A Wee Bit More on Corruption in Government

I've said before that I don't particularly want this to become a political blog, and that's why I put the words "A Wee Bit More" in the title of this post. Fact is, you could fill whole encyclopedias with nothing but instances of public corruption. I prefer to think about more uplifting things, like homemade catapults.

But Roger Z left a comment to my last post that caused the wheels to turn another quarter rotation, and I thought I'd explore the ramifications briefly before going on to other stuff. Roger said:

I think this is the first step on the way to the meme that "everyone does it." Blago goes to jail for graft? Heck, it's universal, it's not THAT big a deal. You can see where, if the public buys into that, it might be a useful defense in the near future for certain media darlings.

I think the "everybody does it" defense is an outright threat to our democratic system, actually. It works like this: one side gets really, really paranoid about all the "dirty tricks" the other side plays--say, regarding voter fraud. That side becomes convinced that the game is totally corrupt, and no one can win an election unless they successfully rig it. So, justifying their actions by saying everybody does it, they start rigging elections. Then the other side notices that the elections are being stolen, and they can't get satisfaction in the courts, so they decide that they have to rig the system just to stay viable as a political party.

Pretty soon there's enough corruption going on in the electoral system that the legitimate votes don't actually decide the elections anymore, and--by definition--you no longer have a democracy. The belief that "everybody does it" became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And this doesn't just occur around elections; it's anything sleazy that anyone in power might do, from selling offices, to selling influence, to auditing their opponents....


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But in all of this, there is an opportunity, if the electorate is alert enough to seize it. So consider this post as my little part in raising the alert.

How do you tell apart the real reformers, the real clean-government advocates, from those who just use the "reform" brand to gain votes?

After all, there is a political victory to be won in taking down the crooks in the other party. If a Republican gets in legal trouble, you can count that all the Dems in the world will get in front of the cameras and denounce the rapscallion, with grave countenance and stern voices. But it's impossible not to notice that the Dems in question have more of an interest than just high-minded defense of ethics in our Republic; if a Republican goes down, it typically gives more power to the Dems. This obviously leads to questions in the public--are these guys actually serious about reforms, or are they just opportunists looking to profit by the fall of their adversaries?

And of course, it's not just the Republicanss who get in trouble and the Dems who claim to be reformers. We're seeing the flipside of things now with the Blagojevic(D) scandal in Illinois.

So, how do you tell apart the real reformers from the opportunists?

Here's one sign: Real reformers are willing to take down the crooks in their own party, and are willing to make real personal sacrifices to do so. That is, they want their own party to be the "Party of Reform", so much so that they're willing to drive out its corrupt elements, even if it gives a congressional majority to the other party, and even if it makes them a pariah in their own party.

Now, not everyone who takes on enemies in their own party is a reformer. In some cases, it just means they're even more opportunistic than everyone else. After all, some of the worst dictators in history started out by driving out all potential rivals from the parties they eventually headed.

But, if a person has never butted heads with the leadership of their own party over ethics issues, it either means that he or she hasn't been in politics very long, or it means he or she can't legitimately be called a reformer.


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Considering this standard, the identifications of the real reformers--the real ethics crusaders--in the last election is left as an exercise to the reader. With one major exception, that is:

One of the big reasons that Sarah Palin was so popular within the Republican base, one of the things that put her on the political map in the first place--and brought her to the attention of McCain--was precisely that she took on the Don Youngs, and Ted Stevens's, and Frank Murkowskis of the Alaska Republican party. She primaried a sitting Republican governor who had become notorious for corrupt practices, and she won. Now, the charge has been made that she's actually one of those opportunists who knows how to play their opponent's flaws for personal gain; and I'm not going to try to refute that argument here. But nevertheless, any candidate who wishes to claim the mantle of Ethical Reformer has to do the kinds of things that Sarah Palin did: they have to take on the corrupt people on their own side. If they haven't done that, they have no legitimate claim to make to being anything but an opportunist on ethical issues.

As I said, I think this is one of the reasons that Palin has remained so popular within the Republican base, even after the November 4th election loss. There are a lot of Conservatives out there who have become absolutely disgusted with their party--the orgy of earmarking, the bailouts, the quid pro quos. There is a sense that the elected officials of the party, fearing the party's sliding popularity, threw out their principles, and tried to hold on to their jobs by using tax money to bribe their constituents. As a result, there was a big chunk of the Republican base that felt betrayed, and many were planning on sitting this election out to teach the party a lesson.

And then Palin came along. And with her came the implicit promise, to those disaffected Republicans, that she would clean house. And not primarily by taking on the Democrats; she was popular among the Republican base because she had a reputation for taking on the Republicans. The fact is, the Republican base wants the Republicans to be the Party of Ethics, and when the Party falls short of its ideals, the base gets very angry, and very discouraged. Palin gave the 'Pubs hope that the party would be cleaned up and put back in order.

And if she keeps butting heads with the party leadership over ethical issues, she'll be back in 2012--and will be a force.


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Anyway, that was a bit of a digression. The takeaway is: if you want reform, you have to look at a candidate's willingness to bite his or her own party. The most ethical candidates are those who try to keep their own homes clean before they try to clean up everyone else's. And if a candidate hasn't done that, then their ethics claims need to be taken as only so much hot air.

How To Lie With Statistics

So I happened to see an eyebrow-raising headline the other day at USA Today: North Dakota tops analysis of corruption.

This smelled a little fishy to me. More corrupt than Illinois? More corrupt than Louisiana? More corrupt than New Jersey, for cryin' out loud?

Well, that's what the story said:

On a per-capita basis, however, Illinois ranks 18th for the number of public corruption convictions the federal government has won from 1998 through 2007, according to a USA TODAY analysis of Department of Justice statistics.

Ay, therein lies the rub. This is a case where, as we move from the original statistics to the journalistic analysis to the news story, that the truth gets increasingly buried. I'm reminded of the old dictum--attributed to Mark Twain--of there being three kinds of untruths: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

The Justice Department statistics list the number of convictions for public corruption that have been made in the federal courts, broken down by state.

And it turns out that if you take each of these numbers and divide them by the number of people in the appropriate states, North Dakota has the highest number of federal public corruption convictions per capita of any state in the nation.

I suppose it's inevitable that the headlines would start trumpeting that North Dakota is the most corrupt state! But that conclusion does not exactly follow from the evidence they present.

Here are some potential ways their conclusion breaks down:

• This metric only counts the number of convictions, not the number of crimes. You only get a conviction when the person is caught. If no one ever gets caught, you can have all the corruption in the world, and still have a low number of convictions--and thus a lower ranking than everyone else. It may be the case that North Dakota is just better at finding its crooks than everyone else--resulting in more convictions, and thus a higher ranking on the list.
• This list only counts federal public corruption convictions. What about state public corruption convictions? It could be that other states catch their own crooks and try them in the state court systems, and North Dakota just happens to be deficient in this regard, so the feds are the ones doing all the work there. It doesn't automatically mean that North Dakota actually has more crimes going on.
• The statistic is counted as a per-capita with respect to the population of the state, not with respect to the population of the state's public servants.

Here's what I mean by this last one: California has 120 people in its legislature--40 in the senate, 80 in the assembly. But California has 36.5 million people. Now, suppose that--on average--one crime is committed per year by each member of the legislature. (I don't know the true figure here; I'm just assuming that they're all crooks, for the purpose of this analysis.) :-) That means 120 crimes are committed by the legislature, or 3.3 crimes for every million people in the state.

North Dakota, on the other hand, has 141 people in its legislature--47 in the senate, and 94 in the assembly. But North Dakota has not quite 640,000 people. If the legislators of North Dakota were just as corrupt as that of California (in our example), there would be one crime per legislator per year, or 141 crimes committed by the legislature, for a total of 220 crimes for every million people in the state.

With the probing analysis of the USA Today headline writers, they'd conclude that North Dakotans are (220/3.3=) 67 times as corrupt as Californians--whereas the truth is merely that the legislators of each state are equally corrupt, but North Dakota just has more corrupt legislators per capita.


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To be fair, the story does walk back its headline somewhat, and it gives the North Dakota partisans the opportunity to give their opinions as to why the reporters are full of it:

Don Morrison, executive director of the non-partisan North Dakota Center for the Public Good, said it may be that North Dakotans are better at rooting out corruption when it occurs.

"Being a sparsely populated state, people know each other," he said. "We know our elected officials and so certainly to do what the governor of Illinois did is much more difficult here."

And later:

The analysis does not include corruption cases handled by state law enforcement and it considers only convictions. Corruption may run more rampant in some states but go undetected.

Yeah, yeah. But the trouble is, when you have a spectacular headline like this, that some non-trivial percentage of people will read the headline, and get the meme North Dakota is the most crooked state of the Union! in their heads--without bothering to read through to the end where all the walk-backs are, and without bothering to think about whether the evidence presented in the story actually adds up to the conclusion they're trying to push in the headline.


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My wife just asked the question: "So were the reporters from Illinois?" I'm shocked, shocked that she could be so cynical.... :-)

But then, her mom grew up watching the political scene in Kentucky....

Happy Fourth Birthday, Adrenaline Junkie!

Well, this post is a FULL DAY LATE. I'm such a lousy father....

Ahem. Actually, we didn't think much about the Adrenaline Junkie's fourth birthday yesterday, because we already celebrated with cake and presents and extended family on Saturday. Still, I gave her a really good birthday tickle, which was duly appreciated.

Yup, the Adrenaline Junkie is now officially four years old.


In this picture, the Junkie is not being tickled. She looks contemplative. (But don't believe it. I was there when I took the picture, and she wasn't actually very contemplative.)

The Adrenaline Junkie has turned into the party girl of the family: she's always getting into things, finding fun (and usually pretty loud) games to play, and sucking everyone else into it. When the Junkie is around, often all three of my kids wind up in a tangled ball of pillows, blankets, and toddlers in the middle of the family room, accompanied by the continuous sounds of giggling from all of them. This doesn't seem to happen as much as when it's just the other two.

Here she is, obviously deep in concentration. Either that, or she's emulating Michael Jordan.

And as I noted in a previous post, the Adrenaline Junkie--who is tall and very slender for her age--has the bodily proportions of a much older child. She could be a pre-teen, or even a young teenager. This is especially true when she wears her glasses, which accentuate just how narrow her face is. While there's no mistaking her for a teenager when you see her in real life (she's only about three and a half feet tall, after all), the moment you take a picture of her next to a non-descript background, all the size-indicating context clues vanish, and all one is left with to judge her age are her bodily proportions. As a result, she occasionally looks like she's almost twelve, and she's about to get asked out to the middle school dance.


They grow up so fast, don't they?

Anyway, here's to our own little party girl. May you have many, many more happy birthdays. And do try not to be too hard on all the boys.

Not Child-Safe Anymore

Anyone remember this image from last year, from my post entitled How to Child-Proof Your Christmas Tree?

Well, we thought it was such a great idea, we'd try it again this year. But this time around, the little guy isn't so little.
We actually caught him trying to climb the fence at one point, by slinging his leg up and over it.

Well, it was good for one year....

(And yes, we're aware that the little boy is blurry in the image. You won't find many non-blurry photographs of him. In fact, he usually looks a little blurry in real life, too.)

Frosty Morning

Well, we had a beautiful winter morning here.

Ok, for all you pedants out there, it's not technically winter yet. Winter doesn't start until--what, the 21st of December or something like that? I always forget the exact day of the solstice. But while there's a certain logic to delineating the seasons by Solstices and Equinoxes, it just doesn't seem to fit. December just seems like a winter month to me, darn it! Somehow, the fact that two-thirds of the month are still autumn, doesn't compute.

Likewise, I think of June as a summer month and September as an autumn month. March--well, I've lived in enough cold places that the phrase "In like a lion, out like a lamb" is actually appropriate. Or if not that, it's "In like a lion, out like a wildebeest," or other creature that you can't actually comprehend. One year in Minot, North Dakota, we were joking that we'd celebrate the last day of school with a snowball fight. And in fact we did get a light dusting of snow on the last day of school that year, though it didn't stick.

But anyway: back to the beautiful winter morning. I've blogged before that I like snow a whole lot. Alas, the Central Valley of California gets enough snow to stick only once every two decades or so.

But we do get frosts here. And last night it got down to the mid-30's, which was enough to do the trick.

I happened to look outside just around breakfast time, and our backyard was absolutely lovely. Every blade of grass was outlined in gleaming white. The morning sun, shining through the fog, was almost pink in color.

So I grabbed the camera and stepped outside. It was quiet and cold, and my breath was clearly visible. Here are a few of the pictures I got.
This is a picture of the rising sun shining through the fog, over white rooftops and through the bare branches of our neighbors' fruit trees. The grass, as I said, was outlined in bright white and was downright crunchy under my boots.

This is one of our Japanese maples. Most of them are nearly bare by now, but this one still has most of its leaves, and for some reason the frost was particularly heavy on it.

Here's our strawberry patch, which will obviously be dormant until April or May. I'm not sure you can see it here, but I found the colors on the leaves--greens mixed with reds and browns-- were strongly accentuated by the bright, harsh white of the frost. Everything in the backyard had an intensified shape and texture to it that isn't normally there.

I felt alive. Like Calvin's Dad. ;-)

My wife, on the other hand thought it was just cold. Which it was, but for her that's a bad thing.

(Her: "Well, it's pretty, I just don't want to be in it.")


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Well, we'll see what happens. This wasn't a hard frost by any means, so the orange trees and the native plants should be fine. However....

There's at least a decent possibility that a massive cold system is going to cover the western US--clear down to Southern California--sometime in the next two weeks. Apparently there are parts of Siberia right now that are at 81 below (Fahrenheit. 81 below Celcius would be enough to freeze the CO2 right out of the air), and this cold mass is heading our way. We'll see what actually makes it here, and whether it'll be cold enough to give us anything but rain. Rain is most likely what we'll get; but I'm still hoping that well get just a smidgen of the real white stuff.

From Russia With Love, indeed.

Here's A Problem They Never Expected To Have....

Ok, for lack of a better thing to blog about, here's a little item from Wired News, which is simultaneously a testament to the power of unintended consequences and a sign that we mere humans will always be able to find things to complain about.

It appears that the new Airbus super-jumbo jet, the A380, is a quiet plane.

Too quiet...

Here's the problem. You're stuck on transcontinental flight for a dozen hours or so, so you're trying to get some sleep. Now, ordinarily you would think that the super-high-bypass engines on that plane would be a good thing, since they're quieter than older engines. And with the sheer size of the plane, those engines are actually spaced fairly far from the cabin, so most of the noise dissipates into the surrounding air anyway. Great!

Except there's a heretofore-unappreciated benefit to having loud engines--they drown out the sound of the lavatory flushing. And they drown out the sound of the baby crying three rows back. And they drown out the conversations of those two mall-rats sitting on the other side of the fuselage.

And they drown out the sound of your conversation, so you can't be overheard by nosy neighbors.

With all those wonderful sound reductions the Airbus people have put in their planes, now everyone is aware of a whole bunch of stuff that they'd rather not be aware of!

This is especially a problem for people who are trying to sleep--like off-duty flight crew. On other planes, those big engines produce huge amounts of white noise that drowns out everything else. Less white noise on the A380, and you can hear all that sneezing, coughing, flushing...

And it doesn't help that Emirates Airlines put their pilot sleeping quarters in the back of the plane, where the passengers mistake it for a lavatory and keep knocking to see if the pilots are done in there yet.


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As I said before, this is a testament to unintended consequences, and it's a testament to the fact that we humans (or is it just us Westerners?) can find anything to complain about, even in something as otherwise praiseworthy as a quiet airliner. Somehow the phrase "there's no pleasing some people" comes to mind....

(Warning: some coarse language here, and some very dry British humor)

Anti-Intellectualism? Well....

I've been making a mental tossed salad of many things I've been reading--and sometimes just sensing--over the last few weeks. Here are some of the ingredients of the salad.

First: Much has been written lately about the "anti-intellectualism" of Americans in general, and of the political right in particular. The observation that there is a distrust of the over-educated, of the professional academic, of the policy wonk, is a valid one. This observation is usually made with an air of disdain on the part of the observer toward those poor, benighted souls who don't recognize what's good for them. If people would just recognize who was smartest and most educated, and put them in charge, that would be good for the country, wouldn't it? And the fact that a big chunk of the population resists doing this is taken as a sign that we don't have a mature, sophisticated electorate yet.

Second: Along these lines, we have this column by David Brooks of the New York Times. Despite the fact that Brooks is generally conservative, he is highly impressed by the personnel choices the incoming Obama administration is making. They all have very impressive educational pedigrees: Harvard/Harvard Law, Yale/Yale Law, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford. Brooks sees this as something noteworthy, and praiseworthy.

Third: Well, Brooks' column provoked something of a backlash. With a hat tip to Carol Platt Liebau at Townhall, here's a column by a professor named Joseph Epstein, writing in the Weekly Standard. He reflects on the students who have passed through his classroom, and notes that the ones who got the best grades weren't necessarily the ones who were most insightful or intellectually curious, but the ones who were so focused on making the grade that they did as they were told. The highest-scoring students were often those who had such stupendous ambition that they were willing to adopt the teachers' worldviews, temporarily--just long enough to get that A so they could go on to graduate summa cum laude and then get into Harvard Law so they could become full partners at prestigious law firms, get rich, and then go into politics.... And he suggests that many of these "good students" are not particularly to be trusted.

Fourth: And along these lines, there's that column by Victor Davis Hanson that I linked to and wrote about in Thursday's post. Very briefly, Hanson alleged that the colleges aren't really what they used to be, or what they could be; they have abandoned the "Core" model of classical education in favor of a smorgasbord of trendy, politicized course offerings that indoctrinate instead of actually expanding the mind.

Fifth: Here's a post from Daniel MacIntyre, whose blog I link to, from a couple of weeks back. He acknowledges that Obama shows every sign of being highly intelligent, but warns that intelligence does not necessarily equate to wisdom, and questions whether Obama has shown many signs of the latter.

Thus, the salad.

I suspect that if my own views were laid out for the whole world to see, I would be pegged by many observers as an "Anti-Intellectual". I do tend to sympathize with the proportion of the population that's suspicious of their intellectual "betters" and skeptical of schemes that give them too much authority over the important stuff. But I've given at least a little thought to the reasons I think this way. I'll let you decide for yourselves if you think this makes me an Anti-Intellectual, and just how negative you consider that term, anyway.


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I would like to present three definitions, and compare and contrast them.

The first one is Intelligence. I like the definition that David MacIntyre gave in his post, so I'll use that as a starting point:

Intelligence is simply the effectiveness of your thought processes. If you can reason effectively, analyze communications accurately and draw inferences easily from various data, you are intelligent.

The second one is Wisdom. Again, here's the definition that David MacIntyre gave:

[W]isdom is the set of rules, guides and/or habits you have developed as "best practices" for life. When you choose not to [pee] on an electric fence, when you stick to a set budget and pay off credit card debt, or when you decide to go ahead and pay the extra money for the snowboard lessons rather than seeing if your limited experience on skis will translate to skill on the board, you are using wisdom.

"Wisdom" is a little harder to define than intelligence. It's a broader concept. And as much as I'd like to define it using words like "understanding", I have to stop myself; some of the wisest people in the world don't necessarily know why they make the decisions they do, they just do what seems right--and it turns out to be right. Think of a mother who knows just the right thing to do when one of her kids has become disappointed or hurt. Is that understanding? Well, maybe... but sometimes it's just plain maternal instinct. It counts as wisdom nonetheless, in my book, because she's still choosing the right thing to do.

Wisdom includes the ability to see ahead to the consequences of current trends and actions, but it's more than that. It also includes such things as experience, and it includes such things as self control, and it includes the discernment to see through distractions to whatever the core issue happens to be.


The third concept is Goodness. This, simply stated, is the desire to act for the defense and betterment of one's fellow man, and for the defense and betterment of society. If I care about the people around me enough that I'm willing to take the time and effort to build them up, that's Goodness. If I don't care about their well-being--especially if I'm willing to benefit at their expense--then I possess a distinct lack of Goodness.

I think most people will agree to this last definition, with the possible exception of the Objectivists. And even with them, I suspect they will have a different definition of goodness that can be substituted in place of the one I just gave without affecting the main point I'm trying to make here.


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Now, here's the point that most American "Anti-Intellectuals" instinctively realize: Intelligence, Wisdom, and Goodness do not always show up together in the same person. It is common to find people who lack one or another of these three.

What does it look like when one or another of these virtues is missing?

Consider a person who possesses great Wisdom and Goodness, but is of merely adequate intelligence. Such a person will not necessarily be the font of scintillating conversation. Such a person may not be able to contribute much to the sum total of human knowledge. But on the other hand, such people are usually loved and respected by the other people in their lives. These are the ones who so often are willing to take care of the people around them who get sick or otherwise fall on hard times. When these individuals get older, they are often full of good advice, for anyone who will listen, on everything from having a good marriage, to how to fix a carburetor. When you think of this combination, Forrest Gump comes to mind. These people may not be very smart, but they are often very successful at life.

Now consider a person who possesses great Intelligence and Wisdom, but lacks Goodness. These people are clever, but they are also often disdainful of those around them. Often corrupt--but the corrupt ones aren't the worst. These types can also be ideologues, to whom the people around them are but pawns in their grand schemes. Their intelligence allows them to see and understand how the world around them works, giving them the power to manipulate; and their wisdom often gives them such virtues as courage, fortitude and patience; and these things, coupled with a lack of empathy for the ones around them, make them very dangerous. When I think of this combination, Vladimir Putin comes to mind.

Now consider a person who possesses great Intelligence and Goodness, but lacks Wisdom. What about these? Well, the Goodness of these people leads them to want to assist their neighbors. And their Intelligence gives them the ability to study a matter and come up with theories about how they work. But in many cases, the understanding necessary to do something worthwhile isn't there. Often these types of people mentally construct their own internally-consistent "realities" that allow them to think they are doing the right thing, while they remain oblivious to the negative consequences of their actions on those around them.

Examples of this sort of thing abound; consider "New Math", which as I understand was an attempt to completely rework the scope and sequence of the elementary-school math curriculum, so that it started not with simple counting and arithmetic, but with set and number theory. Such a program could only have been developed by some very intelligent people--who lacked understanding of the way kids actually think and learn.

For another example of this sort of thing: here's a fairly long article about attempts to clean up the original Skid Row (in Los Angeles), through the use of improved policing and social service efforts, and how these attempts were (are) routinely thwarted by well-meaning "homeless advocates" who use the courts to block them in the name of freedom and dignity of the homeless, without any comprehension of the damage their actions do to the very people they're hoping to help.

To put a name with the phenomenon of someone who possesses Intelligence and Goodness while lacking Wisdom, the one who comes to my mind--fairly or unfairly--is Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose 1946 book Baby and Child Care kicked off a revolution in societal attitudes regarding child rearing. His work ran against the grain of what was then considered conventional wisdom, and eventually came to supplant it almost completely. Whether or not he personally intended his work to be interpreted this way, it led widely to a much more permissive, much more obliging, less disciplined approach to child rearing than what has gone before, which has been cited (again, fairly or not) as one reason for the widespread social disfunctions that appeared with the Boomer generation in the 60's--narcissism, rebellion, moral and family breakdown, and the like.

So after looking at these three virtues--Intelligence, Wisdom, and Goodness--it should be apparent that if you can't have all three in a leader, if you have to leave out one of them, Intelligence is more dispensable than the other two. Highly intelligent people who possess goodness, but lack wisdom, are the ones to pave the road to hell with their good intentions. Highly intelligent people who lack Goodness are monsters. High intelligence lacking either Wisdom or Goodness is downright dangerous, both to the person who possesses it, and to everyone around him.

And the typical American man-or-woman-on-the-street instinctively knows this. From this, I think, follows the reluctance of the electorate to trust the supposed "best and the brightest" with too much power.

Any housefrau can bake a delicious, filling, nutritious loaf of bread. But it takes a scientist to make a Twinkie. ;-)


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There's much more to be said on this topic, which (considering the late hour) I can't really do justice to. For example, I happen to think there are plenty of intellectual pitfalls that are particularly tempting to those who are highly intelligent and who know it. To name a few, they tend to overestimate their own competence, and underestimate the competence of the people around them to manage their own affairs; they tend to overstate the strength of their pet theories, and underestimate the value of experience (especially experience that runs contrary to their theories); they tend to undervalue the opinions and values of those they deem less intelligent; they tend to be afraid of being thought unintelligent by their peers, which makes them vulnerable to groupthink and intellectual fads; and they tend to see themselves as the natural leaders, who should be giving orders instead of taking them.

And all of these pitfalls are a manifestation of Intelligence coupled with lack of Wisdom, which can lead to all the consequences I mentioned earlier.

The late William F. Buckley--who was obviously very well educated and very, very smart, understood all this: that's why one of his more famous quotes is,

I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.

(That's not the only good WFB quote to be had. If you've got the time, read anything by WFB that you can get your hands on--starting with the rest of the quotes at that site.)

And the thing is... The general population of the USA knows all this, at least at some deep, instinctual level. So any time they hear an intellectual--whether a politician, or an academic, or a bureaucrat--proclaim something along the lines of, "We could solve all these problems if we just put the smart people in charge!"; or when they hear mutterings about how foolish they are to hang on to their time-tested values instead of putting academic theorists in charge of their priorities, they have a way withdrawing all trust from the intellectual in question.

This often gets them labelled "Anti-Intellectual". But I'm not always convinced it isn't the wise thing to do.

Well, That Was Quick

Apropos of absolutely nothing, this blog has hit two milestones lately. First, according to Blogger, my last post was number 400. WooHoo! Second, also according to Blogger, I have now officially used up 1% of my available storage space for images. At this rate, I will run out of picture space roughly at post 40,000, which I will write sometime in the year 2140. After that, absolutely no more images will be published on this blog.


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Anyway, that wasn't what I wanted to report as "quick"; that was just a little meta-blogging. What I really wanted to report that was quick, was that our reupholstery project is done. Check it out:

This was a short, fun, high-payoff project. Wish we had more like that, and fewer of the long, annoying, what-does-it-matter types queued up on the to-do-list. Looks like the next big one will be rearranging and finishing out the garage.

Tonya is increasingly sounding like she's imagining reupholstering our sofa at some point, which sounds like a big (but worthwhile!) job. However, with three kids six and under running around, and with another little one on the way, it's a job that needs to be done in the garage and not in the living room. Thus, fixing up the garage needs to happen first.

But the fact that we did these little jobs first has given us confidence about tackling the big one. And we could tell that we were getting better at it as we went along. Take a look at the following picture, for instance:
Notice the difference in the heights of the seats. The chair on the left was the last one we did, finished tonight. The chair on the right was the second one we did, last Saturday. They contain exactly the same amount of material, but we managed to get the fabric on the second seat much more tightly stretched. When you reupholster, you have to compress your padding material as much as possible as you pull the fabric over it, to keep things from getting lumpy, uneven, and wrinkled. Well, we got better at it as we went along, with the result that the seat we did tonight is much more compact than the previous one.

Of course, it also doesn't feel quite so cushy on one's bum, which is somewhat ironic. We like making cushy seats, but the more experienced we get, the less cushy our seats become.

(It reminds me of that guy we met at the spinning/weaving show last year, whose first attempt at spinning had produced an uneven, lumpy skein that won first prize in the "homespun" category. Now that he's much more experienced and consistent at spinning, he couldn't make that kind of yarn anymore if he wanted to.)


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Update: Well, it appears that four of my 400 posts were unpublished drafts that somehow got stuck in the ether. I'm only now on number 397 instead of 401. Please, no weird comments about math abilities....

Article on the State of Higher Education

Pretty much I find anything by Victor Davis Hanson worth reading.

Hanson is an interesting character. He was born into a Central California farming family shortly after World War Two, and was named after a relative who was killed in the Pacific campaign of that war. He grew up as a farmer, then went to college (U.C. Santa Cruz, if I remember) in the early seventies. Somewhere along the way he became interested in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome, and the way they fought wars, so he became a classicist, military historian, and professor of Greek and Latin.

And his insights as a farmer from a military family were somewhat unique within the academy; after all, when everyone else read about an ancient army cutting down all the olive orchards of their defeated foes, everyone else thought of this as just random, wanton destruction; but only Hanson really knew how much work it really took to cut down a mature olive tree. Cutting down an olive orchard may be destruction, but it is neither random nor wanton.

He's written about a range of topics--everything from culture and history, to Mexican immigration (which, being a California Central Valley farmer, he has much personal knowledge of), to the Peloponnesian war. And today I ran across an article of his about the state of higher education in this country.

I found it very thought-provoking. Check it out.

In a nutshell, he gives a description of the older view of what a university was expected to do: it was to give a holistic core curriculum that covered the whole of the Western Canon--philosophy, literature, art, music, history, theology, and so forth. By becoming exposed to this Canon, scholars would become acquainted with the problems of history and how they were solved, and would become acquainted with the ways of thought that were employed throughout history. They would learn both a comprehensive body of knowledge and the critical thinking skills necessary to understand and add to it. By the time the scholar graduated, he would be well equipped for informed citizenship, personal leadership, and further personal study--possessing strong written and oratorical skills and a keen and well-prepared mind.

He explains how this view of the purpose of the university has been fading. "General Education" courses are now selected not as part of a strong core curriculum, but as a "one from column A, two from column B" hodgepodge selected to fulfill graduation requirements. As he puts it,

As classical education declined and new approaches arose to replace it, the university core curriculum turned into a restaurant menu that gave 18-year-olds dozens of classes to choose from, the easiest and most therapeutic usually garnering the heaviest attendance. The result, as many critics have noted, is that most of today’s students have no shared notion of education...

The schools are increasingly becoming vocational institutions, where people go to learn Engineering, or Business, or Nursing, or Journalism, etc. The idea of tying everything in to the grand sweep of human history, or to Western Civilization, is mostly abandoned by this point.

Furthermore, he argues that the traditional standards of academic free inquiry have been turned upside down. Instead of presenting the great ideas of the past in their own light, and allowing the scholars to come to their own conclusions, so often anymore the teachers will begin with a doctrine (whether Marxism, or postcolonialism, or feminism), and teach all the earlier material through that lens. (In what ways did sexism and class-ism affect the philosophies of Plato? Of Kant? Of Nietzche?) The old philosophers are not allowed to speak in their own voices; the new education attempts to analzye them and deconstruct them instead of listening to the actual points they were trying to make.

He argues that these changes, ironically, don't so much make the schools more relevant, as they make them obsolescent. After all, if you're just trying to go for classes in your major study area, if you're not going to use your degree for anything except as a professional certification, if you don't care about going for the full, interdisciplinary sweep of Western Civ, then the University itself becomes unnecessary. You can get your professional training online, or at any number of vocational schools that specialize in teaching the specific subject you're trying to learn; and these institutions can do it more quickly, more cheaply, and without all the politics of the college campus.

And it leaves a hunger among the would-be scholars. What if your teachers have only looked at the Founding Fathers from a Marxist or race-history perspective? What if the scholar is left wondering, "Yeah, but what did they actually do?" The student is left on his own to find it out, on his own time and by his own efforts. Hanson points out that this may already be happening: there are some good historians out there who have sold millions of copies of well-written biographies and histories to a public hungry to learn this stuff, which they never got in school. He mentions David McCullough, whose excellent bio of John Adams graces our bookshelf. (He could also have mentioned David Hackett Fischer--pretty much anything by him is good.) Hanson also mentions the lectures available on audio and DVD by The Teaching Company, three of which we own--and which are also very good.

In all, he paints a curious picture--one in which there's a hunger in the general populace for the things a University used to provide, which is increasingly rare; and simultaneously one in which the Universities themselves are rejecting this demand, and are slowly turning themselves into politicized vocational schools that are in danger of losing in the marketplace to real vocational schools and other adult training institutions. He concludes:

Once academia lost the agreed-upon, universally held notion of what classical learning was and why it was important, a steady unraveling process removed not just the mission but the mystery—and indeed, the beauty—from the American university. How ironic that the struggling university, in its efforts to meet changing political, technological, and cultural tastes and fads, willingly forfeited the only commodity that made it irreplaceable and that it alone could do well. And how sad, since once the university broke apart the liberal arts, all the religious schools, self-help courses, and CDs couldn’t quite put them together again.

In all, an interesting and thought-provoking article. And I think that at some point there's likely to be a backlash in the general population against the university system. Hanson claims that

While the public may not fully appreciate the role that classical education once played, it nonetheless understands that university graduates know ever less, even as the cost of their education rises ever more.

With a college degree currently being absolutely necessary to get into many professional jobs, and the current costs of higher education spiraling out of control, and a growing sense in the population that just because someone graduated from a University, it doesn't mean they're well educated, eventually something is going to break.

I, for one, am curious to see what that "break" looks like. I actually suspect it will be good for society, but I'm a hopeless optimist that way.

You Know Your Kids Are Homeschooled When...

...they get into the kinds of arguments with each other that our six- and not-quite-four-year-olds did today just before bed:

I am NOT a minotaur!

Well, I'M not the minotaur either!

Yes you are!

No, I'm a girl, not a minotaur.

Yes, you're a GIRL MINOTAUR...

Presumably, that would be a creature with the body of a woman and the head of a cow.


...


And then, just as the Pillowfight Fairy crawled into bed this evening, she curled up and announced: "I'm a larva."

Ew, I thought. But then she continued: "Now I'm a pupa. When you come in in the morning, I'll be a bee."

Yup, our kids are definitely homeschooled. And they read too much Calvin and Hobbes, too.