these fears can no longer be confined to a fanatical fringe of gun-toting survivalists. The relentless onslaught of earthshaking crises, unfolding against the backdrop of flash floods and forest fires, has steadily pushed apocalyptic sentiment into the mainstream. When even the head of the United Nations warns that rising sea levels could unleash “a mass exodus on a biblical scale,” it is hard to remain sanguine about the state of the world. One survey found that over half of young adults now believe that “humanity is doomed” and “the future is frightening.”
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Opinion | We Have Two Visions of the Future, and Both Are Wrong - The New York Times - 0 views
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At the same time, recent years have also seen the resurgence of a very different kind of narrative. Exemplified by a slew of best-selling books and viral TED talks, this view tends to downplay the challenges we face and instead insists on the inexorable march of human progress. If doomsday thinkers worry endlessly that things are about to get a lot worse, the prophets of progress maintain that things have only been getting better — and are likely to continue to do so in the future.
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liminality originally referred to the sense of disorientation that arises during a rite of passage. In a traditional coming-of-age ritual, for instance, it marks the point at which the adolescent is no longer considered a child but is not yet recognized as an adult — betwixt and between
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It is easy to understand the appeal of such one-sided tales. As human beings, we seem to prefer to impose clear and linear narratives on a chaotic and unpredictable reality; ambiguity and contradiction are much harder to live with.
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To truly grasp the complex nature of our current time, we need first of all to embrace its most terrifying aspect: its fundamental open-endedness. It is precisely this radical uncertainty — not knowing where we are and what lies ahead — that gives rise to such existential anxiety.
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Anthropologists have a name for this disturbing type of experience: liminality
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If things are really getting better, there is clearly no need for transformative change to confront the most pressing problems of our time. So long as we stick to the script and keep our faith in the redeeming qualities of human ingenuity and technological innovation, all our problems will eventually resolve themselves.
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We are ourselves in the midst of a painful transition, a sort of interregnum, as the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci famously called it, between an old world that is dying and a new one that is struggling to be born. Such epochal shifts are inevitably fraught with danger
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the great upheavals in world history can equally be seen “as genuine signs of vitality” that “clear the ground” of discredited ideas and decaying institutions. “The crisis,” he wrote, “is to be regarded as a new nexus of growth.”
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Once we embrace this Janus-faced nature of our times, at once frightening yet generative, a very different vision of the future emerges.
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we see phases of relative calm punctuated every so often by periods of great upheaval. These crises can be devastating, but they are also the drivers of history.
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even the collapse of modern civilization — but it may also open up possibilities for transformative change
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Opinion | Claudine Gay and the Limits of Social Engineering at Harvard - The New York T... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...-claudine-gay-resignation.html
affirmative action harvard academia justice racism engineering culture politics history
shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 24
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the important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history.
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How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?
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The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.
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I’ve seen arguments that it goes back to the 1978 Bakke decision, when the Supreme Court effectively greenlit affirmative action in the name of diversity.
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the problem with Bakke isn’t that it allowed diversity to be a consideration in admissions decisions. It’s that university administrators turned an allowance into a requirement, so a kind of racial gerrymander now permeates nearly every aspect of academic life, from admissions decisions to faculty appointments to the racial makeup of contributors to essay collections
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If affirmative action had been administered with a lighter hand — more nudge than mandate — it might have survived the court’s scrutiny last year. Instead, it became a pervasive regime that frequently got in the way of the universities’ higher goals, particularly the open exchange of ideas.
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skin color was the first thing The Harvard Crimson noted in its story about her taking office, and her missteps and questions about her academic work gave ammunition to detractors who claimed she owed her position solely to her race.
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This is the poisoned pool in which Harvard now swims. Whenever it elevates someone like Gay, there’s an assumption by admirers and detractors alike that she’s a political symbol whose performance represents more than who she is as a person
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dehumanization is the price any institution pays when considerations of social engineering supplant those of individual achievement.
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It may take a generation after the end of affirmative action before someone like Gay can have the opportunity to be judged on her own merits, irrespective of her color.
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the damage that the social-justice model has done to higher education will take longer to repair. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans expressed high confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup survey. Last year, the number had fallen to 36 percent, and that was before the wave of antisemitic campus outbursts. At Harvard, early admission applications fell by 17 percent last fall.
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Harvard also sets the tone for the rest of American higher ed — and for public attitudes toward it. One of the secrets of America’s postwar success wasn’t simply the caliber of U.S. universities. It was the respect they engendered among ordinary people who aspired to send their children to them.
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That respect is now being eroded to the point of being erased. For good reason
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People admire, and will strive for, excellence — both for its own sake and for the status it confers. But status without excellence is a rapidly wasting asset, especially when it comes with an exorbitant price. That’s the position of much of American academia today. Two hundred thousand dollars or more is a lot to pay for lessons in how to be an anti-racist.
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the intellectual rot is pervasive and won’t stop spreading until universities return to the idea that their central purpose is to identify and nurture and liberate the best minds, not to engineer social utopias.
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Neoracism, Finally on Defense - by Andrew Sullivan - 0 views
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The poignancy of Coleman Hughes’ new book, The End of Race Politics, lies therefore in the tenacity of his faith in the spirit of 1964
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To advocate colorblindness is to endorse an ethical principle: we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and private lives.”
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That’s a principle the vast majority of Americans, black and white and everything else, support. It was the core principle for Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Martin Luther King Jr, and Bayard Rustin.
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Henry Highland Garnet — the first African-American to speak in Congress after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment — even apologized for speaking of various different races, “when in fact there is but one race, as there was but one Adam.”
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Fast forward to 2015, when the University of California called the phrase “There is only one race, the human race” a “micro-aggression”; or 2020, when the phrase “All Lives Matter” was deemed evidence of “anti-blackness”
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The 21st Century, the brief era of color-blindness behind us, reached back to the 19th to insist that race defines us at our core, can never be overcome, and marks us all either an oppressor or a victim.
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Hughes cuts to the chase and calls these reactionaries in progressive clothing “neoracists”. They are. What else would one call them?
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They are race-obsessed. They view any human interaction as a racial power-struggle, and compound it with any number of further “intersectional” power-struggles
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They see group identity as determinative everywhere; and therefore want to intervene everywhere, to discriminate against whites and successful non-whites in favor of unsuccessful non-whites
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Individual rights? They come second to group identity.
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The old black-white paradigm to which so many are still attached has been superseded by the kaleidoscope society, in which “race” is almost always mixed, complicated, or one difference among many.
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Political power? Blacks, who are about 14 percent of population, are represented proportionally in the House — covering 29 states — and can claim the last two-term president, the current vice president, the House minority leader, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the mayors of the four most populous cities last year, and more than a fifth of SCOTUS.
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So do we do nothing? Not at all. In fact, blaming an abstraction — “white supremacy” — takes us backwards practically and analytically. Hughes advocates for color-blind processes wherever possible: blind grading in schools and colleges; or hiring policies that remove names from applications to deter racism.
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the implosion of bad ideas is not the same as the resuscitation of good ones. What Hughes has done in this book is remind us what we already knew: that racism and neoracism are two sides of the same collectivist coin, and that treating everyone regardless of race is the only feasible way forward for a multiracial America, just as it is the only morally defensible regime that can actually counter and erode racial hatred. The proof is in our past progress. But the potential for multi-racial individualism is as unknowable as it is exhilarating.
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Opinion | The Mystery of White Rural Rage - The New York Times - 0 views
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Business types and some economists may talk glowingly about the virtues of “creative destruction,” but the process can be devastating, economically and socially, for those who find themselves on the destruction side of the equation. This is especially true when technological change undermines not just individual workers but also whole communities.
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It’s a big part of what has happened to rural America.
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This process and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman
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“devastating” because the hardship of rural Americans is real, “terrifying” because the political backlash to this hardship poses a clear and present danger to our democracy, and “baffling” because at some level I still don’t get the politics.
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Technology is the main driver of rural decline, Schaller and Waldman argue. Indeed, American farms produce more than five times as much as they did 75 years ago, but the agricultural work force declined by about two-thirds over the same period, thanks to machinery, improved seeds, fertilizers and pesticides
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Coal production has been falling recently, but thanks partly to technologies like mountaintop removal, coal mining as a way of life largely disappeared long ago, with the number of miners falling 80 percent even as production roughly doubled.
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The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated story, and imports play a role, but it’s also mainly about technological change that favors metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers.
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Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are? Some have
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But some cities have become unaffordable, in part because of restrictive zoning — one thing blue states get wrong — while many workers are also reluctant to leave their families and communities.
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So shouldn’t we aid these communities? We do. Federal programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and more — are available to all Americans, but are disproportionately financed from taxes paid by affluent urban areas. As a result there are huge de facto transfers of money from rich, urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia.
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While these transfers somewhat mitigate the hardship facing rural America, they don’t restore the sense of dignity that has been lost along with rural jobs.
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And maybe that loss of dignity explains both white rural rage and why that rage is so misdirected — why it’s pretty clear that this November a majority of rural white Americans will again vote against Joe Biden, who as president has been trying to bring jobs to their communities, and for Donald Trump, a huckster from Queens who offers little other than validation for their resentment.
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This feeling of a loss of dignity may be worsened because some rural Americans have long seen themselves as more industrious, more patriotic and maybe even morally superior to the denizens of big cities — an attitude still expressed in cultural artifacts like Jason Al
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In the crudest sense, rural and small-town America is supposed to be filled with hard-working people who adhere to traditional values, not like those degenerate urbanites on welfare, but the economic and social reality doesn’t match this self-image.
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Prime working-age men outside metropolitan areas are substantially less likely than their metropolitan counterparts to be employed — not because they’re lazy, but because the jobs just aren’t there.
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Quite a few rural states also have high rates of homicide, suicide and births to single mothers — again, not because rural Americans are bad people, but because social disorder is, as the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago about urban problems, what happens when work disappears.
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Draw attention to some of these realities and you’ll be accused of being a snooty urban elitist
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The result — which at some level I still find hard to understand — is that many white rural voters support politicians who tell them lies they want to hear. It helps explain why the MAGA narrative casts relatively safe cities like New York as crime-ridden hellscapes while rural America is the victim not of technology but of illegal immigrants, wokeness and the deep state.
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while white rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it.