Educated Fools
newrepublic.com
Educated Fools
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Re: Educated Fools
#2I know it's maybe too political for HN but I found this article more interesting than expected.
Its main idea is "the loss of social standing, social claims, the social assets that working people used to have, because, in our time, education is so much more decisive".
Re: Educated Fools
#3> There is no foothold left in big cities, or anyplace else where the global winners live, for high school graduates to exercise even a tiny bit of power. There’s no church to slot into as a deacon, no chance on the shop floor to rise as a foreman, no union in which to become a shop steward or officeholder, no big-city political machine that in this digital age needs anyone to go door to door. Our wage workers have been stripped of every way to exercise the kind of morality or have the opportunities that come so easily to the top fifth. At least in the case of the Industrial Revolution, as described by E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, there was religion—the new Methodist faith that gave the English working class a sense of moral superiority over their owners. But in the working class remade and discarded for the postindustrial age, there is an uptick in drug abuse, one-parent families, and indebtedness. The top fifth of the country, the most educated, may well be more moral—and, God knows, even more religious in terms of actual Christian values—than the current white working class. But that, too, represents another form of class oppression, worse than in the Industrial Revolution—the top fifth have appropriated all the morality.
I've never seen an article that is simultaneously semi-self-aware yet contains such a high level of arrogance and condescension. That on its own makes it an interesting piece.
Re: Educated Fools
#4Thanks for sharing this. The piece makes an urgent point that needs to be appropriately acknowledged. It falls in the vein of arguments I've come to term as "relational poverty" or "relational inequality" arguments (what Popper is presented as terming "moral inequality" in the piece) that most social science research I've come across has failed to or is ill-equipped to account for. I do recall Amartya Sen making a definition of poverty along these grounds (in the sense of dignity, or lack thereof, in what one perceives as their social environment) some years back but haven't been able to trace it down since or see if any further work was done on it. (If someone reading this happens to know more about such work, I'd appreciate being directed towards it).
The point made about Trump expressing a liking for poorly educated folk is also noteworthy. Even if the more sensible in the political class come to acknowledge the paradox we face, the matter of articulating and expressing it appropriately arises. Currently, as the author notes, the "college for all" approach doesn't appear to be resonating electorally (that said, there are a number of confounding factors one could put forth) but rather is serving as a reminder to the once robust (perhaps this is romantic nostalgia) working- and lower-middle-classes of their lowered social standing and relational dignity.
Update: I have found a presentation of the relativistic perspective on poverty by Sen (1983). Apologies for the earlier bit, that was laziness on my part. Worth a read.
https://are.berkeley.edu/courses/ARE251/fall2008/Papers/sen8...
Re: Educated Fools
#5Conservatives are split about the changes the article discribes. Traditional conservatives are glad the labor movement was destroyed, and see the Knowledge Economy as good because it is the latest product of the unrestrained free market.
On the other hand, Trump supporters are very angry, but the problem is that Trump's program won't do anything at all to fix the problems that are making them unhappy.
Re: Educated Fools
#6Man, this is gold.
I for long tried to write something along those lines, but I think the author did summarise my thoughts better than I could've done myself.
The class conflict — something that western literati class keep denying acknowledgement, is really the driver of much of social progress. And this holds more even more true in the West than in the East.
The class warfare is there, it exists, and it is what has been responsible for the prime majority of political developments in the West for the last 30 years.
Re: Educated Fools
#7Can someone translate this into:
Perceived problem, attempted solutions, potential new solution.
I have no idea what the hell the article is going on about - it reads like a rant by a typical politically active idiot.
Re: Educated Fools
#8> There is no foothold left in big cities, or anyplace else where the global winners live, for high school graduates to exercise even a tiny bit of power. There’s no church to slot into as a deacon, no chance on the shop floor to rise as a foreman, no union in which to become a shop steward or officeholder, no big-city political machine that in this digital age needs anyone to go door to door. Our wage workers have b…
It is interestingly skipping period after 1832 (where The Making of the English Working Class ends) and now. The social problems were quite large and very real.
Re: Educated Fools
#9> We don’t trust them, and would never vote for one of them. Why should they trust or vote for one of us?
For the same reason I wouldn’t trust a doctor without a degree proving they did due diligence for years. I know this feels different because “anybody can do politics” but without a large worldview the measures taken will be inevitably short sighted.
Now, it works the other way too. As the article states, losing touch with the base leads to problems.
Re: Educated Fools
#10> This all fits the claim of the French geographer Christophe Guilluy about his own country in his 2016 book The Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France.
+1 for Christophe Guilluy's book, it's really eye-opening, even more so considering that he wrote/published it even before the "gilets jaunes" movement started.
Not sure there's a solution for this "periphery" problem, but I see it in my parts of the world (Eastern-European country and EU member), it certainly is present in France and I suppose in other Western European countries, and according to the article is also a real problem in the US.