The writing styles of Yuval Levin and David Brooks have converged over the past few years, and alas, that's much for the worse. (Ironically perhaps, Levin, while also drowning him in praise, once gently criticized Brooks for this overgeneralizing tendency, and nb - even as far back as 14 years ago, before Trump and even before Obama, Brooks' take on mainstream conservative thought - i.e., "Not my center-left True Scotsman Conservatism like it should be" - had exactly the same tone as his more recent articles. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose: https://www.nationalreview.com/2007/10/conservatives-and-creeds-yuval-levin/ )
But over-generalized is putting it mildly with regard to Levin's recent output. Who is going to argue with unobjectionable and inane platitudes? Is one really going out on a limb and inviting criticism with appeals regarding the importance of inculcating good character, public spiritedness, humility, self-restraint, noblesse oblige, and that elites ought to take care to maintain the public's good-will and bolster their opinion of the system's legitimacy?
Question: Is it coherent to say that the good thing about yesterday's elites was their diversity of perspective, ideas, and experiences and that the problem with today's elites is that they are all becoming little mind-clones of each other, while at the same time, to say that we should all be teaching the next generation of elites to have ... the same virtues and attitudes about the importance of character and what it means to be public-spirited. Teach them what about it exactly, one correct set of things? That doesn't sound very diverse. And, um, isn't that exactly what's going on right now, just with a different constellation of values, and part of how we got into this mess? If diversity is the problem, because the universities are doing exactly what Levin recommends now (just not with the *content* he would like them to), then isn't the logical conclusion that universities should *stop* teaching new students what to believe?
Here's the really funny thing: he makes one mild and oblique swipe at ideological-singularity virtue signaling, "... increasingly intense displays of its ideal of social justice," but notice, that's not at all criticizing that principle, and indeed, wouldn't any university respond that their relentless indoctrination and insertion of the "ideal of social justice" into everything they do is *precisely* the correct answer to all of Levin's concerns and recommendations?
For example, wouldn't universities say that it's pretty obvious that they *don't* select students on strictly on the basis of intellect, GPA, test-scores, and so forth, and that - to much public and especially conservative complaint! - they specifically deviate from those measures, sometimes quite substantially, in order to both "demographically diversity" their student body (note again, something Levin applauds) and to try and identify those young people with the best character, values, and commitments?
If Levin's complaint is only that he would prefer that universities teach elites a different faith to the woke one they are currently preaching, then it wouldn't be so incoherent and would gain a lot of clarity for him to be specific and come out and say so. Come on man, just spell it out, if you dare.
Response to Levin from the President of some Top American University:
1. "and so they have an obligation to think seriously about elite formation."
We definitely already think seriously about it!
Have you checked out our Diversity and Inclusion Workshops? We are all about exposure to a diversity of views and forming future leaders:
"Diverse living environments situate students among peers and elders studying in different fields, who come from different walks and stages of life, and whose developing identities interact with others. This sort of character formation, nurtured by our heterogeneous campus environment and pedagogical emphasis on intellectual cross-pollination, is intended to inform the choices and habits our graduates will carry into their respective spheres of influence." Sounds a lot like what you're saying too, no?
Or maybe you've heard about our Human Flourishing Program with its research focus on virtue and character building, which we investigate specifically in order to learn how to do it even better, and precisely because we believe that doing so successfully is essential to flourishing? Sounds practically Levin-esque, wouldn't you say?
You should attend one of our intense week-long seminars where, well, where we do exactly what you say we're not doing, which is to expose students to classics of humanities in a liberal education in order to inspire them to think deeply about ethical obligations and such weighty - dare I say, "conservative-sounding" - matters like, "The Art and Science of a Meaningful Life," and "Virtues, Vices, and Situations: The Importance of Character for the good life," and don't forget, "The Wisdom of Work."
2. "The growing cohesion and malformation of American elites contributes to the dysfunctions of our broader culture and has drawn a powerful populist reaction rooted in profound resentment and mistrust."
A conservative complaining about 'cohesion'? What's wrong with unity, common purpose, shared commitments, and solidarity? Did the Greatest Generation not have that? As for everything after 'dysfunctions' isn't that, you know, because of performative Trump and all that disinformation spreading on social media because it isn't being policed nearly enough? Aren't respectable conservatives constantly complaining about those populist rabble right-wingers on precisely this basis?
3. "Thanks to both assortative mating and the powerful incentives to game the tests that grant entry into top-tier colleges."
Well, the assortative mating part is true enough. Young people in their matching years meet each other often at work and school and these things tend to be education-level stratified by their nature these days. Is that a problem for you, if so, what exactly do you propose doing about it?
As for "game the tests", you might mean that more broadly, but since you weren't clear, I'll assume you mean 'standardized tests' like the SAT. Now, first all, "Mr. Conservative", you are sounding like the stereotypical progressive making that claim. Remind me, between progressives and conservatives, who exactly is leading the charge to get rid of 'the tests' or make them optional or water them down vs. complaining about such efforts, saying that on the contrary, testing is the historically-proven, fair and objective way to promote that 'social mobility' of talented kids into the elites *despite* their lower class origins?
Also, let me be frank here: you are either ignorant or being willfully dishonest with that claim: all the best evidence shows that the test results are objectively valid in terms of being as predictive of outcomes as any other variable in the whole of social science, and that when the precise question of 'gaming' is investigated it turns out that g-loaded tests are practically impossible to game and that even extreme efforts only raise scores a small amount *so long as* the questions on the test are hard to predict and can't be anticipated and thus prepared for in a way that rewards grinding memorization.
4. "Yet it does so without offering any means of persuasively legitimating privilege beyond pushing for more inclusive criteria of admission to elite institutions."
We don't just pick the best and brightest - there are lots of them - but only those who demonstrate high character as evidenced by a track record of never getting into serious trouble (would you have it otherwise?) and a demonstrated commitment to our values and to the improvement of social conditions and extension of justice for all members of our society. What's wrong with that?
5. "Americans have grown skeptical of our elite’s claims to legitimacy not so much because it is too hard to enter the upper tier of American life (even if it is) as because those in that tier seem to be permitted to do whatever they want."
Do whatever they want? What are you talking about? We are constantly telling everybody all the time all the things they must never think, say, or do, and all that is worthy of condemnation, punishment, ostracization, and so forth. This generation of elites is watched for any deviation from the straight and narrow path every moment of their lives. Maybe you just don't like our version of 'the path'?
6. "They must see it as their task to shape leaders who grasp that their privileged position comes with obligations to the larger society, who respect and take seriously that larger society, and who are taught to understand themselves as agents of their fellow citizens hemmed in by civic and professional constraints."
We do this. The answer is, "the ideal of social justice." All those 'displays' are genuine and sincere, and they reason you see those displays is in part *because* we teach them to believe in it.
7. "They should work with their students’ healthy discomfort with privilege, but in a way that points them toward channeling their advantages into obligations ... "
Same answer as above
8. "To see higher education as a potential source of worthy leaders in various arenas of American life would require a recommitment to the promise of the university, not a rejection of its potential or an insistence on turning the academy into yet another platform for free speech."
A platform for free speech?!? Do you think the problem is that there is too much free speech on campus right now? Have you checked out FIRE's website, like, ever? I am going to do some Brandt-Daroff exercises to deal with the case of vertigo I'm getting from all the times "Mr. Conservative" sounds just like a progressive.
9. "the ethic that now dominates elite higher education in America could hardly be further removed from the project of such public-spirited elite cultivation. Our leading universities are nowhere near understanding their obligations this way"
Flat out wrong. We take that obligation extremely seriously and that kind of cultivation is precisely what we do, indeed, if anything, and as some complain, to excess. It's just that we fill in the blanks with "the ideal of social justice", and you seem not to like that.
The fact is - as even a cursory investigation of any of our documents would reveal - we use precisely the same language and phrases you do to appeal to identically worded ideals and goals. It's like we are both speaking in indeterminate code of generic feel-goodisms and the devil is in the details.
All I can do is beg you to get specific for once. Let me help get you started, "The populists are resentful and bitter about X - the thing your elite graduates did to them as a manifestation of their university-malformed character in the name of the ideal of social justice - and the populists are *right* about this while your elite graduates are *wrong*, because ... "
Heh, I almost forgot another irony: he led with advice he didn't follow, "So those of us inclined to agonize over what happens now on campuses need to be specific about what American higher education is failing to do well." Physician, heal thyself!
“Khan uses Kushner as the symbol of privilege over merit. Certainly fair, but I might have gone in a different direction and used Kamala Harris.”
I often wonder whether Kamala Harris is an intellectual mediocrity out of lack of talent or lack of interest. Her father is a Stanford economist and her mother was a biomedical scientist who appears to have made significant advances in our understanding of breast cancer. Yet from a very early age Kamala Harris appears to have employed every political stratagem in the book to route around developing genuine merit and obtain political power instead.
Could she have done a BA at Berkeley (like her sister) but instead chose Howard University to bolster her legitimacy as a member of the black community? I want to say that level of cynicism is too extreme and welcome contradiction to this but I have a hard time imagining she couldn’t have placed higher on the strength of good genes, Affirmative Action, and her parents’ pedigree.
As an aside, it seems the status afforded to activism is vastly disproportionate to that given other endeavors. Two successful minority intellectuals have two children in the 1960s and both devote their lives to activism instead. Even Kamala and Maya’s mother appears to have received more plaudits in her role as activist for her scientific contributions as such. See this obituary from 2009:
“An activist to the end, in lieu of flowers, Harris requested that donations be made to Breast Cancer Action. We remain forever grateful for her generosity.”
I guess in practice, things run in the opposite direction of the famed John Adams quote. One studies science and mathematics so as to make enough money to move up the social hierarchy and enable one's children to study politics and become politicians. That's where the status is, of course. There are probably more statues of Millar Fillmore in the world than of Alexander Fleming.
"Environmentalists don’t hate nuclear because it’s dangerous, they hate nuclear because it works. Almost religiously, the environmentalist’s belief is people should use less, do less, be less."
Just not true unless that mind-set is your definition of "environmentalist." Now even one is one too many, but that does not make the idea a majority. Many people are genuinely if mistakenly afraid of nuclear power and nuclear waste.
Yes, and why is that? Because they know enough physics and biology to judge (mistakenly) for themselves? Because they had a vision from Virgin Mary? Or because environmentalists of the kind you are deprecating here spent over half a century scaring people?
Right. Many people are genuinely if mistakenly afraid of lots of things. Flying, 5G cell towers, death by shark.
But notice that flying in planes and going to beaches and using the latest smartphone tech are all indicators that one has higher status than those who can't do those things. That's why those things don't get shut down.
On the other hand, anti-nuclear activists and fearmongers have enjoyed prestige and respect for a long time, with fawning coverage and plenty of Hollywood bolstering. That's why they are gradually getting their way, despite the experts knowing better and all the "follow The Science!" chanting.
At any rate, one could argue that fear should be declining over time with advances in technologies and as we learn with increasingly confidence that the final toll from even the few top incidents turns out to be very minor. But even if one holds fear constant, the case for rapidly expanding nuclear power should become suddenly much stronger if one really believes in the likelihood of catastrophic climate change in the baseline scenario, which all cool and right-thinking people have believed for the entire 21st century.
Instead, US generation plateaued 20 years ago and is poised for significant decline as old reactors shutter, and political support for decommissionings grows higher. Judging from how they engage in a lot of quantitatively illiterate magical thinking about wind and solar and tend to evade engagement regarding hard choices about trade offs, it seems pretty reasonable to conclude that the people making and supporting such decisions are more content with stagnation than they are with *any* feasible alternatives.
Von Neumann would be surprised and disappointed as to what actually happened in this regard over the past 66 years. See his nuclear power optimism in one of his important essays from 1955: "Can We Survive Technology?", which, naturally, also has a number of other interesting points and insights.
Interesting read, thanks. Puts modern techno-optimism in perspective. If von Neumann himself gushed about nuclear transmutation and geoengineering driven by accurate climate models... well, at least he did get most of the automation story right. Incidentally, when did anti-nuclear activism begin to gain fawning coverage and Hollywood bolstering? I guess mid-to-late 60s, "Silent Spring" etc., but that's the popular side of it; it must have been percolating in elite social circles for years before that. One could also see this as a counterattack by a more culturally/politically-inclined segment of the elites that was always there (Orwell's barbs against sandal-wearing nature-loving breed of socialist come to mind) against the more technically-inclined one whose status was temporarily boosted by rapid diffusion of technology to the masses, WWII and the Cold War, with the Moon landings being the latter's last hurrah.
Thanks for that link to Rao's thread. I get what he's saying, but he seems gloomier and infused with more "what's the point?" nihilistic weariness about it than is warranted.
Oh wait, ha, after reading to the end, I get it, "This thread sponsored by an acute lower back ache I’m dealing with today (while on a short road trip). Between spasms the thought that hits me forcefully is: “what’s the point of solving back aches if no prospect of warp drives?” Heh, he literally asks "what's the point?"
Never reason from a back ache.
It's like getting depressed about the heat death of the universe, "Why are you wasting your time with problem solving? Don't you fools understand?! In the final analysis, it's all for nothing! Nothing!!" If you are going to get gloomy about the big picture, then one might as well go all the way to the biggest picture, and if you do that, his example of aliens landing isn't going to help either.
I'm not much for gloom - my baseline brain chemistry errs towards cheerfulness - but I think there are more compelling "in our horizon" things to get gloomy about.
That's a big topic, too big for this deep in a thread. But briefly ...
I've looked into the origins and history of environmentalist sentiments and efforts before, and to make a long story short, it's complicated with a lot of twists and turns. There's a good case to be made that things would inevitably shake out and settle down the way they did, but it took some time. One
This was before the long trend reached its modern mass-psychosis level of one's answer to every possible question being strongly correlated with one's partisan affiliation. So it takes some effort for someone drowned in the modern tendency from birth to see through that fog and grasp what was going on, for example, in the heated arguments between Conservationists and Preservationists, which probably seem to most modern readers as indecipherably subtle as the theological distinctions between consubstantiation, sacramental unionism, and receptionism.
There were a lot of separate and uncorrelated efforts and organizations, and support or opposition was often more a matter of one's 'interest group' than one's party.
Just like early progressives were big on eugenics and modern progressives think that's the worst thing in the world, many early progressives were also big enthusiasts of industrialization, great works of civil engineering, conquest of nature, disease and pest chemical eradication, economic growth, "Smoke of chimneys is the breath of Soviet Russia" types, and proto-Corbusier lovers of concrete and cement in the dream of building a rationalized new world for rationalized new men. A few prominent early progressives like Muir were trying to stop construction of dams, but uber-progressive Wilson was big on dams.
Most of these efforts were effectively 'put on hold' during the Great Depression and especially WWII, and in the typical way that the New Deal put a lot of the people on the payroll one way or another, who would prove to be the future intellectual movers and shakers in related efforts, and those people did as they were told to keep getting checks.
But after the war, the dam broke, as it were, and the stage was set. Fifteen years later all the disparate threads had already become weaved together in a way we would recognize as having more of a clear family resemblance to the progressive left-affiliated movement of today.
> many early progressives were also big enthusiasts of industrialization
Indeed. This is very noticeable, for instance, in anti-utopias published at that time, where the antagonist society combines ideas considered progressive up to now with techno-futurism that is today largely confined to right-leaning "techbros" etc. What I was really wondering about is to what extent the change represents one set of elite social circles displacing another compared to prevailing ideas / intellectual fashions changing within the same set of elite social circles / milieus. There must have been at least a few obscure book-length treatments of this history published by reputable academic presses.
Ah, I see what you're getting at. There are certainly plenty of books on the history of the environmentalist movement and of the various, older, separate movements which were all eventually folded into Green, but having read a few of them, and as you might suspect, my judgment is that most of them are unreliable in many places on account of being hagiographic and adulatory and tending thus to frame the overall narrative in terms of good guys and bad guys, which requires overlooking or airbrushing out instances of "not yet cancelled, still currently designated as good" guys being on the 'wrong' side of the issue at the time, and mutatis mutandis for now-seen-to-have-been-bad guys nevertheless having being on the right side of history in some way.
All that being said, my impression is that it was not displacement, at least, not any more than the biologically natural amount of turnover deriving from our mortality. My evidence for this is that plenty of 'old progressives' who came up in the still-techno-futurist era clearly converted to industro-skepticism, whereas there don't seem to be any good cases of prominent holdouts of formerly prestigious members of the progressive elite campaigning against new techno-futurism-hobbling efforts on the basis of old-left concerns. Now, there were a few higher-ups in the labor movement / trade union types who understood that burdens on industry and higher prices meant fewer jobs for the boys and thus it would hit their dues revenues and membership numbers, but in my view these people were always at best on the periphery of prestige or elite-status in the post-war era, so if there was any displacement / 'demotion' it was of them.
Otherwise, everyone else seemed to just hop on the new bandwagon and get green-woke all of a sudden, as part of the general and rapid transition from Old Left to New Left that happened at that time.
One example could be Justice Douglas (1898) - always someone with his finger on the pulse and excellent early warning radar for whatever the ideological equivalent is to trend-spotting, stock picking, or venture capital investment and who could be counted on to be way ahead of what would eventually become mainstream progressive opinion - who started out as a typical strong-conservationist pro-industry progressive but who quickly got more and more green-woke after the war, to the point of probably retconning his former views in his own autobiographical "Of Men and Mountains".
By the late 50's he was already becoming a little famous for his rapidly evolving views, and his dissent in denial of certiorari in the Robert Cushman Murphy case established that reputation for good. Note, that case and related NYT anti-pesticide-spraying coverage and worries about DDT all came before Carson's book which was written in part because of the failure of the legal effort, and indeed, Carson sent Douglas an early draft copy precisely so he could write a gushing review. The actual historical path seems to be somewhat in reverse to the way the narrative story is told about it, which was of course quite common with many landmark cases of that time.
At any rate, he served on the board of directors of the Sierra Club for precisely those two years (while serving as a SCOTUS Justice, something that would not be tolerated today), and didn't recuse himself from the 1972 case of Sierra Club v Morton, famous for his "trees should have standing to sue" dissent, "The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it."
While Douglas is kind of an extreme example (as he was for most things), I think he nevertheless reflects what happened to many progressive elites, which is that they pretty much all suddenly went with the new program, perceiving it as logical extension of efforts in the former progressive era to make food, medicines, and urban conditons more pure and healthy, and a continuance of their general antipathy to for-profit corporations, and of their immediately grasping of the usefulness of the issue to justify all manner of new measures of supervision, regulation, and control of private sector activity. I think that is more or less the same story for racial and sexual issues too.
Levin writes "it was frequently a significant (if always imperfect) constraint on the
abuse of privilege", but Arnold writes "I don’t credit the 'discomfort with privilege' as genuine."
Arnold has it right here. The has been no *significant* constraint on the abuse of privilege in at least the last few decades, since the critiques of e.g. Allan Bloom and C. Paglia were successfully marginalized.
Since then, the PC crowd has, virtually w/o constraint, been able to totally enslave academia, and has brought Wokeness so far into the MSM, that now the whole culture is besieged, by orgies of unconstrained propaganda, most of this implicit demonization of the middle classes.
When Levin writes that academia tells elites "to set themselves apart from the larger society, which is corrupt and wicked and needs leaders who will transform it", he seems to fail to see this as anything other than a likely unalterable Feature of who these elites are.
And, he seems to fail to see, that these elites will spare *no* effort, to ensure that never ever again do any competitors have a snowball's chance of displacing the current crop.
This current crop specializes in rigging things, to sabotage all real threats to their power or status, in the name of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity!
All the coal we have burned since the Industrial Age began can fit inside a football field. Great example of 2 dimensional thinking. Interesting that someone on here believes a degree from Howard confers as much status as a degree from Harvard.
OK, Mike, here is your homework assignment: Google “how long is radioactive waste radioactive”. Devise a plan for dealing with the radioactivity to the end of that period. Through every possible physical change wrought by man or nature upon that location and with every possible change in language or culture which people who might encounter this problem might undergo. Then contemplate piling coal.
And that's only because we don't use fast neutron reactors, which don't accumulate transplutonics and can even burn them up. They also burn up neutron poisons and therefore can increase/decrease output power quickly, which makes them a potential replacement for gas-fired dispatchable generation capacity, not just base load. Old Russian lead-bismuth submarine reactors reportedly could go from idling to full throttle in a few minutes.
The writing styles of Yuval Levin and David Brooks have converged over the past few years, and alas, that's much for the worse. (Ironically perhaps, Levin, while also drowning him in praise, once gently criticized Brooks for this overgeneralizing tendency, and nb - even as far back as 14 years ago, before Trump and even before Obama, Brooks' take on mainstream conservative thought - i.e., "Not my center-left True Scotsman Conservatism like it should be" - had exactly the same tone as his more recent articles. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose: https://www.nationalreview.com/2007/10/conservatives-and-creeds-yuval-levin/ )
But over-generalized is putting it mildly with regard to Levin's recent output. Who is going to argue with unobjectionable and inane platitudes? Is one really going out on a limb and inviting criticism with appeals regarding the importance of inculcating good character, public spiritedness, humility, self-restraint, noblesse oblige, and that elites ought to take care to maintain the public's good-will and bolster their opinion of the system's legitimacy?
Question: Is it coherent to say that the good thing about yesterday's elites was their diversity of perspective, ideas, and experiences and that the problem with today's elites is that they are all becoming little mind-clones of each other, while at the same time, to say that we should all be teaching the next generation of elites to have ... the same virtues and attitudes about the importance of character and what it means to be public-spirited. Teach them what about it exactly, one correct set of things? That doesn't sound very diverse. And, um, isn't that exactly what's going on right now, just with a different constellation of values, and part of how we got into this mess? If diversity is the problem, because the universities are doing exactly what Levin recommends now (just not with the *content* he would like them to), then isn't the logical conclusion that universities should *stop* teaching new students what to believe?
Here's the really funny thing: he makes one mild and oblique swipe at ideological-singularity virtue signaling, "... increasingly intense displays of its ideal of social justice," but notice, that's not at all criticizing that principle, and indeed, wouldn't any university respond that their relentless indoctrination and insertion of the "ideal of social justice" into everything they do is *precisely* the correct answer to all of Levin's concerns and recommendations?
For example, wouldn't universities say that it's pretty obvious that they *don't* select students on strictly on the basis of intellect, GPA, test-scores, and so forth, and that - to much public and especially conservative complaint! - they specifically deviate from those measures, sometimes quite substantially, in order to both "demographically diversity" their student body (note again, something Levin applauds) and to try and identify those young people with the best character, values, and commitments?
If Levin's complaint is only that he would prefer that universities teach elites a different faith to the woke one they are currently preaching, then it wouldn't be so incoherent and would gain a lot of clarity for him to be specific and come out and say so. Come on man, just spell it out, if you dare.
Response to Levin from the President of some Top American University:
1. "and so they have an obligation to think seriously about elite formation."
We definitely already think seriously about it!
Have you checked out our Diversity and Inclusion Workshops? We are all about exposure to a diversity of views and forming future leaders:
"Diverse living environments situate students among peers and elders studying in different fields, who come from different walks and stages of life, and whose developing identities interact with others. This sort of character formation, nurtured by our heterogeneous campus environment and pedagogical emphasis on intellectual cross-pollination, is intended to inform the choices and habits our graduates will carry into their respective spheres of influence." Sounds a lot like what you're saying too, no?
Or maybe you've heard about our Human Flourishing Program with its research focus on virtue and character building, which we investigate specifically in order to learn how to do it even better, and precisely because we believe that doing so successfully is essential to flourishing? Sounds practically Levin-esque, wouldn't you say?
You should attend one of our intense week-long seminars where, well, where we do exactly what you say we're not doing, which is to expose students to classics of humanities in a liberal education in order to inspire them to think deeply about ethical obligations and such weighty - dare I say, "conservative-sounding" - matters like, "The Art and Science of a Meaningful Life," and "Virtues, Vices, and Situations: The Importance of Character for the good life," and don't forget, "The Wisdom of Work."
2. "The growing cohesion and malformation of American elites contributes to the dysfunctions of our broader culture and has drawn a powerful populist reaction rooted in profound resentment and mistrust."
A conservative complaining about 'cohesion'? What's wrong with unity, common purpose, shared commitments, and solidarity? Did the Greatest Generation not have that? As for everything after 'dysfunctions' isn't that, you know, because of performative Trump and all that disinformation spreading on social media because it isn't being policed nearly enough? Aren't respectable conservatives constantly complaining about those populist rabble right-wingers on precisely this basis?
3. "Thanks to both assortative mating and the powerful incentives to game the tests that grant entry into top-tier colleges."
Well, the assortative mating part is true enough. Young people in their matching years meet each other often at work and school and these things tend to be education-level stratified by their nature these days. Is that a problem for you, if so, what exactly do you propose doing about it?
As for "game the tests", you might mean that more broadly, but since you weren't clear, I'll assume you mean 'standardized tests' like the SAT. Now, first all, "Mr. Conservative", you are sounding like the stereotypical progressive making that claim. Remind me, between progressives and conservatives, who exactly is leading the charge to get rid of 'the tests' or make them optional or water them down vs. complaining about such efforts, saying that on the contrary, testing is the historically-proven, fair and objective way to promote that 'social mobility' of talented kids into the elites *despite* their lower class origins?
Also, let me be frank here: you are either ignorant or being willfully dishonest with that claim: all the best evidence shows that the test results are objectively valid in terms of being as predictive of outcomes as any other variable in the whole of social science, and that when the precise question of 'gaming' is investigated it turns out that g-loaded tests are practically impossible to game and that even extreme efforts only raise scores a small amount *so long as* the questions on the test are hard to predict and can't be anticipated and thus prepared for in a way that rewards grinding memorization.
4. "Yet it does so without offering any means of persuasively legitimating privilege beyond pushing for more inclusive criteria of admission to elite institutions."
We don't just pick the best and brightest - there are lots of them - but only those who demonstrate high character as evidenced by a track record of never getting into serious trouble (would you have it otherwise?) and a demonstrated commitment to our values and to the improvement of social conditions and extension of justice for all members of our society. What's wrong with that?
5. "Americans have grown skeptical of our elite’s claims to legitimacy not so much because it is too hard to enter the upper tier of American life (even if it is) as because those in that tier seem to be permitted to do whatever they want."
Do whatever they want? What are you talking about? We are constantly telling everybody all the time all the things they must never think, say, or do, and all that is worthy of condemnation, punishment, ostracization, and so forth. This generation of elites is watched for any deviation from the straight and narrow path every moment of their lives. Maybe you just don't like our version of 'the path'?
6. "They must see it as their task to shape leaders who grasp that their privileged position comes with obligations to the larger society, who respect and take seriously that larger society, and who are taught to understand themselves as agents of their fellow citizens hemmed in by civic and professional constraints."
We do this. The answer is, "the ideal of social justice." All those 'displays' are genuine and sincere, and they reason you see those displays is in part *because* we teach them to believe in it.
7. "They should work with their students’ healthy discomfort with privilege, but in a way that points them toward channeling their advantages into obligations ... "
Same answer as above
8. "To see higher education as a potential source of worthy leaders in various arenas of American life would require a recommitment to the promise of the university, not a rejection of its potential or an insistence on turning the academy into yet another platform for free speech."
A platform for free speech?!? Do you think the problem is that there is too much free speech on campus right now? Have you checked out FIRE's website, like, ever? I am going to do some Brandt-Daroff exercises to deal with the case of vertigo I'm getting from all the times "Mr. Conservative" sounds just like a progressive.
9. "the ethic that now dominates elite higher education in America could hardly be further removed from the project of such public-spirited elite cultivation. Our leading universities are nowhere near understanding their obligations this way"
Flat out wrong. We take that obligation extremely seriously and that kind of cultivation is precisely what we do, indeed, if anything, and as some complain, to excess. It's just that we fill in the blanks with "the ideal of social justice", and you seem not to like that.
The fact is - as even a cursory investigation of any of our documents would reveal - we use precisely the same language and phrases you do to appeal to identically worded ideals and goals. It's like we are both speaking in indeterminate code of generic feel-goodisms and the devil is in the details.
All I can do is beg you to get specific for once. Let me help get you started, "The populists are resentful and bitter about X - the thing your elite graduates did to them as a manifestation of their university-malformed character in the name of the ideal of social justice - and the populists are *right* about this while your elite graduates are *wrong*, because ... "
Eagerly Awaiting Your Reply,
N. Ivy President,
Heh, I almost forgot another irony: he led with advice he didn't follow, "So those of us inclined to agonize over what happens now on campuses need to be specific about what American higher education is failing to do well." Physician, heal thyself!
“Khan uses Kushner as the symbol of privilege over merit. Certainly fair, but I might have gone in a different direction and used Kamala Harris.”
I often wonder whether Kamala Harris is an intellectual mediocrity out of lack of talent or lack of interest. Her father is a Stanford economist and her mother was a biomedical scientist who appears to have made significant advances in our understanding of breast cancer. Yet from a very early age Kamala Harris appears to have employed every political stratagem in the book to route around developing genuine merit and obtain political power instead.
Could she have done a BA at Berkeley (like her sister) but instead chose Howard University to bolster her legitimacy as a member of the black community? I want to say that level of cynicism is too extreme and welcome contradiction to this but I have a hard time imagining she couldn’t have placed higher on the strength of good genes, Affirmative Action, and her parents’ pedigree.
As an aside, it seems the status afforded to activism is vastly disproportionate to that given other endeavors. Two successful minority intellectuals have two children in the 1960s and both devote their lives to activism instead. Even Kamala and Maya’s mother appears to have received more plaudits in her role as activist for her scientific contributions as such. See this obituary from 2009:
“An activist to the end, in lieu of flowers, Harris requested that donations be made to Breast Cancer Action. We remain forever grateful for her generosity.”
https://www.bcaction.org/in-memoriam-dr-shyamala-g-harris/
I guess in practice, things run in the opposite direction of the famed John Adams quote. One studies science and mathematics so as to make enough money to move up the social hierarchy and enable one's children to study politics and become politicians. That's where the status is, of course. There are probably more statues of Millar Fillmore in the world than of Alexander Fleming.
"Environmentalists don’t hate nuclear because it’s dangerous, they hate nuclear because it works. Almost religiously, the environmentalist’s belief is people should use less, do less, be less."
Just not true unless that mind-set is your definition of "environmentalist." Now even one is one too many, but that does not make the idea a majority. Many people are genuinely if mistakenly afraid of nuclear power and nuclear waste.
Yes, and why is that? Because they know enough physics and biology to judge (mistakenly) for themselves? Because they had a vision from Virgin Mary? Or because environmentalists of the kind you are deprecating here spent over half a century scaring people?
Right. Many people are genuinely if mistakenly afraid of lots of things. Flying, 5G cell towers, death by shark.
But notice that flying in planes and going to beaches and using the latest smartphone tech are all indicators that one has higher status than those who can't do those things. That's why those things don't get shut down.
On the other hand, anti-nuclear activists and fearmongers have enjoyed prestige and respect for a long time, with fawning coverage and plenty of Hollywood bolstering. That's why they are gradually getting their way, despite the experts knowing better and all the "follow The Science!" chanting.
At any rate, one could argue that fear should be declining over time with advances in technologies and as we learn with increasingly confidence that the final toll from even the few top incidents turns out to be very minor. But even if one holds fear constant, the case for rapidly expanding nuclear power should become suddenly much stronger if one really believes in the likelihood of catastrophic climate change in the baseline scenario, which all cool and right-thinking people have believed for the entire 21st century.
Instead, US generation plateaued 20 years ago and is poised for significant decline as old reactors shutter, and political support for decommissionings grows higher. Judging from how they engage in a lot of quantitatively illiterate magical thinking about wind and solar and tend to evade engagement regarding hard choices about trade offs, it seems pretty reasonable to conclude that the people making and supporting such decisions are more content with stagnation than they are with *any* feasible alternatives.
Von Neumann would be surprised and disappointed as to what actually happened in this regard over the past 66 years. See his nuclear power optimism in one of his important essays from 1955: "Can We Survive Technology?", which, naturally, also has a number of other interesting points and insights.
https://srkaufman72.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/von-neumann-can-we-survive-technology/
Interesting read, thanks. Puts modern techno-optimism in perspective. If von Neumann himself gushed about nuclear transmutation and geoengineering driven by accurate climate models... well, at least he did get most of the automation story right. Incidentally, when did anti-nuclear activism begin to gain fawning coverage and Hollywood bolstering? I guess mid-to-late 60s, "Silent Spring" etc., but that's the popular side of it; it must have been percolating in elite social circles for years before that. One could also see this as a counterattack by a more culturally/politically-inclined segment of the elites that was always there (Orwell's barbs against sandal-wearing nature-loving breed of socialist come to mind) against the more technically-inclined one whose status was temporarily boosted by rapid diffusion of technology to the masses, WWII and the Cold War, with the Moon landings being the latter's last hurrah.
Re techno-optimism, Venkatesh Rao tweeted a very techno-pessimistic thread last week: https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1472042202196951042
Thanks for that link to Rao's thread. I get what he's saying, but he seems gloomier and infused with more "what's the point?" nihilistic weariness about it than is warranted.
Oh wait, ha, after reading to the end, I get it, "This thread sponsored by an acute lower back ache I’m dealing with today (while on a short road trip). Between spasms the thought that hits me forcefully is: “what’s the point of solving back aches if no prospect of warp drives?” Heh, he literally asks "what's the point?"
Never reason from a back ache.
It's like getting depressed about the heat death of the universe, "Why are you wasting your time with problem solving? Don't you fools understand?! In the final analysis, it's all for nothing! Nothing!!" If you are going to get gloomy about the big picture, then one might as well go all the way to the biggest picture, and if you do that, his example of aliens landing isn't going to help either.
I'm not much for gloom - my baseline brain chemistry errs towards cheerfulness - but I think there are more compelling "in our horizon" things to get gloomy about.
That's a big topic, too big for this deep in a thread. But briefly ...
I've looked into the origins and history of environmentalist sentiments and efforts before, and to make a long story short, it's complicated with a lot of twists and turns. There's a good case to be made that things would inevitably shake out and settle down the way they did, but it took some time. One
This was before the long trend reached its modern mass-psychosis level of one's answer to every possible question being strongly correlated with one's partisan affiliation. So it takes some effort for someone drowned in the modern tendency from birth to see through that fog and grasp what was going on, for example, in the heated arguments between Conservationists and Preservationists, which probably seem to most modern readers as indecipherably subtle as the theological distinctions between consubstantiation, sacramental unionism, and receptionism.
There were a lot of separate and uncorrelated efforts and organizations, and support or opposition was often more a matter of one's 'interest group' than one's party.
Just like early progressives were big on eugenics and modern progressives think that's the worst thing in the world, many early progressives were also big enthusiasts of industrialization, great works of civil engineering, conquest of nature, disease and pest chemical eradication, economic growth, "Smoke of chimneys is the breath of Soviet Russia" types, and proto-Corbusier lovers of concrete and cement in the dream of building a rationalized new world for rationalized new men. A few prominent early progressives like Muir were trying to stop construction of dams, but uber-progressive Wilson was big on dams.
Most of these efforts were effectively 'put on hold' during the Great Depression and especially WWII, and in the typical way that the New Deal put a lot of the people on the payroll one way or another, who would prove to be the future intellectual movers and shakers in related efforts, and those people did as they were told to keep getting checks.
But after the war, the dam broke, as it were, and the stage was set. Fifteen years later all the disparate threads had already become weaved together in a way we would recognize as having more of a clear family resemblance to the progressive left-affiliated movement of today.
> many early progressives were also big enthusiasts of industrialization
Indeed. This is very noticeable, for instance, in anti-utopias published at that time, where the antagonist society combines ideas considered progressive up to now with techno-futurism that is today largely confined to right-leaning "techbros" etc. What I was really wondering about is to what extent the change represents one set of elite social circles displacing another compared to prevailing ideas / intellectual fashions changing within the same set of elite social circles / milieus. There must have been at least a few obscure book-length treatments of this history published by reputable academic presses.
Ah, I see what you're getting at. There are certainly plenty of books on the history of the environmentalist movement and of the various, older, separate movements which were all eventually folded into Green, but having read a few of them, and as you might suspect, my judgment is that most of them are unreliable in many places on account of being hagiographic and adulatory and tending thus to frame the overall narrative in terms of good guys and bad guys, which requires overlooking or airbrushing out instances of "not yet cancelled, still currently designated as good" guys being on the 'wrong' side of the issue at the time, and mutatis mutandis for now-seen-to-have-been-bad guys nevertheless having being on the right side of history in some way.
All that being said, my impression is that it was not displacement, at least, not any more than the biologically natural amount of turnover deriving from our mortality. My evidence for this is that plenty of 'old progressives' who came up in the still-techno-futurist era clearly converted to industro-skepticism, whereas there don't seem to be any good cases of prominent holdouts of formerly prestigious members of the progressive elite campaigning against new techno-futurism-hobbling efforts on the basis of old-left concerns. Now, there were a few higher-ups in the labor movement / trade union types who understood that burdens on industry and higher prices meant fewer jobs for the boys and thus it would hit their dues revenues and membership numbers, but in my view these people were always at best on the periphery of prestige or elite-status in the post-war era, so if there was any displacement / 'demotion' it was of them.
Otherwise, everyone else seemed to just hop on the new bandwagon and get green-woke all of a sudden, as part of the general and rapid transition from Old Left to New Left that happened at that time.
One example could be Justice Douglas (1898) - always someone with his finger on the pulse and excellent early warning radar for whatever the ideological equivalent is to trend-spotting, stock picking, or venture capital investment and who could be counted on to be way ahead of what would eventually become mainstream progressive opinion - who started out as a typical strong-conservationist pro-industry progressive but who quickly got more and more green-woke after the war, to the point of probably retconning his former views in his own autobiographical "Of Men and Mountains".
By the late 50's he was already becoming a little famous for his rapidly evolving views, and his dissent in denial of certiorari in the Robert Cushman Murphy case established that reputation for good. Note, that case and related NYT anti-pesticide-spraying coverage and worries about DDT all came before Carson's book which was written in part because of the failure of the legal effort, and indeed, Carson sent Douglas an early draft copy precisely so he could write a gushing review. The actual historical path seems to be somewhat in reverse to the way the narrative story is told about it, which was of course quite common with many landmark cases of that time.
At any rate, he served on the board of directors of the Sierra Club for precisely those two years (while serving as a SCOTUS Justice, something that would not be tolerated today), and didn't recuse himself from the 1972 case of Sierra Club v Morton, famous for his "trees should have standing to sue" dissent, "The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it."
While Douglas is kind of an extreme example (as he was for most things), I think he nevertheless reflects what happened to many progressive elites, which is that they pretty much all suddenly went with the new program, perceiving it as logical extension of efforts in the former progressive era to make food, medicines, and urban conditons more pure and healthy, and a continuance of their general antipathy to for-profit corporations, and of their immediately grasping of the usefulness of the issue to justify all manner of new measures of supervision, regulation, and control of private sector activity. I think that is more or less the same story for racial and sexual issues too.
Levin writes "it was frequently a significant (if always imperfect) constraint on the
abuse of privilege", but Arnold writes "I don’t credit the 'discomfort with privilege' as genuine."
Arnold has it right here. The has been no *significant* constraint on the abuse of privilege in at least the last few decades, since the critiques of e.g. Allan Bloom and C. Paglia were successfully marginalized.
Since then, the PC crowd has, virtually w/o constraint, been able to totally enslave academia, and has brought Wokeness so far into the MSM, that now the whole culture is besieged, by orgies of unconstrained propaganda, most of this implicit demonization of the middle classes.
There's nothing genuine about any of this.
When Levin writes that academia tells elites "to set themselves apart from the larger society, which is corrupt and wicked and needs leaders who will transform it", he seems to fail to see this as anything other than a likely unalterable Feature of who these elites are.
And, he seems to fail to see, that these elites will spare *no* effort, to ensure that never ever again do any competitors have a snowball's chance of displacing the current crop.
This current crop specializes in rigging things, to sabotage all real threats to their power or status, in the name of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity!
All the coal we have burned since the Industrial Age began can fit inside a football field. Great example of 2 dimensional thinking. Interesting that someone on here believes a degree from Howard confers as much status as a degree from Harvard.
Ho ho ho. Good luck with that. The area of a football field but a thousand miles high?
Actually, what's worse than that is that a lot of that coal waste is in our atmosphere and our lungs.
Easier stack 1000 mi high than 2,000 yrs long
Absurd statement.
OK, Mike, here is your homework assignment: Google “how long is radioactive waste radioactive”. Devise a plan for dealing with the radioactivity to the end of that period. Through every possible physical change wrought by man or nature upon that location and with every possible change in language or culture which people who might encounter this problem might undergo. Then contemplate piling coal.
As it happens, I worked on just such a project for nearly 20 years. It's entirely doable with current technology.
Probably just a matter of finding the right football field.
The link was explicitly 3D, "and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards."
And that's only because we don't use fast neutron reactors, which don't accumulate transplutonics and can even burn them up. They also burn up neutron poisons and therefore can increase/decrease output power quickly, which makes them a potential replacement for gas-fired dispatchable generation capacity, not just base load. Old Russian lead-bismuth submarine reactors reportedly could go from idling to full throttle in a few minutes.