Resisting Reality

"Bruno thought of himself as a convinced European but knew he was at the same time a fierce critic of much of the way it was run: a fishing policy that had devastated the fisheries, an agricultural policy created by those with little knowledge of life in the countryside, an industrial policy that spouted words of solidarity but had undermined the skills and pride and jobs of the French workforce".

I'm currently reading Martin Walker's latest book in the Bruno, Chief of Police series, A Chateau Under Siege.  I greatly enjoy the series, set in the Dordogne region of France where we have vacationed many times, and its lead character Bruno and his friends.

Walker now lives in the Dordogne and with his background as a reporter with The Guardian and United Press International his worldview is that of a European liberal.  That viewpoint comes through in his novels, and he uses Bruno to express it, which is why I found the quote intriguing.

Bruno does not approve of European policies on fisheries, agriculture, and industry and elsewhere chafes against unreasonable bureaucratic intrusions into even minor details of French life.  But, as he always, reminds us, he is a "European".  But what does that mean?  Does it mean the European Union?  Throughout the books there is very little the EU does that Bruno approves of.  While he focuses on specific policies, the picture painted is that of an undemocratic faceless bureaucracy outside the control of the public.  Yet, it's clear from the books that being European means supporting the EU, but there is no convincing case for it, other than being better than some ghastly far right wing alternative.  While the EU may not be a success on substance, it has done a brilliant job convincing enough people that the only alternative is a descent into extremism.  That does not make for a healthy long-term prognosis for the peoples and nations of Europe as the fake alternatives posed by the EU will lead to further erosion of democracy and vesting even more decision making power into a bureaucracy whose top priority is its own preservation and growth.

Walker's refusal to face into reality reminded me of a piece I wrote in 2020 about similar viewpoints in the U.S.  Here is what I wrote about one of them:

George Packer is a writer for many prestigious liberal publications including The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine and a standard issue progressive so his October 2019 piece in The Atlantic, When The Culture War Comes For The Kids, must have startled some of his regular readers.  Living in New York City, Packer and his wife fell into the educational pressure cooker regarding their children but ultimately forsook private school for public education in city schools.

My wife and I are products of public schools. Whatever torments they inflicted on our younger selves, we believed in them. We wanted our kids to learn in classrooms that resembled the city where we lived. We didn’t want them to grow up entirely inside our bubble—mostly white, highly and expensively educated—where 4-year-olds who hear 21,000 words a day acquire the unearned confidence of insular advantage and feel, even unconsciously, that they’re better than other people’s kids.

He sees what is wrong with the focus on identity:

In politics, identity is an appeal to authority—the moral authority of the oppressed: I am what I am, which explains my view and makes it the truth. The politics of identity starts out with the universal principles of equality, dignity, and freedom, but in practice it becomes an end in itself—often a dead end, a trap from which there’s no easy escape and maybe no desire for escape. Instead of equality, it sets up a new hierarchy that inverts the old, discredited one—a new moral caste system that ranks people by the oppression of their group identity. It makes race, which is a dubious and sinister social construct, an essence that defines individuals regardless of agency or circumstance—as when Representative Ayanna Pressley said, “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice; we don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”

At times the new progressivism, for all its up-to-the-minuteness, carries a whiff of the 17th century, with heresy hunts and denunciations of sin and displays of self-mortification. The atmosphere of mental constriction in progressive milieus, the self-censorship and fear of public shaming, the intolerance of dissent—these are qualities of an illiberal politics.

It took me a long time to see that the new progressivism didn’t just carry my own politics further than I liked. It was actually hostile to principles without which I don’t believe democracy can survive. Liberals are always slow to realize that there can be friendly, idealistic people who have little use for liberal values.

Packer regrets the civics is no longer taught:

By age 10 [his son] had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught about the founding of the republic.” 

And he understands that what is going on is indoctrination, not education.

The fifth-grade share, our son’s last, was different. That year’s curriculum included the Holocaust, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. The focus was on “upstanders”—individuals who had refused to be bystanders to evil and had raised their voices. It was an education in activism, and with no grounding in civics, activism just meant speaking out. At the year-end share, the fifth graders presented dioramas on all the hard issues of the moment—sexual harassment, LGBTQ rights, gun violence. Our son made a plastic-bag factory whose smokestack spouted endangered animals. Compared with previous years, the writing was minimal and the students, when questioned, had little to say. They hadn’t been encouraged to research their topics, make intellectual discoveries, answer potential counterarguments. The dioramas consisted of cardboard, clay, and slogans.

De Blasio’s schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has answered critics of the diversity initiative by calling them out for racism and refusing to let them “silence” him. As part of the initiative, Carranza has mandated anti-bias training for every employee of the school system, at a cost of $23 million. One training slide was titled “White Supremacy Culture.” It included “Perfectionism,” “Individualism,” “Objectivity,” and “Worship of the Written Word” among the white-supremacist values that need to be disrupted. In the name of exposing racial bias, the training created its own kind.

Finally, Packer's son revolted against this mockery of an education:

“Isn’t school for learning math and science and reading,” he asked us one day, “not for teachers to tell us what to think about society?”  

His conclusion?

Watching your children grow up gives you a startlingly vivid image of the world you’re going to leave them. I can’t say I’m sanguine. Some days the image fills me with dread. That pragmatic genius for which Americans used to be known and admired, which included a talent for educating our young—how did it desert us? Now we’re stewing in anxiety and anger, feverish with bad ideas, too absorbed in our own failures to spare our children. But one day the fever will break, and by then they’ll be grown, and they will have to discover for themselves how to live together in a country that gives every child an equal chance.

Of course, we have the ritual denunciation of Trump but Packer can't put two and two together.  He can't understand why this horrible turn has happened in education.  He doesn't seem to understand that foundational and influential groups within the Democratic Party - teachers unions, school administrators, higher education, our country's largest foundations - are the very reason this disaster is unfolding.  He thinks the "fever" will magically break and all will be well.  It won't break on its own unless people like him face into what is necessary to break the fever. 

It's now 2023 and I see little sign that those like Packer recognize their own responsibility to take action; too many still see the only alternatives being a further descent into progressive racism turning their children into poorly educated and easily led activists or succumbing to extremists of the right.  Given that choice, they will choose the former.

This viewpoint is also reflected in a passage in a New Yorker article published a couple of years ago, Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters?, a profile of behavioral geneticist and self-described progressive Kathryn Paige Harden.  The article centers on the long-running and very controversial dispute over the relative contributions of genes versus environment, including social conditions, to the intelligence of various groups.

It's a dispute that I have not followed closely and have no strong opinions about other than an intuitive sense that both things play a role.  My interest in the article is elsewhere.

On sabbatical for the 2015-16 academic year, Harden and Elliot Tucker-Drob, a colleague to whom she was married at the time, were invited to New York City with their two young children—a three-year-old boy and a nine-month-old girl—as visiting scholars-in-residence at the Russell Sage Foundation. Russell Sage, which occupies a handsome Philip Johnson building in Manhattan, primarily supports sociologists, journalists, and economists, but it had recently launched an initiative to integrate the biological sciences. Harden felt almost immediately unwelcome at the regular fellows’ lunches. Many of the left-leaning social scientists seemed certain that behavior-genetics research, no matter how well intentioned, was likely to lead us down the garden path to eugenics. The world would be better, Harden was told, if she quit. When their cohort went to see “Hamilton,” the others professed surprise that Harden and Tucker-Drob had enjoyed it, as if their work could be done only by people uncomfortable with an inclusive vision of American history.

Here we are talking about a progressive scientist whose work expressly promotes societal actions to address inequality, yet because she "dissents" to some extent from the blank slate belief system of progressive orthodoxy, she is automatically placed in the category of "racist". 

I have an inclusive vision of our society.  I was raised that way, and my parents set an example for me, not only by what they said but in how they lived their lives.  It's how I treat people both personally and in my professional life.  In the job I had for the decade + before my retirement, I was measured on my hiring and promotion practices and repeatedly told by HR that I had exemplary performance.  However, I never hired or promoted anyone because of their identity.  My hiring approach was simple; it's hard to find good people and, when you do, hire and promote them.  Yet, despite this, I know that because of what I've expressed over the years on this blog, I would be not be hired today by my former company or most other large corporations.  And yes, though I've not seen Hamilton, based on what I've heard about from friends who have, I am sure I would enjoy it.

If we, as a society, make it through this ugly epoch of intolerance, I expect we will see many analyses of why liberalism was able to reject anti-liberalism from the right, but was so easily upended by the anti-liberalism of the left.