I found this graph posted by "Number 6" on Twitter today. I haven't been able to track it down independently. If it is accurate, it painfully illustrates our growing cultural/political/partisan divide. In three colors, this is why we can't talk with each other across the aisle any longer.
In episode 205 of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris spoke with Daniel Markovits about problems with meritocracy. Markovits is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. It was an especially engaging and challenging episode that provided many statistics that I hadn't before heard or appreciated. Here's an excerpt I transcribed:
Daniel Markovits: A poor district in America spends maybe eight to $10,000 per pupil per year. Middle Class public schools spends maybe 12,000 to $15,000 per pupil per year, a really rich public school in a town like Scarsdale, New York, where the median household income is over $200,000 a year, spends about $30,000 per pupil per year. And the richest and fanciest private schools in America 80%, of whose kids come from households that make over $200,000 a year, spend maybe $75,000 per pupil per year. So that there's massive inequality in educational investment. This means that if you look at a place like Yale, where I teach, or Harvard or Princeton, or Stanford, there are more kids in those universities whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution than in the entire bottom half.
And if you took the difference between what's invested in a typical middle-class kids' education, and what's invested in a typical one-percenter kids’ education, and took that difference every year and put it into the S&P 500, to give it to the rich kid as an inheritance when her parents died--because that's the way aristocrats used to transmit privilege down through the generations--that sum would exceed $10 million per child. So why am I saying this? I'm saying this, because it gives you a sense for the enormity of the educational inequality that exists in our society, between not just or even primarily the middle class and the poor, but between the rich and the middle class. And then if you look at the jobs that pay the most money, at elite law firms, at elite investment banks, elite management jobs, to graduates of elite business schools, all these jobs, specialists, medical doctors, all these jobs, almost require people who do them to have gone through some version of this fancy education.
Sam Harris: So what we have is a system of stratification and exclusion that runs through the central elite institutions of school and work in our society, in which those institutions exclude middle and working class families and children, not excluding them by any intent, but by surely the contingent fact of what it takes to jump through all the hoops you need to jump through to land in Yale or Princeton, or Stanford or Harvard.
Daniel Markovits: Exactly. Stanford admits fewer than 5% of its applicants. That means that if you're applying to college and anything serious ever went wrong in your childhood, you know, parents lost jobs, you had to move all of a sudden, somebody died, and you had to pick up some burden to earn some income for the family, you're not going to have a record that puts you in the top 5% of the already elite pool that tries to apply. . . . There are exceptional people, there are exceptional people always. But unless you're incredibly exceptional, you won't be able to get ahead if you don't have a lot of privilege behind you. And then this privileged class . . . asserts that they've earned their advantage and that they have got there on the merits and that those who are disadvantaged deserve to be disadvantaged because they're not as hard working. They're not as skilled. They're not as virtuous and now those who are excluded get appropriately angry and resentful and turn against the institutions, the schools, the professional companies, the forms of expertise, that people on the outside correctly think are underwriting their disadvantage and exclusion.
And a populist like Trump exploits that resentment. And a lot of people on the left think, "How can class resentment go with Trump rather than against him, given that he was born to a massive inheritance?" And the answer is, yeah, he inherited a lot of money. But he is not part of this system of training, education and professional certification that people correctly see as the principal source of their exclusion. It's not his inheritance that's maybe unjust, maybe not unjust--we can disagree about it--but it's on the margins of our society. Whereas all the doctors and lawyers and bankers and CEOs and elite managers who are training their kids like nobody else can and getting them into the best schools and buying houses in the best neighborhoods and getting them into the best colleges. That's the system that is keeping most Americans down. And so the populist resentment turns against it, in some sense accurately.
Sam Harris: So what is the alternative to meritocracy?
Daniel Markovits: Well, it can't be aristocracy or a caste system based on breeding or on race or on gender. That's, I think, important to say out up front, this you know, if this is a going concern as a social and political project, it can't be backward looking. It has to be forward looking.
For several years I have taught week-long courses at law schools in Istanbul, Turkey. Those visits have been put on pause due to COVID. I was a couple weeks from traveling to Istanbul once again in early March, 2020, but I reluctantly cancelled that.
I often think of the many people I repeatedly visit when I'm in Turkey. Like most of my friends in the U.S., digital technologies have made it possible to keep in touch, but I look forward to the day when I can once again take it all in through all five senses.
Back here in St. Louis, Missouri, I tend to my ordinary life. Every week or so, however, I fondly think of something that I couldn't have predicted before I first visited the Middle East. I often think of the call to prayer.
In the Middle East, the muezzin calls out from the top of nearby minarets five times each day (sometimes more than one at the same time if you are between minarets). It's a call, for sure, and almost seems like a song, but I've been told that it is not singing. The calls seemed like intrusions on my ears until I heard many of them. Gradually, over my repeated visits, the call to prayer became an exceptionally beautiful moment for me. I write this as an atheist who doesn't understand any of the words of the call to prayer. For me, its beauty is about the sounds and the moment, coupled with images of the venerable mosques I visited (I took these photos in Turkey and Egypt). Also coupled with the second-to-none hospitality of the people I met in the Middle East. It's different than church bells, because it's only five times each day and because you are not hearing a mechanical bell--you are hearing a human being earnestly calling out to you.
As I repeatedly visited Turkey, I started looking forward to the calls as opportunities to stop and think about life and my place in the world. I also took it as a reminder to always be tending to things that really matter because the day is always slipping away. It is also a reminder that you are part of a much bigger community because that call is to everyone in hearing distance, not just you.
There are many reasons for craving an effective vaccine for COVID. For me, this is a reason that I didn't anticipate. This is a good example of a reason that you should travel to new places: If you travel with the right state of mind, you will be changed by what you encounter.
I hate to keep writing about Woke issues, but this ideology increasingly concerns me as the 2020 election approaches. It is an issue that mainstream Democrats ignore or downplay, yet the Republicans have recognized it for the cultural cancer that it is. Woke ideology has successfully entrenched itself deeply into many of our meaning-making institutions and this has positioned it well to spread far, which is unfortunate. Here's a recent example:
Making things worse, far too many Woke advocates are willing to tap into authoritarian tactics.
Andy Ngo's "crime" is that he is reporting on what he is seeing on the streets in Portland, including ongoing attempts to damage or destroy federal property. The NYT thought this sort of thing was a worthy topic, even when it occurred in a much milder form, when right wing zealots merely occupied federal property for a month in 2016 (see here, for example), but "America's newspaper of record" has barely any interest in Portland or Seattle. Because of this vacuum, these stories and concerns critical of Woke culture are being covered mostly by conservative media and without sufficient discussion or nuance. As I noted above, it is my concern that these issues are keeping the upcoming election close. This unwillingness by people on the political left to criticize "their own" is unfortunate. Those relatively few socially brave traditional liberals who are willing to speak out, many of whom consider themselves well-entrenched on the political left, are often being accused of being conservatives/Republicans by others on the political left, merely because they are willing to speak out. This has left many traditional liberals (like me) feeling like we no longer have a political home.
One must usually seek out alternative news sources to find thoughtful discussion about the Woke movement. For those who are trying to get up to speed, consider visiting New Discourses(founded by James Lindsay) and Quillette.
Woke ideology is disproportionately affecting younger adults, people who are increasingly coming into positions of power. This phenomenon was rather predictable based on The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. For another thoughtful discussion about the correlation of age and receptiveness to Woke ideology, see this Wiki letter exchange between Sarah Haider and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (the following excerpt was written by Sarah Haider):
Wokeism is, perhaps, an anti-ideology—a will to power that can be most concretely identified not by what it values or the future it envisions, but by what it seeks to destroy and the power it demands. This makes it especially disastrous. For, when an existing organizing structure is destroyed with no replacement, a more brutal force can exploit the resulting power vacuum. . . . Once liberal institutions have been delegitimized by the woke, what will replace them?
But while its philosophy is empty, the psychology of wokeism is deeply satisfying to our baser instincts. For the vicious, there is a thrill in playing the righteous inquisitor, in mobbing heretics and demanding deference—brutal tactics that keep the rest of us in line, lest we be targeted next. Meanwhile, the strict social hierarchies of the woke are reassuringly simple to navigate: one always knows one’s place.
By contrast, liberalism flies in the face of human nature. “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” is a phrase so often repeated that we have forgotten how deeply counterintuitive it is. We want to punch the Nazi (or gag him), not defend his right to march. Liberalism might ultimately be good, but it doesn’t feel good. And this is why it may find itself vulnerable to public abandonment, especially in times where it is most necessary. . . .
You rightly point out that liberalism has formidable champions in Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and J. K. Rowling. Yet Hitchens is gone and all the others are over fifty. Likewise, this summer, when I co-signed an open letter in defense of free debate, I was disconcerted to see how few of the other signatories were even close to my age.
Bari Weiss recently noted that:
The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes and the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same. The Old Guard lives by a set of principles we can broadly call civil libertarianism. They assumed they shared that worldview with the young people they hired who called themselves liberals and progressives. But it was an incorrect assumption.
This has been my experience too. Woke adherence can be predicted by generation - where true liberals exist, they exist primarily among the old guard. If the woke have won over the young, they have captured the future.
This ideology manifests in many other ways too. For instance, insincere and dishonest debate about the unprecedented surge in (mostly) young girls who are being convinced that they were born in the wrong body, leading to permanent body-altering surgery, hormones and other treatments. You won't find honest discussion about these issues in mainstream media--certainly not in the NYT. Instead of wide-open discussion based on a foundation of biology and medicine, you will only hear discussions where the "factual" foundation is ideology. This is insane. There is a war going being waged to protect young girls (progress being made in Great Britain), yet many media outlets are afraid to cover the story. To learn young girls are being physically damaged by this ideology, you'll need to go to places like Joe Rogan's podcast. His recent episode featuring Abigail Shrier and her excellent book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, resulted in an attempt by employees of Spotify to muzzle Rogan on this issue and other Woke issues. Refreshingly, Rogan counter-attacked by posting this video on Twitter, suggesting that he has carefully anchored his right to speak freely in his Spotify contract:
There are some bright spots--some well-placed people calling out Woke ideology for the illiberal, dysfunctional and mostly dishonest cult that it is. For instance, check out this recent discussion between Sam Harris and John McWhorter. That said, for each of these well-placed people willing to speak out, there are many other people who believe in a vigorous and open discussion, a willingness to consider dissenting speech and a dispassionate determination of the facts as the basis for conversation. Unfortunately, most of these people are lesser known than Joe Rogan (and J.K. Rowling) and more vulnerable to cancellation (see the comments here).
I could go on, but I won't do that here. I'll try to move on to other topics for awhile . . .
James Randi was an inspiration to me. He was one of the many magicians (including Penn Jillette) who also turned their attention toward exposing many paranormal claims. He was a first-rate debunker of those who prey on fear, ignorance and superstition, as well as an entertaining communicator. I was fortunate to be able to see "The Amazing Randi" make a presentation in person at the CSICOP Conference in Buffalo, NY in 1983.
It is awesome to see these charlatans fails so dramatically and so publicly
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