Capitalism is described as a “form of power and oppression,” alongside “patriarchy,” “racism,” “white supremacy” and “ableism.” Capitalism and capitalists appear as villains several times in the document.
The document to which he refers is an “ethnic studies model curriculum” proposed for California public schools. Read the whole piece.
Looking ahead, I see several posts scheduled where I link to stories of the academic hard left and the backlash that is forming against it.
The curriculum documents are comedy gold, thank you 🙂
On a more serious note, the WSJ article includes an image of elementary school children in an opinion piece critical of a proposed high-school level curriculum. It was probably unintentional but it is misleading. Ridiculous ideas do not need slanted coverage.
I wonder what 17-year old me would have thought of the course overview while picking classes. I’m sure I would have giggled endlessly just like I do now but I wonder if I would have made an exception to my no-useless-classes rule just for the comedy value.
In terms of the damaging effects of this curriculum, I’m of the general opinion that education is more about ranking and sorting than it is about transforming students. In terms of a sorting mechanism for identifying unproductive people, this course sounds like the ultimate honey-trap, comedy enthusiasts withstanding 🙂
Maybe the California economics classes can be modified to teach about the deadweight loss, including as an example taxing the population in order to reach useless propaganda.
I sent all my kids to the best the Ivy League has to offer and they came out well to the left of Obama. My oldest grandkid is only in 7th grade and she’s already well indoctrinated. Don’t laugh at this stuff, it’s working.
The thing that alarms me is the statement that “free speech is protected in America–but not hate speech.” That assertion, when coming from a college graduate, alarms and angers me. I can’t even keep calm when trying to follow up on it in a friendly conversation.
Uhhh … I see why we all look askance at this kind of thing, but —
Let’s suppose we’re reading a novel written by some American Negro author in the 19th Century. We wish to discuss its literary merit, its value as record of historical experience, its acceptance by readers, etc. Can we do while totally ignoring the economic and political circumstances of blacks during that period, without mentioning that banks and state governments were dominated by whites, mostly inimical to or uninterested in blacks? That the higher positions in government and academia and the legal profession were almost entirely held by whites, who had no intentions of changing this completely sensible god-ordained social system?
Should we read books about the lives of combat-maimed ex-soldiers or disabled children without realizing that such people will never fare well in the Olympics? Should we contemplate politicians arising in early 20th Century Boston without understanding why their ancestors left Ireland for the slums of America, rather than landed estates in Suffolk? Why do we read John Adams letters written during the Revolutionary War and afterwards to Abigail and wonder at her influence upon him which might have affected his actions and thence our present condition, rather than the letters she might have written to him while she served in our nation legislatures?
And so on. Is there in fact some way to study ethnic matters with doesn’t require us to consider explicitly the actual workings of “capitalism” and “ageism” and “white privilege” and “patriarchy” and other of these left-wing appellations we find so insulting?
Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is about is a pretty fantastic exploration of the origins of ethnicity (as a physical anthropologist would define it) traced through a linguistic lens.
Decent book as I recall though it’s been a few years since I first read Gun, Germs, and Steel. My recollection is that Diamond was less interested in linguistics than geography. Why did Europeans show up on New Guinea’s shores with all that bling rather than vice versa? Eurasia stretches out east-and-west and the Americas from south-to-north and how does this influence the spread of agriculture? That kind of thing.
That said … I think you’re evading the implications of my comment. I invite you to write, let’s say, an academic tome on the rise and spread of Afro-Americans using the tools of physical anthropology. Explain the appearance of blacks along the eastern seaboard of the continent beginning in the 17th century. Describe the physical characteristics of these early populations. with statistics. After excavation of the settlements of these peoples, provide a chronology of their spread to the south and west and their relative scarcity in the northern half of the northern American continent. Explain the social structure of modern American blacks and how it continues to evolve.
Garnish this with as much statistics as possible and references of Carbon-14 dating and genetic analyses and so on. Do not, repeat NOT, mention the existence of Caucasian peoples, AmerIndians, Mexico or Canada or other national boundaries. Do not mention “red-lining” by commercial banks when discussing urban settlement patterns. Do not mention that neighborhood wealth may influence the quality of children’s education. Etc. Etc. You’re being SCIENTIFIC here, after all, so you’ve got to do it all without reference to that lousy left-wing pseudoscience and liberal arm waving.
Get to it, guy! Make all us old white guys proud!
Part IV of “Guns, Germs, and Steel” covers the ethno-linguistic aspects I was thinking about. The table of contents has:
PART FOUR AROUND THE WORLD IN SIX CHAPTERS
CHAPTER 15 YALI’S PEOPLE
The histories of Australia and New Guinea
CHAPTER 16 HOW CHINA BECAME CHINESE
The history of East Asia
CHAPTER 17 SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA
The history of the Austronesian expansion
CHAPTER 18 HEMISPHERES COLLIDING
The histories of Eurasia and the Americas compared
CHAPTER 19 HOW AFRICA BECAME BLACK
The history of Africa
CHAPTER 20 WHO ARE THE JAPANESE?
The history of Japan
I can’t think of anything more pertinent to “ethnic studies”. It sounds like ethnicity for you begins and ends with Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and literary criticism is the foundation of critical thinking.
Decent points, there’s some ethnic history here. I did say it’d been a while since I last reread the book. And yes, I do think of “ethnic studies” as being mostly sociology rather than anthropology (and rather boring, to be honest). If we’re talking about “capitalism”, for example, we’re dealing with the last couple of centuries, not things occurring thousands of years ago.
Let me rephrase my major point, since I still think you’re missing it. It’s probably impossible to deal with the subject matter of most ethnic studies courses without recourse to the things Arnold is objecting to. You need the underlying concepts if not those particular labels.
No, Mike, I’m not missing the point you are making. I’m just trying to engage constructively in hope that you will revisit your core assumptions on your own.
I don’t think you would pass an idealogical Turing test, for instance, being able to re-state Kling’s position in a way that he would agree represents his views.
You are espousing the views that Kling identifies as Liberal/Progressive in his “Three Languages of Politics” framework; the view that focuses on oppression/exploitation.
If you start off with the assumption that capitalism equals exploitation then I’d ask why left-of-center Robert Wright focuses on the importance of trade in the evolution of civilization in his book “Non-Zero” (i.e. positive-sum)? I’d point to Ian Morris’ “Why the West Rules. For Now” in understanding why the Industrial Revolution was a key turning point using his Social Development Index (or maybe something by Vaclav Smil).
If you believe oppression/racism is ignored then why is it such a focus of popular science writers like Nicholas Wade (“A Troublesome Inheritance”) and libertarian-leaning Matt Ridley in “The Agile Gene”/”Nature via Nurture”?
I’m not claiming that all problems have to be seen through a scientific lens but I don’t trust entire fields of studies (e.g. sociology) where the practitioners write beautifully but appear to suffer from innumeracy.
Your mistaken in characterizing what Arnold is objecting to are mere concepts; they’re claims (perhaps dishonestly presenter as concepts). How can you discuss the immiseration of the urban black underclass without discussing the role parasitic usurious Jewry in using the financial institutions they controlled to exploit black gentiles? Well, for one, we can question whether the hypothesis loaded into the concept of ‘usurious jewry’ is a sound one.
Bringing up red lining to try to justify treating capitalism as inherently racist is like pointing to an instance where a Jewish banker exploited some black borrowers to vindicate the financial anti-Semitic narrative. Frivolous attempts to infer essential relationships between features based on particular events does, of course, explain the existence of many such ‘concepts’ with erroneous assumptions baked into them.
Far from being a “form of power and oppression,” capitalism has been a source of freedom from want and a powerful force for ending patriarchy, racism, white supremacy, and ableism.
The actual effects of capitalism include:
– The elimination of any excuse for imperialism. As Adam Smith observed in “The Wealth of Nations,” conquering and maintaining control over foreign territory cost far more than can ever be extracted from that territory. People don’t produce as much at the point of a bayonet as they do when they benefit by their production.
– The elimination of any excuse for slavery. Smith also pointed out that slave labor is far less efficient than is free labor. Again, people produce more when they benefit by their production than they do under threat of punishment.
– Raising women’s status to that of equality with men. In capitalist societies, brains are far more important than brawn, and women are more than capable of competing with men in that realm.
– Establishing significant penalties for discriminating against people because of skin color, religion, age, or physical impairments. For example, southern bus companies pushed back against Jim Crow laws requiring blacks to sit in the back of the bus. Angering customers is bad for business as is having to leave seats unfilled in one section or the other because there are too few black or white riders.
Not to start a fight, but I think you’re viewing capitalism through late 20th century lenses, and confusing economics with social realities. Circa 1900, there would have been plenty of people admiring capitalism who took patriarchy, racism, and white supremacy for granted. Anti-semiticism was culturally smart amongst the English and European upper classes at the time — largely effected, one might hope, but it’s easy to see how the attitudes of aristocrats trickled downward to the general public in Germany and elsewhere. As for “ableism”, I doubt the concept had even been formulated at the time. Pretty much the same for sexism — I think you’d be hard put to find many 1900-vintage economists arguing that women ought to be educated as well as men and steered into careers in law and medicine and science. Affluence made the difference, not capitalism.
But full marks for noticing that southern bus companies didn’t invent back-of-the-bus seating for blacks. That did take state legislatures. I think Jim Crow had complications we’ve decided to overlook anymore. There must be a book there … or a thesis for someone majoring in ethnic studies.
Phenomena can exist even if people aren’t aware of them and even if they haven’t yet applied a name to them. Prejudice against people with handicaps existed long before the “ableism” term was coined. Read, for example, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
Free markets create incentives that, over time, change the way in which people think and act whether or not they are aware of the incentives. In a free market, prejudice is costly. That was as true in 1900 as it was in the late 20th Century and as it still is today.
Yes, but ….
Actually, I completely agree with your points.
What I’m mumbling about is that prejudices can exist without being perceived. Let me give two examples: (1) Are mentally handicapped people “fairly” treated by society? Do we have occupations in which say peoples with Downs’ syndrome can make a decent living solely by their own efforts? I don’t quite see this. Should we tweak some laws and give some tax breaks to employers who can match numerous retarded or severely autistic individuals to high paying jobs? I sort of think the answer ought to be “yes” but I’m at a loss for how to actually accomplish it. (2) How much slack should we cut for people seeking employment after serving prison terms? In principle, we might argue that a former drug dealer could be a perfectly decent beginning aeronautical engineer … but something in me goes eek eek EEK ! at the prospect. Is this entirely due to my flawed understanding of economics?
Affluence made the difference, not capitalism
It boggles me that you seem to think the two are unrelated.
My thought is, circa 1800 there weren’t a whole lot of positions in society in which women — less educated as a rule and physically weaker than men — could find employment which would have brought them on their own into the middle or upper classes. By the middle of the 20th Century, affluence and changing social attitudes had made it commonplace for women to have at least a high school education, and there were occupations available to some of them which made use of that education rather than sheer brute strength — grocery clerking, as an example, or desk work in insurance firms. Do we give the credit to capitalism, or do we see this as a world wide phenomenon, even in places like the Soviet Union?
Where did the mid-twentieth century’s affluence come from? Even in the USSR, much of it came from the West. Many of the USSR’s early factories were built by western companies. During WWII, the U.S. supplied the USSR with munitions that, while a small fraction of U.S. production, represented something like a quarter of the USSR’s GDP. After WWII, Stalin had East German factories dismantled and trucked into the Soviet Union. Moreover, much of the technology that increase global wealth was invented and developed in the West.
@Mike: It’s true that technology* gave rise to considerable increases in affluence worldwide. OTOH, it has had by far the greatest effect in places that were at least mostly capitalist, whether formally (the U.S., western Europe) or de-facto (China since the mid 80s). The fundamental economic system (i.e. the system for organizing production) of a country is likely to be a dominant influence on its affluence (or lack thereof).
*by which I mostly mean the prodigious expenditure of fossil fuels in increasingly sophisticated ways, but I digress.
This comment seems like one half of a motte and bailey routine. You posit some simple, straightforward questions like “how can you study American history without acknowledging white privilege?” while ignoring or minimizing the way the concept of white privilege is actually used and applied, and how it has has evolved in an irrational, cynical way meant to give a scientific or academic veneer to political goals and rhetoric. For example, if you look at the wikipedia page for white privilege, you see all manner of idiocy, but here’s one of the tastiest bits:
White privilege functions differently in different places. A person’s white skin will not be an asset to them in every conceivable place or situation. White people are also a global minority, and this fact affects the experiences they have outside of their home areas. Nevertheless, some people who use the term “white privilege” describe it as a worldwide phenomenon, resulting from the history of colonialism by white Western Europeans. One author states that American white men are privileged almost everywhere in the world, even though many countries have never been colonized by Western Europeans.[60][61]
In some accounts, global white privilege is related to American exceptionalism and hegemony.
This is why I think “status inequality” is so much better a term to use than “privilege”. “Status inequality” is much more neutral, and can apply to different ethnic groups depending on the context, not just whites.
Teachers professor unions dunnit.
“The curriculum describes subprime loans as an attack on home buyers with low incomes rather than a misguided attempt by the government to help such home buyers.”
Because, lesson one, the world is divided into heroes and villains. And these villains are evil on purpose.
Whereas, belonging to the league of heroes, your policies will never have any unintended or untoward consequences. Good policies are good regardless of anything that merely happens in this empirical, human realm.
Never doubt your good intentions. Don’t allow deniers to undermine your self-confidence, or gaslight you with facts. Deplatform them. Cancel them.
Being pure-hearted means that anything that goes wrong in practice with the implementation of your plan is the fault of wreckers, saboteurs, outsiders, demons.
“The curriculum perpetuates the myth that the Indians had the same values as present-day ecologists.”
Using fake quotes. Because cultural sensitivity and being pro-diversity doesn’t require any factual knowledge of anything outside the narrow limits of your prejudice. Just nationalist mythmaking about the golden age before the serpent entered the garden.
“The curriculum lauds bilingual education, but it omits that this program–in which teachers conducted class mostly in Spanish until seventh grade–failed in California and was disliked by much of the Latino community.”
But cultural genocide. But erasure. But linguistic extermination. But the negation of my existence as a Latinx survivor of imperialism.
“This curriculum explicitly aims at encouraging students to become ‘agents of change, social justice organizers and advocates.'”
Blind followers, knowing nothing. Cannon fodder.
Ah, so much to do and the week is just started!
RAD: You are espousing the views that Kling identifies as Liberal/Progressive Guilty as charged, with some reservation — I don’t view myself as particularly liberal, for example, but I’m willing to play at it. I’ve never taken a course in ethnic studies and I suspect I’d be bored stiff if I were in one. I have taken a batch of anthropology and archaeology courses however, and read a batch of history.
My viewpoint here has been that ethnic studies might be of interest to some people — if I were a black novelist for example, I’d probably build up a considerable curiosity about previous black novelists, and I can imagine a linguistics prof wondering whether “Black English” has links to 18th Century African languages (I seem to recall the current notion is that Black English traces back to the language used by plantation slave drivers, many of them lower class English immigrants themselves, speaking provincial dialects). So ethnic studies have legitimate grounds for existing, and the next issue is how do you discuss ethnic issues without putting them in some sort of perspective, so you can view them from some reasonably objective position? And that seems to lead inevitably to concepts like ageism and sexism and white superiority and all the other concepts that so infuriate conservatives.
The funny thing is, monstrous and false and nonexistent as those foolishly invented liberal notions like ageism and ableism and patriarchy and might be, conservatives certainly have picked up the ideas themselves quite quickly, with reasonable agreement on their meaning. I find that fascinating. (And it provokes an amusing Platonic-tinged question — if ageism for example is a totally nonexistent phenomenon, and we all agree on its characteristics, might we say instead that it does exist?)
Mike, most of the readers/commenters here are libertarian. Even if they don’t self-identify as such, they all seem to have a deep appreciation that liberty includes economic freedom. Without economic freedom we don’t have human flourishing. Kling chose a quote that emphasized the demonization of capitalism (i.e. economic freedom).
If you want an honest engagement with libertarians, understand that we see a deep connection between economic freedom and human wellbeing.
Continuing on ….. more from RAH (and others),
If you start off with the assumption that capitalism equals exploitation No … I think some capitalists are or were exploiters — slavers, crony capitalists, rentiers, and so on. Historically some of them were, so why deny the possibility?
Let me notice that some capitalists are red haired and left handed; does that mean I think ALL capitalists are red haired and left handed? I don’t.
I think we’ve got an identification issue here. What is indeed Capitalism? Barter and Trade have been around for a while, probably since humans started to deal with each other peacefully. Markets and Trade as formal relationships have been around not quite so long, but probably as long as we’ve built cities — certainly since King Croesus started minting coins back about 500 BC. Ditto taxes. Long distance trading, Interest and Usury would have come not much later. Piracy, state intervention aimed at suppressing pirates, and other links between businesses and states featured strongly in Roman history …
So we’ve had non-socialistic economic systems quite some while. Were they capitalistic? I’d not say so. As might most libertarians, I’d think I’d draw a line between the sort of thing Adam Smith conceived of, with minimal connections between the state and business enterprises, and the Mercantilism that previous political thinkers had described. Not that Mercantilism was completely wrong — it was the fact that governments and markets were thoroughly intermingled in early Modern Europe — but the notion that colonies were desirable simply as markets for “home” industrialists seems to have been disproven by events.
However, 1776 was a few years ago. The Industrial Revolution wasn’t even a dream then. World population was smaller. The Arts and Sciences were puny by some standards. Life was simpler …. and often brutal. There were wars in the age when Capitalism began and afterwards. There was slavery. There was conquest and looting of ancient cultures by ruthless freebooters.
I’m not here to tell you the Belgians who carved out a chunk of Africa as an empire of slaves for King Leopold were capitalists, or the Englishmen who fought a war with China so they could trade Opium for Tea. I am here to say THEY saw themselves as capitalists, or at least as participants in capitalist economies, and it’s damned silly to pretend they all had 21st Century liberal social ideals.
The curriculum’s inference is that capitalism is inherently a “form of power and oppression,” and not that some capitalists (like some red heads) were exploiters. That is the claim that we’re arguing against, and that is the claim that you seem to be intent on either obfuscating or defending.
I humbly apologize if people here think I’m arguing that capitalism per se is “a form of power and oppression.” OTOH, seriously, people l– what kind of nut would I have to be to hang around on this website to make that argument! Arnold brings up interesting ideas to think about, some of which seem to merit a comment, and really that’s the whole thing.
This is exactly why the defenders of free markets and capitalism ought to be on the side of “social justice”, in some sense. To prove that capitalism is NOT inherently linked to racism and oppression. Both by providing the theory of why free markets and racial equality go along with each other, and by in word and deed supporting the societal efforts to raise the status of marginalized ethnic groups to that of equality with whites. There need to be credible voices out there to counter the far left’s argument that capitalism is innately racist.
“and by in word and deed supporting the societal efforts to raise the status of marginalized ethnic groups to that of equality with whites.”
What efforts are those?
How would it be done?
Why exactly are these groups “marginalized”?
Status is linked to desirable things. Usefulness. Good behavior. Etc.
If minorities are less useful and behave worse…how can you make their status equal?
The only answers seems to be:
1) Blame whites for the state of minorities (lower the status of whites).
2) Claim that things we assign high status to shouldn’t be high status (Superintended of NYC schools claiming that “merit” is a concept of white supremacy).
But we all know that whites didn’t cause that state of minority behavior (The Bell Curve) and that the things we assign status to today are assigned status for good reasons (people performing well at highly productive roles makes the world better). Are we to declare doctors should have less status because there are too many white doctors?
To prove that capitalism is NOT inherently linked to racism and oppression.
It seems to me that the Asian Tiger economies prove at least the first point. Many highly-functioning capitalist societies exist with (practically) no racial diversity, which is fairly compelling evidence that racism is not an essential ingredient in capitalism.
“Oppression” can mean anything, and therefore means nothing.
Lastly from RAD: I don’t trust entire fields of studies (e.g. sociology) where the practitioners write beautifully but appear to suffer from innumeracy.
My perception differs. Innumeracy struck me as the basic flaw in cultural anthropology — the notion that everyone in a society shared the same underlying beliefs and patterns of thought, which a perceptive observer might record. Sociology, as least as practiced this past century, was richer in that it saw society as composed of different groups of people.
You bring up interesting points, though they have nothing to do with the proposed California school curriculum. Still, I don’t see any conflict between capitalism and jobs for “other-abled” people or for former felons. As to the latter, we’ve already seen companies hiring ex-cons as the job market has tightened.
In his “Culture” trilogy (which pre-dated “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and did it better), Thomas Sowell related a story that might apply to both ex-cons and the other-abled. In the 19th Century, some businesses refused to hire Irishmen because of the perception that they were quarrelsome and drank a lot. While some Irishmen were, in fact, quarrelsome and did, in fact drink a lot, the stereotype did not fit all, or even most, Irish immigrants. However, there was a cost to determining who was whom, and the least expensive method of avoiding hiring someone who might be a disruptive influence on the workforce was to simply not hire anyone from Ireland.
This created an arbitrage opportunity for those who could tell the difference. And, in fact, enterprising Irishmen would hire gangs of their countrymen at lower than the going rates and bid for jobs. With lower labor costs, these entrepreneurs easily found work. In the process, they employed otherwise unemployable workers and helped destroy the stereotype that all Irishmen were drunks and brawlers.
Interesting, but getting ex-felons and others employed isn’t actually my concern in that comment. What I wanted to say was that we don’t have a simple one word label for the reluctance employers have to hire ex-cons, or any simply formula for getting them hired with satisfactory results. And as a result, most of us fail to see the employment of former criminals as a Big Problem demanding that we run about and scream and holler — it’s an almost invisible prejudice, even to people who pride themselves on noticing social ills. I find THAT interesting.
The prejudice that is trying to be solved for isn’t “insufficiently affordable underwriting techniques”.
The prejudice people fight today is “totally accurate underwriting techniques”. Once you can accurately predict who isn’t going to be a good employee, it turns out that certain groups (convicts, races, sexualities, etc) are full of more problem people or lack many superstars. This is what’s deemed unacceptable. Capitalism can’t solve this problem because the only way to solve it is to reward people status for something other than their merit, which is the opposite of capitalism.
P.S. Ex-con programs are pretty terrible. My friend who works on roofs once got a “free assitant” (paid for by government) to come on the job with him one day as part of an ex-con program. He was high on drugs and at one point fell asleep on the roof and my friend had to grab him to prevent him from sliding off the roof. This almost caused my friend to fall off the roof himself. Lot of help that was.
It’s kind of the same with the disabled. My friend worked at a company staffed by the disabled and it relied heavily on government subsidy to stay in the black. In order for them to pretend to be doing productive jobs others had to be taxed so what they earned could be transferred to another.
Depressing Fact: The convict program was trying to pull its money from defunding the disabled program. Since at the end of the day all of these subsidized mane work projects rely on a larger society of productive people to fund and the funding isn’t infinite.