John Jay

I share too much with the world in my blog posts, as it is.

Multiple Cultures

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After Ralph’s thought-provoking post below, I’d like to take another pot-shot at the multicultural elites who seem to value any other culture more than our own.

One of the things that persistently puzzles me about the multi-cultural crowd is that, at least when I was a TA, they shied away from intellectually rigorous activity such as studying a foreign language. One would think that actually learning to speak a non-Western tongue would do more for true inter-cultural understanding than any pastiche of factoids, half-truths and generalized misinformation about other cultures that is the general Introduction to Foreign Culture claptrap at most Universities.

The cynic in me says that most multi-culturalists don’t go in for a detailed study of a foreign language for three reasons it would take away the focus from their departments, it’s hard (non-Western languages generally come with non-Western writing systems, and in my experience, students run from those like the plague), and, to Ralph’s point, the more in-depth you study some cultures, the more you are thankful you weren’t born into them. Hardly conducive to the facile moral relativism of the multi-culti crowd.

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Telling Stories

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Jonathan beat me to one of the core ideas of a post I’ve been working on for a few days – a post about evil, art, and self-delusion. Here goes anyway.

Concerning the New Deal, John Updike is a poet in the Platonic sense. And I don’t mean that as a compliment.

The impression of recovery–the impression that a President was bending the old rules and, drawing upon his own courage and flamboyance in adversity and illness, stirring things up on behalf of the down-and-out–mattered more than any miscalculations in the moot mathematics of economics.

To which the great Greg Mankiw replies:

When evaluating political leaders, it is better to trust “the moot mathematics of economics” than “the impression of recovery.”

Wise words, but hardly new ones. In the fourth century B.C.E., Plato is said to have uttered pretty much the same thing:

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Recycling

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Blog-city is closing my personal blog account, and given their spotty service, I’m not going to pay to upgrade to their premium service. For my personal blog, I am going into a joint venture with my blog-buddy CW (who is much more interesting than I am, and is worth reading just for his sleuthing on the missing 727 alone). For the next few months, I’m going to be recycling some old posts, and given Ralf’s post below, I thought that the links in this one might be interesting to some of you:

It is well known that a large contingent of German soldiers fought with the British in the American Revolution, most of whom hailed from the Landgraviates of Hesse-Kassel. These troops were not mercenaries in the traditional sense, since rent-a-regiments were common in 18th Century Europe it gave the home state revenue, it gave the troops something to do other than cause trouble at home, and it kept the troopers at peak combat readiness. As part of the rental agreement, the Hessian state received guarantees of mutual defense from England in case of attack by France, so in a sense the Hessians were fighting for their homeland by serving the British Crown. What is less well known is that some of those troops stayed in America after the war.

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You Get What You Measure

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David Foster, in the comments to my previous post, links to this article. Actually, one of the factors that got me to thinking about the problem of bureaucratic failure about 10 years ago was an article in some British medical journal, probably either  the Lancet or  BMJ (I can’t remember which and if anyone knows this article, I’d appreciate the cite), talking about how measuring specific performance factors in the British Hospital system made things less safe because anything that was not on the government performance evaluation was not given any thought or resources, and the government had missed some pretty big and life-threatening issues. If it jogs anyone’s memory, I believe that the author was an Indian practicing in Britain.

As a small “l” libertarian, I tend to take the same approach to civil society and business regulations that I take to parenting. Laugh if you wish, but I came across an expression of this philosophy when I was 7 or 8 in a children’s book, The Great Ringtail Garbage Caper. It’s a book about a bunch of raccoons who take matters into their own hands and “borrow” a garbage truck to make their own rounds when two new garbage men start cleaning up too efficiently. Pretty libertarian book, now that I come to think of it. It resonated, and I even thirty years later I still recite the line verbatim:

“Make as few rules as possible, but don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”