Magnificent Desolation

We are a mere 6 weeks or so away from marking the 50^th anniversary of NASA’s brightest moment-- landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.  In my view, the successful mission of Apollo 11 was one of the three great technological feats of the U.S. government of the 20^th century, along with defeating the Axis powers during WWII (ending it with the Manhattan Project) and wowing the world by ejecting Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 in 100 days, while taking on the world’s 3^rd largest army and suffering fewer than 200 casualties.   Of these major technological accomplishments, Apollo 11 remains the signature nonmilitary achievement of the U.S. government.  In fact, the technological prowess of the United States was so respected that simply the threat of putting the full weight of the U.S. government behind it was enough to cause the Soviet Union to buckle when Ronald Reagan announced his visionary Star Wars program (33 years later, we’re still not there yet).

The film Apollo 11 is a documentary tribute to that magical flight of half a century ago.   It is uncluttered mostly raw color footage (some new) with no narration save some news reports and chatter between the astronauts and ground control in Houston.   The color footage is amazingly clear and contrasts with how I remember these events as a boy—grainy, shadowy black and white images.

The film sticks to the journey itself and the astronauts and does not provide much historical context, except for JFK’s famous statement of goals and a background news story of Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne.  But those of us of a certain age are aware of the turbulence of the time.  The divisions over the Vietnam War were growing.  This was only five years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.  Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been slain the year before.  But despite all these fissures, the nation could pull itself together and unite in this purpose.  One of the striking images of the film was the blocks and blocks of people stretched out to witness the launch, and the expressions of joy and wonderment as the spacecraft lifted into the sky.

The singularity of purpose was evident in all of communications and the role of each person was acknowledged in this team effort.   President Nixon called the astronauts and proclaimed that it was “the proudest day of our lives.” Ground control remarked to Michael Collings after re-docking, “Not since Adam has a human known such solitude as Michael Collins.”  And Neil Armstrong, upon return, gave “special thanks to all those that built the spacecraft.”

The three astronauts that made the journey—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins largely stayed out of the public eye afterwards.  Neil Armstrong in particular was almost reclusive and contrasts with today’s celebrities and heroes that have book deals and run the talk show circuit.  Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf did book tours after Desert Storm.  Even genuine hero Navy Seal Robert J. O’Neill  (slayer of Bin Laden) put out a couple of books and went on the talk show circuit.  Michael Collins disappeared from the national consciousness almost entirely and only Buzz Aldrin has maintained a public profile (I saw Aldrin speak at the Printers Row Lit Fest a couple of years ago).

The astronauts returned to a ticker tape parade.  But soon thereafter, moon landings became pedestrian, and aside from the near disaster of Apollo 13, public interest in space waned.  The Space Shuttle program was marred 25 years later by the Challenger accident.  And then we lost another crew over Texas in Columbia.   Manned space flight ended under the Obama administration.  NASA ossified became embroiled in some controversies with climate change and Obama’s insistence on including Muslim contributions to science in its purpose.  Then last year, the film First Man, a biopic about Neil Armstrong conspicuously omitted any showing of the American flag. 

Since Apollo 11, the U.S. government has had some spectacular failures.  We lost the war in Vietnam. The War on Poverty was an expensive bust.  The War on Drugs has been largely lost.   We are retreating from the war in Afghanistan and accomplished very little despite the lives and treasure lost in the second war in Iraq. 

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But for one shining week in July 50 years ago, the U.S. government showed the world that it could rally resources and accomplish something magnificent in the time period that JFK established.

Apollo 11 is a stunning film that will take you back to that week, raw and unvarnished and without an agenda.

More from the Higher Ed Swamp

Last week, The College Board announced that it plans to assign an “adversity score” to its standardized test scoring, using 15 factors, including crime rate, poverty levels and whether or not the individual was raised in a single parent household.  But unlike the verbal and math scores, the “adversity score” will not be available to student or parents but will only be available to schools.  This bit of social engineering has created a firestorm of controversy in a sector already rocked by the college admissions scandal, the abuse scandals at MSU and USC and the student debt crisis.

I thought the whole point of “standardized” tests was, well, to come up with a “standardized” predictor and indicator of academic achievement.  But clearly academic achievement is no longer a primary mission of much of higher education.   “Diversity” and “inclusiveness” count more.

After I got over my initial visceral revulsion to the announcement by The College Board, I decided that mostly what the “adversity score” does is quantify what institutions have already been doing informally for a long time anyway.  Perhaps the upside is that the “adversity score” attempts to quantify factors that admissions offices have previously done by guesswork without any quantitative data behind it.

 What don’t I like most about the "adversity score"?

Nontransparency

First of all, the scores are completely opaque to students.  They will be transmitted to colleges, but students cannot see them.   Board scores are like income.  There is no need to share them publicly but keeping the “adversity score” from students themselves is obnoxious, especially at a time when some schools are moving away from board score requirements.   Especially if the “adversity scores” are based in data as The College Board suggests, there is no defensible reason to shroud these scores in secrecy. 

What, exactly, are we handicapping?

The factors that go into the mix are very narrow.  How do you know what “adversity” any individual has experienced?  What about a person from a lower class but two person working family from the south side of Chicago that happens to live in a poor neighborhood?  Is that person facing more adversity than the kid from Winnetka that comes home to a drunk mother every night? What about a kid that has been marginalized in high school because of a speech impediment?  I knew one family in a leafy suburb where one of the three children suffered from a severe mental illness that was very disruptive to family life?  How do those circumstances figure into this measure?  There are a myriad of factors that may limit academic qualifications.  Economic adversity is simply one dimension of possible adversity. 

Solving the wrong problem.

As with most social engineering attempts, the “adversity score” solves the wrong problem.   The problem is that too few African Americans and other minorities do not qualify for admission into top level schools and once they get there their graduation rates are low.

The real problem is complicated and lies primarily in our union infested K-12 public school system, in family structure in minority communities which contributes to low expectations, and in part in the violence that in endemic in some of these areas.   The College Board is attacking the wrong problem.  The problem is NOT that the bar is too high.  The problem is that we need more creative and innovative ways to intervene at a much earlier time in the cycle (think restructuring K-12, and strengthening junior colleges and HSCUs).

Worse, the “adversity score” will actually enable our substandard K-12 system to continue to do what it has been doing. Failing miserably.

One friend of mine whose father was career military said to me that despite the fact that he was professional and had a graduate degree, his actual lifestyle was no better than his parents and may be work.  I replied, “that’s because higher education and the State have conspired to scrape off the excess earnings.”  A middle income or upper middle income person does not get much, if any, in financial aid.  With higher education inflation far outpacing inflation, and increasing taxes, higher education (sometimes in consort with government) have stripped away any incremental increase in wealth from the middle class.   And now children of middle income but single earner parents will get disadvantaged even more, not because of their individual characteristics, but because they happen to belong to a certain class.

Rather than being a bridge to advancement, higher education is now weighing down the middle class, stripping them of wealth and robbing them of an ever increasing proportion of their future earnings with unsustainable debt.

Venture capitalist Peter Theil recently skewered higher education and I think hit it right on:

“The analogy that I’ve often used for universities is that they are as corrupt today as the Catholic Church was 500 years ago on the eve of the Protestant Reformation.  It’s the same sort of stuff that we are being told.  You have the priestly professorial that is very sinecured.  You have runaway tuitions that are like the indulgences.  There is a salvation story where if you get a degree from Harvard, you’ll end up in a good place.  If you don’t get a college degree you will end up in a very bad place.  This is the Atheist Church.  What I am arguing for is a 2^nd Reformation and it is not to replace it with some unitary alternative system.  I think it will be a whole range of different things.”

The “adversity score” will do little to improve the lot of minorities.  It will unnecessarily harm middle class kids.  While I’m not as hysterical about it as many conservatives, the actual effect will be to enable our broken education system to continue on its dismal path.

I’m willing to bet that paying off the student loans of Morehouse College ’19 graduates by billionaire Robert Smith will do more for young minorities starting out in life than any relative advantage conveyed by an “adversity score.”

War of Words and Phrases Part 2

Last week I wrote about the innovative attempt by two intellectuals to coin words in order to more accurately describe a phenomenon and to shape an argument.   Although we typically think of historians as being as innovative as actuaries, these two historians made bold attempts to bring a new perspective and do it with precision.   And these attempts stand in stark contrast to the new nomenclature of the Left—which I find to be sloppy, inaccurate, imprecise, or so broad and vacuous as to be meaningless. 

Here are some of my LEAST favorites:

White Privilege.

This is a distasteful one, and meets all of the criteria—sloppy, inaccurate, imprecise, broad and vacuous.  Yes, slavery was the great stain on an otherwise pretty exceptional history.  And yes, emancipation did not eliminate racial biases and barriers until well into the 20^th century. But to then proclaim that privilege is based on skin color (which then hops to generalized white guilt) is a falsehood.  It is a broad, meritless phrase, exposed by last year’s best selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance.   Vance made the improbable leap from impoverished backwoods to Yale Law School despite poverty, despair and a wholly dysfunctional family life.  In my personal life, I knew a number of white kids that grew up in poverty or near poverty that ended up ok… and some that did not.  To suggest that these people were  “privileged” in any respect is patently offensive.   “Privilege” is independent of skin color and is suggestive of advantages of social class, but its broad use is wholly misleading.  Is the son of a white plumber from Des Moines “privileged” compared to the daughter of an African American cardiologist in Evanston, Illinois?  Is the daughter of a white hedge fund manager who drinks every weekend and abuses his wife “privileged” compared to the son of a black warehouse supervisor from Akron that works two jobs and goes to church twice a week?  The term is offensive, unidimensional and not useful.

Toxic Masculinity.

This term has gained so much traction over the past several years that the social justice warriors at Gillette felt compelled to incorporate it into their recent ad campaign, and the American Psychological Association recently incorporated it into their treatment guidelines.  Like “white privilege,” it is massively overbroad and meant to shame an entire class of people—men—by expanding the truth that some men behave badly sometimes.   Some men sometimes use physical power, status or financial power to exploit others.   True.  Some men use their position to get sex.  True.  Some men sometimes exclude women or are demeaning to them.  Also true.

But like the term “white privilege,” toxic masculinity is way too broad to be descriptive.  News flash: Women are just as capable of exhibiting horrid behavior as men, especially when they are in positions of power.   Moreover, the same instincts that are ascribed to “toxic masculinity” are those that are willing and able to help you change your flat on a subzero winter night, push your car out of a ditch, or step to your aid when you are being harassed on public transportation.  Last January, Illinois state trooper Chris Lambert was killed while aiding a stalled vehicle, leaving behind a wife and 1 year old daughter.  After I saw that news item, I decided to toss all of my Gillette products in the trash.  https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/state-trooper-killed-crash-died-doing-what-he-loved/

Islamophobia

Islamophobia is also an inaccurate and nondescriptive term, designed to silence legitimate questions and criticisms of Islam and Islamism.  A phobia is an unwarranted fear of something.   I can’t name a single person or have seen a single instance of “Islamophobia.”  This phrase is the ultimate straw man.

The phrase is used to cut off the questioning of the legitimate fear of Islamic based violence.   From 9/11 to Charlie Hebdo, to this week’s exposure by the F.B.I. of a jihadist training camp in Alabama, we have seen Islamic based violence permeating the West.   The same people that cry “climate change deniers” ignore or downplay Islamist violence, and "Islamophobia" is a convenient word used to deflect.

While it is true that Muslims who engage in this are in the minority, it is also true that we have no reliable way of filtering them out. 

The Iron Law of Reciprocity should apply.   If a number of Catholic priests were proposing to do an unsupervised weekend religious retreat in the North Woods with a group of pre-teen boys, no one in their right mind would call me Catho-phobic for being reluctant to send my son along.  “Well, it’s just a minority of priests who do this kind of thing, you know.”  Right.  I’ll pass.

But it’s more than just the threat of violence that leads people to ask whether Islam is ultimately compatible in Western society.   Europe is grappling with a proliferation of  “grooming gangs,” no-go zones, pathological misogyny, acid attacks, burkas, female genital mutilation, and demands for special workplace accommodations (Amazon just got sued by a group of Muslim workers).  There is a whole set of behaviors associated with mass Islamic immigration that simply has no place in Western society and it ignores reality to write off objections to them as "Islamophobic."  It is not correct to ascribe these behaviors to all of Islam but we should not dismiss them with a verbal shut off valve, either.

While we have put on productions like “The Life of Brian,” “Jesus Christ Superstar,” and “The Book of Mormon,” a spoof production of “Muhammed the Musical” with dancing girls on Broadway would certainly bring threats of violence.   To  evidence that it is compatible with the West, Islam needs to subject itself to the Iron Law of Reciprocity.  It is not exempt from Western skepticism, parody or criticism.  And demanding that its social norms adapt to those of the West while residing in the West is not Islamophobic.  We are absolutely entitled to our own cultural norms.

These are just three of my [least] favorites.  “Patriarchy” and “the wrong side of history” (what does that even mean?) also should be on this list.   These words are empty and divisive but they have crept into common usage, especially in the media and on college campuses.  One must ask whether these words take us closer to truth, or do they take us further away from truth?   Are they meant to bring clarity or to distort and manipulate?  Do they inform or propagandize? Here, it is pretty clear.

War of Words and Phrases Part 1

In the in intensifying struggle between the left and the right, words and phrases matter greatly.  They frame the argument. They conjure up images.  They help persuade one way or the other.  They brand.  They also paint a picture of a political opponent that is often hard to shake.  And as a general matter, the Left has been more facile at it than the right, both in coining terms and using them. 

But there are two original thinkers that have taken up the challenge and have coined terms that attempt to chip away at the virtual monopoly that the Left has had in this area, and I have had the good fortune of spending a little time with each of them.  Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum and Deirdre McCloskey, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois- Chicago are both very good writers and historians.  McCloskey is an economic historian and Pipes is a Middle East historian and founder of the Middle East Forum, an “activist” think tank.  Both have roots at The University of Chicago.  Pipes and McCloskey have coined new terms that more precisely describe phenomena and attempt to deny the Left’s distortions.

Pipes has been a supporter of the Eastern European governments efforts to push back against the E. U.’s policy of widespread immigration from the Middle East.  While he admits that there have been excesses in Viktor Orban’s Hungary or the Law and Justice party in Poland, he believes that they are generally moving in the right direction.  He has coined the term “Civilizationists” to describe these governments and their supporters. http://www.danielpipes.org/18612/europe-wake-up.  These are governments that wish to preserve the values, culture and social norms of their countries. http://www.danielpipes.org/18301/the-rise-of-western-civilizationism.

Pipes’s use of that term is a valiant effort to blunt the negative connotations from the Left of the term “nationalist.”   The word “nationalist,” of course, conjures up the extreme nationalism tainted with racism and aggression of the Axis Powers of the 1930’s and leading to WWII.   Yarom Hazony has attempted to argue for nationalism in his book “The Virtue of Nationalism.”  John Mersheimer in his recent book, The Great Delusion, says of nationalism, “Nationalism is essential for economic as well as military success, both of which matter greatly for a state’s survival.”  Further, Mersheimer asserts, “By fostering a common culture and tight bonds between the people and their state, nationalism can be the glue that holds otherwise disputatious people together.”   There are a number of important thinkers that believe that nationalism is vital for a vibrant society.

Yet it is almost impossible to dissociate the term “nationalist” from the violent, aggressive and genocidal experience of WWII and the camps of the Third Reich and Imperial Japan.  And the Left has seized on that.   Further, the Left then makes the short hop from “nationalist” to “white nationalist,” and with the flip of a verbal switch instantaneously transforms an American or Polish patriot that believes in their cultural identity and narrative into the wild eyed, torch carrying, hateful neo-Nazi lunatics that were photographed at Charlottesville.

The term “Civilizationist” attempts to more accurately and positively describe the desire of the Poles, Hungarians and Czechs to preserve their unique national identity and cultures in the face of an E.U. that is determined to erase them.  These are countries that resisted the forceful attempt first by the Nazis and then the Stalinists.  These countries are now defying the E.U.’s attempt to coerce them into taking Muslim immigrants from the Middle East.  Civilizationist is a way to scrape off the negative connotations of nationalism and assert the rightful stance of these people to preserve their culture and heritage.

Similarly, last fall, economic historian Deirdre McCloskey, spoke at the Heritage Foundation and used the term “Innovism” as a replacement for “capitalism.”  https://www.c-span.org/video/?454208-2/deirdre-mccloskey-socialism. As with the term “nationalism,” “capitalism” has acquired some taint, especially since the Great Recession of ’07-“08.  The bailout of large financial institutions, coupled with the widening wealth disparity have tarnished the term.  Despite the fact that capitalism’s expansion has been responsible for the near elimination of worldwide poverty, like “nationalism,” the term now conjures up thoughts of and insider game and “privilege.”  It evokes the image of the Monopoly character with the black mustache and black top hat with fistfuls of dollars charging exorbitant rents on the space that you land on.  

But McCloskey has been arguing that it is not capital that has enriched the world, but the freedom to innovate and has plenty of evidence to support that view.  McCloskey asserts that “innovism” is a better word than “capitalism,” for it is betterments not capital that have been responsible for the rise in living standards and the decline in poverty worldwide.

Betterments require disobedience, creative destruction, an overturning or remaking or redirecting of what already exists, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates challenging Big Blue, autos replacing horses—not a bigger centralized computer or a faster horse.

Her book, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World takes you through a 650 page journey to explain why this is so, and she does it masterfully, in historical context.

“The modern world was not caused by “capitalism,” which is ancient and ubiquitous, as for example in Japan itself during the seventeenth century.  The modern world was caused by egalitarian liberalism, which was in 1776 revolutionary…”

The Left has heretofore had a virtual monopoly on creating words and phrases to capture the narrative and propel their agenda.  Will the terms “Civilizationist” and “Innovism” find their way into popular usage?  Frankly, I have my doubts that they will come into common use.  The Left is much is better at making up terms that have emotional appeal (although are hugely misleading) and then bludgeoning us with them (and that will be my post next week).    But both Mr. Pipes and Ms. McCloskey are original and precise thinkers with a deep historical perspective and they are getting in the rhetorical fight.