Hildegarde

It’s a teaching day, so I’m not really writing this.

But–please note, there were TWO PARTS to my fundamental option statement.

Every human being is infinitely valuable, AND THEREFORE no human being can be treated as a means and not as an end in himself.

That second part will eliminate most of the things JD and Robert are worried about.

It has been quite a week around here–mostly because of my own stupidity, but there it is.

The first thing that happened was that bruised and tore the hell out of my right index finger. 

This was entirely unnecessary.  There is, on the second floor of my house, a door whose doorknob mechanism went to pieces.  We therefore removed the doornob mechanism and put it into a plastic freezer bag so that we could take it out to a hardware store somewhere and buy a replacement.

In the meantime, there was a little metal hole where the knob was supposed to be.  It was fairly easy to open and close the door by putting your right index finger into the tip of the metal hole and pulling it gently.

What I did was put the entire finger up to the first joint and pulled it hard. 

My finger therefore caught in the hole as the door swung violently back and forth, and by the time I got it out, it was torn, bleeding and very bruised.

This was not fun.

The next thing that happened was not so violent.

The only jewelry I wear is a chain around my neck that contains, among other things, a star charm and a heart charm.

Bill and Matt picked out the star for me as a Christmas present when Matt was not quite three.

Bill and Greg picked out the heart for me the Christmas before the October Bill died.

One day a few days ago I was fiddling with it and suddenly realized the heart was gone.

I then went tearing all over hell and gone, trying to find the thing.  It was late in the afternoon, and I had been in to teach, and I knew it could have dropped off anywhere.

So I took off the chain and the star and put them in a safe place.

And then, when I went up to bed, I was walking into my room when I suddenly saw a glint, and there it was, sitting right on top of the quilt.

And that was good, of course, but it left me wondering just how far out of it I was when I woke up in the morning and before I had any caffeine.

Because it was right there, right in the middle of everything.

It’s not a large charm, but it’s gold and very shiny.  And the lamp lit it up in the dark like you wouldn’t believe.

And I had apparently managed to make my bed, step back to look it over as always, and just not notice it.

After that, things sort of went from bad to worse, including tax stuff and a royal case of food poisoning.

And that ended me up here, with the first decent night’s sleep I’ve had in days.

Of course, I have had the first decent night’s sleep in days, so I can actually talk about stuff.

Let me get to Michael’s comment that if I’m watching people justify, say, genocide by using critical thinking, then I must be observing people doing critical thinking wrong.

Is that true?  Can  people use critical thinking to justify genocide only do it if they are “doing critical thinking wrong”?

No.

Critical thinking does require you to test your assumptions and presumptions but it can only do that by asking you to test them against some standard or another.

It can also ask you to test the standard, but there’s where you hit a brick wall.

Critical thinking can legitimate or delegitimate any standard. 

I can test and accept “the greatest good for the greatest number” as a standard by which to measure the rightness or wrongness of moral action, but I can test and reject it as well.

And that is true for any standard anybody might name. 

In the end, critical thinking is a hammer.  I can use it to build a dog house.  I can also use it to bash somebody’s skull in.

Which of these I choose to do will be justified–or not–by critical thinking depending on my underlying moral and existential commitments, and those have to be chosen.

I can use critical thinking to show that genocide will hurt many people, ruin the local economy, restrict and even regress culture, and turn my country into a police state–

But none of those outcomes proves that genocide is something I shouldn’t do, EXCEPT in a case where I have ALREADY decided that those outcomes are so greatly evil that they could not under any circumstances be the lesser evil to another outcome, or not evil at all.

And I can show you a whole raft of people “doing” critical thinking right, who have justified things I would consider equally as awful, if not worse.

There’s Peter Singer’s thing about “post birth abortion,” which is argued on impeccable utilitarian grounds, and which can only be opposed by rejecting the argument’s underlying assumption:  that human beings are things to be disposed of for the use and benefit of other people, if those other people are both significantly numerous and believe that such disposing will (as Singer puts it) significantly improve their quality of life.

And before you tell me that no correctly executed process of critical thinking could get you there, I’d like to point out that somebody once argued to me, on an Internet forum, in favor of China’s one child policy, including its forced abortions, because the evils of overpopulation would hurt many more people and be far worse.

The Catholics have, in this case, a jump on the terminology–they often do.

They call it a “fundamental option.” 

What they mean by that is your first and original moral commitment, the  rock on which all the rest of your thinking will stand. 

All of us have to have one.  None of us can do without it.

And critical thinking will not get us there.

My particular fundamental option is that every single human being in the world–old or young, sick or well, of any race, of any creed, of any level of ability and even of any course of behavior–is infinitely valuable in and of him or herself.

And from that I can use critical thinking to get me to the position that human beings always be treated as ends in themselves and never as the means to the ends of others.

But critical thinking cannot tell me that my fundamental option is the one I SHOULD adopt.

It can only tell me what the consequences of my taking that option would be.

So, my regime is going along fine–I really can edit to music, and this morning I had Paganini’s Violin Concerto for Orchestra Number 1 and Number 2. 

They’re together on a single CD, and I haven’t listened to it very often. But it’s very nice indeed.

In the meantime, I’ ve been looking over something else.  JD sent me an e-mail about it a few days ago, and one of my sisters in law has been posting about it on FB, but I’d actually been watching the issue for a while.

To explain:  Congress has now mandated a whole new slew of rules for cafeterias in public schools, including how many calories (850, I think) can be included in a school lunch, what proportion of that lunch must be vegetables and other “healthy” foods (like whole wheat bread over white).

And agency regulations now forbid schools from selling the usual cookies and cupcakes at school bake sales.

Now, granted, these rules only apply to schools that get federal money for their cafeteria programs.  But these days, almost all schools get federal money for their cafeteria programs. 

So, at the start of the school year, almost every public school in the country was forced to reconfigure its cafeteria offerings to fit the new regulations.

Almost anybody with half a brain in his head–and not brainwashed by Scientific Management–could figure out what happened next, but let’s go over it anyway.

The first of the trouble came from the midwestern farm states.  850 calories may seem like a not–it’s probably more than I eat for lunch–but in the farm states there are farms.  And the rise of agribusiness notwithstanding, there are family farms, on which the children of the house work.

What happens in these families is that the kids get up at four in the morning, run around doing manual-labor-intensive chores like feeding animals and milking cows, for two or three hours before they leave for school. 

Then they go to school and do a full day’s academic work.  Then a  lot of them stay late for athletic practices.

And half these kids are adolescent males, so their bodies are already in metabolic overload.

850 calories isn’t going to cut it.  A male adolescent doing all this physical work can easily burn up 5000 calories or more a day. 

At the beginning of the year, some of the guys tried it.  A couple of them passed out at practice.  The bureaucracy still refused to budge. So the kids stopped buying lunch at school, significantly decreasing the income the school can count on from the cafeteria and endangering free lunch programs for poor kids because the money is drying up.

The next trouble–and the trouble these people should have anticipated–occurred in inner city schools with large populations of poor kids on free lunch programs.

For these kids, the problem wasn’t the number of calories, but the taste of the food, which was generally agreed to be awful. 

Awful or not, the kids are not allowed to refuse the “healthy choices.”  So they take the whole wheat roll and the vegetables, and then they just throw them out.

And most of these kids cannot bring food from home as a substitute.  That’s why they’re in the free lunch/subsidized lunch program. 

So when these kids go back to class after lunch, they’re hungry.  They’re sometimes very, very hungry.

The theory is that eventually, they’ll get so hungry they’ll eat the stuff anyway–but it’s been almost two months now, and that isn’t happening yet.

In more affluent areas, the kids are voting with their feet–bringing their lunches from home–and launching Facebook and Twitter campaigns to boycott the school cafeterias until they return to providing decent food.

The whole campaign smacks of Scientific Management at its most arrogant.  There is the complaint by “experts,” for instance, that the problem with McDonald’s and other fast foot, and also most “unhealthy choices,” is that they’re “highly palatable.”

Do you know what that means.

It means they taste good. 

Scientific Management must always translate plain English into something more “expert” sounding, because if it doesn’t, you’ll know what it means.

But the entire “obesity epidemic” is a Scientific Management project.

Yes, people are getting fatter–but people all over the world are getting fatter, and so, oddly enough, are lots of the animals. 

Nobody knows why, no matter what they say or how authoritative they sound when they say it. 

Nor are we really sure that this is a substantive problem.  We have so ingrained in ourselves the idea that obesity is an “epidemic” that is causing numerous health problems that will cost our medical system gazillions of dollars that we don’t stop to question any of the assertions.

A couple of months ago, nearly every news outlet in the US reported on a report by, I think, the OMB that said that obesity would cost us lots of money in the future.

The problem with that?

That wasn’t what the report said.  In fact, it said the opposite–that obesity would not have much of an impact at all on health care costs going forward.

There were a few corrections stuck on back pages and in minor media, but I’ve never seen a major media correction and newscasters and journalists continue to sight this study as if they still believed the misreporting was true.

They probably do.  One of the main symptoms of the Scientific Management culture is that its acolytes must believe any dogma it proposes with the tenacity of religious fanatics.

After all, they are religious fanatics.

Scientific Management just gives them the opportunity to proclaim religious dogma at the same time they congratulate themselves on how rational they are, and how they accept science instead of falling for all that religious mumbo jumbo the Sheeple indulge in.

In the end, the “obesity epidemic” is two things.

First, it is an occasion when the Scientific Management people can extend the reach of coercive bureaucracy into an extremely intimate and individual part of our lives–after all, it’s going to cost us all this money! we’re all going to die!

Right to privacy?  Here’s a fundamental principle of the right to privacy–the government shouldn’t even be able to ASK what I or my children weigh, never mind trying to regulate what we eat.

But the other thing this is is the foundation of the entire Scientific Management movement.

It is the drive to impose “educated upper middle class” everything on the rest of  the country, whether they like it or not.

It is an issue of class, not of science, and not of medicine. 

And it makes people really angry, as it should.

Let’s try this again.

When people hear Democrats call for more regulation, they don’t think of the banks.

They think of this.

When people vote in favor of candidates who want to reduce regulation, they don’t think of the banks.

They think of this.

So maybe they’re not clinging to God and guns, or voting against their best interests when they vote Republican.

Maybe they’re voting against this.

Maybe, if you understood this, you could find a way to get them to vote for you.

I have to correct papers.

I’m in a very bad mood.

First, I’d like to apologize that the comments function was turned off for most of yesterday on yesterday’s post.  If that happens again and you want to comment, e mail me and I’ll fix it.  It’s very easy to fix.

And if I ever don’t want to take comments, I’ll say so in my post.

That said, I had one of those epiphanies I get sometimes when I’m not sleeping a lot. 

It hit me a couple of hours after I’d published the post, and before Robert’s comments about moral training, but the two things are connected.

So, to start–no, I don’t want colleges and universities to provide “moral training,” at least not directly.

I want them to provide intellectual training in the context of an immersion in the Western tradition. 

That does not mean that there should be nothing about other traditions in the curriculum.  One constituent part of the Western tradition is a curiosity about and respect for other tradtions.

But the Western tradition is a particular moral universe.   An immersion in that universe is in itself a kind of moral training. 

But–and this is what struck me–the problem with “scientific management” (which seems to be the actual term for “the bureaucratization of everything”) and with “critical thinking” (which is its most common stated goal in education) is that both things are by their own definitions amoral.

“Scientific management” can be used to manage anything, and the closest it gets to asking whether it should be managing something is its call to consult “the culture” in affirming “values” of the institution or population it is managing.

But “values” can be anything.  Gertrude Himmelfarb was right when she pointed out that “values” and “morals” are not the same thing.

Values are relative.  They can vary from place to place.  Morals are objective.  To say something is “moral” or “immoral” is to say that there is, somewhere, an objective measure of conduct that is true at all times and for all people.

What that means is that “scientific management” will work in the same way when applied to running the Department of Health and Human Services, or the Bank of America, or the University of Michigan, or Auschwitz.

And nothing in “scientific management” can tell us that we shouldn’t be running Auschwitz.

“Critical thinking” has the same problem.

“Critical thinking” is a process–it has no content of its own. 

In spite of the tendency for many people to think that “critical thinking” will automatically drive people to agree with them–after all, what they believe is true, and other points of view are false–the process always follows the logic of the stated and unstated assumptions without which it could not operate at all.

That is why “critical thinking” can be used to support legal abortion and oppose it, to support the death penalty and oppose it–and to support “post birth abortion” as well as to oppose it.

The results of “critical thinking” will differ vastly depending on things like the way the thinker defines the word “human” and the hierarchy of priorities that thinker brings to the discussion.

These are questions that ought to be addressed first, but nothing in “critical thinking” can answer them. 

We can  “think critically” about exterminating the Jews just as easily as we can “think critically” about providing every child in America enough food to never go hungry.

And “critical thinking” will not help us to know that one of those goals is a good thing and the other is unacceptable everywhere and always.

“Critical thinking” is, I think, the perfect goal for a society run increasingly on the lines of “scientific management,” a bureaucratized world where democracy and the claims of a common humanity have been jetisoned for rule by experts whose only claim to expertise is that they know how to manipulate a process that is all mechanics and no conviction.

I don’t mean to say here that I don’t want my students to be able to think logically and coherently and to approach everything they read and hear with a healthy skepticism.

I do.

But those are tools to be applied to content in the context of a moral universe, and the moral universe in which those students live is of more importance, in the long run, than the tools.

If the kid lacks the tool, we can teach it to him.  If he lacks the moral universe, he’s a danger to himself and others.

So, yes.  I don’t want universities to teach morality.  I want universities to teach the Western tradition, which is a moral universe of its own.

And yes, I do know that that tradition has offshoots that go in various directions.

But almost all the offshoots we don’t like–Hitler, Stalin, Peter Singer–require that we first reject parts of that tradition.

It would also help if we studied those rejections, and why they exist and what they mean.

But first–the literature, the art, the music, the history, the hard sciences and the scientific method.

Aside from providing an implicit critique of the offshoots, they will provide a more than implicit critique of “scientific management.”

In a way, this week-end is just like every other week-end for me.  I don’t teach on Mondays or Tuesdays, so I always have a four day week end.  I write every single day of the week, so I always have no week-end at all.

Even so, it always feels sort of wrong to me when these Mondays come up on which there is no mail, no UPS delivery, and no access to an honest to God person at the bank.

So I’m feeling a little floaty.

But in the downtime I’ve also been reading a book.  It’s called Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University, by Gaye Tuchman.   Cathy F recommended it to me.  And it purports to be the study of a public university  attempting to make it into the top tier of university rankings both inUS News and World Report and on other measures.

Let me start by saying that, if you decide to read this book, you’re going to find some things that are absolutely annoying.

The chief among these things is the constant, reflexive resort to social science jargon that sometimes has to be consciously unravelled to figure out what the writer is getting at.

It is not, however, overwhelming, and the book is readable if a bit–stiff might be the word for it.

The other is a tic created by the writer’s commitment to preserve the annonymity of Wannabe U.   Every once in a while this results in her presenting an incident with all the proper names left out, in a situation in which it would not be difficult for the common reader to know who those proper names belong to.

One of these reports concerned the bad publicity that resulted from the attacks of liberal students on a visiting conservative speaker.  Tuchman is careful to say–more than once–that these students had been “provoked” by something the speaker said, and that no word of that provocation had appeared in the news reports of the incident.

Of course, no direct report of that provocation appears in the book, either.  If it did, you could probably look it up on the Internet. 

The problem is that without a report of what the speaker said to provoke the students, and without a report on exactly what the students did, there is no way to judge whether the bad publicity was deserved or not. 

But what’s even worse is that I can almost guarantee that I know who the speaker was, and probably what she said, and probably the general range of things the students did in response–because Ann Coulter is making a career out of this kind of thing.

The entire twisted attempt at anonymity seemed almost precious.

But the big problem with this book is something else, and I’ll get to it.

First, let me give you the good news.

This thing does a beautiful job of describing the operation,  in one place, of what I sometimes call here “the bureaucratization of everything” or the “professionalization of everything.”

The huge administrative staffs.  The constant attempts to beat everything into conformity with a centralized idea.  The falling real skills and knowledge of students accompanied by lots of charts, graphs and procedures showing that the university is actually getting better “student outcomes.”

Unfortunately, Tuchman is so convinced–and was convinced before she started her study–that this is the result of the “corporatization” of the university that she can’t see what’s actually happening around her.

For one thing, it makes her unaware that the trends she is seeing in Wannabe U occur even in community colleges and liberal arts  colleges where faculty members don’t do research that opens up “revenue streams” from things like patents and corporate “public-private partnerships.

For another, she is constantly ascribing to “business” jargon and processes that did not originate with business, but were adopted by business in response to…other things. 

I’ll get to the other things in a minute.

But to give you an example:  “best practices” is not a concept that originated in corporations.  It originated in the social sciences and, more specifically, in the practical arm of the social sciences, like counseling and social work.

And this is, quite frankly, too bad.  She has the material here to do a very good overview study of the Bureaucratization of Everything, and instead she spends too much of her time tripping over her own research.

And she knows it, too.  Some people, she tells us, think that the real cause of all this bureaucratization lies in other things and not business.  Then she draws back and pretends she hasn’t set it.

Then she gets to Chapter 6, and there’s no way to get completely out from under the obvious.

Chapter 6 is entitled “Teaching, Learning and Rating,” and it’s where we find out that almost all the bureaucratization is the result of Wannabe U’s attempts to comply with a cascade of regulations and reporting requirements from federal (and sometimes state) agencies.

And no.  In case you’re wondering,  Republican administrations are not “deregulating” higher education any more than Democratic administrations are.

This chapter was an absolute gold  mine of information for me personally, because it explained the genesis and evolution of some things that had me beating my head against the wall while teaching in an institution that is not a research university and where nobody is even thinking about increasing their ratings in US News and World Report or forming partnerships of any kind with corporations.

Let’s take my particular bete noir–“student outcomes assessment.”

There are two things wrong with “student outcomes assessments” as they exist on college campuses at the present moment.

The first I’ll pass over–and that is that I don’t know how anybody could measure the “outcomes” I think are most important for a student.  How do I measure if my students have a  more finely honed moral sense and a deeper commitment to living morally and honorably in the world?  How do I measure their openness to new ideas, or their commitment to the (Western) culture that gave them birth?

The best I could do about these things is to measure whether the students know a particular set of facts, or if they could produce a coherent short essay. 

And that matters because, in a regime in which we demand measurement of everything, we tend to devalue or dismiss what cannot be measured. 

So the introduction of what Tuchman calls “an audit and accountability regime” will, in the long run, destroy the core purpose of the university.

But here’s the more immediate problem.

Too many of the bureaucratized systems for auditing faculty and student behavior, the giving of grants and the promotion of faculty, and all the rest of it–do not do what they are claiming to do.

In fact, they so consistently do not do what they are claiming to do, I am beginning to get the impression that not doing is the point. 

The government requires not that you do X, but that you be seen to be doing X. 

Therefore, instead of doing anything to solve whatever the problem is, you “put in place” “procedures” that talk a lot about how they’re redressing the problem, and give a good appearance of activity,  but don’t get anything done.

The reason for this is simple.  If you actually fix the problem but do it in a way that does not demonstrate your process to fix the problem, you’re in trouble, because you will be assumed to not have fixed the problem.

If you don’t fix the problem but present all your processes, mission statements, vision states and formalized “outcomes,” you’re golden.  The feds will send you more money, and they won’t fine you millions of dollars for being “not in compliance” with federal regulations.

It works the same way on the state level.

So.  Student outcomes assessments.

First, it’s important to know that the whole fad for SOA originated not with business, or corporations.  It originated in Margaret Spelling’s Department of Education, which insisted on a version of No Child Left Behind for colleges and universities. 

Suddenly, every college and university was required–on pain of losing federal money, both direct and  indirect through student loans and Pell Grants–to produce a list of “outcomes” students were expected to take away from each course.

I don’t know how many of you have ever seen one of these lists, but  they range between not bad to highly jargon-ridden, and “rationalized” to the point of absurdity. 

Here’s a good one, from a course at a place I don’t teach anymore:

Measurable Outcomes:

In order to complete the course with a grade of “C” or better you must:

1) compose a minimum of 6,000 words (24 pages) of typed, revised, and edited prose.

2) produce drafts evidencing a variety of prewriting techniques

3) develop a main idea expressed in a thesis statement

4) support a main idea with specific details

5) use a variety of rhetorical patterns

6) organize ideas with attention to transitions

7) support thesis with logical thinking and sources

8) improve drafts with substantial editing and revision

9) incorporate appropriate diction, sentence variety, grammar and mechanics

10) select, synthesize, and accurately document sources

11) show evidence of library and electronic research techniques

I’m putting up a good one because there is nothing unreasonable about that set of requirements, and there is no reason we couldn’t actually measure them.

And I picked a composition course, because what we expect students to learn from such a course is, in fact, measurable. 

So what am I complaining about?

I’m complaining about the fact that even when we have a course whose content and purpose are actually measurable, we don’t measure it.

Instead, we introduce all kinds of faux-accountability procedures whose primary purpose is to show accrediting and state/federal auditing agencies that We Are Doing What They Ask. 

This does not require actually doing it.

So, for composition, we often have “exit exams” meant to assess whether students have met measurable outcomes, but the exams are designed in a way–holistic grading, for instance–that they cannot determine any such thing. 

And it doesn’t matter.

None of the bureaucracies involved–and that includes the ones within the universities themselves–care if students are actually  learning anything.

They only care that all the procedures have been followed so that the evidence of that can be presented if there’s ever any trouble.

And this sort of thing holds for all sorts of other “outcomes” demanded by agencies–the federal government demands that colleges and universities receiving federal money “do something” both about “diversity” and about the abysmal retention rates of affirmative action admits.

The universities respond by setting up offices of affirmative action and offices of “student success,” which do lots of publicly active things–a course in the first  year experience! tutoring services! outreach and recruitment in schools with large numbers of “underrepresented minorities”–that don’t do much of anything except show the agencies that the university is “in compliance.”

And, as always, bureaucracies beget bureaucracies and bureaucracies get bigger.

At one point, the administration of Wannabe U was forced to hire thirty people–thirty people–to make sure it was “in compliance’ with federal reporting regulations about federal research grants.

What gets  most frustrating to me at the end of the day is that there really are ways to measure some of the outcomes we want to measure.

But actally getting anybody to do that would require one of two things:

1) colleges and universities giving up all that federal money

or

2) an end to privileging schools, colleges and universities by assuming that they’re doing what the say they’re doing, and putting in place outside assessment institutions that allowed everybody and anybody to test, whether they’d been “to school” or not.

In the event of 2, you’d be certified as a “college graduate” if you passed the tests, whether an actual university allowed you to walk in May or not.

Ack.

I’m tangling up here.

I always get to the end of these things thinking I’m making no sense.

So, I’m sitting here, having done my work for the day to the sound of Handel’s Water Music, and I’m looking at news sites.  I’m always looking at news sites.  I’m a complete news junkie.  It’s why my periodic declamations about giving up cable never go on for very long.

Today is what is known as a “slow news day,” meaning there’s not much of any news to speak of. 

Or at least there doesn’t seem to be.  I am increasingly suspicious of slow news days in the US,  because I keep catching real news I haven’t heard about on CNN.  For instance–a while ago, there were riots, vandalism and looting against Japanese companies operating in China, and against their employees, and against Japanese goods.

If the events  had occurred in someplace like France, they would be meaningless.  But you know and I know that nothing of that kind would go on for weeks in China if it didn’t have implicit government backing.

And that says something, to me, about just how secure China’s rulers are in their ability to hold the country.

And if China’s rulers are not secure in their ability to hold the country, that has some interesting long term implications.

 But the news here today is full of the upcoming debate, and nearly hysterical in tone.  Obama could ruin his chance of re-election in this one debate alone!   Will Mitt Romney save his train wreck of a campaign?

The hysteria is in inverse proportion to the substantive interest of the debates in question.

In reality, nothing actually goes on in American Presidential debates, and less than nothing is going to go on in this one.

In the first place, as always, there will not be debates, but mutually assured advertising sessions, where the candidates will say the same things they have been saying for months, if not years, now.  And no one will call them on it.

But there’s something else this year, and that is the fact that not only will the debates not determine the outcome of the election, the outcome of the election was determined so long ago that the whole thing has come to take on a feeling of deja vu.  Didn’t we already do this?  Wasn’t this already over?

The simple fact of the matter is this:  the Republicans lost this election when they nominated Mitt Romney. 

The left was wrong.  The Tea Party and the Evangelical right were never being hoodwinked by the capitalists to voting against their own (financial) interests. 

They were just making compromises until they could put themselves in a position to get what they actually wanted, and after Romney, they will get it. 

Mitt Romney is the last gasp of the old Establishment Right.  There were never that many of them to begin with, and after Romney they will cease to matter except in the sense that they’ll still have enough money to insure that the regulatory state saves them from real competition.

For what it’s worth,  Rick Santorum comes a lot closer to what the Tea Party wants than Romney does, but he couldn’t win this election either.  He may very well win another election down the line somewhere–I think it’s going to matter that he is, almost uniquely in the last 50 years, a politician willing to lose elections rather than compromise his principles–but for this election he was just too new and too scary.

I wrote a post a little while ago saying that this felt to me like a fake election, something that wasn’t really happening.

I’ll stick with that.  This isn’t really an election.  It is virtually contentless, in spite of what should be real substantive issues to be debated and decided.

All this is is a bookmark between Now and Then. 

The media is hysterical because it’s desperately trying to get people to watch the debates they’ve spent so much money producing.

The rest of us are hysterical because none of us, on any of the three available sides, is confident that the Then will reflect what we believe.

I’d better go do some serious work.

Well, it got to be one of those nights when I was actually trying to join in the comment thread from my phone.

This morning it was a Schubert string quintet and Handel’s harpsichord pieces.  The harpsichord will always be my favorite instrument, but I really needed that quintent.

So, is Rome burning?

Yeah, I think so, on a number of levels, although  not necessarily the levels Mique is most interested in.

In the first place, as a side issue,  let me point out that it’s a good thing Linda McMahon didn’t take Robert’s advice.  This kind of thing–Murphy voted to give money to Big Pharma!–is exactly the kind of thing that’s got Murphy in so much trouble. 

It takes thirty seconds to figure out that all that means is that Murphy voted for Obamacare.  Most people in Connecticut are in favor of Obamacare, and they understand the compromises. 

They’re not in love, but they’re willing to take what they can get now and hope for better later. 

To run an ad like that would make the McMahon campaign look like it was deliberately attempting to trick voters it considered too stupid to notice–exactly the backlash now happening against the Murphy campaign for the ad about how McMahon is in favor of allowing “my employer to deny me coverage for contraception.”

When it turned out that that just meant she was in favor of a religious exemption from the contraception mandate–well, Connecitcut is not just full of liberals.  It’s full of Catholics.

That said, Obamacare IS an issue related to–deeply related to–the economy.

Not only is it going to cost a lot of money–a lot more than anybody has been willing to admit so far–but it will fundamentally change the economics of health care in the US in a way that will have an impact not just on health care costs, but  on the way business (small and large) are run, and even on the availability of full time vs part time work.

That said, there are certainly larger problems. 

I would say that the worst of these is the metastasizing growth of the bureaucracies, both in the government and out.

It should matter if the bureaucracy in question is in the government or out of it, but it doesn’t, because the people who staff these bureaucracies have idential training, identical value sets and identical goals.

It doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with a government hospital, a nonprofit private hospital, or a for profit one.  It doesn’t matter if you’re attending the state university or a tony private liberal arts school or a Jesuit college.

In the US today, there is an administrative monoculture–and that administrative monoculture has an internal logic that is absolutely irresistable on any level but all out war.

The most important thing to know about bureaucracies–public or private, and of any kind–is that they exist to aggrandize and perpetuate themselves. 

They need and want to get larger and more influential (if not powerful) at every minute of every day, even if the only way they can get that is to act against what is supposed to be their mission.  And they need to survive in perpetuity even if that means directly acting against that mission.

They will blather on about their core mission until your eyeballs fall out, but at the end of the day they will always act to defend themselves and their institutions ahead of all else.

The Penn State-Sandusky scandal makes perfect sense to me.  Everybody involved in it was obeying the bureaucratic imperative:  protect the institution.

You’d be amazed at  how often that kind of thingdoesn’tend in any scandal anywhere.  And by “that kind of thing,” I DONT mean child abuse.

I mean blatant and concerted cover-ups of institutional wrongdoing.

Consider the present state of higher education.

Don’t say this is trivial and we should be concentrating on the deficit, or whatever.

Everything is connected, and this particular bubble will most definitely explode in our faces in the next decade.

It also has a lot in common with all the other bubbles.

First, it begins with the passionately held assumption of something that is demonstrably not true.

This is the idea that education can solve all our problems–unemployment, crime, the disparities in income between races and sexes and ethnic groups, you name it.

This in turn is founded on the untrue assumption that the failure of our children to learn must be the fault of either teachers (the right) or funding (the left), because if it’s something else (personal choices to study or not, inate differences in intellectual ability, even parental choices about how to raise children or conduct their own lives) then education cannot solve all our problems, and where will we be?

When the second of these two assumptions hits the wall of reality, the bureaucratic instinct is not to ditch the assumptions and try something else.  That would not preserve the institutions.

In the US, what happened was this:  there came to be a widespread consensus among professional educators that the standards that defined high school graduation were “elitist.”  Not all students could meet them–don’t ask why; it has to do with poverty and oppression somehow or the other, but the less said the better.

To insist that all students meet such standards was racist and oppressive.  It made students feel like failures, and made them more likely to drop out of school early, and use drugs and alcohol, and get pregnant out of wedlock at  younger and younger ages.

To fix this problem, we reconfigured the standards to make it possible for more people to “graduate from  high school.” 

In the state of Connecticut, state math standards were changed to concentrate on “practical” mathematics instead of the theoretical kind that led to the kinds of courses usually required for university study.

Rich school districts with parents who understood what was going on often got out from under this kind of thing and managed to insure that their children actually got a high school education in high school. 

But they were vastly in the minority.

The result was that many more students “graduated from high school,” but  more and more of those students did not actually have a high school education.

The skills they needed to actually do work in the world had not changed, however, except that in some areas they had grown more rigorous.

The proclaimed solution was to push more and more students into colleges and universities, which started out providing remedial classes and then–when the number of students in those classes  proved to be an embarrassment–lowered their standards.

The same spiral that had occurred in the high schools then set in at all but the most selective universities. 

The most selective universities had huge apply-to-admit ratios and could protect themselves from lowered high school standards by taking only a tiny number of the students who wanted to attend their schools, and only from that minority that had actually met college readiness standards.

As for everybody else, they found themselves in a position where their high school diplomas were increasingly worthless, and where they needed a college degree to indicate they had the same skills their older brothers and sisters had acquired in 12th grade.

Actually, by now, the situation is considerably worse than that. 

These days, fourth tier schools do no more than insure that their students “graduate from college” with skill levels that used to be the standard for sixth grade.

And some fourth tier for-profit schools, who take in students nobody else in the system will touch, do more than that.

But now comes the really nasty part.

Elementary and high school education in the US is “free” in the sense of not requiring anything out of pocket from students or parents.

Higher education is not free.  Even the cheapest parts of the state system–usually the community colleges–can cost several thousand dollars a year, and that’s not counting books and other supplies. Any tier above that will cost a lot more.

A lot more.

This means that any student today who wants to be educated to the same level as the middle class parents in his community will  have to spring for a lot of cash and a lot more time in “college.”

If this student has a first class mind and a lot of determination, he might qualify for one of the top tier schools, which will cover his expenses through grants if he’s from a family that’s poor enough.  (Harvard tuition for students with parents making under $60,000 a year is $0.)

But even this doesn’t solve the problem, because top tier colleges and universities usually require a student to be in residence, which means there are (hefty) room and board fees.

And money for room and board fees was first declared taxable income (for the student) under Reagan, and then forbidden on college loans (for Obama).

And the colleges get around this by steering students to loans outside the official student loan system, which are monumentally more expensive (an official student loan is about 1 to 3% interest, one of these private loans is closer to 10%).

But yes, impossible as it may be to believe, it gets worse than this.

The Federal student loan system and Pell Grants are themselves pushing up the cost of higher education.

That’s because, if colleges were charging $4500 a year before the loans and grants, they simply raised their prices to $4500 a year above the limit of the loans and grants when those became available.

Why not?  They already knew you were willing and (somehow) able to pay that $4500. 

Over time, of course, the institutions and the government started playing a game of chicken that the institutions were bound to win.  Tuition at private universities now routinely runs between $45,000 and $60,000 a year. Tuition at public universities routinely runs over $20,000.

Which means that there are kids out there running up debts as high as $200,000 for a fourth tier college education that gives them no better skill set than they would have gotten in 6th grade in 1954.

And that debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy.  They’re stuck with it forever. 

At this point, we hear a lot that the solution to this problem is for the states to put more money into their state university systems–but it won’t work, because the universities will not use that money to lower tuition, room and board for students.

They’ll use it for what they’ve been using it for all along–more departments, staffed with more bureaucrats, addressing more “problems.” 

The Office of Affirmative Action.  The Office of Diversity and Inclusion. The LGBT Resource Center.  The Office of Women’s Issues. The Office of Student Success and Retention.  The Office of Disability Issues.

  And on and on and on and on and on.

At the place where I teach, each of these departments has a staff of fifteen or more.  None of them has anything to do with teaching students.

In fact, actually teaching students anything is the lowest priority on the list for any American  university you can think of, including Harvard.

It’s what the institutions spend the least money on, and the first thing they cut if they don’t get all the cash they ask for.

There isn’t a university out there that doesn’t prefer to cut teaching and other student services before administration.  Faced with a budget shortfall, they’ll cut foreign language instruction and expand the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.  They’ll cut sections of required core courses and add another secretary to the nine already working in the Office of Student Achievement and Retention.

Hey, cutting those core courses is even an overall win.  Since students cannot graduate without them, if there are fewer sections then more students will be forced into a fifth or sixth year in order to get into one.

This system is not only insane, and unjust, it is not sustainable. 

The “necessity” of college is real enough, but it is a politically engineered reality. 

Reset the skills level necessary to graduate from high school to where it was in 1954, and the “necessity” of college will disappear. 

But the kicker is going to come in just about a decade, when all those kids with college loan debts requiring payments of $500 to $2000 a month suddenly find that they’ve hit the financial wall. 

A lot of them will be in default, but more of them will just be stalled–can’t buy a house, can’t buy a car, can’t afford the latest iPhone or television or computer gadget, can’t even rent an apartment.

The refusal to allow college loans to be discharged in bankruptcy won’t last–not because this is a generation of spoiled brats (I think they’re more sinned against than sinning), but because to allow it to last would be to blow up the rest of the economy and blow it up permanently. 

What happens then is unclear.

The institutions will pick their own survival over that of the country, that IS clear. 

But what everybody else does depends on a lot of variables, not the least of which is the fact that Eric Holder was right–we cannot, at the moment, have an honest discussion about race in this country.

Now take this schemata, and apply it to everything else the US does–welfare, policing, defense, agriculture…

Then consider the fact that we have two men running for president, one of whom wants to preserve and expand this system because he (delusionally) thinks it’s “fair,” and the other of which wants to preserve and expand this system because he thinks it will keep the have-nots quieter if they get stuff.

I assume I have now permanently ruined  your day.

I am embarked, at the moment, on a long series of revisions for a book, longer than the ones I’m usually asked to do.  We won’t go into that.

But since I’m not usually asked for anything this extensive, I hadn’t (until today) checked out the possibility of listening to music while I worked.

I know I can’t listen to music, even classical instrumental music, when I write for real.  Revising on this level seems to be to be halfway between writing and something else. 

Well, this morning I tried it, with Mozart’s Posthorn Serenade–okay, I have no idea if I’m spelling that correctly–and it turns out that all is well.  I can in fact revise with music.

So I’m a fairly happy camper at the moment.

Except, you know, for my usual neuroses and paranoia.

I am also finding myself in a rather odd position in terms of the coming election.

Let’s forget Romney and Obama for the moment.  I never took Romney seriously as a candidate.  I never thought he could win the election, no matter what he did.  He’s the ultimate dinosaur, extinct even if he doesn’t know it.  He’s a vision out of the Republican past and that past is not coming back. 

Look at it this way.  The membership of the Republican Party is now thoroughly split between the people who wanted to bail out the banks and the people who didn’t want to and did want to see a lot of bankers bankrupted and jailed.  That last group includes the Tea Party, the Evangelicals and the libertarians. 

I never did believe the line about how people only voted Republican because they were being hoodwinked by the capitalists.  And right now, there’s a good demonstration of why that line was never accurate.

But it’s not the Presidential race I want to talk about here. It’s the race for the Senate in my own state.

There’s a Senate seat open in Connecticut because Joe Lieberman–the guy who ran for VP with Gore–has decided to retire.  The Democrats have put up a guy named Chris Murphy.  Murphy happens to be my own Congressman.  The Republicans had a primary race, and ended up nominating a woman named Linda McMahon.

This was depressing from off, because there was a guy I would have been interested in voting for in the Republican field.  That was Chris Shays, who had also been a Congressman from Connecticut until redistricting plowed him under.

Shays was plowed under a second time by McMahon’s money machine, and she had lots of money–her own.  McMahon is the female half of the couple that made professional wrestling a cash machine, and she put mostly her own funds into the race and hammered until she got the nomination.

It was, in fact, the second time she’d done that.  She also ran against Richard Blumenthal for the open seat after Chris Dodd retired.

And she got creamed. 

At the time Blumenthal ran, he was probably the most popular State Attorney General in Connecticut’s history.  His constituent service was outstanding.  He had a clear record and he ran on it.

This time, something very odd is going on.

Murphy has been a Congressman for a while now, so I’ve got to assume he has a record somewhere. 

But his ads have said nothing at all about that record, one way or the other.

They have been, virtually exclusively, attacks on McMahon.

And in every single case in which I know the basis for the attack, they have been either outright lies, or misleading to the point where they might as well be outright lies.

There is, for instance, the story of the ads that accused McMahon of “not paying social security” for her “employees,” and denying them “health care coverage and disability benefits.”

This was so absurd–and so easily disproved by the public record–that those ads disappeared after a while, to be replaced by nearly identical ones that claimed all the same things but about her “wrestlers.”

The problem?

Professional wrestlers are actors.  And like other arts workers–writers, musicians, illustrators–they are not usually classified as “employees” but as “freelancers.”  Even long term standard contracts for most of these people do not result in the guy buying your services paying half your social security taxes or giving you health care or other benefits.

This has been the standard in arts professions for decades–a lot of decades.

There is a case to be made that this is not how the arts industries should operate.  And in some cases particular arrangements have been made to get arts workers one or another of the benefits involved.

But the fact is that McMahon was not only doing nothing wrong by paying her wrestlers in the way she did, she was following standard industry practice.

And the ad relies on the assumption that most of the people listening to it will be bone ignorant of that practice. 

Then there is the ad–filmed oddly in black and white, with only women speaking–that declares that Linda McMahon’s business “demeans women” and that she forced violent images on children and sold violent toys to them.

In other words:  that Linda McMahon was one of the founders and owners of the world’s largest professional wrestling companies. 

As if they think their viewers will not know what professional wrestling is.

This is also the ad that includes the statement that McMahon wants to abolish the Department of Education, which would wipe out “early childhood education” funding and Pell Grants.

But that’s simply not true.  Abolishing the Department would not necessarily abolish any program.  Pell Grants existed before the Department existed.  The Department didn’t establish them.  It just administers them.

I won’t go into the rest of this nonsense–Linda McMahon supports a “radical Republican” proposal that would allow employers to deny women coverage for contraception!

Yes, she does, and so do I.  It’s not radical at all.  It’s the free exercise of religion, and the Constitution guarantees it. 

And this, too, is based on the assumption of voter ignorance.  The voters these ads are going after mostly approve of the religious exemption to the contraception mandate, and Murphy’s people must know it.

But the biggest and most bewildering aspect of all this is the fact that Murphy’s ads consistently call her “CEO Linda McMahon.”

I mean, really?

The woman started a successful company and ran it.   I think that’s the good news.  Does Murphy honestly think that voters will reject a candidate solely because she’s been a success?  They’re not coming out w ith any wrongdoing, or with scandals, or anything else.  Linda McMahon and her company pulled themselves up out of bankruptcy and founded a successful company.  In my book, that’s a good thing.

McMahon’s ads have, of course, also slammed Murphy for various things.  The difference is that the charges they make against Murphy are entirely verifiable–that he took campaign cash from a bank and then voted (from his seat on the banking committee) to hand that bank a bailout, and the bank later gave him a great rate on a new mortgage, in spite of the fact that his last mortgage company had to sue him for nonpayment; that he missed something like two thirds of his committee meetings.

Whenever McMahon’s people put out one of these ads, Murphy’s throw out ads about how she’s “lying.”  Then the local press–newspapers and even the local NPR station–check into it and verify her facts, and she puts out an ad quoting them.

And McMahon also puts out ads that outline what she wants to do and what her political philosophy his. 

After a while, the skew of the Murphy campaign became so bizarre that the press began to comment on it.  The local NPR station  did a story where they tried to figure out why Murphy wasn’t running on his record–why there hadn’t been any mention of that record, or of his political philosophy, for all the months the campaign had been ongoing.

Murphy responded with what I think of as a “kittens and puppies” ad–lots of fuzzy happy children and small things and an urgent message to preserve the future for them, without anything like the details of how Murphy expected to do that.

Those ads correspond to the very first one the Murphy campaign put out, where he and his wife are shown walking through a grocery store and his wife talks about  how they can’t stop because constituents always have so much to say to them.

There was, in those ads, once again nothing about what in particular Chris Murphy has done or intends to do.

The only think that makes sense to me in all this is that the Murphy campaign must be completely and utterly panicked that he’s going to lose the election.

But I can’t understand why.

This is Connecticut.  It’s one of the bluest states in the Union.  We don’t usually vote Republican.

And this is Connecticut in another way, too.  Ann Coulter put it crudely when she was opposing McMahon in the primary–this is prep school and Ivy League central.  Connecticut voters are not going to get behind somebody whose claim to fame is as low rent as professional wrestling.

Chris Murphy may do what nobody else could. 

The ads are so bad and so relentlessly dishonest, he’s probably doing McMahon more good than her own campaign could even if it always ran on optimal.

There’s an essay link up on Arts and Letters Daily today that sort of ties in with this:

http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Library-Without-Walls/Anti-Intellectualism-in-American-Life/ba-p/8967

But at the moment, I want to point out, again, that this is the beginning of the term, and the beginning of the term brings with it…something. 

It’s too early for despair.

A couple of days ago, somebody posted a long status on Facebook about the fact that her students couldn’t write a decent paper, or even a decent sentence.  I would have responded to this post if I’d been anywhere near a real computer, but I was out and about and all I had was my phone.  What I had to say was too long to be manageable on my phone.

From what I remember, the responses to this status were what you’d expect:  the problem was high stakes testing, or the fact that the kids didn’t read. 

I don’t have a problem with high stakes testing myself–if you want to make sure students learn something, you test, and you make the consequences significant–but I’ll vouch for the fact that students don’t read.

But the real reason students can’t write a decent sentence is that nobody teaches them to do it.  In fact, from what I can tell, students no longer study grammar at all. 

My students arrive in my classroom completely unaware that there is any such thing as a “part of speech.”  They don’t know what a “subject” or a “predicate” is.   They don’t know what a “preposition” is, and they don’t know that a word this is part of a preposition phrase cannot be the subject of a sentence. They don’t know that there are forms to verbs, and they don’t know how tenses work.

They don’t know these things because nobody has ever taught them. Nobody has ever taught them directly, and nobody has ever taught them indirectly.

Virtually all grading of essays on the high school level these days is “holistic,” which specifically FORBIDS correcting for grammar, punctuation and spelling.   Instead, teachers are supposed to read through the entire piece and get a “feeling” for its overall quality.

And the high stakes tests don’t help, because those are graded “holistically” too.

So are the qualifying tests  for being tracked into regular or remedial classes on the college level. 

That is, they are unless the college uses a computer tests like Acuplacer, which seems to be a multiple choice type of thing that’s concentrating on a lot of stuff, but not if the student knows what a verb is.

Aside from not knowing the parts of speech or the basic mechanics of an English sentence,  most of my students quite literally are unable to read.

Somebody in the postings and comments on the FB status said that people were functionally illiterate if all they could do was read maps and directions–but it’s worse than that.

The functionally illiterate CAN’T read maps and directions.  They can sound out the words of various pieces of low-level writing, but they have no idea what they mean.

In this system, being able to follow a bus schedule is all it takes to make you “literate.”

My students by and large don’t read, but that isn’t surprising–they can’t read, because they do not have any idea how writing works.  They do not know that the first person narrator of a novel is not the author himself.  They don’t know how to decipher sentences with clauses, or follow a train of thought.

The reading they have been given in high school has been chosen from what teachers think is “relevant” to them, what supposedly follows their own “interests.”

By and large, though, they have no interests, only diversions they’ve picked up on television, the Internet and the radio.  They have no cultural context at all, so they not only fail to understand the references in what they are asked to read, they fail to understand them in the movies and music they supposedly “like.”

I’ve said before–yeah, yeah, I repeat myself a lot–that I think the Harry Potter phenomenon is a direct result of this inability to read.  Childrens books are, by definition, easier to read than those written for adults.  They have smaller vocabularies, fewer complex sentences and usually a near dearth of writing techniques that, if you don’t already know about them, might be confusing or ambiguous.

There is only one way to fix this–require the schools to stop all holistic grading, to teach solid eighth grade grammar, and to grade for spelling, punctuation and grammar even in non-English courses.

The problem is, I don’t know if this is even possible.

I’ve got an increasingly strong feeling that this generation of teachers doesn’t know these things, either–that they were themselves “holistically” graded, that nobody ever told them what a verb was, that their reading comprehension level tops out at children’t books.

And  no, I have no idea, this morning, what we’re supposed to do about it all.

The problem with my schedule this term is that there isn’t any problem.  The actual schedule is great, and my students actually make me happy.

What that means, though, is that when I’m finished on Friday, I have a lot of good intentions about doing things like writing blog posts, which I never do because I’m relaxed, and it’s Saturday, or Sunday, and I’ve got a book, and…

And Frescobaldi this morning, to tell the truth.  Harpsichord pieces.  Nicely done by an academic in Indiana.

But in the middle of all this happy happy, I’ve been reading other people’s blog posts, and FB posts, and articles in magazines, and I have discerned a trend.

It’s remarkable how many people out there, and especially young people under thirty, think they are entitled to things like food, clothing and shelter, a college education, a job…

Or, to put it the way they tend to put it, they have “a right” to these things.

I’m getting to the point where I think we ought to retire the use of the word “rights,” because almost nobody knows what it means any more.

Rights inhere in the person–they are part of ourselves whether any particular government observes them or violates them.   Rights are also both negative and absolute–they are restrictions on what your government can make you do (or not do), and they are uncompromising.

You can’t have a “right” to anything you can only get if somebody else gives it to you, for the obvious reason that to have such a right, you’d have to own the person who must supply you.

If you don’t own that person–if he cannot be coerced into giving you what you’ve decided you have a “right” to–then he can always simply refuse to play, and your “right” evaporates.

Obviously, most people don’t think through the issue of what it would mean to declare that people have a “right” to this sort of thing, and they won’t think it through no matter how hard you try to get them to.

What most people mean when they say this kind of thing tends to be muddled at best.  And not everybody means the same things.

Some people simply mean that they are aware that there are some things they need to have to survive, and that the prospect of trying to get these things and not being able to is scary.

This is, in fact, true.  It is very scary to realize that you could come to a place where you just couldn’t manage it.  And there isn’t a single one of us who could ever be sure that we could manage it all the time, always.

There is a variation on this theme that is the realization that if you can’t get access to some things (like a college education), your life might be less accomplished and happy than it would have been otherwise.

Maybe it’s just that we have been told so often that we can be “anything we want to be” that we’ve lost sight of the fact that that is virtually never true.  The world is full of people who will never be what they could have been because they had to drop out of school to support a family, or because a mother or father or sister or brother because catastrophically ill and needed somebody to care for them, or for a whole lot of other reasons that are not “fair.”

These sorts of things are evidence of a failure to grow up.  and they’re not necessarily catastrophic.  Most of the people making these kinds of arguments are not in fact grown up–that is, they’re chronologically young. 

It’s a little disturbing to look at pictures of the Occupy camps and see just how many  aging hippies there actually are, but that’s another discussion.

One of the other reasons for this kind of thinking is sentimentality–we secure enough ourselves, but we hate the idea that other people are insecure, or without resources, or suffering.

The actually adult version of this can be a very good thing indeed.  There are good cases to be made that we should support people unable to support themselves, that we should provide schooling for every child, and maybe even that we should help to minimize the impact of catastrophic life events on family members.

The non-adult version of this, however, is a form of sentimentality that lacks any connection to reality whatsoever. 

It begins in the mostly unstated assumption that these things–providing a livelihood, taking care of family members who are sick or disabled–are the responsibility of individuals and families, even when the tasks are difficult, or even onerous, and even when meeting those responsibilities means we are cut off from opportunities we might otherwise have.

We none of us has a “right” not to be burdened by those things.  It’s largely the luck of the draw. 

A few years ago, I had as a student a man who had come to America as one of the Vietnamese boat people.  He and his wife had worked like crazy and built up a huge fund of savings to make sure their two sons could go to college.

Then my student had a massive stroke that made him unable to work ever again.  The two boys quit school and went to work to support the family.

Was this “fair”?  No, of course not.  It was a tragedy.  But it was also reality. 

It is one thing to say that there are good, practical reasons for instituting systems that would help to lessen the impact of events like this.  It is another thing to say that we have a “right” not to have reality impinge on us, or that it is the state’s responsibility, and not the family’s, to respond when such events do happen.

The sentimentalized version of this does a couple of other things as well.

The first of these is that it divorces itself from the actual practice of providing government help as a “right” completely.  And it divorces itself from that practice in two ways.

The first of these is the obvious one:  it flat out refuses to accept the fact (and it is a fact) that some of the people getting the help are free riders gaming the system, and that those free riders will always make up a significant proportion of recipients.

We are told–on the basis of statistically evidence that doesn’t answer the objections–that such free riders are only a small minority of recipents, or that they don’t exist at all because nobody would prefer to live in the kind of penury a government stipend provides if he had any other option.

We are presented with anecdotes of people whose needs are real, and people who have used the system to get themselves out of the holes they were in.

And these stories are true.  What they aren’t is proof that the system isn’t being significantly gained and that the existence of it isn’t causing something even worse–that sense of entitlement we’ve been talking about so far. 

But what else is going on here is that people move inexorably toward the position that relieving the sufferings of their fellow citizens is the job of the government and not of the individual–that is, they move to the position that we don’t have to grow up at all, we don’t have to make the sacrifices necesssary to actually help other people.  That’s the government’s job.

This, by the way, is why I have no use for “Republican budgets are unChristian because they don’t help the poor,” and why I have no use for modern Catholic social teaching about the welfare state. 

Christ did not say “go get your government to help poor people!” He said, “go do it YOURSELF.” 

What Christ was asking for was not a welfare state, but a world of Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohys.

Yes, of course, private charity does not meet all the needs, and never could.  But that’s really not the issue here.  One of the things private charity does do–when it’s really private, and not a matter of a technically private agency that acts just like your local welfare office–is that it makes it possible to know things about inidivual cases that are invisible to social welfare agencies and case workers.

Your ne’er do well Uncle Buck may fool the caseworker who shows up once every couple of months, but he won’t fool you, because you’re there all the time. 

The last kind of person who makes this sort of argument–for a “right” to food and shelter or an education or whatever–is actually trying for something else: he’s trying to get the government to put its imprimatur on something he wants to be a social norm that isn’t one yet, and that might never be one.

This is how we get “rights” to birth control and abortion that are not actual rights–the right to be free of government interference in your pursuit of same–but that are mandates on the public purse.   You are the slavemaster. Nobody is allowed to disagree with you in any substantive way.  Everybody is required to acquiese that your position is the only right one.

I don’t know how we got here, exactly.  I think in large part the issue is that we just have, in this society,  far too much money.

But I do know this.

We cannot survive for long in a world where most of our citizens feel entilted to things that, in reality, they’re only entitled to work for.