School as Hoop-Jumping, and the Failure of Education

I have from time to time discussed here my experience of college teaching--and where college teaching often goes wrong, certainly in those areas where I am most familiar with it (the teaching of college English). Where all this is concerned one can point to failures in the design of curricula and of methods (as with composition teachers who mistake themselves for Zen Masters and run their classes in line with their delusions).

However, that is far from the only source of the problem, with what the student brings with them often an issue as well. Most of the criticism we hear about this has to do with their K-12 preparation, which is a matter not just of what schools fail to instill in their students, but what they them do instill in them instead--a cynicism toward education.

It has long been understand that, besides any narrowly academic content, our schools (designed to prepare workers for employment in nineteenth century mills; education for two centuries ago, today!) go to great lengths to inculcate habits of punctuality, self-restraint, tolerance of boredom, and above all, deference to authority figures. To many it may seem that they do not succeed in all this so well as they ought. However, they succeed in this to a rather greater degree than they do in inculcating a respect for knowledge and an understanding that they may get something useful to them here, such that the so-called "hidden curriculum" of habit inculcation can seem the real curriculum, the only curriculum, as it is the rest of what they are supposed to learn that gets obscured, everything they do really seeming to be about placating these authority figure messing with their lives.

At higher levels of education, where more is demanded of the student intellectually--where unless they can take a genuine interest and make a genuine effort nothing much can be expected--this gets to be a real problem, perhaps especially in classes in the humanities that get so little respect. It seems to me that it should be fairly obvious that, for instance, a composition class intended to aid a student in developing the skills of reading closely, thinking critically, and communicating clearly, can have value to everyone--but no matter what anyone tells those ruined for such training by prior experience, they believe that it is just more hoop-jumping, to be treated accordingly.

What Ever Happened to the Debate About Euthanasia?

The recent "assisted suicide" of former Dutch Prime Minister Dries and Eugenie van Agt put euthanasia back into the news--for a little while, at least.

Back in the 1990s, and their overhang into the early 2000s, the topic of euthanasia and all associated with it--like the philosophical, moral and legal question of whether human beings have a "right to die"--seems to have been much more commonly discussed than in the years since. Indeed, it seemed a "hot button" culture war topic comparable to abortion, sufficiently so that South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone devoted an episode of their short-lived sitcom That's My Bush! to it.

Little of it has been heard since--but I suspect it is not because the matter was somehow "settled" in some consensus. Quite the contrary. The evidence indicates that a majority, perhaps a very significant majority, of Americans support the right to die, but taking the fifty states as a whole very little changed legally here.

Why a gap so vast, and at the same time so unremarked?

One possibility is that the issue was crowded out by a crisis-packed century, and the explosion of conflicts that were previously suppressed rather than settled. (Remember how a certain sort of commentator was prone to claim that the country had become "post-racial" not so many years ago? They don't say that now.)

In that it may have helped that the existing situation aligned with the preferences of the right, especially given its success in driving the agenda in American politics in recent decades. There was no equivalent to Roe vs. Wade here for them to protest against--and so, as far as the media was concerned, no argument, making it that much easier for the issue to fall by the wayside.

The "'80s Jerk," Again

The last time that I raised the issue of the "'80s jerk" my explanation of the phenomenon was that in that earlier era of film-making we still had lots of grounded, smaller-scale stories where the stakes are personal rather than galactic and petty meanness or ambition could be significant plot points in movies viewed by large numbers of people.

Yet I can also see a possibility of there being more to the matter than that--reflecting the rightward turn of politics and popular culture in that time. One is a strengthening of the tendency (admittedly, probably always stronger in America than other places in the Western world) to think less in terms of society and the way it is structured and more of individuals, and the obstacle to the hero's realization of their goals as a matter of entirely individual villains. ("It's not the apple barrel that's rotten, just a few bad apples," the conventional always say. Like Sigourney Weaver being all that's really wrong with Wall Street so that Carly Simon sings "Let the river run!" over the end credits to Working Girl.)

Another may be that it was a vehicle of selective bashing of authority--the kind of authority that those skewing rightward did not much like, who tend to be the equal and opposite of the ultraconformist "maverick" the conventional so love. (Thus in libertarian Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters we see the Environmental Protection Agency presented in a very bad light indeed--in contrast with the protagonists who departed academia for private entrepreneurship who save the day.)

So far as I can tell the essential outlook endures, even as the stories that big movies tend to tell have not.

The Truth About the Experts and the Public

One of the eternal laments of the centrist ideologue and their media element is that the public did not defer completely to established expertise, while painting those among the public who fail to do so as a pack of anti-intellectual Know-Nothings. The idea that there could be expertise outside the Establishment; that the Establishment's expertise may be significantly flawed; that those non-Establishment experts, and even others, may have a sound, strong, critique of the Establishment; is something they do not, cannot, concede. In particular they can never admit that the professionalization of knowledge has its dangers, especially where the professionals are especially close to and especially watched by the powerful, such that rather than devoting themselves to fact, truth and public service they just tell the powerful what they want said--because the centrist is famously evasive on the question of power, and anyway conservative enough that they are as respectful toward those on top as they are disrespectful toward those on the bottom, such that even if they did acknowledge such a thing they would not see it as a problem. Still less does the centrist consider the significances of their own lapses in respect for the experts--as in how they disregarded the consensus among climate scientists about anthropogenic climate change as not only real but a problem warranting urgent redress to accommodate the denialists. No, they are sure, the disrespect that bothers them must be a matter of the grubby Know-Nothings being too arrogant and cynical (never mind where that comes from, the centrist is not big on reasoning things out to their causes) to show their upstanding betters the proper respect.

Of Intergenerational Conflict and Military Recruitment

The resurgence of great power conflict over this past decade has brought with it a certain amount of rethinking of the ways in which the Western world has organized its armed forces. The 1990s saw them shift away from emphasizing large-scale conventional conflict to the execution of missions that were smaller in scale but placed a higher premium on rapid-reaction--a reorientation which seemed the safer because of a very high confidence in the capacity of high technology to replace "boots on the ground" in what was essentially a translation of "information age"-type thinking into a "Revolution in Military Affairs". Since then some have been quicker about it than others--but the mainstream of the dialogue seems to have reoriented itself back toward the prospect of older-style, larger-scale conflict.

Amid all that there has naturally been a good deal of talk about expanded military forces, and how they will come up with the required extra personnel, with proponents of such expansion taking yet another chance to sneer at much-maligned "Generation Z" and its supposed lack of the virtues of earlier generations (not least, "the Greatest"). To his, and the journal's, credit, Brian McAllister Linn published a historically grounded piece in the Autumn 2023 Parameters debunking the myth-making, reminding the professional youth-bashers that "since the beginning of the twentieth century the peacetime volunteer Army" (before which the peacetime volunteer Army was a relatively small entity with limited needs) "has been in a crisis more often than not" with respect to its ability to attract recruits, and that "[t]empting as it is to blame 'wokeness,' slacker mentality, Generation Z, or some other nebulous reason," their predecessors as much as they were prone to " join the service for individual reasons, most based on expectations of personal benefit" rather than greater possession of some "warrior" or "citizen-soldier" quality. Alas, lucidly written as Linn's article is, relatively few of the commentariat these days would even seem to possess the required reading level to understand the text at the most elementary level--let alone use it to enlighten a dialogue as depressingly mired as ever in cultural and intergenerational warfare.

Making Sense of the Twenty-First Century: A Few Thoughts

While my academic writing on world affairs initially concentrated on security studies this early on led me away from the field's traditional subject matter toward the economics of the matter--and increasingly to economic questions as such.

It was simply where the action seemed to be (more obviously so in a time in which great power conflict was constrained and declining in comparison with the prior century).

And so I went on writing about the decline of growth rates since the post-war boom and especially the 2007 financial crisis, deindustrialization, financialization, the methods for measuring such developments, the associated economic models and ideologies, and even the social consequences of these troubles, from the erosion of the American middle class to the social withdrawal of the young.

Of course, the events of recent years have made it harder to overlook those more traditional emphases of international relations scholarship--with the result that I ended up writing about such topics as the shifting naval balance between the U.S. on one side and Russia and China on the other, the comparative military-industrial capacities of the U.S. and Russia, the contraction in size of the major West European military establishments, and the changing defense postures of Germany and Japan--and of course, the waning of what has commonly been called unipolarity.

In spite of that one should not mistake this for "security" replacing "economics." The unhappy trend of our economic life is, of course, strongly connected with the increased conflict we have seen in the international scene--though as yet few seem to have troubled themselves much about any linkages, not least because the "experts" so hastened to relegate the crisis of 2007 to the past.

The historian Adam Tooze, indeed, admitted to having shared the conventional wisdom when taking up the subject--only to, when publishing his book on that crisis and its aftermath a decade later, confess that he had since learned better. As Tooze came to realize through his researches the Great Recession was not past in 2018, and is not past now--while the shock of the pandemic, which remains ongoing, is not past either, one crisis merely piled atop another.

Alas, others not in a position to pursue scholarship such as Tooze does, or even properly equipped to cope with his very useful but also long, dense, book demanding more than the "eighth grade and under" reading level of even the college-educated, were aware of the fact all along--through the day to day experience of their own lives, which for many became decidedly more bitter than before.

The Impossible Writing Tasks the Suits Demand of Writers, and the James Bond Series

Recently polishing and putting up a number of book reviews of John Gardner's James Bond novels, and considering the hugely uneven body of work that quite talented author unmistakably contributed to that franchise, it seemed a reminder of how by the time he was enlisted to work on the series continuing the James Bond novels was pretty much one of those impossible tasks that writers are only enjoined to do because the people who own the franchise see more money in it. By the 1980s Ian Fleming's creation was so much out of his time that "more Ian Fleming" was unsalable, and at the same time a more contemporary version of James Bond so unrecognizable that it was pointless to call him James Bond. Reflecting all this Gardner, after (to the extent that his irony toward the character allowed it) going from one extreme to the other in his first two books (a thoroughly updated Bond in Licence Renewed, a thoroughly backward-looking, nostalgic, adventure in the next book, For Special Services), and then mostly offered compromises that did not please many. Unsurprisingly, while Gardner's Bond novels were bestsellers through the 1980s (every one of them from Licence Renewed to Win, Lose or Die making that gold standard of those lists in America, the New York Times hardcover fiction list), they left very little longer impression--certainly to go by that handy index of enduring readership, Goodreads. Customer ratings and reviews are very few for these bestsellers, suggesting that they have not been looked at much in a long time--which in light of what I have seen of the books, and of the franchise recently, bespeaks these books not being forgotten gems, but rather the Bond franchise soldiering on through decades of declining public interest simply because there was just enough money in it for that. Alas, as the audience's response to No Time to Die showed (and as the slowness of Everything-Or-Nothing to get work underway on Bond 26 has also showed), the days of that are likely coming to an end.

Selling Authors, Not Books

As Balzac's vulgarian Dauriat has made clear, the commercial publisher is apt to be more interested in selling the famous name of an author--in selling an author--than in selling an author's writing. One may find this epitomized in the ever-crowdedness of the bestseller lists with celebrity memoirs that, in spite of being ghostwritten on behalf of the illiterates whose names are the object of the traffic, with little regard for the truth, still have nothing to offer an intelligent reader.

Indeed, people have come to expect such selling so much that even those who should know better seem to be taken in by all the nonsense, with the blow-up over a certain gratuitously and superciliously insulting profile of Brandon Sanderson that the editors of Wired magazine bizarrely decided to publish exemplary. Brandon Sanderson was, in the view of the interviewer in question, interesting only as a writer of books that a significant fan base enjoyed reading.

There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, that is all anyone can--or should--ask of a major commercial author. But the interviewer, who did not seem to understand this, started another of those Internet tempests-in-a-teacup that are all people can talk about for hours, but which they have completely forgotten a month, even a week, later.

It is a sad, sad testament not only to what book-selling had already become in Balzac's day, and how it has only gone on getting more disgusting since, but to the way in which the "Fourth Estate" so utterly assimilates and promotes the logic of those whom it should be challenging.

Josiah Bounderby and the Aspirational Society

I have in the past remarked how while Charles Dickens' Ebenezer Scrooge became so familiar a figure culturally that "Scrooge" is a byword for selfish callousness, Josiah Bounderby from Hard Times never got anywhere near so much attention--and indeed reference to him so scarce that the only recent ones I found were in an Indian Express blog post discussing one specimen of the type, and the comparison a South Korean judge drew between the Samsung executives in their recent high-profile trial and Dickens' creation.

It seemed to me that this is because the cult of the "self-made man," if probably universal today (the Indian item specifically attacked this) is so particularly strong in America today--and if discredited over and over again by those sociologists who actually attend to the facts, challenging it a cultural taboo, so much so that few dare do anything that could be construed as doing so.

Thinking about that in the past I have tended to focus on the ways in which this taboo is used to defend the validity of extreme differences in wealth, but that mainly in terms of how it does so by helping defend the claims to great wealth on the grounds that it is the product of great contributions to society. Factoring into this is what this is supposed to mean to the rest of the public--not only that the extreme difference in outcome is valid, but one way in which they and their house intellectuals deflect calls for egalitarianism, telling "the poors" that "You can do it too!"

Admitting to the reality of Josiah Bounderby would be to admit "No, you very likely can't, and certainly shouldn't pin your hopes on it"--and make it a good deal harder to avoid engaging with all to which such an outlook can lead.

Are the Poor Lonelier Than the Rich?

The images of the lonely rich man and the poor who at least have each other are horribly worn cultural cliché.

And besides being well-worn, probably false, more loneliness likely to be found among the poor than the rich.

"How can that be?" one may wonder.

The plain and simple truth is that society is attentive to the problems of the haves--and brushes off the problems of the have-nots. ("Be grateful for what you have!" is ever the answer to the latter as the former are coddled after their every temper tantrum.) And so the loneliness of the rich, just like all the other problems of the rich, get infinitely more press.

But alongside this there is what leaves people lonely. In David Foster Wallace's meandering (and wildly overrated) but not wholly valueless essay "E Pluribus Unum" there is an insight here and there, with one that caught my eye his remark that "[l]onely people tend rather to be lonely because they decline to bear the emotional costs associated with being around other humans."

Those costs are not the same for everyone.

When you have money and status and are sought after, when people show you deference because they cannot afford to show you offense, you are in a very different position to the person who lacks those things, whose company is not sought after, who no one has to treat well with the result that no one does treat them well, and the "emotional costs" of being around others are that much higher accordingly. When you feel safe and protected by your standing in the world, you are in a very different position than the one who is unprotected--who gets brutalized, and as a result find themselves warier of others generally, and is much more likely to have to repress themselves rather than speak freely, with all the alienations that go with that (the "emotional" economy of which Freud wrote strongly paralleling the monetary one).

Indeed, when we look at such realities as social isolation we tend to find that it is not the children of wealth and privilege who turn hikikomori, but the children of much more socioeconomically marginal families that do so. When we look at social retreat in less extreme ways than that--those who eschew relationships, marriage, starting a family, with all these mean for the potential of being with others in a society which leaves few alternatives for robust personal connections--there is a robust statistical correlation between income and involvement, validating not such stupid presumptions as that "Family men work harder" (as if hard work had anything to do with income!), but the fact that people are less likely to have a chance, let alone act on it, in the absence of the conditions that make it possible. And so on and so forth.

But, as one is reminded by the covers of the magazines that most people actually seem to read, celebrities who have everything else will whine about having no one, and people who have nothing will think "Those rich folk sure have it tough."

"It's Only a Hobby"

We all know the cliché of the recipient of a prestigious award in the arts tearfully thanking everyone they have ever met in their life for their "support."

This is, of course, likely to be pure (to use a less fitting but more polite word than the one I originally had in mind) nonsense.

The reality is that the artiste (as Balzac and London," who both knew what they were talking about, each make clear) is unlikely to find support even among their nearest and dearest, who will not understand the need of an artist to create, or his way of fulfilling it. In London's Martin Eden the protagonist's sister was, if incapable of comprehending it, at least sympathetic to Eden, but her husband, Eden's vulgar oaf of a brother-in-law, was not, never missing a chance to sneer.

One of the clichés of such sneering is that what the artist does is "only a hobby."

To anyone who has sweated and sacrificed for their career such remark is insulting in the extreme--and obtuse as they are the speaker not only likely to know this, but delight in saying so.

Perhaps even after suffering all that it is easy to be gracious in the moment in which one is handed a reward.

But that should never make us forget the reality--especially for the far, far greater number of people for whom the prospect of any such awards night is remote in the extreme.

"Sending Everyone to College," Hard Reality, and the Aspirational Mentality

It has long been conventional wisdom among a significant portion of the country's policymakers and commentariat that a plausible response to problems like industrial difficulties and poverty and inequality is "Send more people to college," all while never entertaining any thought of making college more affordable.

No reasonable person would deny that society derives enough benefit from having a system of higher education that one can consider it a modern necessity, and that in an industrialized country (or any country endeavoring to be industrialized) there is a need for a significant portion of the work force to get at least some post-secondary education.

Still, the "Send more people to college"--at its most extreme, the "Send everyone to college" mentality--has worked out to their, rather than arguing for a living wage, encouraging the young to . . . take on student debt as they train for jobs the market does not provide (as with the extreme disproportion between those who pursue arts degrees and those who find jobs requiring them, and even an arguable overproduction of STEM graduates), or if they do find jobs in them, work in them for only a short time, such that one can question the value of the degree to them as individuals who have to make a living (as with many of those STEM graduates who do land jobs in their fields, but soon find themselves replaced by fresher graduates as they are compelled to go and do something else).

One can take the "Send more people to college" mentality for well-intentioned muddle-headedness--or a cynical dodge. However, in either case it contributed to an avoidance of more meaningful efforts to deal with the country's economic difficulties and help the disadvantaged, while greatly benefiting assorted interests (like those collecting all those student loan payments). Alas, that aspirationalism triumphs so completely over egalitarianism in American political culture, and the way in which it has made a sort of respect for "education" a hollow piety but a piety nonetheless, has made it very difficult for those who are neither muddle-headed nor cynical to call it out.

"Not Everything's About You!"

Far be it from me to deny that there are self-absorbed narcissists in the world--and perhaps more of them these days than before.

Yet barring someone's being really, really oblivious to the world around them, being really self-absorbed and narcissistic for very long is something a person is unlikely to manage without having a certain minimum of power--enough so that people do not fling moralizing accusations in their faces, and certainly not the ones who will have seen their self-absorption and narcissism up close, and actually suffered from it.

That is why when we hear the charge it is at least fairly common, and maybe more likely than not, that the self-absorbed narcissist in the conversation is not the one being accused--but the accuser.

"Not everything's about you!" they snarl.

Because you expressing any concern for anything but what I am concerned with is an attempt to diminish from how "Everything's about me! Me! MEEEEEEEE!"

Is the Cult of Celebrity in Decline?

The title of this post may seem an odd question to ask these days, looking at, for example, the extreme heights to which the pop cultural status of Taylor Swift has ascended. Still, I think that even if there are extraordinary outliers, when we look at the bigger picture this is exactly what is happening these days.

Part of it, I think, is the extreme fragmentation of contemporary culture, the more pronounced because of how online life has fragmented. But I also think that the decline of many particular types of celebrity has been relevant, partly as a matter of that fragmentation but not just because of it. There is, for instance, the decline of the movie star over the course of the century (where such factors as the ascent of the film franchise have played their part). There is the decline of the sports star (a function of a declining interest in sports, in which economic factors may be playing their part). There is the decline of the supermodel (which, contrary to the conventional wisdom, seems to me to have by no means run its course in the 1990s, but continued into our time, partly as advertising has changed). And so on and so forth.

Yet that does not seem all of it, a certain "cheapening" of celebrity having also occurred. Overexposure, which seemed a factor years ago as the tabloidization of everything proceeded apace, has likely played its part, removing the sense of distance that was part of celebrity's mystique (as one notices if they have not come to completely filter out of their minds the contents of the clickbait with which we are barraged wherever we go online). Factoring into this is the way in which the category of celebrity has been broadened. Certainly people of conventional mind look at entertainment, sports, fashion and the rest as frivolous, but when those were the foundation of celebrity of that kind the celebrity was at least supposed to be distinguished by some superlative achievement (artistic or athletic skill, for example), or perhaps just exceptional quality (the special something that made somebody "a star!")--as opposed to the idiots we see on all of these online videos, who are famous in spite of being distinguished by nothing at all (or at least nothing good), and inexplicably get millions of views in spite of that.

All that said, is this decline of celebrity I am talking about a bad thing? I find myself remembering that I have written here about the cult of celebrity as having gone insane in the past, and reflected a good deal that was unfortunate and unhappy in our social life. However, the way in which that cult may be passing, if it is passing, does not seem to be suggestive of things getting much better that way, and maybe even their getting worse.

The Ephemeralism of What Passes for Mainstream Social Thought: The Supposed Demise of Celebrity Culture in 2020

Amid major shocks the commentariat tells us that great and profound cultural changes are at hand.

A little while later nothing changes--and the silly pronouncements are forgotten.

Exemplary of this is the claptrap we heard during the early months of the pandemic about the "end of celebrity" (in the New York Times and New York Post, at the BBC and in the Guardian, etc., etc., etc.) back when there was at least some acknowledgment of the severity of the crisis, and the reality that "We're not all in this together," that such catastrophe is one thing for the pampered and protected elite, a very different thing for the rest of humanity.

Today it is forgotten as if it never was (just as the pandemic, the Great Recession and much else are talked about as past when they are nothing of the kind). For my part I do think that the cult of celebrity may well be in decline--but for quite other reasons than the shift of social attitudes in a more egalitarian, socially aware, direction.

Then again, changes in social attitudes of that kind are something we would probably find acknowledged last by that mainstream media, given the ideological and personal blinkers of that apparatus' staff, and especially the portion of it that attends to celebrity culture--a rather revolting pack of courtiers and claqueurs for whom sucking up and punching down are not second nature, but first.