1. How a common argument for the existence of God failed—or did it?
As a philosophy instructor, I often taught the topic of arguments for the existence of God. One of the most common arguments, called the argument from design or teleological argument, in one formulation compares God to a watchmaker.
If you were walking along a beach and found some complex machine that certainly appeared to be designed by someone, which did something amazing, then you’d conclude that it had a maker. But here we are in a universe that exhibits far more complexity and design than any machine we’ve ever devised. Therefore, the universe has a maker as well; we call it God.
This is sometimes called the Watchmaker Argument—since the mechanism our beachcomber finds is usually a watch—and is attributed to William Paley. Variations on this theme could be the single most commonly-advanced argument for God.
The reason the Watchmaker Argument doesn’t persuade a lot of philosophers—and quite a few scientists and atheists generally—is that all the purported signs of design can be found in the biological world, and if biological complexity and appearance of design can be explained by natural selection, then God is no longer needed as an explanatory tool.
Some skeptics go a bit further and say that all the minds we have experience of are woefully inadequate for purposes of designing the complexity of life. Therefore, not only are natural mechanisms another explanation, they are a much better explanation, as far as our own experience of minds and designing is concerned.
But here I find myself skeptical of these particular skeptics.
2. Modern technology looks like magic
Recently, probably because I’ve been studying programming and am understanding the innards of technology better than ever, it has occurred to me very vividly that we may not be able to properly plumb the depths of what minds are capable of achieving. After all, imagine what a medieval peasant would make of modern technology. As lovers of technology often say, it would look like magic, and we would look like gods.
We’ve been working at this scientific innovation thing for only a few centuries, and we’ve been aggressively and intelligently innovating technology for maybe one century. Things we do now in 2017 are well into the realm of science fiction of 1917. We literally cannot imagine what scientific discovery and technological innovation will make available to us after 500 or 1000 years. Now let’s suppose there are advanced civilizations in the galaxy that have been around for a million years.
Isn’t it now hackneyed to observe that life on Earth could be a failed project of some super-advanced alien schoolchild? After all, we already are experimenting with genetic engineering, a field that is ridiculously young. As we unlock the secrets of life, who’s to say we will not be able to engineer entirely different types of life, every bit as complex as the life we find on Earth, and to merge with our inventions?
Now, what havoc should these reflections wreak on our religious philosophy?
3. Could an evolved superbeing satisfy the requirements of our religions?
The scientific atheist holds the physical universe in great reverence, as something that exists in its full complexity far beyond the comprehension of human beings. The notion of a primitive “jealous God” of primitive religions is thought laughable, in the face of the immense complexity of the universe that this God is supposed to have created. Our brains are just so much meat, limited and fallible. The notion that anything like us might have created the universe is ridiculous.
Yet it is in observing the development of science and technology, thinking about how we ourselves might be enhanced by that science and technology, that we might come to an opposite conclusion. Perhaps the God of nomadic tent-dwellers couldn’t design the universe. But what if there is some alien race that has evolved past where we are now for millions of years. Imagine that there is a billion-year-old superbeing. Is such a being possible? Consider the invention, computability, genetic engineering, and technological marvels we’re witnessing today. Many sober heads think the advent of AI may usher in the Singularity within a few decades. What happens a millions years after that? Could the being or beings that evolve create moons? Planets? Suns? Galaxies? Universes?
And why couldn’t such a superbeing turn out to be the God of the nomadic tent-dwellers?
Atheists are wrong to dismiss the divine if they do so on grounds that no gods are sufficiently complex to create everything we see around us. They believe in evolution and they see technology evolving all around us. Couldn’t god-like beings have evolved elsewhere and gotten here? Could we, after sufficient time, evolve into god-like beings ourselves?
What if it turns out that the advent of the Singularity has the effect of joining us all to the Godhead that is as much technological as it is physical and spiritual? And suppose that’s what, in reality, satisfies the ancient Hebrew notions of armageddon and heaven, and the Buddhist notion of nirvana. And suppose that, when that time comes, it is the humble, faithful, just, generous, self-denying, courageous, righteous, respectful, and kind people that are accepted into this union, while the others are not.
4. But I’m still an agnostic
These wild speculations aren’t enough to make me any less of an agnostic. I still don’t see evidence that God exists, or that the traditional (e.g., Thomistic) conception of God is even coherent or comprehensible. For all we know, the universe is self-existing and life on Earth evolved, and that’s all the explanation we should ever expect for anything.
But these considerations do make me much more impressed by the fact that we do not understand how various minds in the universe might evolve, or might have evolved, and how they might have already interacted with the universe we know. There are facts about these matters about which we are ignorant, and the scientific approach is to withhold judgment about them until the data are in.
In this article, authors show how elite parents collectively use cultural, social, and symbolic capital to challenge a school district plan to change attendance boundaries.
via TCRecord
This commentary examines the problem of educational inequality. It argues that we need to make changes beyond simply our schools if we want to have long-lasting and impactful educational reform.
via TCRecord
This commentary examines the implications of President Trump's proposal to increase school choice on American public education. It argues that the more we erode public education, the more we reduce access to local, equitable, and accountable schools that educate all of our common community members.
via TCRecord
This book focuses on four principles: seeing education holistically as inclusive of diverse learning contexts; recognizing how learning opportunities emerge both in and across contexts; advancing research on learning in ways that enable the study of learning over time and across contexts, and; attending to possible futures in the present.
via TCRecord
I. The virtue of intellectual honesty.
Honesty is a greatly underrated epistemic virtue.
There is a sound reason for thinking so. It turns out that probably the single greatest source of error is not ignorance but arrogance, not lack of facts but dogmatism. We leap to conclusions that fit with our preconceptions without testing them. Even when we are more circumspect, we frequently rule out views that turn out to be correct because of our biases. Often we take the easy way out and simply accept whatever our friends, religion, or party says is true.
These are natural habits, but there is a solution: intellectual honesty. At root, this means deep commitment to truth over our own current opinion, whatever it might be. That means accepting clear and incontrovertible evidence as a serious constraint on our reasoning. It means refusing to accept inconsistencies in one’s thinking. It means rejecting complexity for its own sake, whereby we congratulate ourselves for our cleverness but rarely do justice to the full body of evidence. It means following the evidence where it leads.
The irony is that some other epistemic virtues actually militate against wisdom, or the difficult search for truth.
Intelligence or cleverness, while in themselves an obvious benefit, become a positive hindrance when we become unduly impressed with ourselves and the cleverness of our theories. This is perhaps the single biggest reason I became disappointed with philosophy and left academe; philosophers are far too impressed with complex and clever reasoning, paying no attention to fundamentals. As a result, anyone who works from fundamentals finds it to be child’s play (I thought I did, as a grad student) to poke holes in fashionable theories. This is not because I was more clever than those theoreticians but because they simply did not care about certain constraints that I thought were obvious. And it’s easy for them in turn to glibly defend their views; so it’s a game, and to me it became a very tiresome one.
Another overrated virtue is, for lack of a better name, conventionality. In every society, every group, there is a shared set of beliefs, some of which are true and some of which are false. I find that in both political and academic discussions, following these conventions is held to be a sign of good sense and probity, while flouting them ranges from suspect to silly to evil. But there has never yet been any group of people with a monopoly on truth, and the inherent difficulty of everything we think about means that we are unlikely to find any such group anytime soon. I think most of my liberal friends are—perhaps ironically—quite conventional in how they think about political issues. Obviously conservatives and others can be as well.
Another virtue, vastly overrated today, is being “scientific.” Of course, science is one of the greatest inventions of the modern mind, and it continues to produce amazing results. I am also myself deeply committed to the scientific method and empiricism in a broad sense. But it is an enormous mistake to think that the mere existence of a scientific consensus, especially in the soft sciences, means that one may simply accept what science instructs is true. The strength of a scientific theory is not determined by a poll but by the quality of evidence. Yet the history of science is the history of dogmatic groups of scientists having their confidently-held views corrected or entirely replaced. The problem is a social one; scientists want the respect of their peers and as a result are subject to groupthink. In an age of scientism this problem bleeds into the general nonscientific population, with dogmatists attempting to support their views by epistemically unquestionable (but often badly-constructed and inadequate) “studies”; rejecting anyone’s argument, regardless how strong, if it is not presented with “scientific support”; and dismissing any non-scientist opining on a subject about which a scientist happens to have some opinion. As wonderful as science is, the fact is that we are far more ignorant than we are knowledgeable, even today, in 2017, and we would do well to remember that.
Here’s another overrated virtue: incisiveness. Someone is incisive if he produces trenchant replies that allows his friends to laugh at the victims of his wit. Sometimes, balloons need to be punctured and there is nothing there when deflated—of course. But problems arise when glib wits attack some more complex theories and narratives. It is easy to tear down and hard to build. Fundamentally my issue is that we need to probe theories and narratives that are deeply rooted in facts and evidence, and simply throwing them on the scrap heap in ridicule means we do not fully learn what we can from the author’s perspective. In philosophy, I’m often inclined to a kind of syncretistic approach which tips its hat to various competing theories that each seem to have their hands on different parts of the elephant. Even in politics, even if we have some very specific policy recommendation, much has been lost if we simply reject everything the other side says in the rough and tumble of debate.
I could go on, but I want to draw a conclusion here. When we debate and publish with a view to arriving at some well-established conclusions, we are as much performing for others as we are following anything remotely resembling an honest method for seeking the truth. We, with the enthusiastic support of our peers, are sometimes encouraged to think that we have the truth when we are still very far indeed from having demonstrated it. By contrast, sometimes we are shamed for considering certain things that we should feel entirely free to explore, because they do contain part of the truth. These social effects get in the way of the most efficient and genuine truth-seeking. The approach that can be contrasted with all of these problems is intellectual honesty. This entails, or requires, courageous individualism, humility, integrity, and faith or commitment to the cause of truth above ideology.
It’s sad that it is so rare.
The problem with most people laboring under error (I almost said “stupid people,” but many of the people I have in mind are in fact very bright) is that, when they finally realize that they were in error, they can’t handle the shame of knowing that they were in error, especially if they held their beliefs with any degree of conviction. Many people find error to be deeply humiliating. Remember the last time you insisted that a word meant one thing and it meant something else, when you cited some misremembered statistic, or when thought you knew someone who turned out to be a stranger. It’s no fun!
Hence we are strongly motivated to deny that we are, in fact, in error, which creates the necessity of various defenses. We overvalue supporting evidence (“Well, these studies say…”) and undervalue disconfirming evidence (“Those studies must be flawed”). Sometimes we just make up evidence, convincing ourselves that we just somehow know things (“I have a hunch…”). We seek to discredit people who present them with disconfirming evidence, to avoid having to consider or respond to it (“Racist!”).
In short, emotional and automatic processes lead us to avoid concluding that we are in error. Since we take conscious interest in defending our views, complex explanatory methods are deployed in the same effort. (“Faith is a virtue.”) But these processes and methods, by which we defend our belief systems, militate in favor of further error and against accepting truth. (“Sure, maybe it sounds weird, but so does a lot of stuff in this field.”) This is because propositions, whether true or false, tend to come in large clusters or systems that are mutually supporting. Like lies, if you support one, you find yourself committed to many more.
In this way, our desire to avoid the humiliation of error leads us into complex systems of confusion—and, occasionally, into patterns of thinking that can be called simply evil. (“The ends justify the means.”) They’re evil because the pride involved in supporting systematically wrong systems of thought drives people into patterns of defense go beyond the merely psychological and into the abusive, psychologically damaging, and physical. (“We can’t tolerate the intolerant!” “Enemy of the people.” “Let him be anathema.”)
What makes things worse is that we are not unique atoms each confronting a nonhuman universe, when we are coming to grips with our error. We are members of like-minded communities. We take comfort that others share our beliefs. This spreads out the responsibility for the error. (“So-and-so is so smart, and he believes this.”) It is much easier to believe provably false things if many others do as well, and if they are engaged in the same processes and methods in defending themselves and, by extension, their school of thought.
This is how we systematically fail to understand each other. (“Bigot!” “Idiot!”) This is why some people want to censor other people. (“Hate speech.” “Bad influence.”) This is how wars start.
Maybe, just maybe, bad epistemology is an essential cause of bad politics.
(I might be wrong about that.)
It’s better to just allow yourself to be humiliated, and go where the truth leads. This is the nature of skepticism.
This, by the way, is why I became a philosopher and why I commend philosophy to you. The mission of philosophy is—for me, and I perhaps too dogmatically assert that it ought to be the mission for others—to systematically dismantle our systems of belief so that we may begin from a firmer foundation and accept only true beliefs.
This was what Socrates and Descartes knew and taught so brilliantly. Begin with what you know on a very firm foundation, things that you can see for yourself (“I know that here is a hand”), things that nobody denies (“Humans live on the surface of the earth”). And as you make inferences, as you inevitably will and must, learn the canons of logic and method so that you can correctly apportion your strength of belief to the strength of the evidence.
There is no way to do all this without frequently practicing philosophy and frequently saying, “This might or might not support my views; I don’t know.” If you avoid the deeper questions, you are ipso facto being dogmatic and, therefore, subject to the patterns of error described above.
This commentary considers the case of Jill Bloomberg, a principal who was questioned about her political affiliations. It argues that teachers have the right to speak their minds, but they also have to let students make up their minds.
via TCRecord
This issue of the Teachers College Record Yearbook focuses on conceptualizations of engagement, the processes of engagement, portraits of engaging learning environments, and whole-school approaches to education.
via TCRecord
Look at where we are in education and culture today. Let’s catalog the main issues, shall we?
School children are often not taught to read properly, and too many fall behind and grow up functionally illiterate. Yet students are kept in schools practically all day and are made to do endless amounts of busywork, and then they have to do even more busywork at home. The efficiency of the work they do is appalling, as their textbooks and assignments are all too often ill-conceived, being repetitious, deadly dull, and designed without any consideration for what individual children already know (or don’t know). Generally, they aren’t taught classics (but more on that below). So despite all that work, despite graduating at rates as high as ever, the average child emerges into adulthood shockingly ignorant. The educational process is regimented; little humans have essentially become cogs in a giant, humorless, bureaucratic machine. The whole process is soul-killing.
Growing up in these bureaucratized intellectual ghettos, it’s no wonder that rebellion has become de rigeur, that everyone calls himself an individualist although few really are. Popular culture with each passing generation is more dumbed-down, delivering entertainment that can be effortlessly consumed by maleducated conformist rebels, increasingly avoiding any scintilla of intellectualism, any uncool and boring reference to any of the roots of Western culture. On TV, popular music, and the Internet—the ubiquitous refuges of the young from the horrors of the educational machine that dominates their young lives—one can navigate content of all sorts without any exposure to the classics of literature and the arts, or the root ideas of Western religion and philosophy. If a few lucky students are exposed to these things at their more academic high schools, most are not, and the taste for “the best which has been thought and said” is ruined by the presentation in a system that “critiques” and renders dull as much as it celebrates and usefully explains. It’s a wonder if any students emerge with any taste for the classics of Western literature, art, and thought at all.
A problem about Western culture, for the modern world, is that it is intensely critical and challenging. The classics are beautiful, but hard—both difficult to appreciate and presenting lessons that require us to take a hard, critical look at ourselves. Although the classics can be profoundly inspiring and sublime in beauty, they require time, attention, intelligence, seriousness, and sincerity to appreciate. In the context of today’s soul-killing schools, students are too exhausted and overworked to meet these challenges. Many students are also too narcissistic—having been told by their parents and teachers that they are already brilliant, having been idolized by popular culture for their cool, attractiveness, and cutting-edge thinking about everything—so the classics require a kind of self-criticism that is wholly foreign to many of them. It is no wonder the classics simply do not “speak to” the youth of today.
Moreover, almost all of the classics were created by white Western men. Spending much time on them is politically regressive, or that is what school teachers are trained to believe. Instead, the left at universities have been building a new kind of more critical culture, at once holding up the grievances of historically marginalized groups as a new gospel, while actually revering popular culture. Teachers and administrators marinade in this left-wing culture of criticism at universities for six or more years, before they make the choices of what pieces of culture are worth exposing to children. So, again, it’s a wonder if any students emerge with any taste for the classics.
At the college level, matters have become dire in other ways. Everyone is expected to go to college, and at the same time universities have become corporatized, so that the students are now treated as “customers” whose evaluations determine how professors should teach. So, naturally, grades have inflated—which would have been necessary to coddle the “self-esteem” or narcissism of youth—and the courses themselves have been dumbed down, at least in the humanities. But who needs the humanities? Degrees in the liberal arts generally are held to be a waste of money, especially since college has become so expensive, and fewer people are pursuing such degrees. Even if one believed the knowledge gained through liberal arts degrees to be valuable enough to warrant spending $60,000/year, one spends much of the time, in most of the humanities, marinading in that same left-wing critical culture that produces our schoolteachers—so one wouldn’t be exposed to the classics in the way that would incline a student to sign up for one of these degrees in the first place. So it’s no wonder if students and their parents are finding it increasingly plausible to skip college altogether. This is a sad mistake, considering that young adults today, navigating a rapidly-changing world, are more in need of the wisdom and intellectual skills inculcated by a liberal arts education than ever before. And most recently, the consequences of our failure to pass on two of the ideals essential to Western thought—free speech and freedom of inquiry—has led to thoroughly illiberal efforts to “shut it down,” i.e., prevent politically unpopular ideas from getting a hearing on campus at all. This is all in the name of intersectionality, empowering the disempowered, tearing down bad old ideas, and protecting the sensitive feelings of coddled students.
Our education is degraded, and we are falling away from Western civilization. So how did it come to this? I put it down to a perfect storm of terrible ideas.
(1) To be effective in a fast-changing society, we need up-to-date know-how, not theory. American society developed out of a frontier mentality that placed a premium on a “can-do” attitude, an ability to get things done, with theorizing and book-reading being a waste of time. That might be understandable for the pioneers and peasants of a frontier or pre-industrial society, it is a terrible idea for the complexities of industrial and post-industrial societies, in which wisdom, trained intelligence, and sensitivity to nuance are essentials. Nevertheless, American parents and teachers alike generally seem to agree that practical knowledge and know-how are more important than book-larnin’. You would think that this might have changed with more people than ever going to college. But it has not.
(2) Books are old-fashioned in the Internet age. When, in the 2000s, the Internet came into its own as the locus of modern life, we began to ask, “Is Google making us stupid?” and to “complain” that we lacked the ability to read extended texts (long articles were “tl;dr” and books boring, old, and irrelevant). I think many of us took this to heart. Educated people still do want their children to read, but the habits of adults are slowly dying; you can’t expect the children to do better.
(3) Western civilization is evil. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go,” chanted those Stanford students in 1988, which became a watershed moment in the development of Western culture. At the time, it might have seemed a bit of left-wing excess, and just one side of the complex Culture War. But, in fact, it proved to be a taste of things to come. Many Western civilization requirements are long gone. What was once the province of the newly-created Women’s Studies and Black Studies departments, and a few left-wing professors, gradually become the dominant viewpoint in all of the humanities. Why study the classics when the classics simply represent the point of view of the oppressor?
(4) Social justice is the new religion. Hand-in-hand with criticism of Western civilization came an increasing respect (which is good), then celebration (which is fine), and finally a veneration (which is undeserved) of everything that has traditionally been set in opposition to Western civilization, especially the usual identity groups: women, races other than white, ethnicities other than Western, religion other than Christianity, sexual orientation other than straight, etc. At universities, making these identity groups equal to straight, white, male, Christian Europeans has become nearly the only thing—apart from environmentalism and a few other such causes—that is taken really seriously. For many academics, intersectionality has replaced both religion and any apolitical ethics to become an all-encompassing worldview.
(5) Psychology is more scientific, accurate, and credible than philosophy and religion, and self-esteem must be cultivated at all costs. The gospel of self-esteem came into being in the 1970s, right around the time when the self-help publishing industry became fashionable. With the collapse of traditional (especially Christian) belief systems, people cast about for general advice on how to live their lives, and psychology delivered. As self-esteem was a key element of much self-help psychology, it was only natural that the parents of Generations X and Y would pull out the stops to protect the feelings and sense of self-worth of their precious darlings.
We have changed. Despite their education, too many of our children cannot read well, and fewer and fewer of us read books. Whatever we do teach or read, it is rarely classical literature. Classics have become an unexplored country, dull and reviled, to many of us. Recent generations are the first in centuries in which the upper echelons of society are quite shockingly ignorant of their own Western heritage. And here I don’t just mean books, I mean also basic Western principles, ideas, and values. For many young people, social justice, psychology, and especially popular culture have replaced religion and wisdom literature. Popular culture may be a crass wasteland, yet it guides our youth more than ever, as being the only kind of culture that most of them have preparation and taste for.
We have declined. In past generations, this analysis would have sounded like scaremongering. Today, the analysis has come true; it is a postmortem.
But—and here I speak to the older generation, especially educated old liberals—what did you think would happen? This is precisely what some people did predict in decades past, because society’s leaders were teaching a certain set of ideas to the leaders of the next generation:
European civilization colonized and exploited the world; it is irredeemably racist and the main source of the suffering in the world today.
Inequalities are deeply unfair, and white men have the best of everything; so we should celebrate everyone else and take white men down a peg or two.
We must be avoid saying anything that might even be thought to be offensive to disadvantaged identity groups.
Christianity is completely irrational and doesn’t deserve a role in public life.
Science, and psychology in particular, studies all we need to know to live and be happy; philosophy and religion are based on muddle-headed superstition.
The self-esteem and sensitivities of young people are precious and must be protected from the buffets that life threatens to give them.
Even today, some of these ideas might sound ridiculous to some of us. But if you’ve been paying attention, you can’t deny that these once-radical ideas have become increasingly mainstream.
The desperate state of education today is predictable, given former trends and earnestly-expressed convictions. It was called scaremongering to say that these ideas were hacking away the roots of Western civilization—and yet they did. So one wonders: What can we predict about the future, based on ideas now growing in popularity, ideas that it is quite reasonable to believe will guide the education and enculturation of the next generation?
Here are some controversial ideas that are in vogue at universities today:
Free speech is a dangerous idea, and it certainly doesn’t include hate speech and harmful speech.
What determines whether speech is harmful is whether it causes its listeners to react with emotional pain.
But we can disregard the pain of “privileged” people—”male tears,” “white tears,” and all that.
Those who are really plugged in know that books aren’t really what’s important. Know-how is what’s important. You can just look up things online that you need to know.
Popular culture is worth careful academic study, at least as much as “the classics” or “high culture.”
Higher education isn’t important except as a credential to become a corporate drone and in some fields.
Grave inequalities persist, and our very civilization is racist. We ought to tear down and malign all the productions of white men.
White society, and white people (whether they know it or not), are all racist, and all men (whether they know it or not) perpetuate a sexist patriarchy.
Religion isn’t just irrational and wrong, it’s evil, and we should take steps to stamp it out and perhaps prohibit it.
Reproducing does great harm to the world. Life is an evil. Babies are not to be celebrated. We should stop having them.
All of these ideas have plenty of adherents on campus today. They might well shape the next generation. If so, what might our brave new world look like? Let’s listen in to the monologue from a typical, center-left future student, shall we?
“It’s 2047. The way some people talk, you’d think it was, I don’t know, 2017 or something. Check this out. I heard someone, and I don’t care if she was a black woman, actually citing the Bible in class? That triggered a lot of people, and she was kicked out, of course. I doubt they’ll let her back in. It just goes to show you how many people still believe that superstitious bullshit, even though it’s revolting hate speech. But you know what, I was kind of impressed about what she was reading, before I realized what she was reading. It sounded like Old English. Who reads crap like that these days? Well, I guess she can. But it’s still bullshit. You don’t have to be able to read it to know that.
“It’s not just superstitious bullshit, it’s totally irrelevant. Books are so lame! My favorite professors don’t teach books, they teach modern media. When I started this major, I swear, I had no idea pop music and movies were so deep. Seriously! So why do we require students to read so many books at all? Last year I was required to read three books for required Communications courses. Everyone knows that books aren’t really what’s important; knowledge is free for the taking online. Everything’s there, instantly! Besides, the most influential thoughts of the last forty years are all in the form of briefer texts online. I’m thinking I might want to drop out. Half of my friends didn’t even go to college and are just being trained by their employers. But you know, I think those tend to be the more conservative people, you know? So…
“Anyway, at the very least, it’s time to stop requiring that we read any books written before 1970, or maybe 2000, especially if they were written by white men. I mean, of course white people and men are still welcome at our universities, it is perfectly fair that they wait their turn in classroom discussions. I hate it when some white man just starts talking first. You can hear some people hissing when they do. After all, everyone knows that less privileged people have more valid and relevant perspectives, and hearing white people and men—and on some issues, let’s face it, hearing ignorant, insensitive white men at all—causes the marginalized great pain. We can’t forget that white Western civilization persists even today, despite our best efforts. We renamed the state of Washington, but not the capital of our country—it continues to be named after the very embodiment of a white, slave-owning, breeding patriarch! That pisses me off so much!
“And speaking of breeders…don’t get me started on the breeders. We had to fight tooth and nail against the misogynist, patriarchal society just to make it possible to license parents. But now we’re allowing almost everyone to be licensed. What’s the point? Surely we’ve got to prevent so many people from breeding. We don’t let just anyone drive, right? We need to start imposing some restrictions. I know it’s a little simplistic, but sometimes, simple is the best way: we could just, for a while, restrict the number of children white people could have. I know it sounds shocking, but look—everybody knows they use the most resources, they’re the most racist, they create the most inequality. And they’re still a plurality in this country. So it’s really a no-brainer. It’s 2047!”
Maybe that sounds over-the-top. But that’s the point. There are cutting-edge activist types who would find all of this commendable or at least very plausible. And just think: the cutting-edge ideas of 1987, which would have sounded totally bizarre and radical back then, are totally up-to-date today, in 2017. I’m similarly extrapolating, from the “cutting-edge” ideas of today on the same topics to how those ideas might be evolve in another 30 years.
Also, of course, it could get much worse. Illiberal societies have been much worse at different times and places in history.
Am I predicting that the monologue is what awaits us? No, my crystal ball isn’t that accurate and history never unfolds smoothly or predictably. What I’m saying is that it’s a natural extrapolation from ideas about education and culture today. Is that what we want? If not, then what kind of thought world are we trying to build?