George Rebane
The Atlantic usually contains ideas that are antithetical to the perspectives with which I interpret what happens in the world. A longtime and dear friend, who leans a bit to my left, forwarded to me an essay with which he concurs “with 90% of the points made in this article (regardless of the source!)” After reading it, I must admit to a similar concordance. The piece – ‘WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID’ – by Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and NYU Professor of Ethical Leadership (here).
Dr Haidt is described variously as someone who “has attracted both support and criticism for his critique of the current state of universities and his interpretation of progressive values. He has been named one of the ‘top global thinkers’ by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the ‘top world thinkers’ by Prospect magazine. He is among the most cited researchers in political and moral psychology, and is considered among the top 25 most influential living psychologists.”
In the cited essay, Haidt uses the Tower of Babel metaphor to interpret what has happened to America in the last two decades as “the fractured country we now inhabit.” Like many of us, he sees that “something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.” Regular RR readers will recognize these longstanding themes in these pages.
The author goes on to outline “the rise of the modern Tower” in concert with the rise of the smartphone, the internet and its extremely influential social networks which now unite the various thoughts and ideas of several billion people. For Haidt “the high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the Occupy movement. … For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do.” Then things started going downhill as “humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel.”
The problem, as dissected by Haidt, began as social media weakened “at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.” He then goes on to detail how the Left has dominated the various institutions, specifically the media and academe. He abets this argument by citing James Madison in Federalist #10 on “the innate human proclivity toward ‘faction’, by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with ‘mutual animosity’ that they are ‘much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.’”
But since then, thanks much to social media, the Tower has fallen and the factions no longer communicate. The hows and whys of the fall are of some considerable interest to those of us who claim to pay attention. He even details how closed groups of “jerks” dominate discussions and debates on the various blogs. I won’t go on giving you clips of Haidt’s expansion of that very recent and ongoing history. Suffice it to say that Haidt also agrees that we are at least two distinct countries – with appropriately differentiated cultures, languages, histories, values, … - sharing a common border.
What struck me as a significant shortcoming in Dr Haidt’s contemporary ontology is his apparent ignorance (neglect?) of some significant findings by sociologists that dovetail with teachings from the systems sciences. He argues that ‘Democracy after Babel’ will require a ‘redesign of democracy’ that includes reforms in three categorical areas – “three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era. We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.”
When expanding on these areas, it is not clear at all that Haidt’s recommendations do not require the enlargement of our already encompassing government(s). How else would democratic institutions be “hardened”, social media “reformed”, and the “next generation prepared” for a more compliant and compatible “democratic citizenship”? What Haidt misses is the underlying truth that for large complex systems to remain viable, they need to be decentralized – they need to be based on a structure of distributed control and knowledge. In this universe, nature does not support large systems that are centrally comprehended and controlled. On Earth, the evidence for this abounds when we open our eyes and understand what we see in the natural world.
The alternative approach to successful societies in the post-Babel era, missed by Haidt, is to abandon globalism and work to enlarge the community of sovereign nation-states to have members with much smaller and more culturally cohesive populations. I have lost track, but somewhere in the archives of such sociological studies are solutions that identify ideal national populations to be in the five to ten million range, and comprise of jurisdictional units that are not larger than 50,000. This kind of global structure of independent states and free peoples would promote specialization, trade, and the ready transfer of ‘best practices’, as one people sees how another people have a better solution for a common problem.
Roe v Wade v Dodd (updated 6may22)
George Rebane
Now DvJ has reduced this down to the first 15 weeks. (more here) And this started the brouhaha that was appealed all the way up to SCOTUS, which, according to the draft, promises to reconsider the whole question of constitutionality and to reinstate federalism by again allowing the several states each to legislate their own abortion laws.
The Left, generally against federalism, hates this and anybody and everybody who wants to restrict a ‘woman’s right’ to an abortion, up to and including a post-partum killing. And for good measure, all progressives want the state to pay for such abortions on demand.
My own take on abortions is included in the 2012 post ‘Abortion and the Two Bodies Problem’.
[4may22 update] There was a gathering of Nevada County’s ignorant and double dummies to protest the SCOTUS draft on Broad Street. (here) It is hard to believe that any of these fellow citizens and neighbors, among whom we must live, know the contents of RvW, Mississippi’s DvJ, or the leaked draft. The depths of their considerable deficits allow them to comfortably demonstrate for democracy while denying the ability of Americans in the several states the ability to vote for the abortion policy that they and their fellow residents support. The facile way they continue to be manipulated by the nation’s leftwing elites recalls Lenin’s definition of ‘useful idiots’.
[6may22 update] Another illustration of the intellectually brain-dead Left is their ongoing charge Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh broke their promise to the Senate that they would honor Roe after being confirmed. There is no evidence whatsoever that they made any such commitments during their hearings, yet the Democrats and their lamestream have now adopted that as their latest Big Lie, adding it to their already historic collection that continues to grow at an increasing pace as the November election approaches. Another one of their 'poetic truths'?
On the lighter side, the photo below was recaptioned by one of our regular readers. He didn’t specify whether the new non-scalable fence is supposed to keep the Republicans in or out.
Posted at 09:14 AM in Culture Comments, Current Affairs, Happenings, Our Country, The Rear View | Permalink | Comments (46)
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