Author: jacobbacharach

Va, pensiero

War and Politics

policy in disarray greenlight atmosphere of crisis deeply divided claimed lives proved prophetic touching off a crisis banking on the success intervention diplomatic breakthrough deeply ambivalent president contentious debate authoritarian governments enmeshed in a messy war debate dragged on emboldened strained relations messy threat of force paralysis . . .

These are the clichés of American mainstream foreign reporting, which is rarely more than the DC Local beat, from just the first quarter of a long New York Times article on the heart-rending, life-changing story of an administration at war with itself. It’s a sort of metafictive take on the Syrian civil war that manages to be almost entirely devoid of Syrians. Where they do appear, they serve in a solely adverbial capacity.

I’ve already seen some criticism of the story for making the neat arrangement of stock phrases a substitute for analysis, and it is true that it’s just terribly written, a parody of the house style of major American papers.  (I idiosyncratically believe that terrible writing is among the greater contributors to their continued decline in American intellectual life; the chocked, neutered, non-committal, wishy-washy, passive prose of our Timeses and Posts is the literary equivalent of eating a box of stale crackers without water.) I agree with that criticism, obviously, but could the story have been written any other way? Is there anything to analyze? It describes, after all, a non-event; a series of non-events. I know we’re supposed to believe that this sort of reporting exposes the inner workings of the American government, that our civic understanding is somehow enriched by knowing that Samantha Power and some other guy disagree with each other, that the mechanics of these little office dramas, because they happen to revolve around questions of war, are of critical importance to the life of the Republic. Well, I say: bogus.

Actually, these people could be arguing over who does the dishes in the kitchenette and why no one ever washes out the microwave. These are conflicts of temperament and personality in an office, and what makes it so appalling is that an actual event, a war in which many thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands—of people have died and are dying, serves as the last cupcake from the staff meeting that I was saving for after lunch and someone ate it. Yes, someone will say that the attitude of the administration toward Syria is important; we should know when and how the president reached his decision over what to do or not to do there. Well, I’d say, no, not really.

The relentless refocusing of world events onto the minor squabbles of American actors over how to respond to them not only serves to trivialize all the other lives and societies in the world beyond Washington, but also, ironically, it fails utterly in reporting on what the US is, in fact, doing in other countries around the world. We see, for instance, some passing references to the CIA smuggling arms to rebel factions, but that’s lost in the swirl of detail about how crisply Mr. McDonough responded, or how the President’s enthusiasm cooled.

Behind these arias, there’s a war on, but the tunes are so familiar to us; honey, let’s just stay in our seats.

An Incoherent List of Books Demonstrating Why I Am Not on Any Sort of Curriculum Committee

Uncategorized

My tweetfriend @PEG asked after books his kids ought to read during their adolescent unschooling, and since 1.) lists are fun and 2.) I’m unable to resist the calling of my inner pedant, oh boy, I’m gonna give him a list. Idiosyncratic and in no particular order, and apologies for using the word “great” so frequently:

The Story of Philosophy, by Will (and Ariel) Durant. It’s everything you could ask for in an introduction to Western philosophy, thorough but not didactic, elegant but never breezy, at once conversational and erudite. It covers the big guys from Plato through Bergson and Russell and James. I have my dad’s old paperback copy from the seventies, and it’s one of my favorite books.

Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne. This slightly violates Pascal-Emmanuel’s dictum that the list steer clear of books already on the “Great” lists, but it’s one of those titles that everyone seems to know and no one seems to have actually read, which is a shame, because it’s one of the three great inventive novels in the Western canon (the others are Don Quixote and Moby Dick, btw), and because it’s just so funny and such a joy to read. There is no innovation of modern or postmodern fiction that Sterne didn’t anticipate back in 1759. The sentences can be immensely complex and convoluted, so this is also a great book for anyone who wants to truly master the English language.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, by Philip K. Dick. I love Dick’s earlier works; Martian Time-Slip and The Man in the High Castle were two of the great loves of my own adolescence, but Dick’s last novel, published posthumously, is at once his most philosophical and his most affecting, a step away from the madness and disorientation of his earlier work (though they aren’t forgotten or discarded here) and toward a contemplation of humanity, divinity, and belief. I love the whole VALIS Trilogy, but The Transmigration is the great Christian novel of the 20th Century, if you ask me.

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder. Just terrifying: a re-centering of the whole narrative of WW2 to the Eastern Front. Unrelentingly horrific, but so necessary to Anglo-American and French perspectives that the war was fought in Normandy.

The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Half poet and half documentarian, she’s more remembered now for her poem “To Be a Jew in the Twentieth Century,” which was adopted by the Reform movement, but the poems in The Book of the Dead especially are a masterpiece of both poetics and journalism. In a way, she was a mid-century heir to Melville.

Love, Death, and the Changing of Seasons by Marilyn Hacker. A sonnet sequence written in the mid-eighties about getting older and about the end of a love affair.

Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. Ferris’s first novel. It’s sad and yet hysterical, written in a plural first person that somehow never bugs you. One of the really great workplace novels of the last few decades.

On the Floor, by Aifric Campbell. Another workplace novel, this one set in the trading floors of an investment bank and elsewhere in the boom-boom Wild West of The City of London in the early nineties that manages to be simultaneously polemical, wistfully sad, and utterly alien.

And speaking of aliens, Consider Phlebas and the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. Banks, recently deceased, wrote about a dozen novels set in a fantastically advanced, post-scarcity, space-faring society that found itself often intervening in the affairs of lesser civilizations. Banks was one of science fiction’s great moral and economic thinkers.

The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner. Already wrote about this one.

The Comforters, by Muriel Spark. Most high-school reading lists include The Prime of Miss Jean Brody, but Spark’s first novel is a personal favorite of mine, and I still think it may be the best of her works. In the great tradition of British novelists converting to Catholicism and going slightly crazy in a good way.

Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene. Again, an early work by a Catholic Brit that I consider in many ways superior to the (nevertheless very, very good) works that came after. Gangsters, girlfriends, and the priestly admonition: “You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the . . . appalling . . . strangeness of the mercy of God.”

Wonderboys, by Michael Chabon. A lot of people seem to think this is Chabon’s weakest work, a shaggy-dog second novel that lacked the energy of his first book or the inventiveness and AMBITION of the coming novels, but I think it’s his best, a great, Lebowskian stoner comedy, an academic satire as sharp as McCarthy or Jarrell, and one of the only books about writing books that doesn’t make me want to hurl it against a wall.

Forewards and Afterwards, by W.H. Auden. Essays on everything from education in the classics to Protestantism.

Foe, by J.M. Coetzee. Maybe not his best, but one that I studied in college, which contemplates, among other things, the nature of slavery and servitude.

Mumbo Jumbo, by Ishmael Reed. The great conspiracy novel of American literature. I’ll take this over Pynchon any day. Egyptian gods, secret societies, an Afrocentric history of the world, and jazz.

The Gates of Repentance. The Reform machzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. A bit of a “greatest hits” compared to some of the Conservative and Orthodox machzorim, but lots of English (although, fair warning, about half is still in untranslated Hebrew). Still, a very good read for a Christian seeking something other than academic or narrative introduction to Jewish belief and prayer.

Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard. The rare instance where an author’s most critically acclaimed work is also his best. Stoppard is one of those playwrights whose work is better read than seen, if only because actors rarely seem to figure out what he’s talking about. Math, the nature of time, Byron.

Coming of Age in the Milky Way, by Timothy Ferris. This is the physical-science counterpart to Durant’s history of philosophy, an amazing survey of the state of physics and astronomy from Ptolemy to the twentieth century. When I was a skinny science nerd in high school, I carried it everywhere.

Breaking Open the Head: A Psychadelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, by Daniel Pinchbeck. Before Pinchbeck became a bore, yammering on about 2012 and the Mayan calendar, he actually studied and participated in chemical and shamanistic rituals all over the world. Part travelogue and part ethnography and part plain, good-old-fashioned gonzo journalism.

Miami, by Joan Didion. Her best collection of essays and one of the truest, strangest portraits of the Cold War in North America.

Erasure: A Novel, by Percival Everett. Everett’s satire on a black author becoming A Black Author.

Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant, by Edmond Caldwell. Destroy narrative, eradicate character, spoof Beckett, mock James Wood. One of my favorite novels of the last few years, and an amazing, funny, and even heartbreaking book that shows how much more is possible in a novel than the sort of thing you read about in the Sunday Times.

Death at SeaWorld: Shamu and the Dark Side of Killer Whales in Captivity, by David Kirby. Curse the editor who came up with this awful title. Although partly a sort of procedural investigation into several deadly incidents with captive killer whales, this book is really about the relationship of humans to non-human intelligence, a moral investigation of what it means for us to discover that we live among other thinking and feeling creatures.

We Like Ike, Man

Culture, Education, Uncategorized, War and Politics

I graduated from Oberlin College ten years ago, and if the college was in many ways an exemplar of the sort of economic inequality and unfairness that define the waking American dream, a charming oasis of unostentatious but everywhere evident family wealth amid a lot of Cass Gilbert architecture plunked obscenely in the middle of one of the poorest counties in Ohio, then it was also a fine example of what a college or university ought to be. Yes, it had its share of bureaucrats, and yes, there was an occasional adjunct, though usually just visiting for a year right out of graduate school, but there were precious few deans; I never once met a “director” of anything other than, maybe, campus dining; the departments were run by faculty; the office of career services was a distant backwater, an uncomfortable fishbowl near an underutilized computer lab; we got stoned and complained mightily about the fascist administration of then-college president, Nancy Dye, about the progressive, radical spirit of the school disappearing in the assault of Ivy-League-ism, but in retrospect I most remember that everyone seemed genuinely to believe that the purpose of the whole shebang was for everyone to read a lot, think a lot, and learn a few things. There were a bunch of professors, most of them seemingly well-paid, and not very many students as far as the ratios went. It was very expensive, but you could multiply the number of kids times the number of dollars per kid and come up with a reasonable cost for operating such an institution for a year. Select any random college employee, and you could figure out without too much trouble what it was that he or she did all day.

So you can imagine the revelation of entering a business school at a large public university almost a decade later. Great gouts and floods of ink have already broken the dam and overrun the banks of the conversation about “the rising costs of higher education,” and I won’t bother repeating all the data that others have collected, collated, and explained better than I ever could. But I can’t help but share my anecdotal astonishment at the number of inessential administrators running around. Even the dean (especially the dean?) of the business school drifted from here to there on campus in a slightly overlarge suit that seemed expressly tailored to contain both a man and his aura of uselessness. Of the dozens I encountered, only one manager, a sensible, lovely woman named Linda, far down the hierarchy of pay and title, ever managed to get anything done; I mean, she got everything done, from our schedules to the hiccups in our travel arrangements when we went to conferences abroad.

I don’t mean to cast aspersions on their characters. One of the bad habits in the radical’s critique of any institution is to presume evil intentions on the parts of people who simply, unthinkingly serve. Most of the people involved in the spiraling scam of university administration are just doing their jobs, however hopelessly unnecessary they may be to the actual operation of an actual organization dedicated to the real teaching of students. Making some assistant director for recruitment the object of moral ire is like hating on some corporate spend analyst in the bowels of Enron. How many of us would give up our livelihood at the vague prospect that our employer might be causing an indefinable and distant harm? The assistant director of recruitment just wants to make his quota for the year, save enough money for a vacation, pay his rent, go to a nice restaurant from time to time. Does he realize, in some general way, that he’s implicated in the personal debt crisis, or the Taylorization of learning? Hey, he went to grad school, too. He’s no dummy. But you gotta feed the monkey.

This isn’t to say that there’s no moral blame; it is to say that you’ve gotta amortize that blame over an awful lot of associate deans and provosts and boards of trustees. We are uncomfortable with the idea of distributed guilt, but there it is. What makes the problem intractable is precisely its lack of some monstrous secret master, some center, not to mention the essential ordinariness of all the participation by all the beneficiaries of a rent-seeking education apparatus that largely apes finance and government by siphoning money from the general wealth and moving it to certain select cadres of the population. That last bit, of course, makes the whole thing even more confounding, since the scam is so non-particular; you can’t even blame the institutions of education, which are only comporting themselves to an even broader social and economic pattern. The modern university is to contemporary American society what that vice-provost for media relations is to the university: a functionary, just doing its job.

So I’ve been thinking about David Petraeus, a former military commander in Iraq and Afghanistan and the director of the CIA for a year before an inconsequential sex affair involving a sycophant biographer and bankrupt Tampa con artist caused him to resign. He was hired by CUNY to teach the sort of bogus celebrity seminar that appeals to college administrators because it predominantly involves reading Economist articles and consulting group reports and considering how to reproduce them in the form of PowerPoint presentations, in other words, exactly what an assistant director of does for much of the day. This is a slightly more advanced version of the kind of education foisted on primary and secondary students, with the slide show template filling in for the bubble sheet. It’s mostly notable in that it requires no thought; it’s an exercise in formatting. For this, the university offered to pay the general $200,000, later reduced to $150,000, and then, when a load of malcontents refused to shut up about it and administrators got worried about bad press, finally, they knocked it down to a one-buck honorarium.

This original scandal was mostly about money. Adjuncts were starving in the outer boroughs, while some four-star jerk was going to get paid $10,000 an hour to show up and gallop through material prepared for him by his own underpaid assistants. What was fascinating about this episode was less the imbroglio itself than the reaction of the participants; most notable to me was the initial incomprehension and painfully slow dawning of the problem on the administrators who brought the general to the table to begin with. Their first reaction was visceral disbelief. But, but, he’s David Petreaus. Former 4-star general and CIA director David Petraeus! These are people for whom status and career recognition hold intrinsic value—name and title function as a kind of irreducible gold standard of human worth. The idea that one might not richly compensate such a guy just for showing up was so alien to them that they could not, at first, understand what the fuss was about. The relationship between this and the underpayment of temporary faculty was thoroughly beyond them.

But eventually they did come around to the idea that there was, at least, some sort of fuss, and they grudgingly reduced his pay. With the economic argument now largely undercut, opposition to Petreaus’s appointment found a new target in the idea that he is an abominable war criminal who presided over unspeakable violence and torture in the illegal occupation of other countries, and who now sullies the university with his very presence. Since I am, and have always been, deeply opposed to US military action abroad, the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan in particular, I’m innately sympathetic to this view, but I also believe that we err in assigning this sort of direct and unique moral culpability to Petreaus, that we commit, in effect, the mirrored error of his boosters, who generally proclaim him the hero and genius who rescued one, possibly two American wars from utter catastrophe.

Petreaus strikes me as a skilled bureaucrat who rose steadily through the ranks of America’s largest and most byzantine bureaucracy, but I find it hard to believe that a man who assigns Brookings Institution readings and Washington Post op-eds as anything other than object lessons in bad prose can be any kind of genius. His legendary success in Iraq was no success at all, not even by America’s own self-interested, self-designed, and self-applied metrics, and his supposedly ingenious reinvention of America’s Iraq occupation was never more than a tactical redeployment cribbed from a centuries-old colonial playbook. Remember the glowing reports of military brass gathered in dark conference rooms watching The Battle of Algiers? We’ve been to this theater before. His proponents would cast him as some kind of Eisenhower; his opponents as some kind of latter-day Heydrich. In reality, he was a functionary, and for all the horror perpetrated under his command, he was only the latest in a long line of commanders going back many decades. The war in Iraq, let’s not forget, began not under George Bush, but under his father; the US never ceased its low-level conflict under Clinton; Bush Jr. just re-upped; Obama continued it, although it seems as if he may have been out-foxed by the Iranians into withdrawing at last. The US project in the Middle East dates to the passing of influence from Britain to America after the Second World War; we’ve been fighting conflicts and proxy conflicts in the region for half a century. Petraeus may indeed be a criminal, as the internal auditors at Lehman were criminals, but in our zeal to condemn, let’s remember that all of these guys just showed up for work and did what they were told. Better men would have resigned; good men would never have found themselves in such a position to begin with; but there aren’t that many good men in the world, and most Americans do what they’re told.

None of this absolves Petreaus of responsibility or culpability. He was, after all, a general, but the main characteristic of his life and career is not the vicious contemplation of how to bring violence, misery, and death to peoples around the world, but rather the stubborn inability to think about that violence, misery, and death, to consider it in any way other than the unfortunate but necessary ancillary outcome of some other thing that had to have been done. The very same unthinking allows the President of the United States of America stand before the United Nations and say that the US harbors no imperial agenda because it frequently invades other countries. This is taken as evidence of extraordinary hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance, but both interpretations require an element of cognition that’s wholly lacking. The principal characteristic of these sorts of pronouncements is their lack of deliberateness and their lack of thought. These are just rote recitations of obligatory memorization; is it any wonder that a society led by such cliché machines chooses to measure intellectual achievement through standardized tests?

I think this is the really salient point. A brutal and unfair society requires a population that conceives of the intellect in terms of taking instruction. Even in my own student days, when testing was far less important, I can recall teachers and exam proctors stalking up and down the aisles between desks warning us of the dire consequences of not carefully reading the instructions. A culture thus educated develops mental habits that revolve around taking and interpreting commands. Its sense of duty and ethics isn’t is this right, but rather, am I doing this right? In this regard, the appointment of a David Petreaus, or a John Yoo, or a Condoleeza Rice to prominent positions in the academy are less significant because these people are monstrous than because they are expressly not so. When Yoo is asked about the torture memos he authored and replies that he was just providing the executive with what it requested and required, people tend to see obfuscation, but I see an instructive kind of honesty: he just can’t imagine that one wouldn’t provide what his boss required of him. He didn’t torture anyone.

This by the way, was Arendt’s misunderstood point—she had the bad luck to coin a very quotable phrase that distracted from it. What enables evil is not so much the capacity of ordinary people to be converted to dark purposes, but instead the incapacity of people to think about purpose and consequence. Our dilemma is that this form of thoughtlessness is exactly what the reformers of education at all levels seek. Unfortunately, for the most part, they too are unable to think about what they’re doing. The people who hire a Patreaus only perceive that his instruction might in some way help some students do what he did, and what they themselves have done to a lesser degree: enter an institution, serve it, and move upward through its ranks to their natural place in the overall order. Does it occur to them that this is Huxley’s dystopia, a life of servitude in a predetermined class interspersed with the occasional recreational bunga bunga and some Coors Light Lime? No. They haven’t read it. But you can divide into groups of four and prepare an in-class presentation for the next time we meet. Here is a Harvard Business Review article summarizing the case. Use it as the basis for your work.

Small Fowls Screaming over the Yet Yawning Gulf

Economy, Education

It was the last week of our Executive MBA program and we were drinking car bombs on the patio outside the fake Irish pub in Pittsburgh’s dull, chain-infected South Side Works development, a few blocks from the better bars on Carson Street. One of the few concrete lessons I learned as an MBA student was how to get staggeringly drunk in the middle of the day. As an aesthete, a Francophile, and a frantic, obsessive exerciser, I tended to limit my day drinking to a single glass of austere white wine with lunch, and even that only when vacationing in Europe, perhaps in New York if I was feeling particularly louche. But The Businessmen, as I had come to affectionately call my classmates, were titans of lunch-hour beer drinking, driven in part by a general spirit of fratty, macho competition, but in larger part by the growing realization, as our program crawled toward its conclusion, that our classroom experience was bogus, and the only solution was to drink.

This was actually my biggest surprise in MBA-land. I was ideologically and temperamentally opposed to the degree; as a matter of principle, I rejected the very idea of the thing. But it was a couple of years ago, and I hadn’t yet sold a book, and I’m a non-profit manager, and everyone said that I needed the fucker on my resume. I expected to learn a bit of the phony math of finance, formalize my accounting experience, brush up on my stats, ignore the catechismal belief in the divine efficacy of labor cost arbitrage, and despise my classmates, a cohort of thirty-to-fifty-year-old managers and executives from much larger and more horrible companies than my own. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that, while the academic portion was even dumber, more banal, and more ethically objectionable and politically suspect than I’d initially imagined, the guys—The Businessmen—were really pretty fucking great.

I suppose that traditional MBA students in fancier schools with dreams of Goldman Sachs salaries are emptier vessels for the promised miracles of this most American of religions, this socially acceptable Scientology, but a bunch of guys who’ve worked the trenches of the American Corporation for a decade or so are pretty immune to the evangel. Yeah, we all buckled down, or tried to, and learned to calculate the Net Present Value of a growing annuity, or whatever, but when it came to Porter’s Five Forces or the balanced scorecard or disruptive technologies and transformative innovations, well, our eyeballs went right back to our laptop screens. Which brings us back to the patio of Claddagh on a cloudless, 80-degree day in July. “Hey Nicky,” one of the other businessmen yelled. “How much money did you spend shopping online during the program? Order of magnitude!”

Nick had somehow acquired both a bottle of Malbec and a pint of Guinness, and he looked about ready to slide off his chair and curl up under the table. “Oh man,” he said. “At least fifteen grand!” We all had laptops, and we all used them uniquely to while away the hours and hours of nonsense to which we were subjected in the pursuit of a thing that our various bosses and mentors felt was important for our CVs. Nicky shopped. Stewball  read ESPN and Deadspin. Papa Stokes seemed to do actual work for his actual job. Solutions hunted animated .gifs, which he broadcast to the rest of us via gchat. I tended to watch pirate feeds of bike races on cyclingfans. A chacun son goût.

Inescapably, I recalled those hundreds of hours staring at my twitter feed or listening to Sean Kelly mumble about Tour climbs in my earbud while some earnest academic tried to cajole us into thinking strategically for the strategic disposition of future strategies when I read the Times’ latest survey of crackpot education-industry profit-taking—in this case, a scheme to sell the undercarriage protection package  a bunch of shitty tablets to a lot of schools based on the vaguely MBAish idea that education needs “disruption.” The article’s author, Carlo Rotella, is the director of something called American Studies at Boston College and presumably a living human creature, but the writing could have been produced by a New York Times Article Generator Algorithm; brief Statement of Authorial Skepticism followed by Interviews with Interested Parties, Reluctantly in Favor, followed by Entrepreneurial Boosterism, followed by Designated Third-Party Doubter, followed by Assurances of Good Intentions on All Sides of Debate, Despite Their Differences. This formula is deeply ideological, although it presents itself as a kind of position of intellectual neutral buoyancy, merely immersed in the vast, rolling waters all around it.

The story is this: Joel Klein, a vaguely ghoulish but fairly typical on-the-make ex-public administrator, gets himself hired by Rupert Murdoch, whose money people see the potential for profit in selling shiny trinkets to America’s beleaguered schools. Rotella calls this “the tendency to turn to the market to address social problems,” deliberate phrasing that’s meant to indicate the author questions, modestly, the application of for-profit business models to public goods, although it mostly just reveals the author’s own unrecognized ideological assumptions. Selling crap to the taxpayers is capitalism; government purchasing is the market. Whether an incinerator in Harrisburg or a billion-dollar jet that doesn’t fly in the rain, the business of American business is public rent-seeking, and education is just one more tank of money to siphon off. No one is “turning to the market”; a lot of administrators, like Klein used to be, are performing their pre-designated market function by purchasing marked-up commodities. Most of them assume that they, too, will one day move up the salary scale when GE hires them to sell brain implants in the next round of disruptive change. This isn’t a misapplication of the system. This is the system.

Disruption is a very of-the-moment pseudo-coinage of the business world; it’s meant to imply a historical process rather than the more mundane reality that “disruptive” and “transformative” change is as old as business itself. You figure out how to make some shit, and then you go out and convince a bunch of people that they really need to buy it. Do they? They will when they hear about its amazing, time-saving features. The old anecdote about the housewife saving not one second of housework by purchasing a power vacuum applies here. I say this as a lover of technology; but a true aficionado knows the limits of his hobbies. I happen to think and write better in the evening when I’ve had a glass of wine, but I don’t prescribe a universal program of Côtes-du-Rhône in our elementary schools.

And in any case, when you look at the sales pitch, you see the same old clichés about the workplace of tomorrow peddled as the great social inflection point whose crisis-borne arrival necessitates the adoption of these critical tools that just happen to cost $199 a pop. The simple fact of that traditional dollar-short-of-an-even-hundred commercial pricing model ought to tip you that something may be slightly crooked here, the transformative promise more marketing than prophecy. “Robin Britt, the Personalized Learning Environment Facilitator (PLEF)”—no, really—leaps Ballmer-like to the front of the room and engages in a little future-is-nowism for the crowd:

His “before” picture was the typical 19th-century classroom, the original template for our schools. He likened it to industrial shop floors designed for mass production: “People sitting in rows, all doing the same thing at the same time, not really connected to each other.” He contrasted that with a postindustrial workplace where temporary groupings of co-workers collaborate on tasks requiring intellectual, not physical capabilities. “We need a schoolhouse that prepares students to do that kind of work,” he said.

Oh, please. We all have jobs, and we all know about the “team-based environment.” This notion of the collaborative workplace is totally in vogue and totally crap. Maybe that shit sells to the new crop of 23-year-old business students, but the rest of us work for a living, and we’ve heard it before. Everyone still has a boss, and the annual review is the same as it ever was. Meanwhile, the idea that the 19th-century schoolhouse was an emergent social property of the age of mass production misdates the assembly line by at least half a century; the notion that industrial production is a non-cooperative endeavor is spoken like a man who, though he “holds an M.B.A. and a J.D. from the University of North Carolina,” has never seen a shop floor; the idea that most jobs consist of intellectually engaged programmers tossing tablets across the table at each other as if they’re in the Enterprise Ready Room is as divorced from the working reality of America today as the Just Hang In There poster on the Guidance Counselor’s wall from the anxious quotidian existence of the average high-schooler.

The even more basic fallacy is this: that education is a process of injection molding whereby our plastic youth are forced into a utile shape for the machinery of future business profit, AKA employment. Even were this the meaning of education (it’s not, but assume for a minute), the model fails. You’re telling me that giving a third-grader a piece of prior-gen computer technology today is really going to prepare him for the world of tomorrow? Can’t we just teach these poor kids to read and let them play Oregon Trail every once in a while as a treat? Yes, yes, a lot of successful sorts want schools to look more like business, although business mostly looks like a lot of disengaged peons watching their eBay bids and thumbing through Facebook until 5 o’clock. They want disruption and transformation, a classroom full of the dynamism of market capitalism. Except they still believe in all the pieties of universal education, and yet they propose that the solution to its ills is an economic system in which the majority of new ideas and enterprises fail utterly.

Why So Syria?

Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

My friend D. recently sent me an email asking the really critical question: why does Captain Janeway suck? Fortunately, I had recently re-watched most of Voyager, and had given the question a fair bit of cogitation prior to his asking. Viewed in relatively quick succession over the course of a month or so, what you really notice is that the Janeway character combines an immoveable moral rigidity, which manifests as a strident self-righteousness, with an extraordinary capriciousness, a mercurial ethic completely at odds with her self-presentation as a pole of right conduct.

It strikes me now that this is the perfect analog for the Obama administration’s approach to armed violence and the use of the military, stentorian correctness overlaying a feckless utilitarianism, utter conviction the costume of callous ineptitude. The last few months’ red line drawing and redrawing have been as arbitrary as any underwritten weekly serial, and the promises of punitive action suggest an adolescent aesthetic enthusiasm for some explosions right around the third commercial break. That may even be over-crediting this government; at least B-rate TV throws in the space battle because the audience demands it.

Yes, there is the irony of the government that murders 16-year-olds because it doesn’t like their dads arrogating to itself the right to punish other governments for choosing the wrong method with which to kill their own citizens, but I think the grimmer joke is the US so publicly preparing to once more wade into a civil conflict as an act of Public Relations, because if you listen to the appeals and to the rationales, what you hear, again and again, is that the US must make a tepid—albeit deadly—gesture of disapproval at the conduct of a war in order to maintain its brand as the industry leader in hasty moral arbitration. “They must not doubt our resolve.” Yes, and there’s a reason that phrase sounds like an ad for detergent.

Truly, all the agonizing—do we, or do we not light the rockets and launch the mortars—has the real moral seriousness of a generically pretty 30-something commercial actor wondering “where do all these stains come from.” Casuistry is deeply repellent as theater, and the fact that our government is willing to kill even against the better judgment of its own professional military is a sign of just how little it really values life. For all the showy agonizing, the administration has treated its decision to kill as casually as any decision to issue a press release. The thing is already written; they’re just waiting for the right moment to blast it out.

Schnell! Eeeeaaasssy. Um?

Culture, Economy, Media, Movies

I walked into Elysium a few minutes late, and Matt Damon was getting the beat-down from a robot, to whom he’d had the temerity to back talk. This robot was the only character in the film whose motivations were clear and whose actions were a function of its character. Nothing else made any sense.

In the future, an orbital post-scarcity society with the capacity to manipulate complex organic systems at the sub-molecular level maintains Fordist manufactories on Earth. Is it just to give the proles something to do? A single line of dialogue to the effect of, “We gotta keep them busy or they will revolt,” might have covered this flaw, although how an earthbound population could revolt against a well-armed space station, manifest numerical superiority or no, is quite a question, and in any case, most of the people on Earth don’t appear to have work, so there goes that theory. William Fitchner plays the vicious capitalist who runs this robot mill. He does most of his via computer terminal in a hermetically sealed office; naturally, we wonder: why is he on earth at all? Couldn’t he just Skype? Rather more to the point, in an orbital society capable of manipulating individual atoms, why is there still enterprise capitalism? Is it like contact sports, a vicious and anachronistic entertainment, practiced by only a few professionals, kept around for entertainment and kicks? Well, our industrialist suggests that it’s essential he get his company back to profitability, and he is willing to assist Jodie Foster in a coup to do so. Wait, wait, wait a minute. She offers him a 200-year contract to build Elysium’s missiles and robots. Does this not imply a competing firm, or firms? But there’s only one space station. How are these other firms in business? Who’s buying their robots and missiles? Am I going insane? What day is this?

The movie desires to be an allegory of illegal immigration, the hispanophone have-nots of a SoCal favela relentlessly throwing themselves over the Rio Grande of Near Earth Orbit in order to get to the better lives Elysium has to offer. Wait, what? Oh, no, I’m sorry. They’re going for miracle cures. Elysium doesn’t offer a better life. It just offers to fix your boo-boos. Three out of every four shiploads of immigrants gets blown to smithereens, so, like, it appears that you do not increase your chances of beating that cancer, if you consider the actual odds. Here again, the motivations are completely nonsensical, and needlessly so. We could understand people risking their lives to escape this wretched Earth in order to make a new life in space, but all evidence suggests that even those who get there and get their thyroid problems and sugar diabeetuss cleared up get deported right back to our little ball of pollution. Your cancer’s fixed, but you’re still going to starve to death. Hm.

Meanwhile, on Elysium, Jodie Foster plays a French fascist. Fascism, like capitalism, seems an odd ideology for a post-economic paradise, but I suppose assholes will always be with us. She plays some kind of secretary of defense, and she growls that the feckless leadership of Elysium is going to get them all killed, or something, despite the fact that everything on Elysium seems to be going absolutely swimmingly, and the few Earthers who do manage to crash land in this vast La Jolla in the sky appear to be swiftly rounded up and returned. Again and again and again, nothing about this world justifies her snarling aggression (nor her French, but I suppose it’s just meant to convey aristocratic awfulness, so we’ll laissez-faire).Why not make immigration a really confounding problem? The smugglers have figured out how to get hundreds, thousands of people onto Elysium. It’s upsetting the political order. They’re voting for OBAMA! The white peoples is gettin’ restless.  Jodie Foster seule pouvait eux sauver !

So Jodie Foster wants to take over Elysium for no reason, and she has William Fitchner rewrite the code for the Elysium operating system. Which he can do, because he or his company built it? Why is he in such desperate straits, then? Why is he bugging Jodie Foster for contracts? Why doesn’t he take over? I don’t know, I guess he read the script, and it says that he didn’t. He’s motivated by money in a world where money is irrelevant. Elysium has no stores, no ATMs. It’s just houses and swimming pools. Robots bring you champagne. At no point do we see any sort of transactional exchange, except of course when William begs Jodie for a contract. No one has a reason to do anything. William Fitchner goes to Earth, writes the magical spell to take over Elysium, and gets shot down by Matt Damon. Damon is dying because he got irradiated building robots in the factory that exists for no reason. Apparently this happens all the time, because they have a robot whose design features make it useful solely for the purpose of pulling irradiated humans out of a robot chamber. Yo, why didn’t you just send a robot into the radiation chamber in the first place, guys? No, Jim! You’ll flood the whole compartment! He’s dead already.

Anyway, Matt Damon and a gang of dudes who have kept Mazda 626s operational for two centuries shoot down his airplane. Matt Damon has been technologically augmented, and they download the shit into his brain. They unscramble it on the Dell desktop that I had in my office when I was an administrative assistant 10 years ago. Aw, shee-it, it’s the codes to do something. Argue argue. Run run run run run. Jodie Foster sends an augmented assassin whose motivation is that he fucking loves killing shit after Matt Damon. Eventually, everyone ends up on Elysium, because although this is the future and they are able to manipulate matter at the atomic level, if Jodie Foster is distracted for a sec, any asshole can just roll right through the gate, because Elysium’s automated systems read the script and realized that’s what they were supposed to do because of the plot. For no particular reason, the assassin stabs Jodie Foster in the neck with a piece of glass and decides that now he wants to rule Elysium. Has he ever even been to Elysium? Who cares? Jodie Foster bleeds to death on the floor in a closet with a woman who is only in this movie to prove that Matt Damon is not gay, even though Matt Damon is clearly gay; the only person with whom he has a convincing emotional connection is the sexy DL Latin thug car thief who is his best friend, who gets killed, and whose death is Damon’s one moment of actual pathos. These two obviously were boning, but don’t worry, look, there’s this woman!

So the movie kills its main villain in the middle of the last act for no reason, and then reminds you of the narrative senselessness of this act by occasionally cutting back to the room where Jodie Foster is literally lying dead under a tarp, which is the one allegory this movie gets right, except that it is an allegory for this movie. Then some shit happens, and then it turns out that there is no reason at all for the material privation and medical hopelessness on earth, and then the movie is over. I suppose there was some decent production design, in the sense that it all looked better than Star Wars Episode I. Foster does a fine villain, but her character makes so little sense that her performance was lost, and although Damon does the everyman with some skill, he gets lost as soon as the action starts. Bourne proved him a capable action hero in the hands of a capable action director. Here, alas, no.

Look, the future as an allegory for the present moment is effectively the whole point of science fiction, so the movie’s intentions were in the right place, but Blomkamp didn’t think about his concept. You don’t need a Tolkienian backstory to build a realistic fictional world, but consistency matters. If no one has any reason to do anything, or if they act constantly in contravention of their own apparent interests, then all an audience can do is be confused. The movie struggles to present its characters in the tradition of psychological realism. This may be the future, but these people are just like us, etc. etc. And yet, because everything these characters do is in the service of a story that ought not be taking place at all according to its own rules and logic, all these emotions and psychologies are rendered not more, but less real.

A Pound of Music

Art, Books and Literature, Culture, Religion, Science

How do you solve a problem like Stephen Pinker?

Ross Douthat notes the curious convergence: that “the defining practices of science, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods,” which were, according to Pinker, “explicitly designed to circumvent the errors and sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable,” lead inexorably to the economoral worldview to which Pinker has–surely a coincidence–already subscribed. Fuck Theory, meanwhile, notices that Pinker seems unfamiliar with the philosophers he name drops to open his essay. (By the way, Pinker also mangles Bergson’s élan vital, elsewhere and otherwise in the essay, if only in passing.) FT might be too kind. He damns our scientician for having failed to read the primary sources, but the real knock is that Pinker could have avoided a lot of these basic errors just by reading Will Durant. He could have read Wikipedia! Is there anything as unforgivably lazy in this great age of the internet as a man incapable of feigning authority over a couple thousand words?

Look, I’m a materialist. I don’t believe in the supernatural. I’m an atheist. I believe that the mind is an emergent phenomena of the brain. You might say that I constitute the natural constituency for Pinker’s argument, which is what makes its obtuseness and inadequacy so annoying. It gets everything backward. He says, for example, that science wipes away “the theory of vengeful gods and occult forces [and] undermines practices such as human sacrifice, witch hunts, faith healing, trial by ordeal, and the persecution of heretics.” No word on what testable hypotheses prohibit second degree murder or which codicil of evolutionary psychology demands that we not remove the mattress tags, but let’s allow the point. It is true, after all, that the sorts of bureaucratic rationalization that led to more modern systems of trial and punishment are kissin’ cousins with Pinker’s over-broadly defined science. Nevertheless, we end up in a bizarre territory wherein morality is defined by utility but the “science” behind it is a transcendent ideology:

Though everyone endorses science when it can cure disease, monitor the environment, or bash political opponents, the intrusion of science into the territories of the humanities has been deeply resented.

The implication of this complaint, and the essential thesis of the article, is that science, whatever that is, uniquely among all human disciplines and endeavors, is not subject to utilitarian analysis, is not merely a mathematical function, a delta of positive change to “human flourishing.”

In fact, I agree. I think it would be a shame to look at the advancement of scientific knowledge, the immense growth of our species’ physical insight into the world and the universe, as a merely additive process whose sole measure is the number of new patents, cures, and minutes of extended battery life. Yes, there will surely be some practical outcome of learning that dolphins give each other names, but there is something essentially miraculous in simply knowing it to be true. And this is why I find Pinker’s claim so utterly bizarre, as if science must stake out a monopoly on the extraordinary, all our other transcendent experiences subsumed to its totalitarian scope. Pardon me, but isn’t that just weird? Religion claims to give life meaning, but by proving the Biblical creation myth false, science, gives life meaning. Replacing one false, totalizing claim with another is an odd way to run a debate team, if you know what I’m saying.

But then, this is where Pinker really wanders down a dusty path:

Science has also provided the world with images of sublime beauty: stroboscopically frozen motion, exotic organisms, distant galaxies and outer planets, fluorescing neural circuitry, and a luminous planet Earth rising above the moon’s horizon into the blackness of space. Like great works of art, these are not just pretty pictures but prods to contemplation, which deepen our understanding of what it means to be human and of our place in nature.

Slow down there, Percy Bysshe! Okay, I agree that pictures of the Earth from its own satellite are pretty fucking lovely, but what is, and from whence comes, sublime beauty? What does it mean to “mean” to be human? When you say, “our place in nature,” I presume you mean something more than our position on the food chain and our direct impact on global climatic systems. Cognitive neuroscience may lay claim to the question of how and why our particular subset of upright mammals perceives beauty as it does, but clearly we’re talking about something more than a reducible pleasure response to a Fibonacci-derived golden ration. Why do we find the Hubble deep field beautiful? Why, actually, do we artificially color it to make it beautiful? And what is “beautiful”?

These are lines of inquiry that real scientists (as opposed to commercial popularizers) and scholars of the humanities and artists and authors think about with much greater depth and subtlety than you’d suspect reading this crackpot essay, which prefers to lob vague accusations of disastrous postmodernism at the humanities as if it were an essay in Commentary in 1985. I mean, if Pinker reveals himself as something less than a scholar of philosophy at the beginning, he shows himself as an even worse art critic later on. Cheering for a new, scientific art like a bizarro Soviet, he actually says:

The visual arts could avail themselves of the explosion of knowledge in vision science, including the perception of color, shape, texture, and lighting, and the evolutionary aesthetics of faces and landscapes.

This is the rough equivalent of James Turrell demanding that chemists to avail themselves of the unknown discipline of gas chromatography. Yo, Pinky, it’s Robert Smithson calling from 1970. He’d like to sell you a large, earthwork time machine. Artists have long embraced science and technology in their work and their practice. Has Pinker ever heard of Steve Kurtz? Does he know about collectives like Informationlab? Is he aware that the Oberlin Conservatory established the Technology in Music and Related Arts program in 1967? Does he read science fiction? Shit, I mean, has he heard of a little-known avant-garde filmmaker named James Cameron? Physician, heal thyself.

More Sinned Against than Manning

Culture, Justice, Religion, War and Politics

We all knew that the conviction of Bradley Manning was a fait accompli before the trial began, and the government’s petty and vindictive rejection of his plea offer only certified that the amoral keepers of order, beginning with the President himself, considered this sinful spectacle of vengeful formality a necessary bit of instruction, pour décourager les autres. I use the word sinful advisedly. The fact that the government went through with the trial indicates how truly despicable the powerful become when they’ve been embarrassed, how small they are, and how distant from what is good.

You know, I joined Twitter because I wrote a novel and it seemed wise to weasel my way into a few more online forums in anticipation of its publication, but I’ve been gratified to make some interesting new friends and acquaintances, several of whom are devout Christians. I’m not religious in any practical sense of the word, but I’ve always been conservative by temperament, however radical my politics, and although I’m no more inclined to believe that Yahweh is real than I ever was, I do find that, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become both more austere in my moral judgments and more communitarian in my social thinking, habits I certainly associate with the Judaism of my youth, however wishwashy and Reform it may have been. I don’t know, this Shabbat is my brother’s Yahrtzeit, and I always get sentimental. Nevertheless, even if I don’t believe in God and feel no affinity for the concept of a god, then I do believe, abidingly, that there is such a thing as justice, and that justice is more than some dull codex of laws, fairly and blindly applied. There should be room for forgiveness, tolerance, and exigence, and when we afflict the weak and the powerless with our harshest punishments, we traduce justice and sully ourselves. The desire to punish, the eagerness to see punishment, reveals, I think, a human soul, or being, or whatever you want to call it, that secretly fears this very outcome for itself—trial, judgment, and punishment for its sins.

The government tortured Bradley Manning; they tried, literally, to drive him mad, likely in the belief that he would then give up some other participant in a concocted conspiracy. They later accused him of vanity, but is there anything more vain than powerful, paranoid men imagining their own secret persecution? Still, I want to resist the urge to let my heart break for him, because I think that he’s stronger and braver than me; had I been subjected to what he endured, I would not have endured. I doubt I’d have done what he did to draw the vicious ire of the Executive and the military to begin with, even if I’d had the opportunity. Fear would have stopped me, or malaise, or plain indifference. So it seems indulgent to offer him my pity, and instead I would offer my anger.

Manning is a prisoner of politics and conscience. As I sit on my designer (if dog-stained) couch in my pretty little row house in my lovely city wondering how much more furniture or art my ex will want to take as we dissolve the last eight years of life together, it feels vain to have any opinion, to share any sentiment at all. It feels decadent. But my god, we were twenty-three when we met! We were trawling through Pittsburgh bars and going to museum parties. We were the same age as Manning when they arrested him. And I believe that what is really decadent is to cast him as some speechless other, with whose experience and suffering I can feel no connection. I would have hit on Bradley Manning if I’d met him in a bar when I was twenty-three. I can’t help but feel. Another political little queer. The difference, of course, is that he was in the right place, or the wrong place, and he was more formidable than me.

What does the Manning case say? I won’t say mean, because what does anything mean? It says that our rulers are small and vengeful and afraid. The language of security and peril that’s come to cloak every official announcement is decadent. The hounding pursuit of those who undermine and question the imperatives of security and the reality of the peril is decadent. The hollow liturgy of a show trial is decadent. I’ve never been much of a nationalist, never felt especially inspired by America, always known that we are a nation like any other, built on bones and fairy tales as much as anything else, but I do appreciate the power of myth to model society, and this lousy episode really makes you wonder, what is our national myth? What does America have to offer itself anymore? We’ve become very adept at hurting people for nothing. I wonder: is that all?

Brookstoßlegende

Justice, Media, War and Politics

Does anyone remember when David Brooks was a conservative? Me neither, and yet the adjective persists. He’s gotten great mileage out of the not-very-original but not-very-objectionable-either argument that a society, properly constituted, is a nested set of smaller societies, from friends and family on up through your block, your council district, your diocese, etc., all the way up to the Federal Government. He combines these with a Burkean horror at the excesses of the French Revolution; for David Brooks, it is always 1789 1968. This in turn gets folded into a frothy meringue of faddish neurobabble and pop psychology. The result is an odd chimera, a giddy atavistic technocratic utopian anachronist: a Benthamite Whig monarchist. Imagine that on your coat of arms.

Anyway, Brooks uses his column today to accuse Edward Snowden of taking the delicately wrought matryoshka doll that constitutes American civilization up to the roof and hurling it callously onto the sidewalk below. He accuses Snowden of betraying his own mother. Betrayal is one of those words that you only ever encounter in two contexts. In actual politics, betrayal is part of the lexicon of fascism. I’ll let others on the internet accuse Brooks of this. Despite his authoritarian predilections, Brooks is not a fascist, any more than Brooks is a conservative, or a liberal; Brooks is just a grumpy, entitled suburbanite on the downhill side of middle age—il est lui-même la matière de son livre. The other area in which one encounters betrayal is in the realm of romance. Ah, so that’s it. The odd tone of Brooks’ column grinds against what one expects from a polemic, but it does remind you of a breakup letter. Brooks isn’t outraged; he’s jilted.

Gore Vidal famously, or notoriously, quipped: “I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.” Vidal was a real aristocrat, and so he could turn his curdled humor on his own noblesse oblige; Brooks is an arriviste, lacking the confidence to giggle at his own certainty; he echoes everything in that sentence that follows positive and nothing that precedes it. Brooks views himself as essentially metonymous with the United States of America, thus the attitude toward Snowden. I can’t believe you’re breaking up with me! You can’t break up with me! I’m breaking up with you!

The column is full of peculiar, #slatepitch counterintuitions (“He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods”), which, in true Dear John fashion, simultaneously accuse Snowden of never doing the dishes and of always getting water all over the counters when he does the dishes, but there’s one fascinating and bizarre politico-historical claim that merits an additional note:

He betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed.

I have searched in vain, and I find no part of the Constitution, original text or amendments, that makes any provision whatsoever for the keeping of secrets, official or otherwise. In such absence, the accusation makes literally no sense at all. If you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now tell me what you know. The founders did create the United States in part to protect against the issuance of general warrants by an unanswerable government. The closest they get to mentioning 29-year-olds is in making 25 the minimum age for Representatives, 30 for the Senate. Mostly, though, both bodies are occupied by Mr. Brooks’ cohort. Boy, they’re really doing a bang-up job.

Poor? No.

Culture, Economy, Media, War and Politics

To me, the most interesting reaction to the recent Guardian/Glenn Greenwald reporting on the US Government’s vast, creepy, and stupid engagement in various programs of indiscriminate eavesdropping is the shock and disbelief evinced by, mostly, partisan defenders of the President to the effect that there is something deeply disturbing and unbelievable about the idea that a “high-school dropout” could have advanced, succeeded, and come into a six figure salary. Nevermind that the technology industries have always valorized the dropout narrative and that there are prominent tech billionaires offering substantial grants to kids who skip college in order to do something useful with their lives. I’m reminded of some educational activists who point out that in the eyes of the New York Times et al., $250,000 a year is too poor to live in Manhattan, but a teacher making fifty grand is an entitled sinecure living high on the hog. The point is . . . no, the question is: is $200,000 a lot of money to make in a year? Well, in the eyes of the professional classes and their media interlocutors, the answer is: no, if you’re the right kind of person; yes, if you’re not.

The people who express these doubts in the media, who find it so extraordinary that a guy with a mere GED could make what still passes for a decent living in this country, and indeed, find it in a sense offensive that this should be the case, as if the lack of a particular kind of credential is in fact a moral demerit that renders personal financial success not merely suspect but anathema to the proper order of an economy, are the sort of people who eagerly get on board with notions like, “every child should have the opportunity to go to college.” You can ignore the word opportunity; it is a mere formalism. They mean, everyone should go to college. (The obvious economic rejoinder is that if the thing is no longer scarce, it is no longer valuable. Witness, ladies and gentlemen, the Bachelor’s degree. But I digress.) Usually this exhortation is coupled with some vague notion that we—America, if you were wondering—are being outcompeted by China in the war to endow our children with “the skills they will need for the jobs of tomorrow.” No one ever quite gets around to mentioning what those skills are. I assume they mean computers. And it appears, InshSteveJobs, that what a guy or gal needs in order to figger out them crazy computers, is not a college degree, but access to a computer.

In fact, the universalizing of college education has completely elided the distinction between credential and skill. In the days when college was just finishing school for men of a particular class, there was a lot less confusion. I’ll confess to being a conservative sympathizer in certain domains, but I don’t pine for those days. They were shitty. Nevertheless, there was a very real recognition that reading history didn’t make a man fit to be a banker; it made a man clubbable, and then he learned to be a banker. But I propose to you that if Edward Snowden had a BA in English and Creative Writing from Oberlin College and went on to become a high-paid analyst at a defense contractor, no one would say boo about it, even though he would be in a practical sense no more qualified, and hell, probably less so, than any randomly selected dropout blogger. Guys, I know whereof I speak.

What about a degree in visual arts and documentary filmmaking—here I will reveal my conservative sympathies and laugh that such things exist—qualifies a person to judge, one way or other, the professional and vocational qualifications of a person to be a data systems/IT guy? Did you even set up your own home WiFi? Was Edward Snowden a qualified employee? I don’t know, but the dispositive evidence one way or other has nothing to do with whether or not he got into Phi Beta Kappa. The sheer ­de haut en bas snobbery of it is pretty astonishing, especially as it comes from the sort of technocratic centrists and liberals for whom class distinction is supposed to evaporate in the upward movement of social progress. Hey, I think the IT guy who fixes my copier who probably has a 2-year degree from somewhere makes more money than I do, but you know what, I’m just a manager, whereas he has skills.