Academia

Formalism and Credentialism: Reversing the Trend?

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The Trump victory represents in significant part a popular reaction against the excesses of credentialism.  I’m remembering a 2018 post at the Federalist:  Our Culture War Is Between People Who Get Results And Empty Suits With Pristine Credentials….Donald Trump declines the authority of the cultural sectors that most assertively claim it. That’s  the real conflict going on.

The post reminded me of an interchange that took place between Picasso and Matisse as the German Army advanced through France in 1940.  Matisse was shocked to learn that the enemy had already reached Reims.  “But what about our generals?” asked Matisse. “What are they doing?”

Picasso’s response: “Well, there you have it, my friend. It’s the Ecole des Beaux-Arts”…ie, formalists who had learned one set of rules and were not interested in considering deviations from same.

It was an astute remark, and it fits very well with the observations of Andre Beaufre, who before the invasion had been a young captain on the French General Staff. Although he had initially been thrilled to be placed among this elevated circle…

I saw very quickly that our seniors were primarily concerned with forms of drafting. Every memorandum had to be perfect, written in a concise, impersonal style, and conforming to a logical and faultless plan but so abstract that it had to be read several times before one could find out what it was about… “I have the honour to inform you that I have decided…I envisage…I attach some importance to the fact that…” Actually no one decided more than the barest minimum, and what indeed was decided was pretty trivial.

The consequences of that approach became clear in May 1940.

In addition to the formalism that Picasso hypothesized (and Beaufre observed) on the French General Staff, the civilian side of the French government was highly credential-oriented.  From the linked article:

In the first days of July, 1940, the American diplomat Robert Murphy took up his duties as the  charge d’affaires at the new U.S. embassy in Vichy, France. Coming from his recent post in Paris, he was as impressed as he expected to be by the quality of the Vichy mandarinate, a highly credentialed class of sophisticated officials who were “products of the most rigorous education and curricula in any public administration in the world.”

As the historian Robert Paxton would write, French officials were “the elite of the elite, selected through a daunting series of relentless examinations for which one prepared at expensive private schools.” In July 1940, the elite of the elite governed the remains of their broken nation, a few days after Adolf Hitler toured Paris as its conqueror.  Credentials were the key to holding public office, but not the key to success at the country’s business.

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Vectors of Societal Destruction – and the Growing Pushback Against Them

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In Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, one of the characters explains a  ‘European-style gangster hit’,  which he says consists of three shots: head, heart, and stomach.  Yes, that should definitely ensure the target’s demise.

It struck me that this comprehensive approach to high-certainty murder provides a pretty good analogy for some of the malign happenings in America and in many other Western nations, and I wrote a post on that theme last year.  In my analogy, ‘stomach’ represents the basic, essential physical infrastructure of society–energy and food supply, in particular.  ‘Head’ represents the society’s aggregate thought processes: how decisions are made, how truth is distinguished from falsehood.  And ‘heart’ represents the society’s spirit: how people feel about their fellow citizens, their families, friends, and associates, and their overall society.

Over recent years, all of these things are under assault…and, given that 2024 is an election year, I think it’s fair to note that the ideology of the Democratic Party is a major factor in driving all of these malign trends.

Stomach: The suicidal energy policies of Germany could serve as a poster child here, but similar trends are in place in other countries, although mostly not so far along.  (The US state of California seems to want to be next on the list of bad examples.)  The destructive farming policies of Sri Lanka, implemented with the enthusiastic cheerleading of Western experts, now have echoes in Canada and in the Netherlands. And energy and agriculture are of course closely coupled…for the production of fertilizer, for the operation of farm equipment, and for the transportation of supplies to the farms and the transportation of agricultural products to process and distribution centers and ultimately to consumers.

Nearly all physical goods and products come ultimately from farms or from mines. At least in the US and in much of Europe, regulations and litigation have made it very difficult to open new mines and even to keep existing ones in operation. Yet there are very extensive materials requirements for the wind, solar, and battery systems required for the envisaged ‘energy transition’…and the answer, if one asks where these materials should come from, seems to be only ‘not from here.’

Pressuring people and entire economies for maximum use of wind and solar…while at the same time amping up the difficulties and disrespect facing the people and companies involved in the extraction and processing of the necessary materials…is a sure recipe for shortages and Greenflation.

Speaking of disrespect, the American businessman and politician Michael Bloomberg, has made some rather remarkable assertions about both farming and manufacturing.  With regard to farming, he said:

“I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer,” Bloomberg told the audience at the Distinguished Speakers Series at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School.  “It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.”

…and regarding manufacturing:

“You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs.”

All of which elides the vast array of knowledge and skills required in order to do either farming or manufacturing successfully. I doubt that Bloomberg, for all his knowledge of information technology and finance, has much comprehension of any of these areas.  What he projects here is a feeling of contempt for people who are involved in the physical world rather than his own symbolic world of information technology and media.

Journalists and politicians, in particular, seem to have little grasp of those essential technologies, which I have metaphorically classified under ‘stomach’, even at the most fundamental levels.  And too many political leaders think…even while preaching about their respect for Science, that they can ignore people with actual, practical experience with energy and the other technologies which they wish to control.  For example:

Trudeau’s green hydrogen announcement, as big an international energy policy statement as there has been in memory, was held far from Canada’s energy heartland, and included no one from the energy sector that is currently shouldering the load.

Not only were they not invited, but Trudeau went out of his way to make an absurd statement about the lack of an economic case for LNG that was akin to a drama teacher going on stage at the Detroit Auto Show and telling the audience to get rid of all their wrenches because he didn’t think they were needed anymore.

Head:  The cognitive methods that have made Western societies thrive are under assault. Such benign things as asking students to get the right answer and to show their work are denounced as racism.   Debate and discussion have become difficult as disagreement is often perceived as a threat.  In law, the adversary system itself is under attack as lawyers are pressured not to represent unpopular clients…something that has long been the case in totalitarian nations and in areas dominated by mobs and by lynch law.

A vital part of the toolkit that has driven progress–social progress as well as technological progress–has been the open discussion enabled by the spirit of free speech.  This is under severe attack, not least on university campuses.   A recent Quillette article provides multiple data points on campus hostility to allowing speakers whose view might offend somebody. Link   A 2017 study, based on a sampling of all US registered voters, shows that 30% of Americans favor banning speakers “if the guest’s words are considered to be hateful or offensive by some.”   Among Democrats–and professors and administrators are much more likely to be Democrats than to be Republicans–the corresponding number is 40%. And for Democrat women–a demographic which is in the ascendency in key roles on campus–the opposition to free speech, as measured by the above question, is 47%.   Link  Not a hopeful sign for the future of campus free speech or for the direction that American society will evolve as students who have come of age in its universities move out into the wider world.

In science, ideas and conclusions which conflict with established views and prestigious people are increasingly likely to be condemned and suppressed as ‘misinformation.’  This paper Link argues persuasively that identity politics and censorship go hand in hand.  Major scientific publications are now evaluating submitted papers based on (what someone thinks are) the moral implications of the proposed conclusions, not just on the truth or falsity of those conclusions–see Alex Tabarrok’s recent post as well as this Quillette article.

There are of course precedents for this kind of thing.  As the blogger Neo notes, “The Soviets actively squelched science that contradicted certain political messages they wished to get across.”   The agricultural catastrophe that was brought about by the nonsensical but politically-correct and politically-enforced theories of Lysenko is well-documented history, but the damage is much broader than that.  This article mentions that the Soviets at one point banned resonance theory, in chemistry, as “bourgeois pseudoscience.”  The field of cybernetics–feedback systems and automatic control–was at one point denounced as “a misanthropic pseudo-theory”, among other things.  (It is interesting to note that “few of these critics had any access to primary sources on cybernetics”…the denunciations were largely based on other Soviet anti-cybernetics sources.)

In Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon, protagonist Rubashov is an Old Bolshevik who has been arrested by the Stalinist regime. The book represents his musings while awaiting trial and likely execution.

A short time ago, our leading agriculturalist, B., was shot with thirty of his collaborators because he maintained the opinion that nitrate artificial manure was superior to potash.  No. 1 is all for potash; therefore B. and the thirty had to be liquidated as saboteurs.  In a nationally centralized agriculture, the alternative of nitrate or potash is of enormous importance: it can decide the issue of the next war.  If No. 1 was in the right, history will absolve him.  If he was wrong…

Note that phrase in a nationally centralized agriculture.  When things are centralized, decisions become overwhelmingly important. There will be strong pressure against allowing dissidents to “interfere with” what has been determined to be the One Best Way.

The assault on what I have called “cognitive methods that have made Westerns societies thrive” has not originated only from the universities, but they have been the most influential source of this destructive challenge. Which is ironic, given that the great growth of educational institutions was driven by and premised on the Enlightenment ideals that all too many of these institutions seem focused on negating.

There was once a rather sinister toy: it consisted of a box with a switch on the side. When you turned the switch to on, the box would open, and a hand would come out, and the thing would turn itself off.  The behavior of much of western academia seems modeled after the behavior of that box.  Unfortunately, it’s not just themselves that these institutions may succeed in turning off.

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No, They Don’t Really Believe in ‘Equality’

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Kamala Harris has talked a lot about ‘equality,’ and she doesn’t mean equality before the law, nor equality of opportunity but equality of outcomes, ie, equity in the current terminology of the Left.  (video)  Many other “progressive” politicians have adopted similar positions, though rarely expressed in quite so explicit and extreme a manner.  But I would argue that very few among those politicians and other prominent or influential people who argue for ‘equity’ or ‘equality’ really want any such thing.

Consider, for example: Many people in ‘progressive’ leadership positions are graduates of the Harvard Law School. Do you think these people want to see a society in which the career, status, and income prospects for an HLS grad are no better than those for a graduate of a lesser-known, lower-status (but still very good) law school?  C’mon.

Quite a few ‘progressive’ leaders are members of prominent families. Do you think Teddy Kennedy would have liked to see an environment in which he and certain other members of his family would have had to answer for their actions in the criminal courts in the same way that ordinary individuals would, without benefit from connections, media influence, and expensive lawyers?

The prevalence of  ‘progressivism’ among tenured professors is quite high. How many of these professors would be eager to agree to employment conditions in which their job security and employee benefits were no better than those enjoyed by average Americans? How many of them would take a salary cut in order to provide higher incomes for the poorly-paid adjunct professors at their universities? How many would like to see PhD requirements eliminated so that a wider pool of talented and knowledgeable individuals can participate in university teaching?

There are a lot of  ‘progressives’ among the graduates of Ivy League universities. How many of them would be in favor of legally eliminating alumni preferences and the influence of  contributions and have their children considered for  admission–or not–on the same basis as everyone else’s kids? Yet an alumni preference is an intergenerational asset in the same way that a small businessman’s store or factory is such an asset.

Do you think that Hillary Clinton would be happy living as an ordinary individual, without power, status, national and global recognition, and, yes, the money she and her husband have been able to accumulate  in their lifetime of ‘public service’?  (I remember she once chose to wear a $12K Armani jacket while delivering a speech lamenting Inequality)  Is Kamala herself not seeking a rather extreme form of inequality by seeking the highest office in the land?  Is not regular access to Air Force One a form of inequality at least as potent as a billionaire’s access to the business or personal jet that he owns?

The reality is that ‘progressivism’ is not in any way about equality, it is rather about shifting the distribution of power and wealth in a way that benefits those with certain kinds of educational credentials and certain kinds of connections, and, especially those who are holders of important political offices. And remember, power is always and everywhere transmutable into wealth. Sometimes that wealth is directly in monetary form, as with the millions of dollars that former presidents such as  Clinton and Obama have made from speaking fees, or the money made by a former government official who leverages his contacts into an executive job with a an energy company even though he may have minimal knowledge of either energy or business. And sometimes the wealth takes the form of in-kind benefits, like a governor’s mansion or access to government aircraft.  (Those who lived in the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe can tell you all about in-kind benefits for nominally low-paid officials.)  Plus, power itself provides a kind of ‘psychic income’, which can be as valuable to the beneficiary as is monetary income.

And, almost always, today’s ‘progressivism;  is about the transfer of power from individuals to credentialed ‘experts’ who will coerce or ‘nudge’ people to do what those experts have decided would be best.

To a very substantial extent, the talk about ‘equity’ and ‘equality’  is a smokescreen, conscious or unconscious, behind which  ‘progressives’ pursue their own economic, status, and ego agendas.  It is a about a kind of class warfare, conducted on a horizontal rather than a vertical basis.  If your career is based on academic credentials from an ‘elite’ university, or on political connections, or on being in a politically-favored industry, you would come out ahead under the Harris-Walz view of how things should work. But if your career is based on hard work, measurable accomplishment, and creativity, not so much. Especially if you are not willing to eagerly express agreement with whatever the elements of the  ‘progressive’ worldview might be at any particular time.

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The Demons Return

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This is Barclay’s Bank, St Johns Wood, after overnight attack by ‘Pro-Palestine’ activists:

Link

“Palestine Action” has openly bragged about this and other attacks on Barclays.

Don’t think this is only a UK thing.   In Washington, DC, ‘protestors’ vandalized monuments on Federal property and threw bottles at a park ranger.

Link with video

It gets worse.   At UCLA, the Chabad Rabbi was assaulted live on camera, with students calling him a “Zionist pedophile Rabbi,” telling him to “go back to Poland.”   Link with video. Also at UCLA: More ‘protestor’ violence.

In NYC, Palestinians and/or their supporters protested outside a theater, attempting to intimidate Jews and their supporters who were inside the theater screening a movie about October 7.   Video.

The response to the events at UCLA from the UCLA Faulty Association was to complain about the university’s (highly insufficient) attempts to contain the ‘protestor’ violence.   “Campuses are not police states. @UCLA stop militarizing our workplace, cease and desist from using police violence against students and employees.”    

It is worth noting that virtually ALL of the recent ‘pro-Palestinian’ (anti-Israel–anti-Semitic–anti-American–and anti-civilization) violence and intimidation has been centered on America’s institutions of higher education.

The title of this post is taken from a chapter heading in Peter Drucker’s 1939 book The End of Economic Man, which is about the rise of European totalitarianism.