Arnold Kling reflects on matters of order that nicely resemble my own thinking. He starts a recent blog post with this:
Society is orderly when people are mostly playing positive-sum games. Voluntary exchange is a positive-sum game. Both of us are better off. Taking someone else’s stuff is a negative-sum game. If I take your stuff, not only do you lose your stuff, but now you have to think about putting resources into protecting stuff instead of making stuff.
His discussion is about how he views the threats to our social order from different angles. He concludes with the latest penchant among the elites for radical progressivism.
Degeneracy
Finally, and most worrisome of all, I see the moral/intellectual order in tatters. That is where I echo some of the most strident voices on the right. On Substack, I keep amplifying Aaron Renn, who wrestles with the challenges to traditional religion and moral conduct. I keep amplifying Lorenzo Warby, who rails against the intellectual bullying by radical progressives.
Kling names several others criticizing these developments.
I would note that I don’t care much for the term “elite” as a category, since it is overused in order to complain about some anonymous unseen forces—it’s convenient as a catch-all, but too broad to be of much use. More specificity would be preferable.
Nonetheless, there are clearly people who use their influence to make topics like gender identity into the dominant subject of our day. Other than calling those human beings “elites” of some stripe, I can’t think of a more succinct and convenient term. Can you?
Last night I found some pistachio muffins for sale, so I bought a 4-pack. They are green! 😀 I left them in my office for my youngest. I showed them to Katie last night who had a concerned look on her face. "I don't remember buying these; did they fall behind the breadbox over Christmas break? 🤦♂️
"Pistachio, not penicillin". She looked closer at the label, realizing the green was from the pistachios...
On the subject of edcuation. The New Yorker has this:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/18/have-the-liberal-arts-gone-conservative
(Apologies for pay wall issues, haven't figured out how to get around them).
It's on the rise of Classical education - facts, objectivity, the Trivium (for a start). It is a big deal in homeschooling and is often connected to religion. But not always and not necessarily.
After an unrelated conversation about the difference in connotation between "school" (hierarchical) and "academy" (collaborative), it struck me that both the critics of the program and the critics within the program fell into the hierarchical mindset rooted in the idea questions could settled for all time.
Questions about real scientific processes (the basic functioning of the digestive tract, say) that have been tested and test results reliably reproduced comes as close to settled as we can get.
Questions about psychology and behavior can only go so far because psychology is intertwined with experience, imagination and creativity. Responses can evolve and usually do.
The portion of educational research that is rooted in contemporary ideals looks only at the present and so has limited use. It often deserves CybthiaW's recommended sneer. None of its conclusions can be said to be settled.
The fact that certain methods of education have been effective for many people over the centuries points to the presence of something that is settled. Language is phonetic, memorization stocks the memory with facts that save time (generally quicker to recall 12×7 than to punch it into a calculator), logic is logic because it works, knowledge of grammar reduces confusion when communicating across distance, native language and experience. History tells us how we got here. Experience tells us we can't change if we don't accurately understand how we got here.
These systems evolved in an environment with much higher stakes. Sometimes love requires saying "Honey, not everyone is good at this." Or "Honey, being really good at something requires hard work, more work than you seem willingto put in." Let the guy who is good at it take down the bear.
I have come to believe that sports and the arts are the most important elements in education right now. Playing an instrument well, decreasing your sprint time through training, being part of the act that brings the house down, dunking the winning basket, painting a scene that wows viewers - these things can not be faked.
In contrast, grades based on assignments created in an environment demanding academic "improvement" - they can be faked. And children sense this.