Stillborn God, Chp. 4 and start of Chp. 5

 Chp. 4 spends a lot of time on Hegel. I don't feel like I can summarize his entire summary, I'll just quote one point (regarding Hegelian thought, not necessarily Lilla's own preferences) from near the end of the chapter (pages 206-207):

Now we know what it is to live in freedom: It is to live in modern bourgeois societies where we exercise control over the machinery of political life, hardly noticing its gentle hum. These societies will be complex, comprised [sic] of organically connected social spheres, in which we play different roles: citizen, producer, consumer, newspaper reader, club member, parent, friend. Those who are educated and cultured will have no trouble reconciling themselves to such a system, since they will understand its rationality and appreciate its freedom. Those less gifted may still need religion and patriotic symbols to win their loyalty and sacrifice, but these, too, can be provide within the ambit of the bourgeois state.

One could argue that Trumpism and the sacking of the Capitol show what happens when the less cultured (at least by the measures favored by people like Hegel, and me, apparently) feel like the system is run by people who don't actually share their beliefs in religion and patriotic symbols. That's hardly a complete diagnosis of what led to the current troubles, but it's a factor, and a way of pointing to a bigger cultural divide that fuels a lot of things. Lilla has summarized so many political philosophers as conceding a need for some sort of religion to control the worst in people and/or channel the best. If religion is not heartfelt worship then it is a noble lie, and noble lies only work when delivered convincingly. If they aren't even delivered then there's no solidarity. 

Not everyone on the right (even the hard right) is as religious as people think, but if they reject revealed religion they still adhere to a "civic religion" that reveres a particular vision of the Founders and the Constitution. It isn't theology in the sense that most of the political philosophers discussed by Lilla probably thought of it, but it is religion. It is a narrative that tries to explain the origins of the setting in which people live, and offer morality tales. It's mostly BS, if for no other reason than that the Founders disagreed with each other on so many things, so one can't ascribe a consistent belief system to them.

And it's disrespected. I just called it BS. I'm part of the disrespect. And they know it. They also know that the federal government rejects this originalist religion, as it does far more than the Constitutional Convention ever contemplated. We have a priestly caste of Supreme Court Justices who interpret the original texts and proclaim that the federal government's actions are consistent with their reading of the Constitution, but it is, on some level BS. I don't offer that as a revolutionary statement or a call to an uprising. It's just a fact that basically every modern society on earth has a government that does far more than our Constitutional Convention contemplated. It's how the modern world works. Which is arguably fine, but to have a priestly caste say that the sacred text authorizes this requires mental gymnastics.

On the other side of the culture war, inclusivity is the new religion. I've said plenty about that and don't need to rehash it.

So back to Lilla. He says that the religious wars of post-Reformation Europe led to a desire to separate church from state, or at least remove church authority from any possible meddling in the state, and leave at best an "opiate of the masses" that could be used to suppress the worst and/or bring out the best in people, in accordance with some plan. He's focusing on the debate between those two sides, but I'm left wondering how you get people to buy into either form of religion if they can tell that the elite classes supervising the delivery of this religion, like shadows on the wall of Plato's cave, very obviously don't believe it.

Anyway, he is focusing a lot on Germany part-way through chapter 5, noting that many Germans believed Protestantism should be an integral part of a modern state, while England and the US believed that religion would benefit from religious freedom. (I gather that by that time the UK had largely stopped persecuting Christians who eschewed the Church of England.) He even notes that many Jews in Germany thought that their values were sufficiently similar to those of Protestantism that they could be assimilated into this new Germany. (Lilla adds that we know how that worked out, in a moment of dry understatement.)

One other thing I notice at this point is that he focuses so much on Catholic-Protestant tensions and doesn't mention the Eastern Orthodox churches. I gather it's because he's talking about debates in Christian Europe, and most Eastern Orthodox Christians either lived under Ottoman rule or Russian rule.  Russia was/is, of course, Christian, but it's also on the geopolitical edge of Europe and poorer than most European Christian countries. And Christians under Ottoman rule couldn't really have religious politics.

One other thing about chapter 4: On page 189 he notes that Hegel found Greek religion interesting because their gods were so human. While it meant it would be hard for Greek gods to have final moral authority, he saw it as a window into Greek cultural appreciation of humanity as humanity. Christianity, at least in many forms, tells us to look to the next life, not to lust for this world, while the Greeks could appreciate human life as embodied life in this world that even the gods had gusto for. Lilla notes later that, for all of Catholicism's otherworldly pretensions, it became a very worldly power. The reaction was a Reformation that focused on individual faith rather than adherence to an institution, and somehow wound up producing a Protestant work ethic that led to great worldly prosperity while focusing minds on salvation.

Latest read: Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe

 The latest read is Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe. Arguably it is pointless to read a critique of liberal guilt after watching MAGA lunatics take over the Capitol. On the other hand, 2020 saw an incredible outpouring of liberal guilt and self-flagellation, and the end result of that liberal guilt and self-flagellation is that the mob was not stopped. Mind you, I'm not placing all of the blame on any particular liberal official or faction, or denying the role of the Trump administration (far from it). Trump and his cult are indeed the bad guys here, and beating ourselves up did exactly nothing to stop them. Say everything that needs saying about the ignorance and bigotry of MAGA and I will agree with the big picture and most details. (I will always reserve the right to dissent from specifics, but I might also assign that dissent a low priority, depending on the detail.) 

But given all of that, what did liberal guilt do to stop them? Did liberal guilt get reinforcements in place sooner? Did liberal guilt erect more barricades or get more police out there? Did liberal guilt speed any evacuations? Did liberal guilt talk any Trumpanzees out of the insane notion that Democrats rigged the election for Biden but forgot to rig enough Senate seats to give themselves a majority prior to the Georgia elections? Did liberal guilt persuade anyone that the ghost of Hugo Chavez isn't dropping off faked ballots in Maine?

Liberal guilt is worth exploring precisely because it is the irrelevant distraction that liberals turn to. And, honestly, what is simultaneously heartening and disheartening about this book is just how little things have changed. All of this has happened before and will happen again. To wit, page 26 quotes a particularly woke passage from a Vogue article. I don't know exactly when it was published, but presumably in or shortly before 1970 (the year that Wolfe's Radical Chic essay was published). There are two salient points here:

1. Vogue was woke even back then. I bring this up because the anti-PC corners of the internet have, in the past few years, taken note of the extreme wokeness of Teen Vogue. They find it strange, and quote excerpts of articles with definitely woke viewpoints. Being a person who has never read fashion magazines, I likewise find it strange. Then again, since I've never read fashion magazines, how would I know what is normal for them? There's the old joke about only reading Playboy for the articles, acknowledging (and protesting!) that Playboy has articles about things other than naked women. I guess it makes sense that a fashion mag would have political articles about things besides the gender politics of skirt lengths or whatever.
2. The Vogue article capitalized Black but put white in lower-case. 2020 saw a lot of this, and a lot of carping about how it was a new and unreasonable stylistic choice. The reasonableness is very much a matter of opinion, but the newness is factually wrong, as I now know.

At this point I don't have a lot else to say about the book. But I'm glad to see that all of this has happened before and will happen again.

The inevitable consequence of egalitarianism

A syphilitic Roman Emperor recently mused on whether doctors should inject disinfectants into people in order to cure the COVID-19 virus, and now companies that make cleaning products are issuing statements warning people not to do that.

It's easy to mock him, but what on earth did my colleagues think would happen if we spent decades proclaiming that everyone is equally smart and every perspective is equally valid? Did they think that Marcus Aurelius would rise from his grave and usher in a new era of philosopher-kings?  Did they think that after we knocked the sages from their stages the demos would find enlightenment and start proclaiming sublime truths? Did they think that the products of these school systems would engage in skeptical, careful examination of hypotheses and demand sound statistical evidence?

What happened is that the American people selected a game show host who's failed at every endeavor in his life (except reality TV) to be their king, and a critical mass of the American people would push their Senators to acquit him when he inevitably conflated public and personal interests. That's what happened.  And now this idiot stands over doctors and makes them genuflect while he prattles on.

And every kool-aid-drinking liberal can say that this isn't what they intended, but isn't it?  Didn't they want to stop elevating the smart and accomplished?  Didn't they want every idiot out there to feel comfortable expressing their views?  Didn't they want to flatten society and diminish the importance of expertise? Didn't they want the smart kids to twiddle their thumbs while the teacher kept pace with the slowest?

You can't make it a moral imperative to hand a college degree to everything that floats to the surface of the k-12 toilet bowl and then scratch your head and wonder how an idiot is standing up there talking over America's most accomplished infectious disease specialists. This was inevitable.

Caldwell, cont.

By the standards of 279-page popular-audience books written by conservatives, Caldwell is not too bad. (That's not much praise.) In the chapter on gender issues, whatever its flaws, he concedes a lot in places.  For instance, he makes a point that had not previously occurred to me: The GI Bill, for all the good it did for America, also temporarily set back gender equity in higher ed via a massive influx of men (WWII vets). Women had been growing as a share of college students for a few decades, but the GI Bill re-adjusted the balance, setting back the trends of institutions learning to accommodate women.

More promisingly, he admits that Ronald Reagan drove the debt sky-high, and that the Laffer Curve is a flawed concept. He even concedes that the 1980's, during which Boomers were all over the workforce and America could have been saving lots of money, were a giant missed opportunity for fiscal policy.

And then he screws it all up by saying that Reagan's debts bought America social peace via domestic redistribution programs.

Yes, that was part of the budget in the 1980's, but the military was an even bigger part. And it's the part that Reagan worked hardest to expand. I will grant that Reagan avoided "guns vs butter" trade-offs, but let's not kid ourselves about which side was larger.

Some might argue that Reagan did for Johnson what many presidents have done for predecessors of the opposite party, declining to substantially reverse signature policies (i.e. Johnson's Great Society), but the ratification of the Great Society happened under Nixon and Ford; it was a fait accompli by the time of Reagan.

Another take on racism and the American constitutional system

I forgot to link to this article, arguing that "limited government" arguments in America are doomed by their historic association with racists. The argument is somewhat different in tone than Caldwell's, reproaching the right from a position of sympathy, but reproaching nonetheless.

Thoughts on MLK thus far

I'm a few chapters into the MLK book. I don't have many specific points to highlight (aside from one, below), but I will note that his thought was far more complex than that one line from that one speech that everyone quotes as an argument for color-blindness.  There's no denying that he wanted to work toward color-blindness, or work alongside people of all races in the present. At the same time, he never acted as though history could just be hand-waved away. He was quite adamant about the burden that history had imposed specifically upon African Americans, and how it made their advancement much harder than the advancement of Irish, Italian, Polish, or even Jewish Americans in the face of discrimination.

But he was also not an apologist for pathologies of crime, broken families, etc. in African American communities. He would argue adamantly that these things were rooted in history, argue adamantly that the government must remedy this, but also argue adamantly that while pushing for the government to remedy this the African American community must also work on it themselves.  In short, he went easy on nobody. A liberal could point to where he argued for white people to recognize their responsibilities and the role of history. A conservative could point to where he argued for African Americans to do everything possible for themselves. A relativist could point to where he recognized unique historical circumstances. An absolutist could note his firm adherence to Christian morality and personal responsibility. It was a far more complex take than anybody looking for a simple partisan box to slot him into. What else would you expect from one of the sharpest minds and best Christian teachers of the 20th century?

One specific point that I found interesting was where he noted that the challenges of automation pointed to the need for workers of all races to cooperate politically. It is a point that has been salient for centuries (water and wind power were automating tasks long before "machine learning" became a buzzword) but has certainly not become less salient. I don't claim to know what he and Andrew Yang would say to each other if they met, but I would love to overhear that conversation.  I suspect that there would be many areas of distinction and differences of emphasis, but both of them would recognize the significance of some key questions.

Also, he repeatedly condemns the Vietnam war, and the way that the government spends far more money producing a Vietnamese corpse than it spends uplifting a poor American. A Christian indeed.

Plutarch, more thoughts

I just finished reading about Numa Pompilius, an early King of Rome.  He was supposedly a reluctant ruler, more interested in prayer and contemplation than power.  Supposedly.  Of course, that image just made him even more in demand as a ruler, so he got the throne.  Plutarch regards him as a pretty good King.  It's always hard to be sure with such a long remove and so few reliable records, but one thing he has going for him is that he didn't go to war, which makes him a standout among Roman rulers.  Also, he tried to do something about tribal divides, so he encouraged the Romans to organize themselves along lines of professional guilds and economic classes rather than ethnicity.  Today his embrace of economic class over ethnic identity would make him a right-winger because, hell, I dunno, the modern world is weird.

I've just started reading about Solon of Athens.  Plutarch pays a lot of attention to how Solon and others tried to address disparities between rich and poor.  When I grew up, I absorbed a worldview in which rule by the rich had been traditional (which, yeah, pretty much) and paying close attention to economic inequality was a very modern thing, with a Marxist legacy.  To read a Dead White Male (we'll leave aside whether modern racial labels make sense for ancient people of the Mediterranean, and just stipulate that classical writers are regarded as white and Western by many of their critics and proponents) who approves of rulers paying attention to economic class is...well, it's surprising.  In retrospect it's nothing shocking (poverty and wealth have always been salient to human experience) but the lessons imparted to children are generally the lessons of history's winners (i.e. rulers), and history's winners wanted us to think that paying lots of attention to class (outside of certain charitable avenues) is a modern aberration dating to Marx.  I don't know that anybody ever explicitly told me that older rulers wisely ignored economic inequality, but few told me that they did, and most (on both the left and right) implied that attention to class is a Marxist thing (and God knows Marxism was a shit show).

Until a few years ago I would have said that ignoring classical rulers' and writers' concerns with inequality was a right-wing project. I certainly don't recall any of the "We must pay more attention to our Western Cultural Heritage!" types banging on about it. They're from the political camp more interested in tax cuts, after all. Now, with identity foremost in the minds of many on the left (at least in my professional world), seeing a Classical writer (with a capital C, being a person with a big name) care about economic class and praise rulers who paid attention to the problem feels a bit transgressive. I feel like if I pointed this out too loudly, instead of being the guy who is pointing out truths that rich conservatives don't want you to hear, I'd be the guy saying "All lives matter" in response to a diversity campaign.

The world is weird right now.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Privilege, class, and diversity

I like this essay from the Hedgehog Review.  The three final paragraphs are the best:

 The concept of diversity first germinated in the corporate world, and was quickly seized upon by academia in the 1990s. It arrived just in the nick of time. The previous two decades had seen the traditional mission of the university undermined, if not abandoned, under pressure from a highly politicized turn in the humanities that made its case in epistemic terms, essentially debunking the very idea of knowledge. The role that the upper-tier university soon discovered for itself, upon the collapse of ideals of liberal learning, was no longer that of training citizens for humane self-government, but rather that of supplying a cadre to staff the corporations, the NGOs, and the foundations. That is, the main function of elite schools is to supply the personnel required to run things in an economy that has become more managerial than entrepreneurial.

The institutional desideratum—the political antipode to hated “privilege”—is no longer equality, but diversity. This greatly eases the contradiction Furet identified, shielding the system from democratic pressure. It also protects the self-conception of our meritocrats as agents of historical progress. As was the case with the Soviet nomenklatura, and the leading Jacobins as well, it is precisely our elite that searches out instances of lingering privilege, now understood as obstacles to fulfillment of the moral imperative of diversity. Under this dispensation, the figure of the “straight white male” (abstracted from class distinctions) has been made to do a lot of symbolic work, the heavy lifting of legitimation (in his own hapless way, as sacrificial goat). We eventually reached a point where this was more weight than our electoral system could take, as the election of 2016 revealed. Whether one regards that event as a catastrophe or as a rupture that promises the possibility of glasnost, its immediate effect has been panic in every precinct where the new class accommodations have been functioning smoothly, and a doubling down on the moralizing that previously secured them against popular anger. We’ll see how that goes. 

The term shibboleth is interesting. Its definitions include “a peculiarity of pronunciation, behavior, mode of dress, etc., that distinguishes a particular class or set of persons” and “a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth.” It is a random Hebrew word that acquired its present meaning when it was used by the Gileadites as a test to identify members of an enemy tribe, the Ephraimites, as they attempted to flee across the Jordan River. Ephraimites could not pronounce the sound sh (Judges 12:4–6). I think it is fair to say that one’s ability to pronounce the word diversity with a straight face, indeed with sincerity made scrupulously evident, serves as a shibboleth in this original sense. It answers the question of whether one wants to continue as a member in good standing of those institutions that secure one’s position in the upper middle class.

It's all about legitimizing the status quo while dismissing class.  An upper class can be diverse in terms of gender, sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, etc., but by definition it cannot be diverse in terms of class, nor can it be equal to other classes. (And if you're confused about why I would separately list sex, sexuality, and gender in the previous sentence, that just points to another shibboleth that you can't pronounce, you heretic.)

I think it's particularly interesting how diversity is now the concept placed in tension with privilege, instead of equality.  When I was a kid, the privileged kids had affluent parents.  Now the white lower-middle class is deemed privileged, and the men of that class especially so.  That's quite a rhetorical trick.  Equality (whether economic, or of opportunity, or whatever) got pushed aside somewhere along the line, replacing solidarity with celebration of difference.  I'm not a Marxist, but on this one I see their point.  Yes, there are very valid points about the differences in the life experiences of men and women, or white people and people of color, but it's quite remarkable that the word we used to use for rich kids got co-opted to frame those very valid points.  The word may have a new denotation, but it still carries old connotations that sit uneasily with the new usage.

Also, I think there's a very important point in there about the difference between a managerial economy and an entrepreneurial one.  Founders/owners of privately-held businesses (or even businesses that have gone public but still have a very strong Founder presence) are often quite different from people who climbed corporate ladders.  They aren't always self-made people who rose from nothing (Trump built his empire on inherited wealth) but they are people who spent most of their careers making their own decisions (sometimes appropriately bold decisions, sometimes risky follies) rather than answering to a boss.

Corporate managers aren't fans of the regulatory state, but they can often make compromises (even lucrative compromises) with the regulatory state more easily than an entrepreneur can.  A corporate manager has spent his career answering to people, and following rules written by higher-ups who may be several time zones away.  This leads to a different demeanor and ideology than men who didn't have bosses.  And while privately-held companies typically face most of the same PR and HR issues as corporations of similar size, the quirks of founders play can play more of a role in how they respond to those issues (though more on that below), so they may have more room for managerial liberals (with all of their diversity talk) than a company still dominated by an entrepreneur.

One interesting exception to this dichotomy is Silicon Valley.  Large tech companies are mostly young (at least in comparison with other corporations of similar size, though Google just entered its third decade), but they are, for the most part, very socially liberal.  Mind you, I have no doubt that there are plenty of Google and Facebook managers who hate taxes and regulations, but the prevailing cultures of those places are famously liberal (at least on social issues) and unabashedly pro-diversity (unlike most of the right-wing billionaires who rose to power in the pre-internet era).  This has helped them make peace with the same cultural and regulatory issues as older corporations.

So, Trump is, on the one hand, a rich guy who has ripped off many ordinary people, and treated many workers like shit.  On the other hand, in this economy dominated by corporate managerial types (often liberal, at least in their acceptance of rules and certain PR and HR imperatives) rather than entrepreneurial types (who are often right-wing), Trump is an exception, a rich man who doesn't talk like a corporate manager.  That helps me to understand why he has appeal among some (not all) middle class white voters.  It's not the only factor, of course, but it's among them, and helps to make sense of why they see him as different from the other rich guys.

Finally, let's return to this line:

It also protects the self-conception of our meritocrats as agents of historical progress. As was the case with the Soviet nomenklatura, and the leading Jacobins as well, it is precisely our elite that searches out instances of lingering privilege, now understood as obstacles to fulfillment of the moral imperative of diversity.

This helps me understand why so many academic administrators honestly see themselves as "change agents", even while repeating the same slogans and buzzwords as every other administrator out there, and diligently following in the templates taught to them at workshops.  It explains to me why academic administrators from families of administrators see themselves and their advancement as bold and progressive rather than the fulfillment of a status quo destiny laid upon them when sperm met egg.  It helps explain why I, from a family that has grown more educated with each generation, a family that still circulates stories of immigrant roots, feel old-fashioned and traditional rather than progressive in academia:  Because the born insiders are all proclaiming their progressivity, leaving tradition as the only refuge of the outsider.

My only dissent from the above-quoted observation is that I don't see this as a uniquely contemporary thing, an artifact of a new liberalism that replaces economic class solidarity with diversity.  Hofstadter noted that Dewey's disciples, all managerial types, were desperate to find a way to institutionalize anti-institutional ideology.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.

The purest distillation of the modern zeitgeist

Not much time, but I must memorialize this post by Kevin Drum:

Hillary Clinton describing her typical day in What Happened:

Six a.m.: I wake up, sometimes hitting the snooze button to steal a few more minutes. Snoozing leaves you more tired—there are studies on this—but in that moment, it seems like such a great idea.

Of course there are studies on this. And of course she knows about them. This is Hillary Clinton in a nutshell.

There's nothing wrong with paying attention to studies and following the tips.  But it just figures that that's how a member of the technocratic establishment would describe her mornings--in terms of studies and Best Practices.

Just try being human.  Climb down from Mount Olympus and be human.  Don't descend too far--you'll wind up being sub-human like Trump--but descend a few steps and see what humanity is like.

On a related note, Bladerunner 2049 was amazing.

They were normal by the lights of their society

There's been much discussion of this picture of Auschwitz guards, taking some time off from their busy schedule of extermination to enjoy a little rest and relaxation.  The discussion has been of how normal they look, and I agree, they do look normal.



But I'll go one step farther:  Unlike today's neo-Nazis they do not look like members of a fringe group.  They look like cheerful, well-assimilated members of their society, people who are wholly in-tune with the widespread assumptions shared by all Right-Thinking members of their society.  Were they alive today they'd be popular people, sharing this photo on Instagram and getting "likes."  They'd be respectable people who don't question conventional wisdom.

I don't fear that Nazis, as such, will ever return to power.  There are indeed neo-Nazis in our society, and they can do a lot of dangerous things, but they will never consolidate power again.  Not in that form.  Yes, there's a neo-Nazi sympathizer in the White House, but his impeachment and removal is an inevitability at this point.  He will soon enough be toppled.  His followers might riot, they might do a lot of damage, they might kill innocents in retaliation, but as long as they carry Nazi flags they will never again gain true power.  That might seem like small consolation, given the harm they could nonetheless do, but it's an important consolation when one considers the power that they'd have if they controlled the resources of a modern nation-state.

That's not to say that the bad guys will never again hold power.  Of course they will.  By some lights the very definition of a "bad guy" is "a person in power."  But the neo-Nazis of today are fringe losers, and their label is far too toxic for mainstream acceptance.

No, the type of evil that the Nazis represented will only return to power by adopting a form that is not so frightening to the well-adjusted majority.  Now that the swastika has (accurately) been emblazoned on our cultural memory as a symbol of purest evil, no successful movement will ever again use it.  The next time an evil that great gains power, they will use some other symbol, a symbol that a decent person who desires social acceptability might come to embrace.  The bad guys might start off with mostly just fringe losers in their camp, but they will go mainstream in order to win, and then they will purge the losers.  Hitler did exactly that.  He rose to power on the backs of fanatical street-fighting men, creepy losers, then he got wider popularity, gained power, and purged many of the creepy losers.  That's what made him dangerous:  Once he had power he availed himself of the sorts of mainstream people who know how to make trains run on time, run munitions factories, raise and organize armies, and keep the economy humming to support the construction of that deadly war machine.

I want every Right-Thinking Person to reflect seriously on this.  The original Nazis, the ones who helped Hitler when he was small potatoes, they looked nothing like the people in that picture.  But once Hitler had power he was able to make use of normal, socially well-adjusted people who could fit in and conform to the society around them.  The sorts of people who could get out of bed on time, show up to work, make things happen, feel secure in the knowledge that they are in harmony with all of the other respectable people around them, and then at the end of a long week of mass murder go blow off some steam with other well-adjusted members of their society, taking group photos of smiling people at a party.

Question authority.

Higher Superstition, Chapters 6-9

I paid less attention in these chapters.  I think Gross and Levitt started off with a fair point in chapter 6, on environmentalism:  Romanticizing non-Western cultures or ancient civilizations is a really bad idea.  Rejecting science while searching for solutions to environmental problems is just plain dumb.  To the extent that environmentalism is pursued as an ideological project, as opposed to applied science that takes into account human factors (and ideologies pretty much always over-simplify human factors wrong), such anti-scientific perspectives are just plain dumb.

Gross and Levitt go too far, however, when they go after scientists who take alarmist stances.  If this were a book on strategies for communication, I would probably agree with most of what they say against alarmism.  However, this is a book on anti-scientific attitudes, not un-scientific attitudes.  A scientist who exaggerates his or her findings is not doing good science, but they certainly aren't acting with animus toward science.  If anything, they are making the pedestal too high, not toppling it.  There are any number of valid criticisms to make against alarmists, but the alarmist is NOT rejecting scientific data.  There's a difference between rejecting science and abusing it with fanatical excess.  Environmental alarmism by scientists does not belong in a book on postmodernist and sociological critiques of science.  Alarmists are NOT saying "Science is just, like, your opinion, man."  Quite the opposite.

Also, the Gaia types lost.  Public pitches for environmentalism in America today are overwhelmingly dominated by appeals to science.  Somebody somewhere might be saying "Technological society is just a damaging Western construct based on scientific knowledge that poses as objective while in fact being a produce of heteropatriarchy..." but that person has no influence outside of their book club.

Chapter 7 covers a number of miscellaneous topics, among them AIDS and Afro-centric science.  I won't defend every statement made by every AIDS activist ever, but to my knowledge most of them criticized science from a place of frustration with the slow pace of good science, not from a place of rejecting scientific knowledge.  Even if some individuals adopted some anti-science rhetoric, it clearly was coming from a desire to speed up science, not replace it.  I would not have placed them alongside the postmodernists or the gender essentialists.

Afro-centric curricular with false historical claims about the scientific feats of African civilizations are a different matter, and tend to also blend in much of the same cultural relativism ("Science is just a Western way of looking at the world...") as many of the other targets of Gross and Levitt, albeit with appeals to different texts.  Gross and Levitt were fair here, and perhaps the best evidence that they were fair is that they also singled out a place where Afrocentric curricula are correct:  The first known example of steel production was in Tanzania 2,000 years ago.  It's worth noting the paradox of asserting, on the one hand, that ancient civilizations accomplished amazing innovations in science and technology, and on the other hand that science and technology are just arbitrary Western constructs.

Chapters 8 is on why people believed in the various sociological and philosophical critiques of science.  The basic conclusion of Gross and Levitt is restlessness with a Western society that failed to fix the problems people hoped it would fix.  I think that restlessness is indeed at work, and is also the source of many edufads.   People want a fix, and they want to rebel against whatever isn't delivering it.

Chapter 9 is on whether any of thtis matters.  They believed that it did.  They contended that it would lead to a schism between STEM and humanities (with social science probably being torn in two), with the revolt being led by STEM faculty.  That's not what happened, however.  Administrators put STEM on the pedestal because of grant money, but also pushed on us to deliver it (making many tenure-track jobs effectively into grant-writing jobs) and to take in more students rather than weeding out students.  We didn't tell the humanities faculty to shove it, the administrators did.  And they didn't do it in response to the postmodernists.  They would have just as easily pushed aside conservative defenders of the traditional Western Canon, and probably faster (in the name of diversity).

They argued that this will lead to the debasement of science education, but the people who have done the most to weaken science education are the people pushing edufads at the highest levels, and the people who have declared it a political imperative to get every available warm body into STEM.  Keynes was right about practical men being slaves of defunct intellectuals, but it doesn't follow that every defunct intellectual will enslave a generation of practical men.

They argued that it will debase public discourse, but ultimately it's not the left that did the most to weaken science in public discourse.  The left has much to answer for in the politics of the outside world, including misunderstanding and misusing science in certain cases, but the left has NOT tried to dethrone science.  If anything, lefty technocrats have elevated science above its station, ignoring the is/ought distinction.

Why were they wrong?  I think they were wrong because they over-estimated the power that humanities professors have over the next generation.  As I said above, one must not over-state Keynes' observation on the power of intellectuals.  Dethroning science was never an interesting project for Gen X, coming of age as the internet did.  Science kept improving things for us; why would we take up torches and pitchforks at the behest of our comparative lit profs?  Instead, we made the mistake of listening to the other idea-pushers, the ones insisting that we'd soon face a STEM shortage.  And the final result of that was to make traditionalists like me so pissed off that I've spent two and a half years reading and blogging about humanities and social science.

The real enemy we face now is a technocratic class that somehow rejects meritocracy.  Hey, I don't get it either.  But they see stubborn social problems and believe that we can fix it by defining away merit in STEM education.

Strange times.