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.

Meritocracy and virtue signaling

I like this take-down of Ivy League faculty who virtue signal by arguing against meritocracy:

Look, it's possible that the anti-meritocratic and anti-competitive posture of so much of the enlightened academy is really grounded in academics' own experience of the rottenness of their paths to success, their skepticism that the system that produced them is producing good leaders for our regime, and their conviction that therefore, they are necessarily part of the problem. But given these kinds of arguments, it's not a very plausible conclusion. When you read stuff like this, the conclusion that the elites now turning against meritocracy are just people who've gotten theirs and now want to pull up the ladder behind them so that they don't have to face any further competition is much more plausible. 

I don't actually think that they're intentionally trying to pull up the ladder. Rather, I think that they don't actually think. When you spend your days around the products of selective educational programs, you see them with all of their warts. They are fully human (except when they seem more sub-human...) and have human flaws. Meanwhile, that nice assistant at the dentist's office seems at least as decent as any of the professors on your hallway, let alone that one jerk who acts so selfish in department politics. And you read all about kids who did poorly in school until someone sat down and really helped them and now they're flourishing. So clearly this whole selective education system is far from perfect.

Of course, if they thought carefully they'd realize that:
1) Well, nothing is perfect, including whatever system you'd like to replace the current one with. Have you actually made the case that the alternative is really better?

2) The dental assistant is a great person who deserves respect, a chance to advance in their endeavors, and the same safety net as anyone else, but that in and of itself doesn't mean they should (or would even want to) work as a college professor.

3) Yes, there are always some kids who do great when given an extra chance. There are plenty of kids who flounder when pushed into a more advanced path. By all means, make room for the diamonds in the rough, but not everyone is a diamond in the rough. There's a perfectly fine left-wing argument to be made that what most people need is a safety net and some respect for their middle class jobs rather than a shot at an elite educational path.

So this is less about shielding themselves from competition and more about remaking John Lennon's "Imagine" in op-ed format. To the extent that it might be about competition, it's about winning a virtue competition against other elites.

Hofstadter, wrapping up

For some reason I don't have it in me to laboriously type out every awesome quote in chapters 13-14. I'll just note two things:

1) Hofstadter's description of the "life adjustment" movement, which tried to make high school more relevant to the kid who isn't going to college, initially makes me sympathetic to them. The biggest challenge I face is working with kids who were pushed into college by progressive educators, not kids who were steered away from college by progressive educators.  Progressive education sure has changed!  In an earlier era they thought it was silly to put college on a pedestal, but now they want everyone to go!

The problem with "life adjustment", alas, is that they also didn't think much of preparing a subset of the students for college.  They thought everyone should get that same lowest common denominator, rather than different strokes for different folks.  If progressive educators actually appreciated individual diversity they'd be fine with individualized paths.

2) The chapter on Dewey is full of awesomeness, and I'm not going to quote all of it.  Several years ago I quoted the awesome closing line of the chapter.  This time I'll quote something from near the beginning:

[Dewey] has been praised, paraphrased, repeated, discussed, apotheosized, even on occasion read.

I've tried reading Dewey, and he's boring.  But one of these days I will make myself read a couple of his essays all of the way through, because I hate myself that much.

Now I'm off to read a few books that I probably won't feel like blogging.

Hofstadter Chp. 12, continued

Hofstadter had a lot to say about the history of American education and attitudes towards teachers. Teaching has never been a high-status profession in this country. He claims that it is (or was, in 1963) a high-status profession in other countries, and I've heard some anecdotal reports that it's a high-status profession in countries that do better than us on international tests (e.g. Finland, the country where I want to be). A few fascinating points from the reading:

1) On page 313, he notes that some towns got teachers via a mechanism remarkably similar to Teach For America:

Others accepted the fact that a permanent schoolmaster was all but an impossibility and employed briefly a serious of ambitious young men who were on the way to other careers, perhaps in the ministry or law.

2) On page 316, he notes that in the 19th century America did a very unusual thing, and adopted a European educational practice.  That practice? Sorting students by grade.  Previously (and continuing into the late 19th century in some places) children were almost entirely educated in one-room schoolhouses with ages and grades mixed.  But with the sorting of students came specialization, larger facilities, and hence respectability.  Perhaps counter-intuitively, though, while Hofstadter claims that sorting students led to respectability, he also claims that it opened the profession to women, because of increased demand for teachers.  Given that high-status professions have historically been slow to open to women, I'm a bit skeptical of this claim.

He doesn't do much to reinforce it, because he goes on to note that skeptics of women teachers were silenced by the realization that they could get away with paying women less.  On the one hand, it is unsurprising that people would be OK with paying women less, and that they would put aside other concerns if they could get something for cheaper.  Still, that doesn't buttress his claim that teaching became a respectable profession.

That said, I love this sentence about low-paid women teachers:

Here was one answer to the great American quest to educate everybody but do it cheaply.

3) A few pages later, Hofstadter quotes a New Jersey school administrator lamenting in 1855 that you can't attract men of ability and promise to the teaching profession when teaching is a low-paid and still disreputable profession. This seems to undercut the claim of a few pages ago.

4) Finally, on page 320 he discusses the feminization of elementary school teaching. He claims that (1) American elementary schools have many fewer male teachers than peer countries around the world (a claim for which I don't have 1963 data at hand) and (2) this is another cause of American anti-intellectualism, because it sent the message that the life of the mind is not masculine.

Regarding the percentage of teachers who are female, in this era the number seems to be highly variable around the globe. But regarding the alleged message that studying isn't masculine, I'll just note that the percentage of male teachers increases going from elementary school to middle school to high school to undergraduate institutions to graduate schools. If anything, this sends a message that the highest tiers of knowledge are very masculine, and the lower tiers of knowledge are feminine. I don't think it fits Hofstadter's claim.

Hofstadter, Chapters 10-12

Just a few scattered thoughts.  I don't have it in me to blog chapters 10-11 in detail, and I'm only part-way through chapter 12.

Chapter 10 is "Self-Help and Spiritual Technology", which continues to discuss America's preference for the practical over the theoretical. There's a lot of reverence for "self-made men", never mind that they are extraordinary, and even at their best they are reliant on employees who are decidedly not "self-made." America is a country where everyone believes that they can and should be above average, and so should their kids.

Chapter 11, "Variations on a Theme" talks about a lot of things.  One of them is the labor movement, which was not truly successful until it shed the leftist intellectuals who wanted broad social reform and focused on very specific, tangible goals like wages, working conditions, etc. There's absolutely nothing wrong with favoring the practical over the theoretical. That's not the sort of anti-intellectualism that distresses me in academia.

Chapter 11 also discusses farmers, and the divide between gentlemen farmers, who saw their farms as businesses that could and should adopt new technology, and "dirt farmers", who had a deep resistance to agricultural science.  They saw farming as a cultural matter, a practice handed down in families, not something to be improved via soil science, plant science, etc. Interestingly, when the land grant universities were founded, few children of farmers attended, and those who did often studied things that would get them out of farming.

Chapter 12 notes that as much as Americans distrust intellect, they have deep hopes for schools.  Schools are not to challenge people and push them to ever-greater heights.  Rather, schools are to shape people into (depending on the era) Christians, citizens, assimilated members of an Anglo-dominated culture, workers, or whatever else the era needs. The schools exist to mold us, not to challenge us, build up that which is best in us, or push us to the frontiers of knowledge (unless pushing us to the frontiers of knowledge will help us build weapons to defeat Russia).

It's something of a paradox that a country with such long traditions of racism nonetheless believes that humans are infinitely malleable, fully determined by nurture.  Or, at least, while racists might believe that different groups have different potentials, within those confines they are completely malleable, and so schools should shape each group to fit into some vision of society. It defies the simple dichotomies that people usually bring to "nature vs nurture" discussions.

(Since I've touched on that third rail, I need to make it clear that I don't believe for one moment that there are meaningful differences between races.  We are too similar if you actually get to know people, the boundaries are too fuzzy, and the cognitive and social challenges that our ancestors faced spanned basically the same range on every continent. For a hundred thousand years we were mostly hunters and gatherers, then agriculture and herding commenced virtually everywhere, and everyone started specializing and trading. Finally, however meaningless racial boundaries and comparisons might be on a global scale, they're even less meaningful in a country like America.  We have too much mixed ancestry, and the groups that have been most at odds--southern whites and African-Americans--have the most shared ancestry of all, due to their complicated and tragic histories.)

Finally, chapter 12 notes that, as much as Americans think schools are needed to shape society, nobody has ever wanted high taxes for schools.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.

Hofstadter, Chapters 7-9

Just a few quick thoughts.

Chapter 7: The only other thing that leaped out from it was that Teddy Roosevelt was, in many ways, a pretty intellectual guy, but he was acceptable to the public because he also projected an image of vigorous, well-rounded masculinity.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with being well-rounded, of course. I'm glad that my undergraduate institution emphasized extracurriculars.  Nonetheless, while the public only wants its scientists and writers and thinkers to also show a "human" side, the public never expects its athletes to be smart.  Many of them are, but it's not an expectation, and they certainly don't have to be well-read.

Chapter 8: Mostly about New Deal experts (accepted by the public) and Adlai Stevenson (not so accepted by the public).  I don't think this is much of a mystery. In a crisis, people will put aside prejudices if they think an expert will help them, and the essence of FDR's New Deal policy was counter-cyclical economic spending.

Likewise, right now much of the public likes Dr. Fauci because we're afraid we'll die and he's a really smart doctor. Doctors are one of the few professions in which the public will accept elitism.  Yes, there are cranks who reject vaccines and whatnot, but they are (fortunately) a small minority.  And, yes, everybody ignores their doctor's advice to eat less and exercise more, but that's less about intellect than inertia. In general, the public likes the idea of a smart doctor. They might gripe if a doctor is cold or impersonal, but they'll never gripe that the doctor uses a lot of big words.  You need to be a college professor or the like in order to signal your virtue by saying "I prefer a doctor who appreciates a balanced life to a doctor that is really smart." Nobody else says this. Nobody else sits in the ER, thinking about the blood that they just urinated, and says "I don't care if the person making the calls here is smart."

As to Eisenhower vs. Stevenson, I admittedly wasn't around in the 1950's, so I never witnessed that campaign coverage, but Eisenhower masterminded the most complex military operation that the US had ever pulled off.  I can't really fault the public for trusting him to run the government.  If they'd selected some handsome private who had a medal and claimed to have more common sense than the eggheads, I'd have a different take. But I really can't fault the public for entrusting the federal government to the guy who successfully pulled off the most complex task the federal government had ever executed.

Chapter 9: It's mostly about business and the public's preference for businessmen and practical knowledge.  It's hard to fault the public for this.  In fact, as a science professor I'm keenly aware that most of my students will go straight to the private sector after college, and I want to teach them skills that they can use in a job.

Also, on page 238 he starts discussing the American attitude toward the past.  He starts by noting that America is a land with many fewer ancient ruins than Europe, so we have less respect for accumulated knowledge. That's largely true, but I'd like to note a few things about the societies that were here before Europeans:
1) Yes, they mostly left fewer ruins behind than the older societies of Europe, but not every corner of Europe is replete with Roman ruins and whatnot. Many (not all) parts of Scandinavia and Russia have less in the way of old civilizations building with stone. Mexico, Central America, and large parts of South America are a different matter.  Climate determined where people could develop the knowledge base to build large cities with stone.
2) To the extent that we do have Native American ruins, for most Americans they fit into narratives of something other than "Our Glorious Ancestors." To some they elicit guilt about the past, and for others they arguably buttress a sense of pride in being part of the culture that "civilized" these lands.

Final quote from Chapter 6 of Hofstadter

On page 159, Hofstadter quotes a description of the 1824 election as a contest between:

John Quincy Adams who can write
And Andrew Jackson who can fight.

That was apparently intended as an argument for Jackson. Nice to know that Americans have always been this dumb.