I’m Not Interested in Figuring Out Whether I’m Leaning Left or Right—I Have a Hard Enough Time Remaining Vertical

The notion that netroot Democrats are a radical protest group may be politically useful spin, but it is analytically inaccurate. The center of gravity of the dissident bloggers is located in the middle, not the periphery—Kos, Atrios, Brad DeLong, Marshall and many others are liberals, not leftists. The occasional old guard types that do surface in the comment sections from time to time stand out as a bit quaint, blue-dog Marxists among the irritated pragmatists. Remarkably few commentators are dreaming about nationalizing the toilet paper factories. The funny thing is that many of the bloggers think of themselves as more leftist than they actually are, perhaps unconsciously buying into the right-wing way of conceptualizing things. For the right, after all, Eisenhower was a pinko.

You also read that the Democrats on the web have no positive program. This too is spin. Precisely because the developing consensus of the netroots is anything but radical, its values and policy preferences are bound to be less dramatic than the revolutionists on the right. If you don’t want to repeal the Bill of Rights and you aren’t proposing an invasion of yet another foreign country or attempting to establish a national church, you’re bound to have more trouble making headlines than your photogenic opponents with their amusing pathologies. Even universal health care, a traditional Democratic goal sometimes featured as radical, obviously is anything but groundbreaking. It’s catch-up—Indoor plumbing! What will they think of next! Taking the energy crisis and global warming seriously isn’t daring innovation either. It’s what we obviously ought to do.

Unfortunately, a manifesto composed almost entirely of sensible proposals aimed at managing real problems is not going to make very inspiring reading. Maybe I’ll take a whack at composing one. I’m told I’m good at dull.

On the Advantages of Maintaining a Sense of Humor about Human Sexuality, a Not Exactly Pindaric Ode inspired by an Internet Debate on the Impropriety of Certain Amorous Proclivities

All our games are coarse and rude,
Unless, of course, you’re in the mood.
Besides, when you come down to it,
Both girls and boys are full of shit
As was delivered by the Saint
Commenting on the human taint
Betwixt the boudoir and the loo
And number one and number two
Where we beget and were begot
And go to get and to be got.

Academics and Politics

Profs often complain that they are ineffective politically because people resent their intellectual level. No doubt that occurs, but I think the main reason that academics have trouble reaching large audiences is not that they are smarter than their potential listeners, but that their way of speaking conforms to specialized rules of scholarly discourse. A lot of the complexity of professorial language consists of rhetorical Masonic Handshakes that verify the guild membership and status of the speaker to his colleagues; and both habit and humility guarantee that a learned person will make unreasonable assumptions about what the listener already knows about a subject. Meanwhile, academics spend their whole careers trying to come up with something new to say or at least some new way to say something old. This requirement alone guarantees that no simple truth will be uttered, even if it is news to the actual recipient, without a elaborate garnish of ifs, ands, and buts. There is always the suspicion that the plain facts plainly enunciated will not suffice either to maintain one’s own dignity or respect the capacity of the other person, even when the plain facts are already damned hard to explain and nobody knows anything without having learned about it.

The Most Apt Analogy

Commentators consistently impute more rationality to the Bush foreign policy than the record warrants. They write as if the goal of our occupation of Iraq was to set up a stable regime and then leave, even though the administration is on the record that it plans to remain in the area and the military is constructing elaborate installations with room for 50,000 or 60,000 troops. It is hard to believe that even the fantasists that run our government imagine that the U.S. has the political will or the economic and military resources to turn Mesopotamia into a permanent entrenched camp in the midst of a hostile region. Stupidity, however, is a great enabler of optimism.

Snow and other administration spokesmen have recently taken to likening the current impasse in Iraq to the Battle of the Bulge as if the activities of the insurgents were the last, desperate counterattack of a strategically defeated enemy. The problem with the analogy is that we are not contending against a single organized power like Hitler’s Germany. With remarkably few exceptions, everybody in the neighborhood hates us, including most of our current allies in the ersatz People’s Republic of Iraq. It’s possible that we can defeat any particular group, but so long as we insist on continuing our occupation, there will always be new groups, armed and financed by public and private sources in the surrounding nations. We simply don’t have the armed forces required to pacify the entire Middle East, and we don’t have the economic resources necessary to bribe the Iraqis into willing submission.

The accurate analogy here is not the Battle of the Bulge. It’s an ingrown toenail.

Every Cow is Driven to Pasture by a Blow

The usual thing to say is that the foreign policy of a national leader becomes less effective as he loses political power at home. In Bush’s case, the reverse may be true. Lacking the strength to mount a military attack on Iran, the Administration is falling back on diplomacy and actually getting somewhere, in part because a manufactured crisis rapidly becomes less threatening when you stop manufacturing it. If the president’s poll numbers continue to decline, his State Department may be compelled to take additional intelligent steps.

This morning’s killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi provides an opportunity for another retreat to rationality. It’s not just that eliminating the principal bogie man allows Bush to declare victory while preparing a strategic withdrawal from Iraq. It gives both the Republicans and the liberal hawks a chance to wean themselves from their dependence on bogie men. So long as the conflict in Mesopotamia is defined as a struggle of radical good against radical evil, cutting deals is impossible even though any semblance of a resolution of the problem in the region will require the cutting of a huge number of deals. Bush could—and may well—replace Zarqawi with another papier-mache monster as Zarqawi once stepped into the shoes of Saddam and Bloefeld succeeded to Dr. No but that won’t help because the supply of candidate terrorists is not the rate-limiting factor in this reaction. Short of literally grinding the contending factions to dust, we’ll eventually have to recognize that our opponents aren’t mindless henchmen directed by Hitler-clones but political, ethnic, and religious groups that regard their own interests as legitimate. So how about singing just one more chorus of “Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead” and then setting up some meetings with the Sunnis?

The Default, Dear Brutus, Is Not in Our Stars

Unless you’re listening to your relatives, you have a right to expect something new in every declarative sentence, some hint of surprise, since a perfectly predictable utterance conveys no information. This pragmatic rule is presumably more rigorously enforced in written language since print costs more, at least in bother, than idle conversation. Unfortunately, this net effect of this imperative can create a misleading impression of what people actually believe at any given time in history since what is written is written against a set of assumptions that seldom get stated except by mathematicians and sociologists. Statistically considered, the Zeitgeist described by the intellectual historians is not the default position of the educated people of an Age but some sort of measure of the typical forms of dissent to the mysterious dark matter of the real consensus. This problem isn’t just academic. I may not care very much about what they really thought during the Scottish Enlightenment, but I’d very much like to know what I myself am thinking right now. To figure that out, I’d have to dare to be dull; and, appearances to the contrary, I’m not sure that I’m that audacious.

Private Property is like Ketchup

The classic route to staggering wealth begins with the assumption of a huge mountain of debt. I like to use the same technique in writing essays, beginning with some peculiar sentence that makes no sense at all on its face and saddles me with an obligation to explain my way out of a fix I've willingly put myself into. The best example I know of this sort of thing and the inspiration of my title is the first sentence of one of Levi-Strauss’ books: “Totemism is like hysteria.”

If you haven’t already guessed, private property is like ketchup because both are homely items, which, though far too familiar to be taken much note of, would be sensational inventions were they to appear for the first time in the year 2006. One can easily imagine the rapturous reception the zesty new condiment would earn on the cooking shows. Similarly, the discovery of a way to ensure that cars get washed and shops get opened on time would amaze and delight the public. It’s too late to experience either frisson now, except, perhaps, to the extent that the disappearance of a thing rhymes sadly with the memory of its debut. Of course ketchup isn’t actually going away. Private property, on the other hand, is under serious attack as corporate capitalism, at last poised to fulfill the dream of Henri Saint-Simon, pursues the Wal-Mart route to socialism.

Look and See

In a public debate, those with the facts are at a serious disadvantage because their listeners have to learn something in order to understand arguments supported by evidence. Inertia favors appeals based on platitudes and commonplaces since these notions are already well known and people tend to think that ideas are true simply because they are familiar. In debates about religion, for example, it is taken as a given that belief in the supernatural promotes morality and prevents social breakdown while even a cursory examination of the historical record suggests that things are far more complex. Sometimes religious institutions have maintained order in the aftermath of military defeat and general demoralization as when the bishops of Western Europe, often members of the senatorial class, stepped in to manage as best they could the ruined provinces of a fallen empire. In these instances, as perhaps in the case of some of the successor states of the USSR, religion was important by default. On the other hand, where societies are doing well, as in contemporary Scandinavia, or manage to organize themselves around nationalism or secular ideologies, religion is often largely irrelevant. And there are also cases such as Mongolia and Tibet where a mania for religion appears to have led to national decadence. Historical sociology does not yield simple conclusions, which is not to say that it doesn’t yield any conclusions at all. The point is, you have to look and see.

By the way, the atheists are as fond of coarse answers as any believer. Every time I encounter some villager waving the bloody shirt of the Crusades or the Inquisition, I find myself wondering if any of these worthies has bothered to assess the historical record. As a cause of mortality, getting burnt at the stake is pretty insignificant compared to brain tumors or probably even lightening, not to mention really serious killers like spousal jealousy. Similarly, though there have certainly been times of terrible religious wars, there have also been long eras during which people found other reasons to kill one another. It is trivially true that every kind of villainy correlates with religiosity; but that just reflects the fact that a proclivity to superstition and fanaticism, if not part of the essence of humanity, is at least a universal accident like original sin. Indeed, on balance, it may have been a good thing that organized churches have managed and channeled our potentially dangerous spiritual impulses over the centuries. Thus even the Spanish Inquisition, terrifying as it undoubtedly was, did serve to curb the homicidal prejudices of the Spanish people, for whom being a Christian had become a matter of blood, not belief, If you think Torquemada was bad, wait until you face a Castilian mob.

On the Hoof

There’s a joke in the Pooh Perplex about the professor who published “All Previous Thought, a rather large freshman casebook.” The notion that even an elephant folio could contain that much content is pretty funny, but I have several volumes on my shelves that purport to be only marginally less capacious—the closest in view is Wing-Tsit Chan’s Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy, clocking in a comparatively modest 856 pages. Sourcebooks are an improvement on the potted summaries one encounters in surveys since even translations convey something of the voice of the real thinkers instead of reducing them to a set of opinions rephrased in the conceptually impoverished pidgin language of all-to-much intellectual history. That doesn’t evade the problem of selection, however. It isn’t just a choice must be made between particular thinkers—that subtraction is often part of the value added by the editor. What is problematic is the almost inevitable systematic bias in favor of representatives of traditions whose activities come down to defending definable points of view as opposed, for example, to those for whom a philosophy is more a methodical practice than a body of results. But if the tendency of anthologies to focus on doxa misrepresents the history of philosophy, something similar has a far worse effect when it comes to compilations that survey the world’s religions.

Perhaps because in modern times having a religion is often more like having a hobby than anything else, it’s not surprising that one thinks that adherence to Christianity or Buddhism is definable as belief in a series of propositions. One can easily decide to believe this rather than that. Adapting a total manner of living and feeling is quite a different matter, especially considering the very onerous obligations that go along with the traditional practice of religions. Are you really going to give 10% of your income to the church? Are you really going to sit on a mat two hours a day? Are you really only going to have sex with your wife when you intend to reproduce? And that’s not the worst of it. The theologies of the various religions, having typically been elaborated by extremely intelligent and sophisticated men engaged in a long-range debate with other extremely intelligent and sophisticated men, are intellectually respectable while the ritual, devotional, ethical, and magical elements of the same faiths are often rather embarrassing. Small wonder if a comprehensible belief system presented in a scriptural anthology seems more congenially than the Howl’s Moving Castle of a real religion.

If, for some reason, you really want to know something about the religions of the world, you have to find a way to go beyond accounts that focus on the intellectual rationalizations of the several traditions and take a series of soundings of their daily substance. Donald S. Lopez, Jr.’s Princeton Readings in Religions series is a good place to start since these volumes focus on practice. Reading them conveys a very different picture of the reality of the world religions than the usual accounts, which, in contrast, often seem to be apologetics by proxy, appreciations of alien cultural institutions that accept the accuracy of the self-definitions of the religions they describe. The contemporary scholars who introduce the selections in the Lopez anthologies demonstrate something largely missing from popular discussions of religion: a combination of sympathetic understanding and critical distance.

When the Man on the Horse Won’t Get Off His Ass

Like many others, I’ve taken comfort over the years from the reluctance of American military men to intervene in politics—two hundred and thirty years without a coup. George Washington’s decision not to seize power by force is perhaps an even more defining moment in our history than the Declaration of Independence, which, after all, would read as pretty feckless exercise in enthusiasm had the revolution resulted in a dictatorship. The willing subordination of military to civilian authority is not without its ambiguities, however. It certainly doesn’t mean that the generals and the admirals, inhabitants of an authoritarian world of obedience and deference, respect democratic politics. Indeed, many of them find the give and take of free institutions distasteful and avoid partisan involvement as much out of fastidiousness as principle. Which has a good side and a bad side. The prospect of some future Colin Powell riding a tank onto the Whitehouse lawn is remote, but it’s easy to imagine the Joint Chiefs of Staff looking the other way in the event of a violent seizure of power. “We don’t want to be involved.” The precedents are not favorable. It wasn’t the Italian army that marched on Rome back in 1922, but the fascist seizure of power was made possible by passivity of the generals. The aristocratic German General Staff certainly looked down on the hysterical corporal; but they were too proud to get political and, anyhow, the new party promised to respect their prerogatives and increase their budget allotments. Historically, right-wing craziness is ineffectual without the willingness of military men to sit on their hands. Of course Bush hardly measures up to Mussolini or Hitler and he lacks (for now) the requisite army of street thugs; but the acquiescence of high-ranking officers to torture and illegal wiretapping shows how little effective resistance to extra-constitutional behavior we can expect from a supposedly apolitical military. That’s especially serious because the American military has enormous prestige right now, not only because of its technical competence but because it is perceived, probably inaccurately, as less corrupt than such despised institutions as Congress and the Press. If Bush turns out to have been the John the Baptist to some really malevolent messiah, can we expect the Generals to defend the republic?

Kadavergehorsamkeit

As the Bush administration becomes odious even to its erstwhile ideological supporters, many conservatives are defecting. In a parliamentary system, the result would be a vote of no confidence and a new government. Our constitution prevents that sensible outcome. An American President is like a king, albeit a king with a legally established term of rule. Baring impeachment—an exceedingly unlikely event even if the Democrats regain the House—Bush will occupy the Whitehouse for more than two more years. Of course he might have better luck or try better policies in that period. He might follow the precedent set by Reagan, whose last years in office were rescued by a set of moderate Republicans. Bush, however, is not Reagan. The “new” people he is bringing on board are, if anything, even more ideological than their predecessors. Meanwhile, since the people who are leaving are more principled or at least more cautious than the ones who stay, the administration will probably become more erratic and incompetent. The tarry remains of the distillation will be characterized above all by blind loyalty. Not a comfortable prospect, especially since the better people are not just being driven out of political jobs. The CIA, the armed forces, the civil service, and the science advisory bodies are also affected.

The Swinging Door Policy

Even the most consistent demagoguery becomes self-defeating in the face of a divided people. When illegal immigration wasn’t a particularly salient issue and the prospect of picking up a significant proportion of Hispanic votes outweighed the danger of irritating the nativists, Bush cheerfully sang the Star Spangled Banner in Spanish—in those days, as his publicists were eager to inform us, he was fluent in the language. With his base in revolt, both Bush’s bilingualism and his enthusiasm for La Bandera aren’t what they used to be. The President can’t solve the underlying political problem with this simple PR adjustment, but PR is all he has. A serious crackdown on illegal immigration would harm the interests of his moneyed backers. Indeed, it would put them in legal jeopardy. Meanwhile, the mass part of his support is afraid of all those brown faces. Anyhow, as true Americans, they’d rather face a thousand deaths than actually learn a second language; and you can’t simply point out to these folks that imprisoning or even deporting twelve million hard-working people isn’t going to happen. So it’s a guest worker program to appease the Chamber of Commerce on the plane of the real and three cheers for a culturally white America on the plane of the imaginary.

You’ll Miss It When It’s Gone

You don’t have to exhibit the piety of a Sister Wendy to appreciate the renaissance’s wealth of religious art. Indeed, indifference to religion makes it easier to view these images as art instead of objects of use. I expect that something similar will eventually occur in the evaluation of the enormous mass of commercial art produced in our era. Once nobody gives a damn what the picture was an ad for, when the corporate sponsor has become as forgotten as the various “my honey lords” of Elizabethan prefaces, when the political purpose of the poster is simply quaint, it will be noticed that the 20th and 21st Centuries were ages of staggering creativity.

Contrary to the presumption that excellence is hard to winnow from the dreck, the challenge for the art historian will be how to deal with a volume of highly accomplished work that dwarfs the capacities of any possible human appreciator. The currently available technical means of preservation make it likely that a far higher proportion of artifacts will persist, at least in virtual form, even in the wake of a serious contraction of human civilization. Classicism is a very pleasant form of scholarship in part because the paucity of the surviving evidence makes it possible to take a synoptic view of the field. The humanists owe something to the monks who didn’t chose to copy everything and the Goths who thinned out the statuary garden. No guarantee that the next round of barbarians will prove as helpful to the savants who try to comprehend the American Centuries. Too many DVDs. Too many deleted scenes.

All in the Family

Just as liberal non-believers are constantly admonished to keep quiet about their atheism so as not to offend the credulous majority that decides elections, people skeptical about American exceptionalism are shushed when they dare to criticize the sacred nation, not only by those who ask without irony, “Why do you hate America?” but also by erstwhile progressives whose political courage—or prudence—doesn’t extend to challenging our national vanity. One can talk about “true patriotism” but the notion that there is might be something problematic about any kind of patriotism is a non-starter.

I don’t know whether Americans are more thin-skinned about their country than the citizens of other nations. They–we—seem to be, though you might expect that the inhabitants of so dominant a nation wouldn’t have to be so touchy, not only when foreigners criticize us but also and especially when one of our own dares to suggest that we aren’t all that wonderful after all. I have a different take on things. I’m an American whether or not we’re perfect and lovely in every way just as, for better or worse, I’ll go on belonging to my family even if there really is something alarming about Uncle Ernie. Which is why, while I much prefer the “May she always be in the right” part, I also buy into the “my country, right or wrong” part of Stephen Decatur’s toast. But if I’m going to sign on to stick with the ship, I’d very much prefer if the ship didn’t actually go down; and I propose to go on reading the riot act to the other sailors and even the captain if I think they’re steering towards the rocks.

The Gettysburg Address of Stand Up?

Not quite. In fact, I expect that Steven Colbert feels a certain amount of regret about his delivery, which wasn’t very smooth. On the other hand, the predictable absence of audience response must have made it difficult to maintain the timing, guaranteeing that the level of the performance wouldn’t match the excellence of the script or the significance of the occasion considered as a political act.

As Garry Wills points out in his wonderful book on the Gettysburg Address, the idea that Lincoln’s speech fell on deaf ears is a myth. The official journalistic reaction to Colbert, on the other hand, really is silence. Nothing surprising about that: under certain circumstances, the Press Corps may be willing to turn on Bush, but they certainly aren’t going to give any airtime to a deadly attack on themselves. They certainly can’t answer the charge implied by his jokes. They aren’t living up to their own narrative about themselves and they know it. Supposedly a band of heroes that speaks truth to power, they act like a bunch of well-paid whores.

Colbert violated a sacred rule of corporate funfests. When the employees make the ritual jokes about managers, they can, indeed they must, say outrageous things; but the daring cracks have to be completely irrelevant. You can rib the boss for his golf game or even his waistline, intimate that he can’t pronounce nuclear and suggest that he isn’t very bright. Remarks that actually hit the target, no matter how witty, are forbidden. The point of the reversals of roles during Saturnalia is to make it easier for the slaves to go on being slaves, not to suggest that there is anything problematic about servitude.

(transcript of Colbert's performance)

Projection

I recall a science fiction story in which an astronaut freezes to death in his malfunctioning spacesuit during an expedition to sample the blazing surface of the Sun. That particular prefabricated irony is fictional. Another paradoxical misfortune, claustrophobia in the middle of a mostly deserted agora, is apparently all too real. I suffer it whenever I visit the comment’s sections of various blogs and find the participants in desperate rhetorical combat like maniacs with fire axes locked in a closet. Or maybe the better analogy would be an arm wrestling tournament in view of the limited number of strategic options available to the contestants. Granted the enormous number of points of view that can reasonably be taken about almost any public issue, it ought to be amazing that strangers have no trouble getting close enough to disagree. It ought to be amazing, but of course it isn’t. The meeting of minds, the butting of heads, is not a miracle. It’s an illusion. Which is also why the sands of the electronic arena are not soaked with even metaphorical blood, except by the rarest of accidents, because each combatant aims his blows not at the ideas of another person but at his idea of those ideas.

Looking up at the night sky, we often see a star near the moon; but we don’t brace for the shock of their imminent collision because we know that the objects never actually approach one another since the moon is next door to us while the star is hundreds of light years away. By the same token, we eventually learn that the protozoans or organelles that appear to be adjacent on the slide may not be in the same plane: the microscope’s shallowness of field squashes everything together. In these instances, a three-dimensional array is projected onto two dimensions. Discourse is like that. What’s called the public sphere is really a flat screen, a surface that distorts the proportions of the represented objects and creates shadow constellations on the walls of the cave.

The Few, the Proud, the Blogsites

I’ve added a few new links. Real Climate is a clearinghouse for climate research. It appears to me managed by climatologists for climatologists. The Oil Drum is the best site I know for information and debate about liquid fuels issues—it reflects a range of views and in this respect is very different than Peak Oil rant venues like Clusterfuck Nation (shorter James Kunstler: “Suburbia delinda est.”) Arms and Influence covers military affairs. I’ve also added Economist’s View, mostly because it somehow gets away with reprinting Paul Krugman’s columns from the New York Times.

Daily Kos replaces Eschaton, which has become increasingly perfunctory and predictable over the years.

A Gas Attack

Nonpartisanship lives. For example, both Democrats and the Republicans are supporting investigations into price gouging at the pump. Even Bush, who is an oilman himself, found it impossible to resist the urge to deflect criticism onto the traditional villains. Just as every candidate, of every party, ideology, and hairdo, eventually calls for an end to government waste as an answer to the deficit, they all automatically blame market crises on unscrupulous manipulators—the term used to be “malefactors of great wealth”—as if unnamed sheiks and Texans had suddenly decided to cut off the spigot to run up prices. Now it’s not that the aforementioned sheiks and Texans don’t bear considerable responsibility for the current energy problem. They do. The trouble is that the relevant bad behavior isn’t price fixing in the present. Chuck Schumer and Barbara Boxer understand this fact as well as any economist—it’s not exactly a nuance—but they can’t resist the political advantage of rounding up the usual suspects. The trick is to get the upper hand without actually putting into effect the really stupid policies implied by the rhetoric—the very last thing we need, after all, is a cut in gasoline taxes at a time when government finances are shaky and there is an obvious need to allow higher prices to restrain demand.

Only the most gifted of politicians are able to persuade the general public with arguments that are relevant and valid. In the intervals between these miracles, it’s the bad arguments that win the debates. Insisting on straight talk and good logic is suicidal. Which is why I try not to be upset as I watch the Democrats winning through the use of tactics similar in kind, if not degree, to those used by the Republicans in the previous cycle. There is simply no reason to be surprised at a disconnect between the means and the ends, even if the perils of even a virtuous Machievellianism are obvious.

One Teeny-Weensy Little Mint

Say what you will, the economic journalists do learn from their mistakes. A year ago they were saying that the world economy would be harmed if oil prices stayed above $50 a barrel. They’ve certainly learned not to say that anymore. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean they were wrong the first time, even though oil at $72 a barrel hasn’t resulted in an obvious slow down. It may just mean that the law of overshoot is in operation and that everybody will have lost interest in the catastrophe before it arrives and surprises their exhausted expectations. Even then, the temptation will be to ascribe the crisis to dramatic world events in Iran or Venezuela rather than to unsupportable underlying trends.

Everything happens at once, which is certainly inconvenient. Out here in California, for example, you still hear people insisting that our power crisis was the result of market manipulation rather than of a lack of generating capacity. Indeed, there would have been no blackouts had the power companies been staffed by angels. On the other hand, the narrowness of the reserve margins is what made it possible for Enron and the others to ravage the state. By the same token, when things go to hell over oil, some particular set of events will punctuate the transition to a new energy regime; but the fact that a civil war in Nigeria or an attack on Iran or another hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico could upset everything will have been a result of the advanced state of the game of Jenga in which we are currently engaged.

You need both the shit and the fan. Unfortunately, there isn’t any shortage of either.

Fallacies of Composition

If I climb up on a soapbox to see the parade, I’ll get a better view; but that doesn’t mean that if everybody climbs on a soapbox, they’ll all get a better view. While many people understand that, many people don’t notice that something similar obtains in education. If a child gets an elite education, they’ll do better than the others; but that doesn’t mean that if every child gets an elite evolution, they’ll all do better than the others. They just can’t: the whole point of privilege is to get more than an equal share. The magic of technology (it says here) may be able to universalize wealth, but not even nanotechnology can universalize prestige. Which is why the baby boomers went bad. In 1945, a college diploma was still a relatively rare accomplishment and acquiring one normally led to greater income, social status, and security. By 1965, millions were getting degrees, but the economic and cultural value of a college education had been drastically diluted and the country was full of young people who had nowhere to take their sense of entitlement. When the revolution didn’t materialize, the disappointed students turned utopian, seeking imaginary solutions to equations that had no real roots. And then they became very, very interested in money—at least I did. Meanwhile, American higher education, faced with the same realities, underwent an analogous set of adjustments, including vastly increased enrollments in professional and B School programs and a corresponding crash in the liberal arts.

Apportioning privilege is, of course, not the only function of education. For example teachers spend an enormous amount of time attempting to keep children from learning too much from their older peers—values education, sensu latu, is a rearguard action waged to decelerate cultural change—and part of the curriculum really does teach skills that everyone can use. People with higher levels of literacy and numeracy are more productive, which means skills education doesn’t fall prey to the fallacy of composition: it makes the whole society wealthier. The fun result of education remains the prospect of looking down on the others, however; and that’s a goal that cannot be generalized.