Society

Harvard–A View From 1835

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Harriet Martineau was a British writer who has been called ‘the first female sociologist’ and even ‘the mother of sociology.’   (No fair blaming her for the activities of sociologists today!)   From 1834-1836, she paid a long visit to the United States and traveled and observed extensively.   Her comments about Harvard University are interesting:

The politics of the managers of Harvard University are opposed to those of the great body of the American people. She is the aristocratic college of the United States. Her pride of antiquity, her vanity of pre-eminence and wealth, are likely to prevent her renovating her principles and management so as to suit the wants of the period; and she will probably receive a sufficient patronage from the aristocracy, for a considerable time to come, to encourage her in all her faults. She has a great name, and the education she affords is very expensive in comparison with all other colleges. The sons of the wealthy will therefore flock to her. The attainments usually made within her walls are inferior to those achieved elsewhere, her professors (poorly salaried, when the expenses of living are considered) being accustomed to lecture and examine the students, and do nothing more. The indolent and the careless will therefore flock to her. But, meantime, more and more new colleges are rising up, and are filled as fast as they rise, whose principles and practices are better suited to the wants of the time. In them living is cheaper, and the professors are therefore richer with the same or smaller salaries; the sons of the yeomanry and mechanic classes resort to them; and, where it is the practice of the tutors to work with their pupils, as well as lecture to them, a proficiency is made which shames the attainments of the Harvard students. The middle and lower classes are usually neither Unitarian nor Episcopalian, but“orthodox,” as their distinctive term is; and these, the strength and hope of the nation, avoid Harvard, and fill to overflowing the oldest orthodox colleges; and, when these will hold no more, establish new ones.

She attended a Harvard commencement and remarked on the speeches given:

A great variety of exercises were gone through by the young men: orations were delivered, and poems, and dialogues, and addresses. Some of these appeared to me to have a good deal of merit; two or three were delivered by students who relied on their reputation at college, with a manner mixed up of pomposity and effrontery, which contrasted amusingly with the modesty of some of their companions, who did things much more worth of honour. I discovered that many, if not most of the compositions, contained allusions to mob-law; of course, reprobating it. This was very satisfactory, particularly if the reprobation was accompanied with a knowledge of the causes and a recognition of the real perpetrators of the recent illegal violences; a knowledge that they have invariably sprung out of a conflict of selfish interests with eternal principles; and a recognition that their perpetrators have universally been, at first or second hand, aristocratic members of American society.

The next day, Martineau attended the annual meeting of Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa society:

Prayers were said by the chaplain of the society; and then a member delivered an address. This address was, and is, to me a matter of great surprise. I do not know what was thought of it by the members generally; but if its doctrine and sentiments are at all sanctioned by them, I must regard this as another evidence, in addition to many, that the minority in America are, with regard to social principles, eminently in the wrong. The traveller is met everywhere among the aristocracy of the country with what seems to him the error of concluding that letters are wisdom, and that scholarship is education. Among a people whose profession is social equality, and whose rule of association is universal self-government, he is surprised to witness the assumptions of a class, and the contempt which the few express for the many, with as much assurance as if they lived in Russia or England. Much of this is doubtless owing to the minds of the lettered class having been nourished upon the literature of the old world, so that their ideas have grown into a conformity with those of the subjects of feudal institutions, and the least strong-minded and original indiscriminately adopt, not merely the language, but the hopes and apprehensions, the notions of good and evil which have been generated amidst the antiquated arrangements of European society: but, making allowance for this, as quite to be expected of all but very strong and original minds, it is still surprising that within the bounds of the republic, the insolence should be so very complacent, the contempt of the majority so ludicrously decisive as it is. Self-satisfied, oracular ignorance and error are always as absurd as they are mournful; but when they are seen in full display among a body whose very ground of association is superiority of knowledge and of the love of it, the inconsistency affords a most striking lesson to the observer. Of course, I am not passing a general censure on the Association now under notice; for I know no more of it than what I could learn from the public exercises of this day, and a few printed addresses and poems. I am speaking of the tone and doctrine of the orator of the day, who might be no faithful organ of the society, but whose ways of thinking and expressing himself were but too like those of many literary and professional men whom I met in New England society.

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The CEO of the United States?

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In an interview, Elon Musk said he wished we could “just have a normal person as President.”   He also went on to say:

Since the president is effectively the executive officer of the country, it actually matters if they are a good executive officer. It’s not simply a matter of do they share your beliefs. But are they good at getting things done? There are a lot of decisions that need to be made every day. Many of them are unrelated to moral beliefs.”

I certainly agree with Elon about the importance of executive skill in a President–it is an ability that is clearly and sadly missing in Biden, as well as in certain past Presidents.   After all, the President’s primary and constitutionally-defined job is execution, not legislation. Yet operations is something that Biden is clearly not interested in, nor, I believe, was Obama.

Where I disagree with the above Musk passage is that phrase executive officer of the country.   No.   The President is executive officer of the government, not of the country. The government is not the society.   It is an agent of the society.

If statism in this country existed to the level that a US President could truly be said to be the executive officer of the country, then Musk would not have been able to accomplish the things he has accomplished without overwhelming levels of government approval, far about and beyond those approvals he has in fact had to get.   Rinse and repeat for all innovations, whether product or business process.

Indeed, given the role of Congress and that of the judiciary, even a President’s job as executive officer of the country is more analogous to a Chief Operating Officer in the private sector than that of a private-sector CEO.

Head–Heart–Stomach

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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 strikes me that this comprehensive approach to high-certainty murder provides a pretty good analogy for what is going on in America and in many other Western nations.  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.

In the year 2023, all of these things are under assault.

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 hass 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 Koestlerâ’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 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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The Kids — They May Not be Alright

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A poster at Twitter, responding to a CDC survey showing that 45% of high school students were so persistently sad or hopeless that they were unable to engage in regular activities and that almost 1 in 5 had seriously considered suicide. His story:

One of my kids’ best friends went to a remote, outward bound style summer camp deep last summer. She came back giddy, and told her mom how amazing it was that the entire time she was there no one talked about climate change or politics or activism or genders. For 2 weeks, they were all allowed to just be kids again. Parents – liberals in particular – think they’re churning out little warriors now, but they aren’t. They’re churning out depressed, confused, terrified, angry, despondent, lost, broken young adults. As someone who has spent a lifetime fighting depression, seeing what we’re doing to our kids fucking infuriates me, and the idea that it’s perceived by so many as virtuous sends me over the edge. Kids’ lives are so wrapped up in the twin harms of the shallowness of social media and the existential dread of things far out of their control that they’re breaking apart, and parents are facilitating it.

The Twitter thread is here…also read the comments.