Tommy > Books: cultural-critique‎ (39)

Looking back . . . over the long and labyrinthine path which finally led to the discover [of the quantum theory], I am vividly reminded of Goethe’s saying that men will always be making mistakes as long as they are striving after something. 15

We must combat those aspects of modern society that threaten the individual’s integrity as a free and moral responsible being. But at the same time we must help the individual to re-establish a meaningful relationship with a larger context of purposes.

In the process of growing up the young person frees himself from utter dependence on others. As the process of maturing continues he must also for him himself from prison of other self-preoccupation. To do so he need not surrender his individuality. But he must place it in the voluntary service objectives. If something prevents this outcome, then individual autonomy will soar into alienation or egocentrism.

Unfortunately, we have virtually no tradition of helping the individual achieve such commitment. We now have a fairly strong tradition of helping him detach himself from the embeddedness of childhood…. Just as we help him in this way to achieve independence, we must later help him to relate himself to his fellow man and to the best in his social, moral and intellectual tradition.

Today, 43 million people owe $1.6 trillion in student debt, an amount that has tripled since 2006. Americans owe more in student debt than they owe in credit card debt and car loans (3)

Thomas had cheaper options than Alabama. He could have gone to a state school in Florida for a lot less [because he was a Florida resident]. But he was responding to incentives built into the student loan system--and so was Alabama (181).

1. Forgive interest on student loans. Attempting to scale the ever-growing mountain of debt, many borrowers see no hope of ever paying it off. They don't want them forgiven, but they do want a shot at paying them off. Forgiving interest would help.

2. Make four-year schools put up their own money. This was Lyndon Johnson's original vision. With financial skin in the game, institutions would be more careful, thinking twice before giving away cash willy-nilly.

3. Make community college truly free: Mitchell does not support four years of free college for political and practical reasons. He is, however, a proponent of making a year or two of community college free so students can test the educational waters.

4. Revise the idea of the American Dream to respect and reward alternatives to the four-year degree, particularly apprenticeships. The research is clear: "Apprenticeship programs are effective at getting students well-paid jobs" (218).

5. The government should stop subsidizing grad school. Mitchell explains a number of financial educational products, among them Grad Plus, which he charges with being the most dysfunctional. Eliminating it would drive down graduate education and cause students to think twice before tackling the master's degree.

6. States, cities, and communities should step up. Mitchell cites Kalamazoo, Michigan, where wealthy philanthropists invested in the education of their own citizens.

Lively believed the practice deepened racial inequality. Those with the highest LSAT scores were predominantly white students who grew up in privilege. Law schools had "this perspective that certain people aren't cut out for this--they can't do it," Lively says. "They can do it if as an institution you're willing to make the commitment to enable them to catch up with those persons that have a more privileged heritage and background life experience" (150).

"The whole system broke down," Lively says in retrospect. "We weren't ready to deliver on a scaled basis. To be successful at this level, you've got to have a really strong academic support program. And we haven't built up our academic support program to a level that would enable us to deliver those things that we were convinced we could deliver" (163).

Auden's vision, then, is of a vocation-based education sustained by a democratic polity, and a democratic polity sustained by Christian faith. The vision stood (as did Maritain's in Education at the Crossroad, as did Lewis's in The Abolition of Man against the commanding power of the nation-state, against pragmatism, against modern technocratic canons of efficiency--against Weil's Social Beast (click here for more on Jacobs and Weil's Social Beast(148).

That is, what Americans need to learn from Europe’s catastrophe is the danger of failing to cultivate intellectual and spiritual aspirations beyond what one's every day culture encourages. In Europe, what had primarily impeded genuine education was a false and ultimately poisonous model of group identity -- as manifested, for instance, in the belief in an intrinsically “German physics“ that had led the Nazi regime to expel most of its Jewish scientists. In America, the chief impediment to genuine education was technocratic pragmatism. Both paths led, in their different ways, to the death of deep education and therefore, ultimately, to the death of genuine human culture (129).

Post-Christianity is not pre-Christianity; rather post-Christianity attempts to move beyond Christianity whilst simultaneously feasting upon its fruit (p. 15).

A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be (4).

Government is at a stand; little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago (5).

No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence (7).

Character again was fate.

“What America lost in Vietnam was, to put it in one word, virtue” (374).

A prudent person foresees danger and takes precautions. The simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences.

General principles, such as “justice“ or “equality," are often passionately invoked in the course of arguing about the issues of the day, but such terms usually go undefined and unexamined. Often, much more could be gained by scrutinizing what we ourselves mean by such notions than by trying to convince or overwhelm others. If we understood what we were really saying, in many cases we might not say it or, if we did, we might have a better chance of making our reasons understood by those who disagree with us (p. vii).

Transgenderism is a symptom, not a cause. It is not the reason why gender categories are now so confused; it is rather a function of a world in which the collapse of metaphysics and of stable discourse has created such chaos that not even the most basic of binaries, that between male and female, can any longer lay claim to meaningful objective status. And the roots of this pathology lie deep within the intellectual traditions of the West. 376

My purpose throughout has been to show how ideas that today permeate both the conscious philosophies and the intuitions that dominate the social imaginary have deep historical roots. p. 339

A mimetic view regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it. Poiesis, by way of contrast, sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual. p. 39

The LGBT+ alliance represents the latest and most powerful example of an anticulture, a deathwork, and a rejection of nature, underpinned by the aesthetic and emotive ethics that are so typical of a therapeutic age. p. 340

For the first time in medical history, natal girls are not only present among those so identifying--they constitute the majority. Why? What happened? How did an age group that had always been the minority of those afflicted (adolescents) come to form the majority? Perhaps more significantly--why did the sex ratio flip: from overwhelmingly boys, to majority girls? p. xxi

Between 2009 and 2017, the number of high schoolers who contemplated suicide increased 25 percent. The number of teens diagnosed with clinical depression grew 37 percent between 2005 and 2014. And worst hit--experiencing depression at a rate of three times that of boys--were teenage girls.

A woman's emotional life is her strength. A key task of her adolescence must be to learn not to let it overwhelm her. A key task of maturity is to learn not to let it fade away (217).

"The first effect of not believing in God, is that you lose your common sense. p. 265

If this book serves to highlight just one truth, I hope it's that real beauty can come from the ashes of our country's history with racism. So we continue to spread the message. As the apostle Paul declared, "Because we understand our fearful responsibility to the Lord, we work hard to persuade others."

The point is that those poetic truths, and the notions of correctness that force them on society, prevent America from seeing itself accurately. That is their purpose. They pull down the curtain on what is actually true. If decades of government assistance have weakened the black family with dependency an dysfunction, poetic truth argues all the more fervently that blacks are victims and that whites are privileged. Poetic truths stigmatize the actual truth with the sins of America's past so that truth itself becomes the "incorrect." (Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country, p. 25

Although Australia and Canada bring in more migrants as a share of their population, the United States dwarfs all others in terms of the absolute volume of legal immigrants--typically around one million people per year, more than twice as many as any other country." And that is not counting the illegal stream crossing the border from Mexico. (177)

Today, many white Americans, either implicitly--through anonymous posts on the web, for example--or explicitly--through the so-called alt-right movement--complain that the United States is losing its identity as a mostly white, Christian nation, which is why they supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, and support as well his plan to build a "big, beautiful wall" at the Mexican border to keep out "illegals." Others fear that immigrants of all kinds steal jobs from "real" Americans and depress wages.

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