As always, a fascinating discussion. I am reminded of the Hunger Games and the spectacles put on to entertain the mindless elites.
Re education, in Canada it has come to light that school boards across the country are welcoming kids who wish to transistion to the gender of their choice, and then tell their class mates to be careful not to tell the parents of those children. When children are left with adults who are not their parents, one of the cardinal rules is, there are to be NO Secrets. Perhaps there are no adults in the schools now.
Claire, I know your interest in the culture wars is limited and Canada is rarely mentioned in your writings ( you cover Europe, Asia, fly to the US, and then pivot to Australia) but you might find Jordan Peterson's travails of interest. He is being threatened with expulsion from the Ontario College of Psychologists for political comments he made outside of his professional capacity. One was made when he was discussing world population with someone who stated that the population of the planet should be limited to some number, and Peterson invited him to leave it. The College has accused him of encouraging someone to commit suicide, among other things.
The point is that professional associations, corporations and government bodies are all starting to get into the re-education and social engineering business.
Fortunately Peterson is as obstreperous as he is stubborn and the coming battle will be interesting.
I think Zena Hitz (see Lost in Thought) --translating Augustine's curiositas as "love of spectacle"-- has a nice discussion of this problem. It's not a new one.
Maybe because it’s periodically necessary to point out that our education system needs work. Work that might more easily be accomplished if we allowed our educators do what they are trained to do and then paid them according to the importance of the job we ask them to do.
Unfortunately, many of the institutions training our educators. train them to spend less time teaching the basics parents expect and more time indoctrinating them in wokeness.
Many parts of many institutions of higher learning no longer value the ideas of classic liberalism. They teach and believe that classic liberalism is racist, exploitive and a tool of white supremacy and should be discarded.
The problem is that many educators are doing what they were trained to do. Unfortunately, what they are doing is not close to what the parents believe they are paying them to do through their property taxes.
Good luck reforming our educational system when the rot is firmly rooted within.
Since a majority of media people are more sympathetic to the woke than not, it is entirely possible the "problem" is underreported. The intensity may be higher than reported.
Certainly, social media is down filtering stories on this subject as we have discovered with the Twitter disclosures. Facebook and all the rest most likely have their thumb on the scale to make the problem appear less than it is.
All that being said, the quality of reporting by the press and social media is currently so poor that believing the standard outlets are accurately reporting on any subject is a mistake. It is difficult for the average person to have the time to find multiple sources so they can read enough conflicting views to have a chance of sorting out the truth.
That is a strength of Global Eyes in that it exposes the reader to multiple sources which provides the opportunity for the reader to sort things out.
Another source that does this is SEPP.org which compiles a weekly PDF with every article they can find on all sides of energy and climate.
Sites that do this type of aggregation are one best things about the internet.
"All that being said, the quality of reporting by the press and social media is currently so poor that believing the standard outlets are accurately reporting on any subject is a mistake."
This probably gets to the crux of my interest. I wouldn't claim that the Times spends much time criticizing the fringes of the left (only a bit, so it's refreshing when they do).
But I don't think many of the non-standard sources are substantially more accurate. Many of the alternative sources I've seen reporting on "woke university professors" expend huge amounts of time and energy injecting dramatic pearl-clutching and equivocation. The intent is to generate more traffic and fury in their audience, more than to give an accurate representation of the issue.
I think most parents are not concerned about university professors. They are concerned about woke teaching in primary and secondary schools especially when part of the program is to keep this curriculum hidden from the parents.
When this activity is exposed to parents, as remote learning exposed it in the last couple of years, it will generate alarm among many parents. No one should be surprised by that. There are things any good parent should be alarmed about.
"Pearl-clutching" implies the concerns of those parents are invalid. I think that phrase should be retired.
Every news source needs to be evaluated by each of us. Those paying attention will notice over time which sources are often accurate and which aren't. That's how a news source earns trust, by being frequently accurate. No one is correct 100% of the time, but it usually doesn't take long to notice which sources are frequently wrong.
I am curious how Adam and Claire would classify the famous floor fights(in the physical sense) of East Asian Democracies including Japan. Are these part of the same phenomenon of affluenza inflicting Western Democracies or is it something sui generis to East Asia? I have to personally proving Adam's point since I started learning about politics in middle and high school in the 1990s a part of me has always wanted these famous floor brawls from Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan to come to the US House of Representatives. More life WWF Wrestling than Barnum and Bailey but the point stands.
Oh yes, Turkey has them regularly. They're not uncommon in many parliaments. It's not surprising: Democracy is what we do to keep from killing each other. One shouldn't really expect that parliamentarians will never to slip up.
This is a very interesting essay and a delight to read. It’s very rare to find a pundit who writes as well as Adam Garfinkle.
With that said, I’m skeptical that loss of the skill of deep reading is a major factor in either the clown car character of American politics or the rapid debasement of our culture. When exactly was the American working class immersed in deep reading?
Did the militia men cooling their heals at Valley Forge pass the time of day reading deeply? Did the assembly line workers in Ford plants? How much deep did peons toiling away at Facebook or Google ever do?
Isn’t the ability or inclination of elite Americans to read deeply equally absent. I think you have to go back to the Founding Fathers to find American elites deeply interested in reading books and seriously confronting the ideas presented therein. Were John Adams and Thomas Jefferson deep readers? Of course. Were Andrew Jackson, James Polk or any of the Presidents who came after them? Maybe a few, but not many. Were Senators and Congressman who served in the past less dimwitted than those serving now? I doubt it.
I also wonder whether the spectocracy that Adam refers to is an American phenomenon or a wider phenomenon. The United States is not the only nation experiencing political turmoil. The UK, Israel, Brazil and several other nations have suffered through unusually turbulent political times. If Adam thinks the rise of the spectocracy is responsible for some of this in the United States, I wonder if he thinks the local version of spectocracy accounts for political instability in those other countries.
Finally, Adam says,
“When a former President proposes doing away with the Constitution so he can return to power—and almost no senior members of his party publicly condemn him for it—it is easy to see which way the wind is blowing.”
That’s right. But Adam could just as easily have said:
When the FBI, CIA, and State Department work to censor the right of Americans to publish views the Government finds objectionable and when the Government’s attempt to intimidate the press is endorsed by a Congressional majority and not condemned by other members of the press (or Claire Berlinski for that matter) it is easy to see which way the wind is blowing.
Claire, you’re way to smart to ignore the ramifications of some of the revelations from the Twitter files. The fact that the then Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, pressured Twitter to censor Paul Sherry is both despicable and disturbing.
The fact that Twitter (and presumably other social media sites) held weekly meetings with the FBI (which in addition to its own concerns was acting as a front for American intelligence agencies) is also very concerning.
The paranoia of the lap top class about threats from misinformation and disinformation is particularly informative about the pathology which characterizes the disordered thinking of members of this class. Only the narcissism of people who make their living sitting in front of a computer all day can explain their belief that they should be the arbiters of what information is real and what information is false.
You would think these pampered Americans would understand what democracy and pluralism are all about and, hyper-educated as they are, should have learned somewhere or other about the concept of “the marketplace of ideas.” It tells you everything you need to know that they seem far more interested in shutting this marketplace down with the able assistance of the FBI.
Put simply, I don’t want the editors or publishers of the New York Times or Washington Post determining what reading material I have access to and I don’t want some Fed stationed at an FBI office in Texas (or wherever it was) making that decision either.
I guess you’re fine with it. I’m not.
I’d find it remarkable if you thought it was A-okay for law enforcement organizations to meet continuously with Twitter or similar organizations after reviewing their content. The Twitter files plainly show that Twitter’s censors felt intimidated by some of these interactions and removed (or tuned down) content that the FBI wanted banned even though Twitter thought the content did not violate their rules.
I am old enough to remember the Church Hearings that riveted our Country. The behavior of the intelligence community was problematic then and the Twitter files provide at least circumstantial evidence that it’s problematic now. Certainly the evidence is sufficient to inspire a vigorous investigation by the new GOP House majority.
Some of the revelations from the Twitter files are disturbing; others are just entertaining.
What’s clear is that the FBI’s behavior is unacceptable. The organization’s penchant for interfering in American elections has become a real problem. From it’s role in facilitating the election of Donald Trump (remember the emails on Anthony Weiner’s lap top) to its role of acting as the censor of last resort on what can appear on social media sites, the Federal Bureau of Investigation itself needs to be investigated; aggressively.
I’m sure that Russia conducts information operations against the West and our allies. I’m sure that other nations do as well. I am also pretty certain that the United States returns the favor using social media and other means.
I don’t care about any of this and I don’t think it’s particularly meaningful. Whatever threat to democracy is posed by Russian attempts to create fictionalized social media posts is dramatically outweighed by the threat to democracy posed by the FBI, CIA (and its intelligence sisters) and State Department assigning themselves as arbiters of what Americans can and cannot read.
We live in a disintermediated world. There are opportunities and challenges that go along with that, but it is overwhelmingly a good thing. But censorship is still censorship. It is beyond foolish to assign any Government Agency the responsibility of distinguishing truth from fiction and the power to coerce Twitter or any other organization into adopting its views.
Nothing good for democracy will come from allowing any branch of the U.S. Government to operate as the ultimate arbiters of what’s true and what’s not. It is far better to allow Russian lies to flow freely than to establish a censorship system in the United States.
I know you don’t like Russia, Claire. Why are you so anxious for the United States to take steps in the direction Russia or Hungary when it comes to media control?
If we don’t want a new authoritarian Cesar in the United States, the smartest thing we can do is shut the
FBI censorship system down.
Victor Orban would look at the behavior of the FBI revealed in the Twitter Files and break out in a huge smile as he nods his head approvingly.
So you don't think the FBI should try to shut down coordinated Russian disinformation activity? Have I got that right? Because yes, we just fundamentally disagree, if that's the case. I've seen no evidence the FBI tried to shut down US citizens.
As always, a fascinating discussion. I am reminded of the Hunger Games and the spectacles put on to entertain the mindless elites.
Re education, in Canada it has come to light that school boards across the country are welcoming kids who wish to transistion to the gender of their choice, and then tell their class mates to be careful not to tell the parents of those children. When children are left with adults who are not their parents, one of the cardinal rules is, there are to be NO Secrets. Perhaps there are no adults in the schools now.
Claire, I know your interest in the culture wars is limited and Canada is rarely mentioned in your writings ( you cover Europe, Asia, fly to the US, and then pivot to Australia) but you might find Jordan Peterson's travails of interest. He is being threatened with expulsion from the Ontario College of Psychologists for political comments he made outside of his professional capacity. One was made when he was discussing world population with someone who stated that the population of the planet should be limited to some number, and Peterson invited him to leave it. The College has accused him of encouraging someone to commit suicide, among other things.
The point is that professional associations, corporations and government bodies are all starting to get into the re-education and social engineering business.
Fortunately Peterson is as obstreperous as he is stubborn and the coming battle will be interesting.
I think Zena Hitz (see Lost in Thought) --translating Augustine's curiositas as "love of spectacle"-- has a nice discussion of this problem. It's not a new one.
Any chance of exploring myth maintenance further?
Many of the "myth" writers unnerve me. I think I prefer historians.
Mr. Garfinkle is standing, pulling his hair out, and stomping, creating the very spectacle he is deploring. Why was this piece included in CG?
Maybe because it’s periodically necessary to point out that our education system needs work. Work that might more easily be accomplished if we allowed our educators do what they are trained to do and then paid them according to the importance of the job we ask them to do.
Unfortunately, many of the institutions training our educators. train them to spend less time teaching the basics parents expect and more time indoctrinating them in wokeness.
Many parts of many institutions of higher learning no longer value the ideas of classic liberalism. They teach and believe that classic liberalism is racist, exploitive and a tool of white supremacy and should be discarded.
The problem is that many educators are doing what they were trained to do. Unfortunately, what they are doing is not close to what the parents believe they are paying them to do through their property taxes.
Good luck reforming our educational system when the rot is firmly rooted within.
Could I convince you that the intensity of the problem is not as high as reporting on it indicates?
Since a majority of media people are more sympathetic to the woke than not, it is entirely possible the "problem" is underreported. The intensity may be higher than reported.
Certainly, social media is down filtering stories on this subject as we have discovered with the Twitter disclosures. Facebook and all the rest most likely have their thumb on the scale to make the problem appear less than it is.
All that being said, the quality of reporting by the press and social media is currently so poor that believing the standard outlets are accurately reporting on any subject is a mistake. It is difficult for the average person to have the time to find multiple sources so they can read enough conflicting views to have a chance of sorting out the truth.
That is a strength of Global Eyes in that it exposes the reader to multiple sources which provides the opportunity for the reader to sort things out.
Another source that does this is SEPP.org which compiles a weekly PDF with every article they can find on all sides of energy and climate.
Sites that do this type of aggregation are one best things about the internet.
"All that being said, the quality of reporting by the press and social media is currently so poor that believing the standard outlets are accurately reporting on any subject is a mistake."
This probably gets to the crux of my interest. I wouldn't claim that the Times spends much time criticizing the fringes of the left (only a bit, so it's refreshing when they do).
But I don't think many of the non-standard sources are substantially more accurate. Many of the alternative sources I've seen reporting on "woke university professors" expend huge amounts of time and energy injecting dramatic pearl-clutching and equivocation. The intent is to generate more traffic and fury in their audience, more than to give an accurate representation of the issue.
I think most parents are not concerned about university professors. They are concerned about woke teaching in primary and secondary schools especially when part of the program is to keep this curriculum hidden from the parents.
When this activity is exposed to parents, as remote learning exposed it in the last couple of years, it will generate alarm among many parents. No one should be surprised by that. There are things any good parent should be alarmed about.
"Pearl-clutching" implies the concerns of those parents are invalid. I think that phrase should be retired.
Every news source needs to be evaluated by each of us. Those paying attention will notice over time which sources are often accurate and which aren't. That's how a news source earns trust, by being frequently accurate. No one is correct 100% of the time, but it usually doesn't take long to notice which sources are frequently wrong.
I am curious how Adam and Claire would classify the famous floor fights(in the physical sense) of East Asian Democracies including Japan. Are these part of the same phenomenon of affluenza inflicting Western Democracies or is it something sui generis to East Asia? I have to personally proving Adam's point since I started learning about politics in middle and high school in the 1990s a part of me has always wanted these famous floor brawls from Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan to come to the US House of Representatives. More life WWF Wrestling than Barnum and Bailey but the point stands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTmgwX8taQQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpSUq8lu74Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2b-2YnfZso
Apparently Turkey, India, and Ukraine have been known to have physical brawls in there legislatures as well.
Oh yes, Turkey has them regularly. They're not uncommon in many parliaments. It's not surprising: Democracy is what we do to keep from killing each other. One shouldn't really expect that parliamentarians will never to slip up.
This is a very interesting essay and a delight to read. It’s very rare to find a pundit who writes as well as Adam Garfinkle.
With that said, I’m skeptical that loss of the skill of deep reading is a major factor in either the clown car character of American politics or the rapid debasement of our culture. When exactly was the American working class immersed in deep reading?
Did the militia men cooling their heals at Valley Forge pass the time of day reading deeply? Did the assembly line workers in Ford plants? How much deep did peons toiling away at Facebook or Google ever do?
Isn’t the ability or inclination of elite Americans to read deeply equally absent. I think you have to go back to the Founding Fathers to find American elites deeply interested in reading books and seriously confronting the ideas presented therein. Were John Adams and Thomas Jefferson deep readers? Of course. Were Andrew Jackson, James Polk or any of the Presidents who came after them? Maybe a few, but not many. Were Senators and Congressman who served in the past less dimwitted than those serving now? I doubt it.
I also wonder whether the spectocracy that Adam refers to is an American phenomenon or a wider phenomenon. The United States is not the only nation experiencing political turmoil. The UK, Israel, Brazil and several other nations have suffered through unusually turbulent political times. If Adam thinks the rise of the spectocracy is responsible for some of this in the United States, I wonder if he thinks the local version of spectocracy accounts for political instability in those other countries.
Finally, Adam says,
“When a former President proposes doing away with the Constitution so he can return to power—and almost no senior members of his party publicly condemn him for it—it is easy to see which way the wind is blowing.”
That’s right. But Adam could just as easily have said:
When the FBI, CIA, and State Department work to censor the right of Americans to publish views the Government finds objectionable and when the Government’s attempt to intimidate the press is endorsed by a Congressional majority and not condemned by other members of the press (or Claire Berlinski for that matter) it is easy to see which way the wind is blowing.
Re. the first paragraphs, yes, it's definitely a wider phenomenon, as Adam says.
Re. the last paragraph, I hope you're not alluding to the Twitter Files, because you're too smart to have been snookered by that.
Claire, you’re way to smart to ignore the ramifications of some of the revelations from the Twitter files. The fact that the then Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, pressured Twitter to censor Paul Sherry is both despicable and disturbing.
The fact that Twitter (and presumably other social media sites) held weekly meetings with the FBI (which in addition to its own concerns was acting as a front for American intelligence agencies) is also very concerning.
The paranoia of the lap top class about threats from misinformation and disinformation is particularly informative about the pathology which characterizes the disordered thinking of members of this class. Only the narcissism of people who make their living sitting in front of a computer all day can explain their belief that they should be the arbiters of what information is real and what information is false.
You would think these pampered Americans would understand what democracy and pluralism are all about and, hyper-educated as they are, should have learned somewhere or other about the concept of “the marketplace of ideas.” It tells you everything you need to know that they seem far more interested in shutting this marketplace down with the able assistance of the FBI.
Put simply, I don’t want the editors or publishers of the New York Times or Washington Post determining what reading material I have access to and I don’t want some Fed stationed at an FBI office in Texas (or wherever it was) making that decision either.
I guess you’re fine with it. I’m not.
I’d find it remarkable if you thought it was A-okay for law enforcement organizations to meet continuously with Twitter or similar organizations after reviewing their content. The Twitter files plainly show that Twitter’s censors felt intimidated by some of these interactions and removed (or tuned down) content that the FBI wanted banned even though Twitter thought the content did not violate their rules.
I am old enough to remember the Church Hearings that riveted our Country. The behavior of the intelligence community was problematic then and the Twitter files provide at least circumstantial evidence that it’s problematic now. Certainly the evidence is sufficient to inspire a vigorous investigation by the new GOP House majority.
Some of the revelations from the Twitter files are disturbing; others are just entertaining.
What’s clear is that the FBI’s behavior is unacceptable. The organization’s penchant for interfering in American elections has become a real problem. From it’s role in facilitating the election of Donald Trump (remember the emails on Anthony Weiner’s lap top) to its role of acting as the censor of last resort on what can appear on social media sites, the Federal Bureau of Investigation itself needs to be investigated; aggressively.
Do you believe Russia conducts information operations against the West? Do you consider these operations to be the proper purview of the FBI?
I’m sure that Russia conducts information operations against the West and our allies. I’m sure that other nations do as well. I am also pretty certain that the United States returns the favor using social media and other means.
I don’t care about any of this and I don’t think it’s particularly meaningful. Whatever threat to democracy is posed by Russian attempts to create fictionalized social media posts is dramatically outweighed by the threat to democracy posed by the FBI, CIA (and its intelligence sisters) and State Department assigning themselves as arbiters of what Americans can and cannot read.
We live in a disintermediated world. There are opportunities and challenges that go along with that, but it is overwhelmingly a good thing. But censorship is still censorship. It is beyond foolish to assign any Government Agency the responsibility of distinguishing truth from fiction and the power to coerce Twitter or any other organization into adopting its views.
Nothing good for democracy will come from allowing any branch of the U.S. Government to operate as the ultimate arbiters of what’s true and what’s not. It is far better to allow Russian lies to flow freely than to establish a censorship system in the United States.
I know you don’t like Russia, Claire. Why are you so anxious for the United States to take steps in the direction Russia or Hungary when it comes to media control?
If we don’t want a new authoritarian Cesar in the United States, the smartest thing we can do is shut the
FBI censorship system down.
Victor Orban would look at the behavior of the FBI revealed in the Twitter Files and break out in a huge smile as he nods his head approvingly.
So you don't think the FBI should try to shut down coordinated Russian disinformation activity? Have I got that right? Because yes, we just fundamentally disagree, if that's the case. I've seen no evidence the FBI tried to shut down US citizens.