"The Kids Are in Charge: On Downward Mobility," part 2

Well-known economics expert Chris Rock

“Income inequality” is a term that has only recently come into vogue. It instantly turns up 20 million hits on Google, way ahead even of “anthropogenic climate change.” Before 2011, however, according to a May 2014 article on the website of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, the term was infrequently mentioned in the news, at least not online. The New York Times began to lead the way in 2010, with 46 mentions. Did the Times’ coverage give birth to the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement? Somehow one feels there was symbiosis. By 2013, the term appeared in the Times 430 times, compared to 277 in the previous year. Even CNN.com was way behind: “income inequality” appeared only 79 times in 2013, compared to 25 times the previous year. Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has spectacularly profited from the phenomenon. A March 31, 2015, article entitled “Economic Inequality: It’s Far Worse Than You Think” in Scientific American by Nicholas Fitz, “a graduate student in neuroethics” at the University of British Columbia, shows that you don’t have to know anything about economics to opine on the subject. The article begins by quoting well-known economics expert Chris Rock. And now a book has appeared, The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon, reviewed in January in the New York Times by Eduardo Porter. The headline: “America’s Best Days May Be Behind It.” As is well known, the seemingly endless prosperity of the U.S. came to an abrupt end in the mid-1970s.

All these writers seek to pin inequality on economic factors. Left-wing writers, for instance, argue for income redistribution or massive taxation on the wealthy to solve the problem. Most Americans are aware, if not exactly consciously, that such "solutions" have been ongoing for years without much to show for them. After all, the U.S. has spent TRILLIONS since the 1970s in an attempt to address the problems of poverty. (The data for this comes from what is apparently a conservative website. I would like to have added here a link to the New York Times or the Washington Post, but Google turns up no references to articles in either paper concerning the costs of the Great Society programs. Go figure.)

As I suggested in my last post, income inequality is a result of the downward trend of educational achievement since the 1950s. Who wants to hire kids who graduate from high school with below-par reading and computational skills? The downward trend, I argue comes from having put kids in charge of education, which began to take place in 1973. I don’t mean, literally, kids, as in Americans under the age of 18. I mean the values of kids.

What is the value world of kids?

Foremost is getting what they want, which is the natural, indeed most rational, inclination of kids, especially in adolescence, when they are driven by new urgencies. Left to their own devices, kids will always seek their short-term interest, often to their detriment. Consider the risks that teenage boys and girls succumb to, if not kept on the straight and narrow by their parents. At the same time, as parents know, it is hard to "reason" with kids: without ever having heard of Jacques Derrida, kids are natural “deconstructors.” They instinctively feel that all adults are mean. They think all people over the age of 25 are old. Their interests do not include knowing the size of the national budget or about foreign affairs.

Now, if they come from a background in which their every need was met while growing up, and without any particular obstructions in their way, the "kid mentality" will continue into the age of adulthood. Many will continue to live with their parents and be dependent on them for their needs.

Short term describes our current national priorities. Adults are no longer in charge, and we have a nation of dependents.

The transition from adults being in charge to kids being in charge took place beginning in about 1973, which is when my generation began to take over the reigns of the institutions from our parents. We are the generation described in my previous post. It is we who have presided over the decline of American education and of American prosperity.

To be continued.

Picture credit: Time; Rolling Out

“The Kids Are in Charge: On Downward Mobility," part 1

A Clockwork Orange

Back in the 1950s America had plenty of rich people. I don’t mean the now-legendary individuals who were richer than Croesus and, like that king, had names with multiple vowels. I am talking about people who might have been our neighbors and whose wealth was within our comprehension: they didn’t marry movie stars or ski on the slopes of Switzerland. No: they were the first ones who could afford private phone lines and color TVs. In essentials, however, even the life style of the well-off did not diverge profoundly from that of ordinary folks. For instance, the bank manager might have been able to afford a Cadillac, but he didn’t set himself off by driving one. He and his family didn’t travel to Paris for their vacation. His kids went to the same school as the kids of workers.

Consider the situation in the new millennium: Not a single big city mayor or other politician, no prominent hedge-fund manager, attorney, or corporate executive, not to mention investment banker or actor, sends their kids to non-competitive public schools. High earners are no longer in sync with ordinary working folks, and this difference is reflected in the educational outcome of the mass of American children today: except in the richest districts of the country, the process by which schools produce successful children has been reversed since the 1950s.

Here is a comparison that brings the difference down to earth. Consider a boy who began school in 1950 and who, upon graduation from high school twelve years later, became a New York City bus driver or an employee of Con Edison. He and his wife––the one he married not long after high school–– now undoubtedly own at least a second car. (If she also worked after the kids started school, how would she get to her job otherwise?) If they have been sensible in their habits, they own their home, travel by air on vacation, perhaps to Paris if they are interested, and may even have sent their children to college. If seriously ill, they are treated in the same hospitals as wealthier citizens and have reached retirement without a diminution in their lifestyle. If they have been judicious in their spending and with his municipal pension, their children will have to deal with inheritance taxes after their deaths.

 Can the same be said about someone who becomes a New York City bus driver in the new millennium? Most Americans today do not think so.

The change in the educational landscape since 1950 has made all the difference. In the 1950s, kids mastered the three R’s, learned to write in a comprehensible hand, and absorbed the ability to sit quietly at their desks for several hours straight. They developed lots of inner starch and were ready to step into adult jobs on graduation from high school. By the millennium, in contrast, if you aren’t able to read at third-grade level after eight years in school, you move on to high school anyway. Parents  can no longer spank their own children, teachers can't fail them, and everyone agrees that competition is bad for the psyche. What prospects to such children have?

It is not the case that parents today are happy that their children receive a high school degree while possessing inadequate skills. They know, however, that their kids will be passed without doing their homework and even with a poor attendance record. It would take a lot of spine to discipline their kids and make them study when no one except the offspring of recent Asian immigrants is doing so. Kids always win if they scream loud enough. One only has to watch a screaming two-year-old to know this.

There is no way around it: kids are now in charge of the institutions. They determine public policy, including that of education. The result is that, year by year, the window of opportunity for success has narrowed — and it is not because mothers now work and are no longer de facto guardians of their neighborhoods.

To be continued.

Bible reading

Sointula Community Church

Whenever I spend time in a place, as I have now in Sointula, I take part to the extent possible in local activities. For instance, I am on the dragon boat crew here, which coincides with my great love of paddling. I also go sometimes to the local church services, in this case at the Sointula Community Church, which is affiliated with Evangelical Free Church of Canada. I was raised Catholic, and I had reached quite an advanced age before I ever entered a Protestant church, much less a Jewish synagogue (or, in Asia, Buddhist or Hindu temples). In fact, I think the first Protestant church I attended was the Congregational one in Cummington, Massachusetts back in the 1980s. I was at the time a resident at the Cummington Community of the Arts, an artists' colony that seems to have reestablished itself in a new incarnation. There was, as I recall, no communion during the service, but the pastor gave a pretty good sermon. Several of the residents of the CCA sang in the choir and liked to play basketball with the pastor.

Evangelicals are pretty much out of my ken, but they too like to sing. The preacher here, Ben, plays the guitar, and his wife, Anna, leads the singing. They don't use hymnals, but the music is projected on a screen at the front, and congregants sing along. Recently the songs reminded me of those that used to be sung in "vacation Bible school," which I actually attended as a child, when I spent summers with my grandmother in a small town in Central Ohio. The "school" wasn't held in any church, but in a huge tent in a field. There wasn't much to entertain a child back then, so Bible school was on the agenda, even though I was a Catholic. My father's sister used to pick me up every Sunday morning and take me to church at Saint Mary's. Afterward, we went back to the family home for lunch with my father's maiden aunts.

Catholics of the generation with which I grew up didn't sing in church. That was what the choir did. We listened.

Another difference: Protestants are much more Bible-literate than Catholics. Small portions of the Old and New Testaments are dished out during mass, but we never did Bible reading. At home, we had a huge Bible with red covers and gold-edged pages, but we did not spend evenings reading it. I was, however, inculcated at Catholic school with "Bible history," which principally concerned the Old Testament. The Catholic Church still seems to take the approach that the Bible has to mediated. I think I would agree. Unless you are a serious Bible-reader, you will pick and choose what appeals to you. And there are so many conflicting accounts.

I bring all this up because I noticed last Sunday that the woman in front of me at the Sointula Community Church was reading from a personal Bible that was very marked up. She clearly treats her Bible the way I treat books I am reading: underlining, notes in the margins, the like. So, she is a serious Bible reader.

I know that in the world that I inhabit, the very "liberal" Upper West Side of Manhattan, the sight of a woman annotating her Bible would provoke smirks. But is the woman's behavior really any different from that of people who read the New York Times, as it were, religiously? My husband used to speak of the Times for its faithful readers as offering "Emmes from Sinai": truth from Sinai. The Times is more than the leading journal of liberal opinion; people literally takes its opinion pages as Gospel truth. I have noticed from the few times that I take a copy into my hands these days that I will come across an article that will be quoted in the course of the day.

I think that my generation got into the habit of newspaper reading from growing up with parents who read the paper daily. When I joined my parents for breakfast as a child, they would be sitting quietly at the table, coffee beside them, with their heads bent over different sections of the Louisville Courier-Journal. My own breakfast — consisting of a glass of Welch's grape juice and a bowl of cereal with milk and heavily laced with sugar –– was accompanied by the comics page of the Courier-Journal, a page not solely devoted to "the funnies": although Dennis the Menace was annoying Mr. Wilson back then, and Nancy was also pounding Slugo, my two favorite features were "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" and an advice column called "Lemme Do It," which covered everything from local sewage problems to whether garbage trucks were allowed to drive in the opposite direction on one-way streets. So there we sat, each immersed in a portion of the newspaper, a harmony of independent souls, before we went off to our different daily pursuits, me to school, my parents to their jobs.

Even if we no longer eat at home, the adult customs of many members of my generation still reflect those early years: why else do so many of them still read the New York Times accompanied by eggs and coffee at a diner or with a muffin and latte at Starbucks? Some people read the Bible at the start of the day; others read the New York Times.

The Paradox of Love, 3

Picasso, Homme et femme (1971)

Lovers give each other not only their bodies, their pleasures, their mutual talents, but also "a history unlike any other that will bind them together, even if they have to part." This is, again, Pascal Bruckner. I was becoming a little restless with his discussion of the insecurities of love in the modern world. In the last page of chapter 3, however, he finally writes of the joys of the couple. Here is my favorite part:

"The virtue of living in a couple: indulgence. Being accepted as I am, with my weaknesses ... Being able to ignore my image, whereas outside, in society, I constantly have to prove myself. ... Life in a couple is routine, but a happy routine, a promise of security. The sweetness of familiar things, the pleasure of having the beloved at one's side every evening."

The painting here by Picasso is one I saw at the Vancouver Art Gallery during my recent stopover in that city. My friend Herb and I went to the exhibit there of Picasso's "muses," and the portrait here is of the artist with his last wife. The label's description reminds me of what happens with couples: "The woman and the man appear to be morphing into one another." Rick used to say to me that if we lived to be 150 we would be just alike.

Picture credit: Tout Nancy

The Paradox of Love, 2

The Prisoner of Love by Yelena Tylkina

Did I say I was back in Sointula? I brought 33 pounds of books with me, so heavy that the airline affixed a "HEAVY" tag to the suitcase. The books divide into two categories: Goethe and love. Goethe is always with me, and in this case I have to write a review for Goethe Yearbook, for which I have carted along other books by the author I am reviewing. Books on love are a new interest, part of the theme of "love versus the sublime" that now occupies me.

I am moving along in Pascal Bruckner's The Paradox of Love, subject of my last post. There are lots of good thoughts in it, but I am beginning to think that French writers are more content with dazzling readers with pregnant observations that making a cogent analysis. Perhaps on the subject of love, one should not be overly cogent. Part I, which I have just finished reading, is entitled "The Redemption of Love." Does Bruckner tell us how love redeems us? Not at all. The subject, as I wrote in my last post, is really the fluidity of love in the modern world, a world of freedom, of so many alternatives in lovers, that we hesitate and doubt ourselves and are, of course, freely rejected by others.

Chapter 3, "I Love You: Weakness and Capture," begins with an analysis of what the words "I love you" mean. This very phrase is itself borrowed, not unique to the speaker of the sentiment. It is, as Bruckner writers, "a collective vehicle for a personal end." Indeed, all of the words we use to express what feels like spontaneous feeling exist before us and are part of a "treasuring of loving words that we apply to those close to us, to pets, and to babies." Even if we go through many lovers, we will use the same words over and over. Otherwise, we "would have to create unique words that are valid only in the instant that I utter them and then disintegrate." We do not tread new territory in our expressions of love; the path been trod by millions before us.

Uttering the words of love leads to the disconcerting situation, for moderns, that we have committed ourselves to something permanent. Although we consider ourselves free, we now have responsibility for what we have said. Lovers resort to stratagems to get themselves out of a situation that promised permanence. As befits love in a capitalist society, "the declaration of love is also a blank check that we can hardly wait to cash: the marvelous gift is transformed into a debt, and we want to recoup our costs." Thus, lovers are constantly bedeviled by the risks in loving and calculate ways to spare themselves risk.

"We Are All Blind Before We See"

Mostly Bruckner speaks of the insecurities of love, and I recognize from my own experience what he is talking about. Having been married and loved and been loved, however, I tend to regard what he says as applying to restless people who have no real anchor in the world, which characterized me at one time. Indeed, I would say that love anchored me. Thus, I was glad when he added some thoughts about what I consider true love, which is unselfish, free of any obligation, a gift that "in no way deprives its donor but instead enriches her beyond all possession." He is speaking of the love of parents for children, but I felt the same way in my marriage. "To love in this way," he writes, again writing of parents, "is to consent, despite ourselves, to lose the other," as when children grow up and move away.

But to tell someone you love him also means that he will not go away. You have committed yourself to "forever." He quotes Gabriel Marcel to this effect: "To say to someone: I love you, is to tell him: You shall not die." Is this one reason that I still have so much trouble accepting that Rick is dead?

Picture credit: Fine Art America; Vision Bank Corp.

The Paradox of Love, 1

The title of this post comes from a book by the French writer Pascal Bruckner. French intellectuals are masters at the art of the aperçu, and Bruckner is no exception. Here is one drawn at random from the first chapter of The Paradox of Love: "The telephone is the spouse for single people, allowing them to be with everyone without having to be close to anyone."

The paradox referred to in the book's title refers to the raptures and tribulations of love in the modern world. The emancipation of the individual has led to certain rights, including choice in matters of love, which, has meant since the early 19th century, for instance, the right to marry for love, that is, the person of one's own choosing, rather than the person chosen for one by one's parents. Consider the novel Pride and Prejudice, the 2005 movie version of which I recently saw. Lizzie Bennet will not be forced to marry Mr. Collins. As portrayed in the movie, she must overcome her own prejudices to recognize the man she is really in love with and will marry.

But we moderns are beyond marriage. The incidence of divorce today indicates the failure of the choice one has made in regard to marriage. The very freedom we insist on often makes us unable to commit to what is the unfreedom of love. Bruckner contends (again in the first chapter), that today "most of us live in a serial polygamy (or a serial monogamy); our lives are governed by the principle of addition. There was John, and then Paul, and then Serge, or Aline, and Diane, and Rachel -- and we could go on to list all the saints in the calendar." Is he also talking about American people? Probably.

Bruckner of course makes the parallel between rise of individual rights and "nascent capitalism." There seem to be so many opportunities, and just as with compulsive shoppers, we don't want to miss out on anything. "Love is an experience we don't want to forego, on the condition that it not deprive us of any other experience." The modern "market" for love is full of beautiful offerings, but most everyone of us has had the experience of not being able to have what we desire. As he reminds us, the tyranny of appearance is as strong as it was in the days of the caveman. What good does freedom do for us, if no one wants us in return?

Women's liberation asserts "my body belongs to me," but it has also led to the free circulation of desirable bodies for men, who now have vastly more choices than women, especially as the latter age.

More anon.

Picture credit: City Lab

Freedom: Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose?

Occupy Edmund Burke (illustration: Michael Hogue)

I have been digesting the insights of Jeffrey Hart's essay "Burke and Radical Freedom," which appeared in the journal The Review of Politics in 1967. Burke, according to Hart, was the first to recognize something that many of us are aware of, namely, "the deep moral division of the West," which, for Burke, arose from the French Revolution. As Russell Kirk has written, "conscious conservatism, in the modern sense," first arose with the French Revolution, and Burke is the founder of that conservatism.

Burke opposed the revolutionary and disembodied notion of "freedom" enunciated by Rousseau at the opening of The Social Contract: "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains." Rousseau was imagining a self before the existence of society, which, in Rousseau's eyes, had deformed the purity of that pre-social self. For Burke, such a self was an abstraction, and true freedom existed only in a network of social and historical relations.

Freedom, like justice, like beauty, is an abstract concept, although, as Socrates described the latter in The Symposium, both can be embodied in earthly forms: in good laws, for instance, as well as in beautiful individuals. Hart makes much of the differences between the reality-bound views of conservatives and the absolutist notions of progressives concerning freedom, but it seems to me that, whatever view one takes of freedom, its modern importance arose in tandem with the spread of material progress in the West. Karl Popper argued that the ideas that are current in democratic societies, including freedom and individuality, cannot be suppressed once people have become aware of them and that a return to a "closed society" is impossible.

But ideas only achieve power when they reflect material possibilities, and the idea of freedom was an intellectual rationalization of facts on the ground. What we now called liberalism coincided with the rise of the market economy by the late 17th century, the effect of which was to liberate individuals (mostly men at first) from the ties of traditional institutions and allow them to craft their own destinies. The veritable tide of scientific and technological knowledge in the same era led to individual risk-taking, ingenuity, inventions, and a historically unprecedented march of wealth creation.

The new knowledge and the new possibilities it created likewise undermined the veneration for traditional sources of power and led to the reconceptualization of the rights of individuals vis-à-vis authority, which now finds expression in modern liberal constitutions. Thus, the rise in the past two centuries of the demand for freedom. And, as the West grew richer, freedom and individual rights were gradually extended to more and more members of Western countries.

Enlightenment figures at dinner (note serving man at right)

The philosophes ignored the effect of this material affluence in establishing freedom. After all, they were already well situated individuals, with invitations to dinner parties and participants in civilized conversation. They mistakenly took their experience of freedom as something natural. Thus, they postulated an abstract man, a self free of the shackles (Rousseau's chains) that constrained man's ability to be himself: in the 18th century, these shackles were the Church and the Crown. If these were removed, man would march on his way to pure freedom, removed from the ties of history and of local associations.

We tend to think of freedom in personal terms: the freedom to marry whom we want, what career to follow, which the Old Order restricted. In olden times, a woman married the man chosen for her by her parents, a man followed trade of his father. Now, the choice is individual, and choice has become a moral idea, but it has been historically achieved in the West. There is nothing natural about this freedom, which can be seen in the attempts since World War II to implant it in non-Western societies. Popper may have been right to say that such ideas cannot be put back in the bottle, and clearly people all over the world today, for instance, in the Middle East, are familiar with the idea of freedom. People in closed societies aspire to live in countries in which freedom is institutionalized: Sweden, Germany, the U.S. But I suspect that people from closed societies are drawn by the material enticements of choice — a “better life” —  not by the the moral requirements of a free society.

Progressives hate "requirements." Requirements smack of the limitations of traditional societies. Requirements inhibit the expression of the "true" self. So it was that the poet Shelley, in Hart's words, "longed for another revolution, a final and successful one, which would liberate man at last from the 'masks' of actual social existence":

The loathesome mask has fallen, the man remains
Scepterless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unlcassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself: just, gentle, wise; but man
Passionless? no, yet free from guilt and pain.

What Hart calls Burke's recognition of "the deep moral division of the West" can be seen in divisions concerning the current refugee crisis now roiling the open societies of the West. Progressive humanitarians today, inheritors of the abstract ideas of the philosophes, advocate for the rights of immigrants from closed societies to join free societies without any requirements. Germany and Sweden and such countries attempt to "acculturate" the new arrivals, but advocates of open immigration would insist, pursuant to an abstract notion of rights, that immigrants are entitled to the same rights that we enjoy, without any precondition. After all, in the abstractions of the revolutionists, the immigrants, too, are men. Like the French Revolutionists, modern-day humanitarians ignore the embeddedness of the new arrivals in their own historical situation. To look at Europe today, however, it is evident that the majority of new arrivals do not immediately feel like Germans or like Swedes when their feet touch the new soil. They do not revel in their freedom. After all, few of them have the money to be "free," in the sense of having choices. For them, freedom does not mean having "nothing left to lose." They have lost everything, but are hardly free. So it is that they gravitate toward people like themselves, most of whom are not citizens of the host country, have few choices, and have not grown up understanding the necessity of realizing one's freedom in concrete acts.

Ultimately, of course, today's progressives wish to destroy society as it exists in its imperfections and replace it with an ideal one. Today, the system from which we are to be freed is capitalism; its overthrow will supposedly bring about that classless and stateless condition envisioned by the philosophes, in which men are liberated from the shackles that bind them and are able to jettison the roles or masks that deform their true self. As Hart writes of Marx, Sartre, Rousseau, and other revolutionists, "the negation" is more vivid than the affirmation. "The 'chains' are concrete, but the 'freedom' abstract and vague." We learn what we ought to be, but the "'free' man who is to emerge from all entangling alienations remains unknown."

Picture credits: The American Conservative;