To some people it looks that way, but I am going to say no. The key issue, in my view, is the pursuit of excellence. Can great thinkers, engineers, and entrepreneurs still pursue excellence, or are they being stifled by ankle-biting social justice activists?
I think that the pursuit of excellence is still possible. If the New York Times fails as an outlet, there is still Quillette. If many academic departments become mediocre, excellence will find its way to other departments or the corporate sector or perhaps privately-funded research institutes. If the top tech firms stifle their best talent, venture capitalists will find better uses for them.
I worry about Scott Alexander. His excellence could be harder to pursue if his worst fears about the NYT revealing his name are realized. But on the whole, I think that the ability to pursue excellence is going to still be here.
How do we create and protect islands of unwoke sanity in a sea of self destructive crazy? How do we let “refugees” know the islands exist without making them targets? The SJWs don’t want people to be able to vote with their feet any more than the Soviets did.
If you’re inclined to try to do that, leaving the coastal US is probably necessary. Europe, Canada, and Australia aren’t noticeably better, but Texas will probably hold out for a while and I hear good things about Mexico. East Asia is probably a very poor choice right now.
Texas is better, but not by much. In the big cities, where the talent goes, all the big universities and corporations have SJW fever. I challenge you to find a decently ranked TX academic institution whose leadership didn’t make some sort of SJW noice is response to the recent protests. Most, if not all, doubled down with town hall meetings and discussions on oppression and injustice.
Like coronavirus, you can isolate yourself all you want, but the only way out is through. The woke mob, like the virus, will have to play itself out and destroy a lot of lives in the process before we get back to normal.
Isn’t this the situation in every state? Every corporation that operates nationally is subject to the same pressures. Every profession has incorporated the same ideological obsessions into its standards. Except maybe for a few oddball institutions (like Hillsdale), the “woke” outlook has infiltrated every school system, college and university, as well as the state bureaucracies. Ordinary voters have not yet fallen in line everywhere, but the people with power in every state are on board with the new narrative.
Northeast Asia *is* Galt’s Gulch.
The Atlas Shrugged “moment” is more like a slow and steady flow which started years ago.
Ayn Rand simply didn’t anticipate that there would be a long transition period in which the Captains of Industry would move everything but themselves to the Gulch.
More on that in a bit, but let’s get to the Stalinism charge first.
Stalinism isn’t fun, but the trouble is, their centralized Stalinism is still preferable to our rapidly approaching decentralized Stalinism.
This is in much the same way as stationary bandits are to be preferred to mobile bandits. Stationary bandits come to understand which gooses are laying golden eggs and that one ought not to kill them. Mobile bandits immediately roast any geese they can get their hands on.
What ends up happening in revolutionary circumstances is that in the scramble to go to even more extremes on A to fight side B, overall conditions degenerate and the constant ‘autophagic’ infighting means that the insufficiently A are accused of being pro-B and the situation quickly descends into bloody collapse.
Until some strongman like Stalin or Napoleon reimposes order by planting a flag at one point and neutralizing threats from the right *or left* of where he is standing.
Mao’s approach with the Chinese cultural revolution was different, since he found them and the terror they could unleash to be useful to protect his supremo position against competitors in the Party. But the minute he found the Red Guards more trouble than beneficial, he ejected them from the cities and ordered the army to put them down, allowing them to continue existing only in a “political strategic reserve” capacity should he even need to use that tactic again. That was only important so long as he was alive, and so after his death the whole thing was ended for good, thank God. But China’s centralized Stalinism has been stable for a long time because you can’t get to either the right or left of where the Party is.
Let’s get back to Atlas Shrugged and the question of excellence.
South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, and in many respects China (so long as you never undermine the regime) are not just places where people can and do pursue and produce world-class excellence across many fields, where they can actually still build things unlike America, but increasingly where formerly “excellence-hospitable” developed Western countries go when they need some excellence to actually get something done.
I have multiple acquaintances who are somewhat guilty and bitter about the facts of our general uncompetitiveness and being compelled by competitive pressures to do so, but who are nevertheless completely candid about trying to absolutely maximize the amount of their business activities and contracts they offshore.
The reason is not just lower prices, since there are hundreds of countries with billions of people who are cheaper than those you can find in Northeast Asia. It’s not also just the fact that quality levels and reliability are now as good or better than what one can get from even the top Western facilities.
The reason is the one over which we like to flatter ourselves, in a delusion originating in a kind of carryover of inertial memory back when it was still true. They actually have *better institutions* now – it is easier and cheaper to get things done and do business in those countries.
Every business gets involved in a lot of commercial legal disputes, usually over payments and expectations for quality. It is hard to express in words the shame I feel when they tell me that pursuing these claims in Chinese courts is not just cheaper and quicker but also *more predictable and fair* (even when they sometimes lose!) and with no good opportunity for parties to leverage the enormous burden of using the legal system to unethically pressure people to give up trying to get any justice – a common occurrence in American disputes.
There are no endless appeals and if the company doesn’t pay up what the judge tells them to right away, China will trash the social credit score of the CEO himself so he can’t even move around the country. So compliance with judgments is quick and normal.
Some of their progress in this direction might be slow, but to catch up and surpass someone in excellence, it doesn’t matter how slow they’re going forward, if we’re going backward. And we are.
If you’re (Han) Chinese, then you might be right. If you aren’t, your Chinese partners will very likely set you up to take the fall for their crimes. I recommend the linked China Law Blog in general as a source on the situation in China from people who regularly interact with the Chinese government in Chinese regarding foreign investment; their advice is to leave China now.
I follow that blog, and just to be clear, I generally agree with the assessment that China has become increasingly inhospitable to foreigners, investors or otherwise, who are indeed well-advised to cash out their chips and leave the casino. The feeling is mutual, “Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.”
The Chinese government has never liked foreigners, and put up with them and treated them ok only for so long and up to the point when they no longer needed to do so. Now they are invited to leave. “Gua le a!”
However, the generally positive features of the system by which the Chinese state adjudicates business disputes will remain for Han-on-Han suits, and the comparative efficiency gains should not be underestimated just because the regime no longer feels it is in their interests to protect the fair treatment of foreigners.
One thing the Chinese Communist Party is very good at is patience and timing. While America couldn’t pass a geopolitical marshmallow test for five whole minutes, they can wait one hundred years to get the whole marshmallow factory.
There are many moves they would have taken decades ago if they were strong and rich and scary enough to deal with the international (i.e., American) push-back those moves would have provoked. But they weren’t yet, so they put those plans in mothballs and waited until they closed the gaps enough to put those plans into execution.
That’s what we’re seeing now.
It is not quite the realization of totalitarian control, “nothing outside the state, nothing against the state, everything within the state” as a less pan-arrogating version of secured sovereignty, “Everything policed by the regime to ensure that there is nothing against the regime.”
Instead of totalitarianism you might call this Noncontestabilism. There will be no competitors or undermining and the legitimacy of the regime shall not be questioned.
Noncontestabilism requires “spiritual sovereignty” (security against undesired influences on opinion) and the absence of any competing loyalties sufficient to pose a threat to the vision of “One People, One Country, One Party.”
To achieve that requires a lot of measures which are by no means nice or liberal or humane. But the CCP is *serious* about achieving this goal and will use their great wealth and power to climb all 999 steps of the stairway to heaven. If they can’t get over a step at the moment, they just wait until they can.
Not disputing anything about China, but the opening of their advice in the “leave China now” post
has aged very badly. Given how inept US response has been compared to China’s, not to mention the Fifth Great Awakening that’s been on for the last month or so, should people leave USA now? The progressive church has never liked conservative family- and excellence-oriented people of European descent, and put up with them and treated them ok only for so long and up to the point when they (think they) no longer need to do so. Now they are invited to submit completely, confess their privilege in public, kiss feet, give up their children for indoctrination and hormone treatments, etc. Что делать?
@Handle: If you’re saying that China resembles Galt’s Gulch because it’s a hotbed of industry, I totally agree with you. If you’re saying that it’s a place of opportunity that one could reasonably leave America for, I have serious reservations (The Chinese government encourages a grievance toward white people that’s not much less than BLM’s, and there are a lot of competitors per opportunity). Apparently you’re not saying that it offers meaningful liberty, which is good because saying that would be crazy.
@Candide: Coronavirus is only part of it; see above.
@Jay: I didn’t speak only of coronavirus either, see above. Also not proposing China as a place to leave for, but there is much to learn from it.
“I worry about Scott Alexander. His excellence could be harder to pursue if his worst fears about the NYT revealing his name are realized.”
Scott’s reaction to this whole thing doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If any of his patients put his real name into DuckDuckGo (especially), Bing or Yahoo, his blog identity pop up in the first few results*. How many of his patients do that vs. read the middle pages of the NYT?
As for his excellence, if after all this he still thinks the best use of his time is to spend hours upon hours of otherwise productive time naively trying to squeeze signal from the noise of social science data then turning them into long-winded posts that don’t advance his career or make him money, I’m sure he’ll find another outlet. Hopefully, he’ll use a better pseudonym this time and avoid the temptation of advertising the exact relationship of the pseudonym to his real name.
*Google is the exception. It seems to be actively protecting him, which is very nice, but also a frightening display of their power to protect or expose anyone they choose.
That’s kind of bizarre, given what we know about Google’s political disposition. It’s possible some people there just have a principled respect for voluntary anonymity, or it could be an accident, but usually google is better than the rest of the search engines by far.
Scott may have a fan a google who’s doing this. Whether it’s company policy or a single person, the fact that “objective” search is being manipulated by the #1 search engine is very worrisome.
Not the first time, either:
https://vdare.com/posts/great-moments-in-google-american-inventors-almost-all-black
Please look at the Democratic primary process. A large, diverse field of candidates who almost all fully embrace social justice ideas is whittled down to one candidate … Joe Biden. If you ranked the Democratic candidates on some sort of SJW index, he probably would have come in last. He is the weakest, least politically talented Presidential nominee in my lifetime by far.
It remains one of life’s great mysteries as to how he managed to win the nomination when no one, and I mean no one, believes in him. He is a placeholder only. Any attempt on his part to actually participate is fraught with danger. His best chance to win is to just be quiet. What does this say about the scope of SJW? (Let me guess. It’s just a huge bait and switch scheme.)
How is it possible that most posters here actually believe this is an asymmetrical problem? How can anyone seriously argue that the Trump side of this is any smaller, any less virulent, any more tolerant?
You’re right about the Trump cult, but it probably (hopefully?) goes away when he goes away. The woke revolution isn’t personality based.
The Trump side is just as bad as you assume; they just don’t have the power of the entire respected news media, social media/big tech, Hollywood, academia, professional sports, multinational corporations, etc. behind them. That’s what makes the SJWs impervious to any real challenge and extremely dangerous to freedom.
Dr. Kling’s analogy of the current situation to the red scare is the correct one, although I’d argue it’s worse now.
As for Biden, he’s either going to be diagnosed with dementia while in office or be functionally impotent without a diagnosis, so his VP will be the next president. His VP seems to be getting picked by the SJW crowd. They’ve already pressured him to limit his scope to one grievance group (female). I’m sure they’ll get at least one more grievance group in there (probably race, but perhaps sexual orientation).
If she becomes the president, they’ll have control of the entire system, save the supreme court (which they have already signaled they want to pack again) and maybe the senate.
Armin-
The power of the entire respected news media, social media/big tech, Hollywood, academia, professional sports, multinational corporations, etc… are committed to being liked and remaining successful. You do still believe in economic incentives, don’t you?
There is Black Lives Matter the phrase, and Black Lives Matter the political organization. There is AOC, “I really like her and what she stands for”, and there is buying into a remapping of the entire US economic system. And, there is a similar mood affiliation vs true believer thing going on with the Trump crowd too.
America wants to be nice, and it wants to be fair, and it wants to sell things to young people. The mean end of SJW and the mean end of Trump’s corruption of conservatism stand mostly outside of that popularity. The power exerted by those two poles are purely a measure of popular distrust in American pluralism.
Institutional power hates those two edges. If we tip in one direction or the other, it won’t be cause the establishment wanted it that way. It will be because someone saw an outside lane where they could manipulate outrage to win power and things got out of hand.
1. Most of those institutions are neither liked nor respected.
2. And that is because their economic incentives don’t line up the way you are implying. A) For many of these institutions, the economic reality is that selling inflammatory opinion to extremists is more profitable than selling mainstream opinion. B) Market power and regulatory control matter too.
In the end, I’ll vote for Trump (even though I didn’t in 2016) and against Biden for two reasons.
1. The side that’s putting forth Biden was willing to try and remove the duly elected president from office for reasons that should never have merited a second thought. That is a terrible precedent and I have a strong interest in punishing those who broke it.
2. If re-elected, Trump will continue to be restrained by these forces. On the other hand, if Biden is elected, the SJWs are in a position to dramatically further agenda, which. Sure, one can argue that maybe they wouldn’t be successful, but I’m also not going to jump off a bridge based on the chance that “maybe” I sprout wings and fly to safety.
If you look past the day-to-day nonsense of politics, the choice is clearly Trump. 4 more years of him will be 4 more years of impotent TDS. Which isn’t optimal, but is still preferable than signaling that impeachment should be used as a political weapon and giving SJWs a greater foothold on power.
Trump is the perfect foil for the left. He’s a risible parody of everything they hate.
Not only is Trump a parody of everything the left hates, he is almost entirely ineffective in thwarting the left’s agenda. The sole exception is judicial appointments, and that exception is only partial, as Gorsuch recently reminded us.
He’s literally a professional wrestling heel. Would you expect nuance from the Undertaker?
You can criticize Trump online under your own name/public profile and it will not harm your status or job prospects. It will, if anything, tend to improve them in media, academia, and most large corporations. You can tell because they all do this, all the time.
Meanwhile, even tepid criticism of BLM or other social justice golden cows can absolutely cost you your job and diminish your career prospects in media, academia, etc. People are getting purged all over the place, you must be delusional if you don’t see it.
It doesn’t necessarily say much at all, just as Trump’s victory in the primary doesn’t say as much as people make of it. You win the primary by winning the plurality, which you can do even if you’re most people’s least favorite candidate. The primary system in the US is pretty ridiculous in that respect, and precisely why the best candidate (from the standpoint of primary voters) does not always win and not much can necessarily be inferred from them. There’s just too much luck involved (e.g. being lucky enough to have other ‘lanes’ be split by similar rival candidates).
When we try to forecast the future, the smart way to make the first rough attempt without needing some sophisticated theory or validated model is simply to look at history and guess that trends that average slow and steady movement in a particular direction will continue.
Now, what is your feeling about the recent trends in levels of American excellence? Yeah, me too.
The level of pursuit of excellence isn’t something that turns on or off. It will not fall below your threshold in the remaining months of 2020, but what about 2030? 2040?
You know how they say, “personnel is policy”? Very true! But more generally, “personnel is everything”. “X personnel do X Y” for any X and Y, with a few rare exceptions. “Hawkish Personnel make Hawkish Policy”, “Dumb people make dumb decisions”, etc.
Indeed the exceptions to this rule when the results are worse than the sum of the parts are the really fascinating cases worthy of study because they illustrate some fundamental Cognitive Bias or Social Failure Mode. “What about when smart people make dumb decisions?” “What about when crowds are mad and not wise?”
You want excellence? Personnel is excellence. Excellent people make excellent things, usually concentrations of mostly excellent people incentivized to be willing to take big risks in pursuit of excellence.
If social pressures, conditions, and trends undermine or reduce the preponderance of these essential factors, the excellence level will decline and decline some more. The sanctuaries and refuges will shrink and shrink. Maybe not down to nothing, but confidence in mere non-zeroness is hardly any consolation.
At a more philosophical level, one can support excellence for the sake of excellence, progress for the sake of progress. But if it doesn’t help decent people enjoy decent lives, prosperous and free, then whether or not it will continue to be pursued above some threshold is also not much of a consolation.
Excellence is egalitarian and non-democratic. It’s exclusionary and “acting white” and is, therefore, racist and must be stamped out at all costs.
I think the last few posts can all be summed up in this.
You think this will be like the 1960s. It won’t. In the 1960s there was a Silent Majority that could contain the radicals. There is no Silent Majority anymore. This time is different.
I think excellence has continued to be possible but has been on a decline since the 1970s. Despite Cowen’s low-hanging fruit argument, my belief is that only a small number of countries have had the ability to pursue top end, world-class innovation that is both inventive and successfully implemented. The whole institution of innovation — especially in education, transportation, health care, and in producing things not bits — has gotten bogged down.
The big surprise to me is that no rising countries have stepped in. This speaks poorly for China and even Japan. Recall that even in the 19th century — long before the US was the world leader — American innovators helped develop the lightbulb, the telephone, automobiles, motion pictures, recording technology, etc., as well as pioneering electrification. Not just catch up but leading edge stuff in broad domains. In contrast most of what China is doing is playing catch up. And even Japan doesn’t seem to have built on their 1970s successes. This means that bureaucratic and socieetal changes in a few western nations have basically limited the world’s ability to push out the production frontier as quickly as before.
” In contrast most of what China is doing is playing catch up.”
Increasingly this is no longer true. Part of the problem in teasing this trend out is because corporations are global and a lot of innovation is integrated into these trans-national efforts.
That is why it may not seem as though “India” is pushing forward the frontier, but it is in the form of Indians in India working for all the big American technology companies. Of course for the really top innovative talent, corporations prefer to move those people closer to major headquarters for reasons of organizational utility, but the fact that those headquarters are located in a particular country does not mean that the country’s system or culture deserves proper ‘credit’ for the innovation happening there.
It’s more obvious in categories of production that are uni-national because of political distortions or national security reason.
So, the same as I said for Indians in India can definitely be said for Israelis in Israel, but its more obvious how Israel’s defense sector is pushing forward the frontier in those particular domains, because those are much more exclusively “in house” productions.
But China and other Northeast Asian countries like South Korea are indeed at the cutting edge of many technological sectors. Samsung is of course a dominant global brand, and putting aside the issue of embedded backdoors, Huawei smartphones are genuinely top-notch.
It’s already been 10 days since the Chinese military started *administering* the vaccine from CanSino Biologics, which already finished the first phase of clinical trials, and uses an innovative ‘hybrid’ approach. Yes, the CAN is for Canada, with which they started collaborating back in 2013, but as I understand from reporting this recent work is domestic.
An old common approach was to use disabled particles of the same virus for which one is trying to produce immunity, but this is risky and doesn’t work for many virus species. Another approach would be to use the virus genetics to have other organisms mass produce the antigens in a lab, then isolate, purify, and administer those.
CanSino’s approach is to use a common cold adenovirus for which we already know that the disabled particles work to produce successful vaccinations and immune reactions. Then they engineered *that* to produce the cv19 spike protein antigen all over it’s surface. Then they disabled those virus particles and used those to make a vaccine. So far, it seems safe and shows some promise in producing antibody responses, so, fingers crossed.
But the point is, we’re actually going to start getting actual results from their evaluations and testing of mass-administration in just a few weeks. It is entirely conceivable that by the fall, millions of people around the world will start to get vaccinated with this Chinese-developed vaccine.
If you ask me who owns the future, I’ll ask you who wins the races.
There was a time when ideology kept many good minds free from the control of the period’s universities. Those thus freed of the limitations transformed the world. The technophobic universities came around and often led the incremental development of that leap forward. But in many ways that is petering out after the early 20th century inflection point.
“Newcomen’s religion had consequences greater than absence from a local census. Dissenters, including Baptists, Presbyterians, and others, were as a class, excluded from universities after 1660, and either apprenticed, or learned their science from dissenting academies.”
“At the same time that he chartered the world’s first scientific society, Charles II had created an entire generation of dissenting intellectuals uncontrolled by his kingdom’s ever more technophobic universities.”
p29, Rosen, Willam, ‘The Most Powerful Idea in the World’
My previous comment made me think of his passage from Henry Adams’ ‘History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson’:
“The man who in the year 1800 ventured to hope for a new era in the coming century, could lay his hand on no statistics that silenced doubt. The machinery of production showed no radical difference from that familiar to ages long past. The Saxon farmer of the eighth century enjoyed most of the comforts known to Saxon farmers in the eighteenth. The eorls and ceorls of Offa and Ecgbert could not read or write, and did not receive a weekly newspaper with such information as newspapers in that age could supply; yet neither their houses, their clothing, their food and drink, their agricultural tools and methods, their stock, nor their habits were so greatly altered or improved by time that they would have found much difficulty in accommodating their lives to that of their descendants in the eighteenth century. ”
By 1830, the world was much different even in agriculture with rapid development in modern plows and mechanization.
I have somewhere on my hard drive, an academic paper investigating improvements of the type of hearth fireplace in many homes from the 1920s. The last real improvements in kerosene lanterns happened in the 1920s. But by the 1930s, electric light was spreading with the power distribution and home heating (and cooking) was shifting toward oil, gas and even electricity. And the shift in Society mores/dress in the 1920s is well known
The Longitude Prize was enacted in 1714, setting off a period of development and accompanying exploration.
So I’m wondering if there is something about the 2nd/3rd decade of a century that sparks an inflection point in, at least Western civilization? Does it all seem so chaotic because psychically we are reaching that point in the 21st century?
Obviously, this is just casual speculation, but it does seem change comes 20-30 years into a century with the remainder spent sorting out the disruptions and shifting power.
The pursuit of excellence is a tricky thing. As James Thurber once wrote “Anyone can merely hunt the (imaginary) Thorny Boar of Borythorn.”
Excellence requires communities of practice. You don’t get Socrates and Plato without the Sophists. So the fact that there are geniuses today who can pursue excellence is no guarantee that there will continue to be geniuses in the future. The real action is in the education of the young, using education in its broadest sense. I am not very optimistic, though I would blame social media and smartphones more than the left, though of course the left’s resurgence in the West is largely due to those technologies.
This: “communities of practice.” A focus on establishing these, and the conditions necessary for them to exist, will be challenging and necessary.
I do not agree that the resurgence of the left is technological in origin – although it is certainly enabled by technology. Rather, if evil is metaphysically impotent, then the work of the mind that being corrupted. Furthermore, the origins of what we recognize as this “Long March” are philosophical. Thus the challenge and the necessity.
Stop supporting your destroyers.
Unfortunately there are entire fields that have locked out significant portions of the population. To be a social worker you have to subscribe to a hard left code of ethics: https://www.socialworkers.org/About/Ethics/Code-of-Ethics/Code-of-Ethics-English
The MCAT has been designed to screen out sane people with questions about “whether the wage gap between men and women is the result of bigotry, sexism, racism, or biological differences (no other options are provided, and the “correct” answer is sexism). Another asks whether the “lack of minorities such as African Americans or Latinos/Latinas among university faculty members” is due to symbolic racism, institutional racism, hidden racism, or personal bias (the correct answer is institutional racism). Yet another asks test-takers to select from a list of debatable definitions for “the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender.’ “” (See Washington Examiner article “The Politicization of the MCAT
Why should we care about the opinions of aspiring doctors?”
By Devorah Goldman
April 8, 2018).
And unless a climatologist exhibits strident conformity to “the consensus” their chance of employment is nil. Federal employment is largely restricted to leftists due to the career management’s politicization of hiring decisions.
For many of the most excellent there is nowhere at all to go. The most they can hope for is to that if they delete their entire social media history, and avoid saying as little as possible about everything they might slip through. The best advice parents can give their children of promise is to never say anything political at all, on or offline, because there is no way of telling how it will be reported to those in a position to deny applicants.