Two Paths Forward on Race

We've gotten to the point where we now have a category called "People of Color minus Asian." This is a true story.

I suspect (but don't know) that if Asian students stop studying so much and start getting worse grades, they might be allowed back into the category "People of Color."

I see two possible paths forward from this madness. A) We decide that there is one human race and that we are all shades of brown, or B) We keep dividing people up into smaller and smaller groups until we notice that we have 330 million Americans, each one of them being its own individual "race."

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What if You CAN Take it With You?

What if, when you get to heaven, they tell you that everything costs money and that your earthly bank account has been converted into “heaven-dollars” as of the moment you died? What if you find out, however, that there is a cloud rental fee and a daily fee for the manna food bar and everything else heavenly costs money too?

What if you complain and those in charge tell you to go get a job? “There’s a lot of work that needs to be done up here. Go make yourself useful.”

You start belly-aching again, telling them how hard you worked while on Earth, blah blah blah.

They aren’t impressed. They tell you: “This is heaven, not paradise.”

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The Problem with Today’s Woke Students

This article about the dumbing down of American students quotes Camille Paglia:

What has happened is these young people now getting to college have no sense of history – of any kind! No sense of history. No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where you can go to the store and get orange juice and milk, and you can turn on the water and the hot water comes out. They have no sense whatever of the destruction, of the great civilizations that rose and fell, and so on – and how arrogant people get when they’re in a comfortable civilization. They now have been taught to look around them to see defects in America – which is the freest country in the history of the world – and to feel that somehow America is the source of all evil in the universe, and it’s because they’ve never been exposed to the actual evil of the history of humanity. They know nothing!

There’s one exception to this, however. Even while today’s students have not been taught knowledge, they have also been taught not to bully a person on the basis of their race, class, gender, or any other trait.

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Jonathan Haidt and Jonathan Rauch Discuss “The Constitution of Knowledge”

From Heterodox Academy, a discussion of Jonathan Rauch's excellent new book, The Constitution of Knowledge. Here's the HxA landing page for this video.

The production of knowledge thrives when universities value open inquiry, but recent trends in conformist thinking pose new threats to research, writing, and teaching. How do we combat conformist culture in our classrooms and research, while encouraging inquiry into unorthodox ideas? How can our epistemic institutions continue to seek and know truth? We were joined by HxA co-founder and Board Chair Jonathan Haidt for an in-depth discussion with Jonathan Rauch, author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.

As Rauch states in the teaser, the system doesn't work by magic. It requires all of us to participate in good faith:

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