump President (albeit several decades later).  We Americans are a fiercely anti-intellectual bunch.

Since then, Dunbar has been exactly like any other school in DC, and as communities have deteriorated so has Dunbar. Later chapters describe the school with narratives that we hear for every troubled urban high school:  A faculty with a mix of earnest and disenchanted people, an underachieving student body, and periodic attempts to "reform" (to little effect).  There are people who keep their spirits up by focusing on the "diamonds in the rough", which is an ironic contrast with the era when selective admissions made it a well-stocked jewelry store of talent.

Sadly, this wasn't solely the doing of white people who wanted to avoid mixing talented white and black students.  Apparently many African Americans resented Dunbar students and parents, seeing them as rich and elite.  Some certainly were well-off by the standards of black people in DC several decades ago, but most were of modest means and just happened to have some mix of good brains and good upbringing.  The book talks about this a bit, and one gets the sense that these resentments may have played a role in keeping Dunbar from returning to selective (albeit race-neutral) admissions.  American anti-intellectualism knows no color, and Americans of every background resent smarty-pants types.  Maybe our best hope for racial understanding is for people of all races to come together and discover that they all hate smart people.

Quick thoughts on "We're All Multiculturalists Now"

Much of this book is descriptive, and reasonably even-handed for such a hot button topic as multiculturalism.  There's a lot of discussion of history, both noting that debates over cultural assimilation of immigrants are nothing new (all of this has happened before and will happen again) and also noting that assimilation mostly works.  HOWEVER, what is different is that after decades of ever-increasing attempts at integration, with a large-scale marshaling of resources for a more-or-less benevolent (though not necessarily respectful or well-informed) effort to reduce educational and economic disparities, it's much harder for some people to sustain faith in integration.  It's worked for new immigrants but not for a continuing underclass.  The woes of that underclass arise directly from America's original sin, and will not be remedied easily.  So, some people throw up their hands cynically and say do nothing, while others throw up their hands earnestly and decide to define the problem away by celebrating difference, and declaring that disparities come from policymakers' failures to properly account for cultural difference rather than inflicted pathology.

I think I largely agree with this.  We are desperate to define a problem away, or channel guilt, because if we don't define the problem as arising from some difference worthy of celebration then people will define it as arising from some difference worthy of scorn.

But, as I've said before about how you can have different theories of failure, you can have different theories of difference.  Making difference into too big of a thing will eventually cause some to question whether it is always a positive thing, let alone a positive thing that always favors a group that you are trying to shield from harm.  As unsavory as the motive is, they will be able to wrap themselves in the mantle of disinterestedness and open-mindedness.  Spend enough time saying that groups are different and eventually someone will come along and say "Yeah, groups are different, and I freakin' love my group!  My group is the best!"

And that never takes us anywhere good.

But as easy as it is to scold those who celebrate difference, it's a response to an original sin that we've been unable to wash away.  Its effects linger, they resist efforts at reform, and the legitimacy of the system requires that we either remove the difference, rationalize it, or properly assign blame.  The first has yet to be realized, the third is something that people try to do but don't really get satisfying results from, so we go to the second.

New book and other things

1) I'm currently reading We Are All Multiculturalists Now by Nathan Glazer.  It's about multiculturalism in education from the perspective of the 1990's.  On some level it doesn't feel like it's telling me anything really new, not drawing on things I haven't already read about and thought about and griped about.  But I also feel like parts of it are groping toward explicitly stating something that I've struggled to state.  I won't state it in the midst of a quick post, but I'm thinking about it.  It ties in with an essay I'm working on.

2) I'm reading this 2017 piece on how identity and representation get explored more and more in art criticism.  I don't have time to pick apart the whole piece, and I always try to be skeptical about claims that something only started recently.  At the same time, this excerpt ties into something I've been thinking about for a while:

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment it became evident we’re in a new era of criticism, but a good candidate for that tipping point might be the 2012 controversy over the all-white principal cast of HBO's Girls. 

Some critics had been pointing out for years that TV and movies offered an unrealistically white portrayal of New York City; there was even a song about the inconsequential parts for black characters on Friends. But the idea that there was something wrong with this never got much traction in the wider media; when Friends finally introduced Aisha Tyler as a recurring character near the end of its run in 2003, she said: "I don't think anyone is trying to redress issues of diversity here." 

But by 2012, when Girls creator Lena Dunham was criticized for her monochromatic vision of Brooklyn, she felt a need to make it clear that she respected those criticisms by addressing them on the show.

2012 is an important year because it was the year after Occupy Wall Street.  OWS had a message of "We are the 99%."  There's a lot that's wrong with that (the upper part of the 99% differs from the bottom 90%), and a lot of silliness came out of Zuccotti Park, but at the same time they had a message that resonated, that brought people together rather than dividing them, and that pushed back on some genuinely bad stuff (e.g. bailouts for the rich and austerity for the rest).

Shortly after that attempt at unity, cultural criticism did seem to escalate in its divisiveness.  One needn't be a conspiracy theorist to note that a brief moment of unity was followed by chattering and writing elites--and the companies that market their work--emphasizing difference over solidarity.  It's a bit like how some people feel the need to scold working-class Trump voters about their privilege rather than empathize with their economic anxiety.  Yes, there's a lot that's wrong with Trump, and there are plenty of reasons to disagree with their supporters, but surely that disagreement can be framed in some way other than "You know, you have it pretty good!"  There used to be a word for people who told blue collar workers that they have nothing to complain about:  Republicans.

So, yeah, it is interesting that division overtook solidarity in elite commentary shortly after 2011.

3) As long as we're talking about commentary on art and entertainment, I highly recommend this piece by Lauren Oyler.

A strange moral reversal

Gillette, the razor company, has received considerable attention for an ad campaign that talks about how men have to be better in their conduct and their approach to others' conduct.  Many are applauding it while others are recoiling from the criticism of men.  There's no point in me trying to say whether the ad does or doesn't paint with a broad brush, whether the message is or isn't ultimately positive about men (while there's surely criticism, there's also a clear implication that men can be better), because it's very much a Rohrschach test.  You see what you see, not what I argue that you should see.

What fascinates me is that the critics of the ad, many of them nominal conservatives, include in their ranks people who say that the ad is condemning the inherently aggressive nature of men, while those praising it, many of them nominal liberals, speak of the need to teach men discipline and self-control.  In an earlier phase of the culture war, it would have been considered hippie-ish to say that people need to celebrate their own inner nature and do what feels right for them.  It would have been considered conservative to say that discipline and structure and conformity to rules and ethical norms are what matter.  Now, granted, the hippies would have said that people should follow their natural instincts for love, not war.  Likewise, conservatives would have wanted to discipline men to channel their aggressive natures into healthy competition and the use of force for the enforcement of laws and protection of national security.  This just means that while history rarely repeats it often echoes.

Still, the echoes are strong, and inverted.  And they bring to mind a recent chance conversation with someone who turned out to be an elderly professor, and also an outspoken conservative.  The topic of the #MeToo movement came up, causing him to speak quite adamantly about how modern political correctness is denying men the chance to act on their instincts.  I was dumbfounded that a conservative would call for a social order in which men follow their instincts, rather than one in which they are disciplined to submit to the order of society, and channel the best parts of their instincts into worthy pursuits that are governed by rules, while taming and suppressing the worst parts of their instincts. Conversely, liberals have become quite rule-oriented.

I'm not necessarily a fan of every rules-oriented move by liberals, especially on the topic of political correctness in speech and entertainment, but surely some self-restraint in matters of sexual behavior is a necessary prerequisite for civilized society.  Surely we can enjoy some jokes while also keeping our hands to ourselves.

Of course, there are still some hippie types on the left, and some restrained types on the right.  But I think that this era of a genital-grabbing TV star as head of state has caused some on the right to walk away from the virtue of restraint.  I'm not wholly in favor of ever-increasing restraint in all aspects of life, but academic fields are called "disciplines" for a reason, and I am a proud academic.