Bill McMorris, “How the Supreme Court Created the Student Loan Bubble” at The American Spectator = http://spectator.org/articles/60741/how-supreme-court-created-student-loan-bubble. About much more than student loans – about how the Supreme Court decision in Griggs v Duke Power Co has caused breathtaking harm to modern American society by effectively making a college degree the bare minimum necessary to get a decent job. Higher education has become mostly a credentialing system.
The Supreme Court could resolve many of these issues by beheading disparate impact and the diploma-as-credential. Does Wall Street need humble, ethical young men and women? Then give them tests, start them at the bottom, and let them earn their way up based on merit. Want to teach risk management? Pull students out of the classroom goldfish bowl and put them in the real world.
I have written about the mess that higher education has become. And frequently argued the American society desperately needs to stop assuming everyone needs to go to college to have a good career and decent standard of living.
Yuval Levin, “Blinded by Nostalgia” at First Things = http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/10/blinded-by-nostalgia. Levin critiques the tendency toward nostalgia on both the left and the right. Agree with Levin or not his article has generated some discussion this week. Levin argues that America is becoming increasingly decentralized and that is the central fact liberals and conservatives (however one defines those terms) need to face.
On the cultural front, the tendency of decentralization to undermine all authoritative institutions will present more of a challenge for the right. Social conservatives are so far experiencing this transition as a loss of their dominant position in the culture. But they should see that this generally means not that their opponents are coming to dominate but that no one is. They should judge their prospects less in terms of their hold on our big institutions and more in terms of their success in forming a thriving and appealing subculture, or network of subcultures. Christianity has a great deal of experience in that difficult art, of course, but it is largely out of practice in our society.
I am inclined to agree with Alan Jacobs who argues this decentralization is more appearance than reality.
Upate 9:05 a.m. – Peter Leithart, “Culture War, Spiritual War” at First Things = http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/10/culture-war-spiritual-war. Good piece on the spiritual dimension of our modern Kulturkampf. I appreciate how he applies biblical theology to what we see happening in modern Western society. This is another theme I have been seeing = God is letting us experience the natural consequences of our rebellion.
When Christians see something that looks like a collective delusion, they’re looking at demonic deception and/or divine judgment. We live in a culture that has venerated idol-ologies of unbounded freedom with relentless zeal, and God has given us over to the logic of our folly.
As Leithart notes this does not demonize our “opponents”. In fact it humanizes them. Because we recognize that our true opponents are not fellow human beings. Our true opponents are demonic forces. Yeah I know that sounds rather heavy. But tell me the insanity of modern Western society is the product of human rationality.
Update 9:28 a.m. – Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, “How our botched understanding of ‘science’ ruins everything” at The Week = http://theweek.com/article/index/268360/how-our-botched-understanding-of-science-ruins-everything?utm_source=links&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=twitter. I think Gobry is one of the sharpest most interesting young new writers (or is that new young writers?) on the Interwebz. Article from last month but I only just caught it this morning. In a nutshell Gobry argues we throw around the word “science” all the time – even base public policy on it! – but if we stop and think carefully about it we are actually confusing science with… wait for it… magic.
You might think of science advocate, cultural illiterate, mendacious anti-Catholic propagandist, and possible serial fabulist Neil DeGrasse Tyson and anti-vaccine looney-toon Jenny McCarthy as polar opposites on a pro-science/anti-science spectrum, but in reality they are the two sides of the same coin. Both of them think science is like magic, except one of them is part of the religion and the other isn’t…. / It also means that for all our bleating about “science” we live in an astonishingly unscientific and anti-scientific society. We have plenty of anti-science people, but most of our “pro-science” people are really pro-magic (and therefore anti-science).
Upate 10:52 a.m. – Scott Alexander, “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup” at Slate Star Codex = http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/. Fascinating essay by a self-described progressive and psychiatrist who one day realized he does not know any conservatives (however one defines that term). Explores how we identify with a tribe (the ingroup) that finds it necessary to reject and insult the other tribe (the outgroup).
If I had to define “tolerance” it would be something like “respect and kindness toward members of an outgroup”. / And today we have an almost unprecedented situation. / We have a lot of people – like the Emperor – boasting of being able to tolerate everyone from every outgroup they can imagine, loving the outgroup, writing long paeans to how great the outgroup is, staying up at night fretting that somebody else might not like the outgroup enough. / And we have those same people absolutely ripping into their in-groups – straight, white, male, hetero, cis, American, whatever – talking day in and day out to anyone who will listen about how terrible their in-group is, how it is responsible for all evils, how something needs to be done about it, how they’re ashamed to be associated with it at all.
HT Rod Dreher at The American Conservative