Hildegarde

Every once in a while, somebody says something that so startles me that I don’t know what to do with it.

Mique said:

>>>Your sons and, I suspect, most other kids with the ability to achieve a life of the mind will either come from privileged backgrounds with sufficient family intellectualism and relative wealth, or simply be so brilliant, like Sowell, to make it despite the real and perceived obstacles to be faced by most adequately talented people.  But the reality for the rest is relative poverty, the need to work to survive all levels of their education, and to compete for limited opportunities in academia against more privileged people while
still trying to live a semblance of a normal life among family and friends who most likely share neither their talents nor their
ambitions.
<<<<

And I’ve got to work out how to work through this.

First, let me clear up a misconception.  When I said “my fourteen year old kid,”  I didn’t mean one of my children, both of whom are–well, well over the age of fourteen. 

I meant “my” as in “the one I’ve been talking about in these posts.”

But beyond that–

First, it’s simply not true that most poeple who want and achieve the life of the mind are from “privileged” backgrounds, unless you’re using “privilege” in a very different way than I am.

It’s almost never the case that the children of “privilege” in the sense of those coming from the top rungs of the socioeconomic ladder opt for the life of the mind.

In fact, I doubt that there are many societies in which this particular social strata did so opt.  Renaissance Italy might be an exception.  The people who make serious money in the  US, however, do not do it in intellectual pursuits, aren’t interested in intellectual pursuits, and tend to be far more sports-and-pop-culture oriented than concerned with Shakespeare and Scarlatti.

Successful intellectuals in the US rarely get much higher than the upper middle class, which is itself composed mostly of people like doctors and lawyers who are themselves not much interested in the life of the mind.

What that class does have, however, is a strong commitment to formal education, so that they push their kids to get the grades and board scores and extracurricular resumes to make them attractive to “name” schools, where their wholesale anti-intellectualism is the bane of their teacher’s lives. 

Even most academics in the US come from ordinary middle class backgrounds, and often less.  And that is as true in the Ivies as in the lower tier colleges. 

One of the better aspects of the American educational system is the fact that it doesn’t matter what a mess you’ve made of your life, you can always go back to school and take another shot–and people do, all the time.  They drop out of high school at fifteen to have a baby, stay on welfare for a decade, get fed up, get their GED (general ed degree–a high school diploma you can get by taking a test instead of actually going to high school), find a college to take them (there are lots) and go on from there. 

Granted, most of these people, and the ones who start college in prison, and the ones who start college in old age, will do something “practical,” but the call for adult education courses in things like philosophy and literature, and the success of enterprises like The Teaching Company that provide DVD and audio “courses” in the liberal arts, say that a lot of people out there who are neither privileged or brilliant are interested.

As for brilliant–well, brilliant never hurts, certainly, and Sowell is certainly brilliant, but I doubt whether most intellectuals are. 

I think intellectuals have to have a talent for certain kinds of thinking, but I’d hesitate to say that they’re more intelligent as a whole than, say, old Henry Ford. 

Most intellectuals are like most of anybody else–of average intelligence, from average families, with average resources. 

Finally, I don’t think that the anti-intellectualism of much American public life will discourage vast numbers of these people from doing intellectual work or from making themselves intellectuals–although it does deter some.

I do think that the impression given that only one side of the political spectrum is hospitable to intellectual work increases the chances that such people will pick that side of the spectrum.

And I do think that that impression will lead to younger people–and older people, like those adult students–not even bothering to look into writers like Edmund Burke, Frederick Hayek, and, for that matter, Thomas Sowell.

In other words, the present American climate, where the “conservative” side is constantly railing at how awful, stuck up, immoral, and despicable “intellectuals” are, creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Of course most intellectuals are on the left these days–they’ve been given the distinct impression, since childhood, that nobody else would have them.

And I think it’s interesting that nobody yelled at me about that populism quote, but I think I’ll just end this here and go find some music.

In case you’re wondering, the music this morning will probably be intellectual enough, but my mania this week is a gospel piece by a (white) country singer named Josh Turner, called “Long Black Train.”

Okay, here’s the thing.

I promise–I ABSOLUTELY PROMISE–

Never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never

To get sarcastic on this blog.

When I said Ward Churchill didn’t have the credentials, I was being sarcastic. 

And I’m beginning to think I’m really bad at this, because I never seem to be able to get out from under when I do it.

Ward Churchill does not have the credentials to be an academic.  No major university–and he teaches in one–hires full time faculty with less than a doctorate, and really doesn’t promote them to full professor without one.  Churchill not only does not have a doctorate, but his master’s degree is from a third tier (at best) school in a largely irrelevant field and his publications are…how should we put it?…less than scholarly. 

Churchill is a creature of the grievance departments.  His only claim to expertise in anything was his (false) self-identification as Native American, and that was the only reason he was hired.

Churchill lakes the erudition to be an intellectual, and erudition is essential.

“Intellectual” is not a job.  It’s not something you do.  It’s something you are. 

And it doesn’t matter what Thomas Sowell’s definition of “intellectual” is, either.

I am not criticizing Sowell for his arguments.

I’m criticizing him for using the word “intellectual.”

It doesn’t matter how he’s defining it, because most people will never read the book.  They’ll just see the title.

And since “intellectual” has a standard definition, a lot of them will think–with perfectly good reason–that the title refers to the standard definition.

And that Sowell is therefore bashing ACTUAL intellectuals, rather than the weird little group of intellectuals-and-others that he’s aiming at.

And that fourteen year old kid of mine, the one with the talent and the drive and the  passionate commitment to the life of the mind, will get the impression, yet again,  that anything to the right of Keith Olbermann is antagonistic to everything he loves.

It’s bugging me that I seem to be having a very hard time getting this across. 

And no, don’t tell me I’m doing that thing where I go, “Oh, you’d agree with me if you only UNDERSTOOD!”

I have no idea if anybody would agree with me or not, but when these posts are followed by people saying “but you can’t change Sowell’s definition!” then no, I’m NOT being understood. 

Sowell’s definition of “intellectual” is IRRELEVANT to the argument I’m making.

Okay, it’s rainy, I’ve just gone through a copyedited manuscript where the copyeditor apparently didn’t know things like that there’s a church (the building) and the Church (the total institution), so that she kept lowercasing “church” in all cases and then rewording things because I wasn’t making any sense. 

Among other really interesting things.

I’ve got to go get this thing to UPS before the snow starts.

So let me throw a (rhetorical) bomb, and see what happens.

This is from the book Last Exit To Utopia by the late Jean-Jacques Revel.  He’s describing the French LEFT in politics. but it reminds me of something else a little closer to home.

So here it goes:

<<<<<Populism boils down to simplistic ideas, unwarrented assertions, erroneous or grossly exaggerated facts, ad hominem attacks on opponents, the art of stuffing the heads of a well-trained audience by delusions of conspiracies by “the real rulers of the world”–whether Jews, capitalists, journalists, television producers, the agents of globalization or whoever happens to be the current hobgoblin.”

Like, you know, “intellectuals.”  And “the elites.”

So, John Oliver says:

>>>Mique has been talking about the history departments in Australian universities.
I tend to agree with him. They have adopted a politically correct party line of
historical interpretation. Am I expected to respect them as “intellectuals” who
work with ideas or should I despise them as people who have destroyed the
concept of a university as a place of free thought and free debate?
>>>

And my answer is:

Neither.

What you should do is recognize that what you don’t like about them has nothing to do with whether or not they’re “intellectuals.”

It’s not their intellectualism you don’t like.

It’s their specific ideas.

So criticize their ideas,or criticize the group they actually belong to, but don’t mislabel them “intellectuals” as if that is what causes them to falsify the history of Australian aborgines or to get on the bandwagon for Pol Pot. 

Some of these people may be intellectuals and some may not, but the category they actually belong to that you don’t like isn’t “intellectuals.”

This is one of those days when doing this blog should be easy, since I’m on the good computers, but of course it isn’t, because there are half a dozen people in this room blasting music out of–well, what do they blast it out of?  If it’s coming out of their earphones, they’re going to be deaf in another week.  But you see what I mean.

So let me answer a few questions, and go on from there.

First, I didn’t “change” Thomas Sowell’s definition of intellectual. Lymaree and Cheryl asked me for my definition, and I gave it by bouncing off Sowell’s as a way to clarify what I was saying.  I wasn’t commenting on Sowell’s book, which I haven’t read yet.  I’ve only glanced through it.  The most I was doing was complaining about the fact of Sowell’s book, one more conservative diatribe against “intellectuals.”

But here’s the thing–I think Sowell is using, and Robert is concuring in, the word “intellectual” to describe a group of people that really is recognizable as a distinct group.  It’s just that their distinctness does not reside in their intellectualism.

Okay, that was a convoluted sentence.  But bear with me here.

John wanted to know if Noam Chomsky is an intellectual, and he most definitely is–but Ward Churchill is not.  And yet people like Sowell rightly put the two men into a single distinct category, because they belong in one.

Robert wants to know about all those “victim studies” departments–aren’t all those people going to be useless without government supporting them and don’t they therefore necessarily favor left-leaning positions?

And I’d say yes to the second question), but most of them (see Ward Churchill, again), aren’t intellectuals.

What I think Sowell, and Robert, and a lot of otherconservative writers want is a single word that would describe “certain kinds of academics and writers belonging to certain kinds of departments and publications at certain kinds of institutions and universities.”

Which is convoluted, I know, but it’s closer to the truth than to call all these people “intellectuals” just because they make a living writing things or teaching in a university.

The various studies departments are a good example of the problem with this.  You might want to try Daphne Patai and Noretta Kortege’s Professing Feminism to see what some of the problem is here.  They do a pretty good job of documenting departments on “elite” campuses who hired people without doctorates or intellectual credentials of any kind but who happen to have the right “experience” to “teach”–well, they’re hired to teach a political party line.  It’s something of a tautology to complain that they then teach it, and it says nothing about what anybody not hired to teach it would think on the same subjects.

Ward Churchill was hired, with piss poor credentials, because he was thought to be Native American and because he spouted a specific set of opinions, determined in advance to be the “right” ones.  He’s no more an intellectual than my cat.

But he is that other thing.

John also asks if some of these people just lied, back during the Thirties or so when the Communist parties were paying them–well, yes, quite a few of them did, and everybody knew it.  You can find some good reports on the lying in Orwell’s essays, especially “Homage to Catalonia.”  In France there was Wilfred Burchette (I think I’m spelling that right), an Australian emigre who spread the word that the US was using biological warfare in the Korean War–something that was provably not true even at the time and has since been completely debunked by released KBG records, since they were the people who started the rumor and asked Burckette to spread it. 

In the US, there were people like Walter Duranty, who wrote for the New York Times for decades and filed report after report from the Soviet Union that covered up famines, torture, and mass executions that he himself had either witnessed directly or heard about from the people who perpetrated them.  He also falsified reports of the material well being of the Soviet people–the economy is doing great!  much better than capitalism!–and had a little side business going in destroying the reputations of reporters who tried to tell the truth about the USSR and of escapees from various forms of Soviet state terror.

They not only gave him a Pulitzer Prize, the PP committee refused to revoke it after Duranty’s deceptions had been thoroughly documented.

Duranty, by the way, would go into that same group as Chomsky and Churchill, and Michael Moore.

I was going to try to outline a few characteristics, and I can think of a few right off the bat.

First is the enormous double standard–“I don’t criticize socialist regimes,” William Sloane Coffin said, and he was talking about Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.  But there’s that thing where everybody lands with both feet on the head of somebody like, say, Pinochet, but lets somebody like Mugabe or Mengistu walk free without much in the way of criticism at all, even though their records of murder and torture are far worse.

This, by the way, is part of the reason why I’m opposed to American participation in the International Criminal Court.  Everybody over there seems eager to snatch Pinochet out of a hospital bed to bring him to justice, but just can’t seem to find anything wrong with Mengistu’s track record, never mind Castro’s.

The double standard, by the way, is to judge all “right wing” dictatorships on the basis of what they do, but all “left wing” ones on the basis of what they say they want to do. 

Me, I think torture is wrong and should be prosecuted, mass famines are wrong and should be prosectured, mass murder is wrong and should be prosecuted, no matter what it is you “meant” by it.

And no, I don’t apply those terms to properly declared wars.

The other tactic is to declare any criticism of the preferred governments–governments “on the left,” as the phrase goes these days–by declaring that that must mean you want the poor to starve and everybody to go back to slavery, or something. 

And, ack, there are a million others.

And now somebody is blaring a sports commercial off a computer.

So, there we go.  I’m getting distracted.

But this is a point that should be made–there should be an accurate term for the kind of people Robert, and Thomas Sowell, are complaining about.  But “intellectual” is not it.

Maybe you want to try Jean-Jacques Revel’s Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era.  It’s an analysis of just the sort of person we’re looking at, although as he exists in Europe rather than the US.

There doesn’t seem to be much difference.

So, let’s start here.

Robert says:
>>>>Leftist positions will always be supported by a majority of intellectuals. The underlying premises are more congenial to them, and in a world of more limited government and less deference, many of them would have to find other employment
<<<<<

This is, I think–and I think I can prove–entirely false.

I’m going to skip the whole thing about “deference,” because to this day I don’t understand it.  I’ve known a lot of people who’ve demanded deference in my life, but they haven’t been academics or intellectuals.  They’ve mostly been nurses, teachers, and other people in “not quite really respected” professions, if that makes any sense.  If it doesn’t, I can get back to that later.

But first, to define an intellectual.

For the purposes of his book, Sowell defines an intellectual as somebody whose work begins and ends in ideas.  He deliberately excludes anyone who then goes on to do something that attempts to put those ideas into practice.

I think that this definition is far too limiting.  It excludes people like Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Adams, for instance, who were definitely intellectuals.  It even excludes Mique’s architects.

I’d say that an intellectual is somebody whose work in with and through ideas, and who brings to that work a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the life of the mind in his civilization (art, music, literature, philosophy, history, et al).

So some scientists are definitely intellectuals–take, for instance, Steven Pinker–and some are not.  Some academics are intellectuals and some are not.  Some writers and artists are intellectuals and some are not.

But to claim that such people will “always” find positions “on the left” more congenial is to fly in the face of history.

Let’s start by pointing out that not only are “intellectual” and “university academic” just different ways of saying the same thing, they were until very recently assumed to be mutually exclusive.

As late as World War II in the United States,  intellectuals disdained college teachers and college teaching.  Most intellectuals worked on little highbrow magazines, work essays freelance for dozens of tiny journals, and basically starved themselves in places like Greenwich Village.

Every once in a while, such a person would write a book that would command a wider audience, and finally have a little money.  Most of the time, they just went without.  Philip Rahv and “the boys at Partisan Review,” Randolph Bourne–

One of the most illuminating things I ever read was a biography of Mary McCarthy (Seeing Mary Plain) which relates the story of her gall bladder operation.  She went into the hospital and came right home the same day.  Having no money–and medical insurance being largely unknown at the time–she couldn’t stay in the hospital for even a couple of days to recuperate.

As for holding mostly leftist positions, or finding them most congenial, American intellectuals weren’t “mostly on the left” until around the time of WWI, and that might be something of an illusion. 

Most of the intellectuals who were “on the left” in that period were immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe, or the children of those immigrants.  Native-born American intellectuals who trended left did so in ways that were significantly different in a number of respects from the left orthodoxy of people like Rahv.

The big surge in leftward identification on the part of American intellectuals comes between the two world wars, and if you think about it, that makes sense.  The Soviet Union was established in 1917.  It started funding left wing writers and artists all over Europe and the United States within a year or two.

If the old saying is true–you get more of what you pay for and less of what you tax–then the reason for a swell in the ranks of specifcially left-leaning intellectuals at this point is perfectly obvious.  There were more of them because the Soviet Union was willing to pay them.

Always before then, intellectuals were all over the map politically and philosophically, and in at least one period (the eighteenth century) in one place (the Anglophone sphere) even tended to be what we now call “on the right”–that is, in favor of limited government, free enterprise, and individual rights.

But money matters, and intellectuals have, until very recently, always been poor.  In th ose days, even college teaching made you poor.  Professors with doctorates made much less than middle management in business in those days–and they still do today, outside of a few very elite schools at the very top of the academic heap.

The result of this influx of (underground, and deliberately kept secret) money from the Soviet Union was a rise in left-leaning little magazines, and in left-leaning intellectual guns for hire.

It was also the beginning of a sort of quid pro quo situation–if you were an adolescent with an intellectual bent, if what mattered to you was the life of the mind, then virtually the only  opportunity you had to live such a life was by being able to sell to all those little magazines, the vast majority of which were on the left.

The march into university teaching came after WWII, faciliated by the fact that the GI Bill swelled enrollments and left colleges scrambling for people with any kind of credentials at all to put into teaching.  Most intellectuals of that era did not have PhDs, but they did have publications. 

There’s a difference between “intellectuals naturally tend to find the left more congenial than the right” and “young intellectuals are faced with a situation where only the left seems to care about what they do and be willing to pay for it.”

It’s the second situation, not the first, that we find ourselves in.

And we can prove it in another way–the United States has an active intellectual right because William F. Buckley started the first of a series of institutions that was willing to pay for it.

A kid in France who wanted to live the life of the mind was basically stuck with the Left–it controlled the publications and the universities both.

A kid in the US could join Young Americans for Freedom, get his articles published in Ntional Review, spend the summer taking courses in political philosophy at half a dozen think tanks.

By the time Buckley was done, both founding things himself and encouraging and faciliating other people founding them, there was a network of magazines, television programs, Internet web sites, organizations, think tanks (Hoover, Cato, Heritage), and even publishing houses where a conservative intellectual could work and support himself. 

You get what you pay for.

Buckley’s work paid off big time–we have here a drastically different climate from the one in Europe, and a drastically more diverse intellectual life. 

And, on top of that, havin such people on your side–people who work with ideas–vastly improves the chances that you will see those ideas make an impact on your society.

You get what you pay for.

And not necessarily through the government, either.

What you also get is less of what you denigrate and defame.  

Which is why I say that a constant drumbeat that says that the problem with Eric Foner is not that he’s wrong, but that he’s intellectual, is shooting yourself in the foot.

I’ve been thinking for a while about getting back to something I tried to express earlier, and got sort of blindsided for.  I never know when to qualify what, if you know what I mean.  I never know when something I say or something I write is going to result in a lot of running around hacking at side issues, so that I never do get the point across and end up putting out brush fires in largely unrelated buildings.

And, you know, ahem–I do understand that annoyance that comes with somebody saying “but you just don’t understand!”  On the other hand, sometimes you just don’t understand.  I’ve been thinking about it in the case of Barack Obama lately.  He’s gotten a lot of flack lately for saying that his big problem on the health care bill is that he hasn’t explained what he’s doing well enough. 

Well, people say, and some of them commenting on this blog, here he goes again–we’re just too stupid to get it.  It’s not that we disagree with the policy.

But if I were Barack Obama, and I knew I’d said X, and the polls said people thought I’d said Y, I’d opt for thinking I might have been misunderstood.

So here I go, although not on the subject of Barack Obama.  Thomas Sowell has a new book out, called Intellectuals and Society.  Like Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, it’s a long screed about why intellectuals are basically awful, immoral, dangerous people, written by somebody who is one.

Let me start out with this:  I don’t understand why people who, like Sowell, are intellectuals, always write about intellectuals as if all of them are left-wing.  Sowell, for those of you who don’t know, is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, a conservative think tank.  He’s also black, which gets him a lot of press sometimes.  If you want to know what he does, I’d suggest a book of essays called White Liberals and Black Rednecks, which includes a really interesting piece on the genesis an evolution of “ghetto” culture.

Sowell is not only an intellectual, he works in an institution full of other intellectuals who are all themselves not left wing.  In fact, most of them aren’t even liberal.  Sowell must know that it is possible to be both an intellectual and anywhere on the political spectrum at all.  He must know that his is not a lone non-leftist voice in the ranks of the people who do what he does.

Here’s the thing:  I can understand criticizing Eric Foner for being an addled, supercilious, tenured Marxist twit.  I can understand criticizing Howard Zinn–who died a few weeks ago–for lying about history and trashing all the good things about Western civilization. 

I don’t understand criticizing either of them because they’re “intellectuals.”  It does not seem to me to be their intellectualism that is the problem.

William F. Buckley was an intellectual.  Roger Kimball is one.  So is Gertrude Himmelfarb.  So was Richard John Neuhaus.  There are plenty of conservative, neoconservative, libertarian, and “classically liberal” (meaning economically conservative) intellectuals. 

What’s more, the constant attacks on people like Foner and company for being “intellectuals,” or for having first class educations, makes it sound as if the real grievance is not what these people say, but the fact of their being intelligent and educated at all.

And the problem with that is that hundreds of kids coming up in the next generation get the not entirely wrongheaded impression that conservatives and libertarians are antagonistic to them not because of anything they might do, but because of what they are.

And the problem with that is that no movement, no political system, no culture, no civilization can do without  people who do what intellectuals do.  Lenin might have called them useful idiots, but as idiotic as he thought they were, he did understand that they were useful.

The conservative (and sometimes libertarian) movements in the United States don’t seem to have caught on to the fact that intellectuals are useful, never mind that they might be fundamentally necessary, to the growth and success of any collection of ideas in a literate society.

And that’s kind of funny, really, because there would be no conservative movement in the United States today without an intellectual, William F. Buckley, jr, who pretty much resurrected the movement from the ashes of thirty years of near-suicidal cultural idiocy. 

It’s instructive, too, to look at what Buckley did in his campaign to found a viable conservative movement in the United States:  not only were the hard-right nutcases like the John Birch Society banished from the pages of National Review, but so were the anti-evolution Darwin-is-a-plot-to-destroy-religion fundamentalists.

Buckley was a crusader for intelligence, culture and high standards in literature and art as well as in politics.  We forget that, in the Sixties, it was the American right who defended Shakespeare and Bach against a Left that found all these things “elitist.” 

I have no idea what happened between then and now, but this particular tack, this endless wailing on people not for the content of their ideas but because they dare to be “intellectual” at all, this disdain and contempt for people because they prefer Handel to country music or Trollope to the latest Die Hard movie is counterproductive in the extreme.

Conservatives and libertarians need intellectuals just as much as liberals, socialists and Marxists do.  No society can exist for long without them, because they provide the narratives that frame the cultural experience for all the people in it.  I don’t understand why Buckley understood that and nobody else seems to have since. 

If people like Sowell–and Johnson and Kimball and Himmelfarb–want to criticize the Eric Foners of the world, they should criticize them for the incredible idiocy of their ideas, not for dealing in ideas at all.

If people like Sowell want to actually do something about the Eric Foners of the world, they should encourage younger people with conservative and libertarian ideas to embrace the intellectual life instead of abandoning it–or abandoning conservatism and libertarianism for liberalism and leftism because only liberalism and leftism will offer them a home.

Ack.  I want to go do something, I think, before I have to run out.  

But I would like to note–among the other things Anthony Trollope did, like write lots of novels that have lasted for over a hundred years, while he was working for the Royal Mail (which he did all his life, even after his writing was successful), he invented the street corner mailbox.

There’s a distinction for you

I know, I was off on some other subject the day before yesterday.  And part of me would like to rant and rave here about the Percy Jackson books, if only because I find them incoherent.  Of course, they sell like crazy, so it’s probably me.

But Critical Thinking keeps coming up, and I’m fed up with it.  So let me start there.

In the first place, there may once have been a definition for this that made some sense, but by now it’s come down to a sort of reflexive phrase without a lot of content that everybody can declare themselves in favor ot. 

What should children be taught in school?  Critical thinking!  Why do so many people disagree with me?  They lack critical thinking skills!

That second one is, really, what people do seem to mean when they deplore the “fact” that children or students or readers or whoever don’t know how to do “critical thinking.”

My present annoyance on the subject came from reading this month’s issue of Free Inquiry, which is beginning to drive me almost as nuts as those bulletins the American Family Association puts out.  In case you don’t know the American Family Association, it’s a folk-Protestant/largely Biblical literalist/social conservative organization down south somewhere that does a lot of fulminating about “secular humanism.”

Free Inquiry is the flagship publication of the Council for Secular Humanism, and it used to be one of my favorite magazines.  Back when Bill had first died and I was being driven crazy by the nearly endless outpouring of religiosity that landed on me because of it, FI, along with the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s monthly newspaper, was about the only thing that kept me sane.

Lately, though, all it seems to do is to print endless rehashes of the same old stuff.  This month’s issue had a mind-numbing obtuse argument about how there’s nothing particularly special about human beings, and science teaches us that.  I sat in the Barnes and Noble cafe drinking some caramel coffee thing my son bought for me and making notes on a napkin for an article about how science actually proves just how really special we all are.

But that was, you know, just an opinion piece, and an opinion piece saying the same thing a couple of dozen other opinion pieces have already said in FI over the years.

The kicker–where critical thinking is concerned–was a longish article by a man named James Haught called Fading Faith.  In it, Haught attempted to “prove” that the United States was becoming just as secular as Western Europe.

If “critical thinking” means anything, it ought to mean being able to see where people are making a mess of statistics, but the editors at FI–who are constantly publishing stuff declaring that secular people are “critical thinkers” while religious people are not (or else they wouldn’t be religious)–don’t seem to have caught the obvious problems with this particular thing.

There is, for instance, Haught’s constant use of absolute numbers when they suit his purposes (as in the record of the decline of mainstream Protestantism), and quick switches to relative stats when the numbers won’t work.

He tells us, for instance, that 96% of Americans called themself Christians in the Fifties, while only 86% do so now–but in the meantime, the population of the country has literally doubled in size, and immigration from non-Christian countries has gone way up.  The fact is that there are at least twice as many active Christians in the US today as there were in 1952. 

Then there are the old numbskull refrains:  the Church may say that abortion is wrong, but even most Catholics who go to church don’t agree!  So what?  Science may say evolution is true, but even most students in science classes probably don’t agree.  Science is not a democracy, and neither is the Catholic Church.

Ack.  There’s not really anything unusual in any of this.  And both sides do it, in spades.  I just wish we could get rid of the whole “critical thinking” business.  What we need is not people who know how to “think critically,” but people who are willing to question what they read even when they agree with it.

That would be a start.

It’s the morning after a big storm that went on late into the evening, which means that my walk and my driveway are not yet shoveled out.  This happens sometimes.  After a while, it just gets too dark to do anything sensible, and then it gets dangerous to handle a snowblower. 

The problem, of course, is that the temperatures tend to go down during the night, and that means what started out as wet, easily handled snow turns into ice.  As I write this, it’s about twenty-five after four in the morning, and there’s someplace I’m supposed to be at eight.

Well, before eight.  I’d do better to get there at seven thirty.  It will get light here around seven this morning, which is going to make it all a good trick.  I’m also obliged to show up for classes, no matter how impossible it seems to get out of here, unless the university decides to  postpone opening this morning, which I truly hope it will.

I complain about students a lot, and I have a lot to complain about, but the ones I don’t complain about tend to be almost aggressively over-responsible.  If they’re the kind who come to class and do their work, their the kind to risk their necks driving in dangerous situations to make it in to school.

And I have a damned hard time getting them to call the weather phone first.

This is the obverse of the things I talk about most of the time.  When kids who have been disadvantaged for a long time, or done something really awful and screwed up their lives before now big time, decide to get their acts together, they tend to go all the way to the other extreme. 

They’ll come in sick so that they don’t miss class, deliver papers over the Internet from their hospital beds, bring their suddenly-babysitterless babies with them to final exams, and not sleep for a week to get the research paper done.

And they’re battering rams.  They’ll take the course and fail it, take the course again and fail it again, take the course the third time and finally pass it. 

I don’t know if they learn how to live with failure or if they simply learn how to grit their teeth and survive it.

It does occur to me, though, that the failure issue is one we never address in programs like the one I teach in. 

An awful lot of the kids I teach have never known anything but failure.  Their schools were bad, not only in the sense of badly funded (not enough textbooks, bathrooms with clogged toilets unfixed for weeks on end), but in the sense of being staffed largely by teachers who just didn’t give a damn.

Many of them were passed along year after year without actually learning anything.  Some of them get to me unable to read in any sense, never mind in any meaningful sense. 

Obviously, dropping out and joining a gang, or having a baby at fifteen, is self-destructive behavior, but I think I only know that because I know what the possibilities are.  A lot of my kids don’t know, or they assume that they’re just not good enough to have possibilities. 

I used to think that the ugly phenomenon in some minority schools of kids who don’t study beating up on kids who do for “acting white” was caused by anger at being presented with the possibility that they might actually get somewhere if they worked at it.  A kid from their own neighborhood who succeeds and goes on to college proves to all the ones who don’t that it’s just their own fault that they didn’t.

I’ve been changing my mind on that lately.  I think a lot of the anger is anger at a universe in which they did not get whatever lucky gift their classmate did–I think they see it as a case of some people are born beautiful, and some people are born smart, and they were born neither.

I think it would be difficult to underestimate the crushing sense so many of these kids have, at least by the time they finish high school, that they are utterly worthless and unredeemable. 

Some of these kids, some very few, crash through all this by main force and end up first in my classrooms and then in other classrooms and finally with a degree, although not usually a good one.

It occurs to me, however, that it’s not possible to achieve anything really significant in this world without being able to swallow a lot of failure along the way.  It’s the old thing about Babe Ruth having not only the record for most home runs but the record for most strike outs. 

Getting somewhere means taking the risk of trying something you might fail, and with really hard things the chances are you’ll fail a lot before you succeed.

A lot of my kids have no tolerance for failure.  They’ve never done anything else but fail.  Unlike., say, me, they can’t look behind them and go–oh, yeah, I failed at that other thing and then I tried again and I succeed, I can get through this.

They see failure as an absolute because failure is, for them, an absolute.  They’ve never known anything else.  When they fail, they assume that’s the end of it–because that has always been the end of it.  They’ve got no reason to expect that if they keep on keeping on, as the man said, they’re going to see anything like a light at the end of the tunnel.

I have no idea what to do about this kind of thing.  I have no idea if there is anything that can be done about it.

I just know I’ve got to get in this morning because the three kids who will kill themselves getting there will kill themselves getting there, and I won’t quit work in the middle of the term because I don’t want to put those same kids in the position of losing time and money they can very ill afford.

If it was just up to me, though, I’d cancel everything and pretend like this day didn’t exist.

Because it’s going to be ridiculous trying to get out of my driveway. 

Off to David Hart Bentley and tea for an hour, and on to the Orthodox Churches tomorrow morning.