33 thoughts on “Kids Today”

1. Adam Smith would offer a synthesis of (2) and (3) – “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”

   We’ve been lucky because all the hell-in-a-handbasket going has been getting bailed-out (so far) by continuous improvements in the sectors that actually keep the lights on and the economic engines of commerce and technological innovation humming.

   From that perspective, the most important thing in the world is to keep politics focused on other, comparatively minor or inconsequential things, and from killing this golden goose which keeps laying these golden eggs and bailing us out.

   • It’s a good point. If innovation and progress get swamped out by mediocrity, safety, and mindless plattitudes, then what exactly would we expect to happen?

     Things might not necessarily decay to a large degree. The worst effects would be all the great innovations that weren’t FDA approved and that hadn’t made it through the teachers unions.

     • One ‘Straussian’ theory of democratic politics is that it is of course a thoroughly awful system for producing good government, but it also happens to be a great system for bolstering the robustness of the ‘legitimacy’ of the system. So the trick is to have a minimally democratic system (in the end results) that nevertheless is perceived as maximally democratic (in the distracting show of an entertaining periodic circus of procedures and politics, which captures the passionate attention of a certain class of people just like sports does for others.)

       That is, for a functional and stably governed society, one has to neutralize most of the predictable excesses and follies, but in a way which doesn’t undermine the legitimacy too much (i.e. just come out and overtly admit that technocrat insiders and industry lobbies of various kinds who really makes the important decisions and run the government. Better to keep that obscure. Also, there must be cheerleading, and discouragement of anyone attempting to question the wisdom of democracy or to notice and point out we don’t really have one.)

       However, since democratic politics always requires something to argue about and it’s too hard to keep the illusion going without also opening oneself up to the real possibility of having to placate some new radical populist movement, the question is whether you can channel those instincts and divert them into arguing about things that, to be sure, are still possibly harmful, but they are comparably less immediately destructive than some of the ideological points which we know (alas, from awful experience) will lead to rapid catastrophe or even horrible atrocity.

       The most obvious failure modes of democracy are when the majority uses its numerical power to achieve power in order to crush the minority. Sometimes this is ethnic, but in our day with many countries in some form of financial precariousness or distress, the biggest risk seems to be economic and some version of brain-dead hard Socialism and economic leftism bordering on Communism. If a real Communist party come to power in such circumstances, it could really mess with the really important stuff of stability, wealth creation, and innovation, and flush your country down the toilet.

       That’s a big reason why all the Very Serious People (especially in Europe) are really, really freaked out about – and completely despise – the Syriza party in Greece and what they’ve been doing lately. Among other things, the surprise of their success threatens to undermine the long-standing consensus of “Technocratic Social Democracy” with just enough redistribution to keep people from going Communist, and just enough democracy to keep people from having their political domination instincts triggered and rebelling against their systems of government.

       In comparison to a real possibility of a non-technocratic Communist party coming to party and actually implementing its seductive, but predictably disastrous, political program, I’d much rather a society’s axis of debate (inescapable that there will always be one) be about something like the ideological of sexuality or something. That may also prove, in time, to lead to policies that prove to be big mistakes, but it’s bound to evolve slower and there is always the possibility of either adaptation and adjustment to mitigate the damage, or even reversal later on.

       That’s a least-worst, marvelous diversion from the nuclear core generator of a society’s welfare. But with things like Communism, the fall comes to quick, and then the meltdown.

2. When government spending and the hidden cost of regulations consume almost half of GDP, and when freedom of speech and freedom of association are under constant attack, I’d say that the nation has already gone to hell in a handbasket. Or, to change the metaphor, the water has been getting hotter for decades, but we stupid frogs didn’t have the sense to get out before it started to boil — which it has.

3. Your view on driver’s licenses sounds bizarrely archaic to a yuppie urbanite. What freedom would a car give compared to chatting online/viewing things on the internet? Why get used to using a car when you won’t be able to afford one and/or won’t need one in a larger city?

   Hearing an old person complain kids don’t know who Winston Churchill is also sounds bizarre. The author was born in 1955. When he was 15, World War 2 happened 25 years before. For someone that’s 15 in 2015, World War 2 happened 70 years ago. The comparable time for David Gelernter is 1900. I wonder if, when he was 15, David Gelernter knew anything about the Boer War, which happened roughly around 1900 and was certainly an important world event. Or, say, the Boxer Rebellion. It sounds way too much like a 50-something mother lamenting her teen daughter doesn’t know any of her favorite boy bands.

   I also have no idea what it means for Universities to have *more* left-leaning people now than previously. I have no baseline for university faculty political leanings 30 years ago, but is the argument honestly that they’ve changed that much? It can’t possibly be that they’ve changed across the board, in all departments, and on all topics. That claim is far too expansive to be believable without some actual data. So what, exactly, is being claimed?

   • While earning a car in an urban area is an expensive luxury, having a drivers license and being able to take an excursion outside the urban area or rent a van to move bulk items around is valuable.

     David Gelernter mentioned Teddy Roosevelt right after Churchill, and Teddy Roosevelt was right in the 1900 time frame. David Gelernter also mentioned Beethoven, so he is not just talking about the historic figures of his youth.

     I agree that measure of leftism and “mindless leftism” is undefined.

   • Yes,
     There is a certain “these changes in society are bad and all due to the lack of respect for my pet theory” to this argument.
     Personally, I blame deregulation!

   • The reason that Churchill is one of the ten most important people, geopolitically anyway, of the twentieth century is World War Two, and perhaps the Iron Curtain speech that so helped set the tone for the early Cold War. It’s not his penchant for aphorisms, or his History of the English Speaking Peoples – however more interesting they make him individually. So if history is important at all, then certainly Ivy League students ought to know who he is, and your Boer War analogy is spurious. Next you’ll be saying it doesn’t matter if an elite student doesn’t know who Abraham Lincoln because, if so, he probably doesn’t know who James K. Polk and Zachary Taylor are. Or that if he doesn’t know Frederick Douglass that’s ok because then he probably doesn’t know who Nat Turner or John Brown is. Just say history is bunk and be done with it, or at least debate that idea.

     • My point is that history 10 years before when someone was born is a lot closer to home than history 65 years before someone was born. So Gelernter probably had more than ample opportunities growing up to hear about Churchill in conversation, while that will happen much less so with people born in 2000. That’s what I meant by it sounding like a grown-up complaining a teens don’t know anything about the gronw-up’s favorite bands.

       I’m not really sure why I, or most people, really, should care about the top ten people, geopolitically, of the 20th century? I’m also not even sure Churchill belongs on that list, but that’s another argument. In any case, me saying “the top ten people, geopolitically, of the 20th century doesn’t seem all that important” isn’t the same as dismissing all of history. I’d rather someone not have a clue who England’s PM during WWII was, but have a firm grip on how the war started and some of its high points and low points.

       • I think you’re being too literal. Gelernter was mentioned Churchill as an example of the very ignorance you’re describing.

       • “My point is that history 10 years before when someone was born is a lot closer to home than history 65 years before someone was born. So Gelernter probably had more than ample opportunities growing up to hear about Churchill in conversation, while that will happen much less so with people born in 2000.’

         So that’s how Gerlernter learned who Washington or Lincoln or Robert E. Lee was? Or Shakespeare? Way back in the ancient history of 1965, when Gerlernter would have been a boy, those figures were a lot further back in time than 65 years.

         “n any case, me saying “the top ten people, geopolitically, of the 20th century doesn’t seem all that important” isn’t the same as dismissing all of history. I’d rather someone not have a clue who England’s PM during WWII was, but have a firm grip on how the war started and some of its high points and low points.”

         So someone could understand World War II without knowing who Hitler was; understand the high and low points of the war without knowing the names of at least a few allied and axis commanders?

   • As far as the universities are concerned the entrenched leftism of the professorate l would imagine peaked out sometime ago. As to the facticity of left dominance among university faculty I think there is no dispute of that; only differing explanations of it.

     What has certainly increased on college campuses is the aggressiveness of the left in college administration, and in governing the social atmosphere on campus – safe zones, trigger warnings, and such as that.

   • “sounds bizarrely archaic to a yuppie urbanite”

     Isn’t this a pretty good summary?

4. When (and if) things go really bad I expect them to go bad quickly. How long did it take Cuba to go from the being the richest of Caribbean nations to being one of the poorest? And didn’t Venezuela fall hard and fast? Zimbabwe had troubles, but was livable, but quickly became unlivable.

5. “doesn’t know who Beethoven is.”
   What does it even mean? To know he was a musician, to be really acquainted with his oeuvre, to have heard the name, to know in which country he was born? I really doubt that many teenagers were interested in Beethoven in 1960 or whenever Professor Gelernter believes the Fall of Man took place. It is silly to equate mere brand recall (and for someone without musical training it is mere brand recall) with love of the Western Civilization. However, if it makes the shallow feel better, all freshmen could be issued a leaflet with the names of and concise information on, say, 50 icons of the Western Civilization pedantic professors pretend they care about.

   • Everyone who is educated knows Beethoven was a Saint Bernard who starred in many classic 80s and 90s family friendly comedies.
     That today’s kids don’t know this is a crime against culture.

     • I knew the name was familiar, I knew it was the name of someone important!

     • I thought he was some dude that bill and ted found on their excellent adventure. And to be clear, I thought it was pronounced beeth oven, not Bait Hoven.

       All very confusing.

   • It matters because the sort of expectation you dismiss as brand recall, while only the basis, is certainly the necessary basis for a common intellectual culture implicit in the only history representative government has ever had in this world. And this is other than the fact that the expectation of such even basic “recall” knowledge lays the groundwork for those who wish to go beyond mere “brand recall” to a deeper appreciation. Knowledge for the uneducated must start somewhere, and from that axiom it follows there are standards about what one is expected to know, and someone must decide them. So dismiss history in all its forms if you will, but if it matters those standards apply. So argue with Gerlernter on that question if you have an actual point to make, and don’t just enjoy sneering at him as a fogey.

     • Non-sequitur. Just because standards are necessary, it doesn’t mean yours or Mr. Gerlernter’s are the right ones (oh! they didn’t come to hold the same views on the Bible I hold, they are not religious enough, their parents didn’t make them read the Bible enough–were this kind of petty nonsense being uttered by a liberal, the howls of “social engineering” would be deafening half the globe).
       I confess I am much more worried about the kinds of knowledge students should have picked up but we don’t know if they did because said knowledges lie outside the narrow confines of pedantry (to be fair, it was estimated in 1957, and the year is key, that Russian high schoolers had muech better knowledge of sciences than American undergrads so I am optimist that things got better in the USA or at least worse in Russia– Socialism runs out of other people’s money and all that.
       So that’s it, Beethoven’s name is the fulcrum of “a intellectual culture implicit in the only history representative government has ever had in this world”, whatever it may mean in English. His name. Why is he important? Well, who cares? We ticked this box already, don’t rock the boat. My modest proposal (Swift. Did you see how smart I am? Maybe Professor Gerlernter would want to talk to me if he is tired of his boring students and needs some intellectual stimulation) stands: issue every freshman a leaflet with the 50 figures whose names-not works or lives, just names- will come up in the erudite talks they will have with their betters. They can tick all boxes in the first week of the academic year (Tom Lehrer taught humanities students a course he used to call Math for Tenors, maybe the good Professor can teach a course called Symphonies for Phonies) and go back for more serious work.
       Anyway, do you want students to have heard of Beethoven and Churchill (I know who they were, but I never went to Yale, so there’s it)? Easy, I will help you. Ask about them in a competitive entrance examination, don’t mention them to bored teenagers at classes with no stakes. Scrap SAT, interviews, extracurriculars, serving soup for the homeless and the like. It doesn’t need to be the Gaokao, even Brazil’s humble Vestibular entrance examinations are enough to coerce schools into teaching what prestigious universities demand from applicants. I take it Mr. Gerlernter teaches in such an institution and can take the matter from here. The rest is chit-chat, which makes pedantic professors feel good, but does little to help anyone else.

       • I’ll see you a non-sequitur and raise you a straw-man; several of them in fact. That whole post.

   • Did Stanley Kubrick have musical training? If not he used an awful lot of classical music to great effect, not least of which “the old Ludwig-Van” for someone who possessed only brand recall.

     • “… but however good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time?”-Kubrick
       Maybe not musical training (I should have said appreciation), but he clearly was way beyond Mr. Gelernter’s box-ticking requirements. I am not sure just hearing the name “Strauss” would have done much for him or any potential Kubrick. Anyway here comes, “Strauss”. Let be Kubrick. By the way, should Kubrick be mentioned among the 50 names students must recall? Kennedy, Khruschev, Kerensky, Kalinin, Kerouac, Koloth, Kelvin (Lord), Krugman, King (Martin Luther), Kling, Kierkegaard, there are only so many K-names our leaflet can cover.

6. …4) Institutions will start falling apart and pendulums will start swinging back the other way.

   One can only hope that the demise of the higher education complex is near at hand.

7. Considering that Cicero famously decried the moral decline in the first century before Christ (O temporal, O mores), the idea that things are going to pot is a perennial. Something does eventually occur to reverse the decline, although empires and civilizations do collapse before things turn around.

   Human civilizations do need a lot of maintenance to survive, and the failure to understand that can lead to disaster. Progressives have been at war from the founding principles of our country for 100 years and the rot is becoming obvious and dangerous. We can survive Obamaism, but not the public attitudes that led to his reelection. We have reached a critical point and the outcome is uncertain.

8. I think of the goal of Western leftist intellectuals as being two-fold: creating a one-world, one-people pseudo-utopia where the old ethnic and cultural divisions which cause so much conflict melt away, and secondly to signal their own thoughtfulness and intelligence by taking a critical stance against their own culture. What Gelernter laments is a byproduct of this, because the less you know about your own cultural heritage and its highpoints, the less attachment you’ll feel toward it. In that sense, ignorance is a feature, not a bug for the great 21st century project of progressivism.

   I’m of mixed feelings about this, actually. On the one hand, I see a world that is sort of converging in fits and starts on a single globalized society. Johnny Jihad using American-designed, Chinese-made cameras to shoot British-accented Islamic State propaganda videos in Syria to recruit American and European Muslims via youtube is perhaps the quintessential embodiment of this phenomena. If post-national globalism is our inevitable future, then perhaps we all ought to hope the progressives succeed, because the alternatives might end up looking too much like ISIS or the Jim Crow south for any civilized person’s liking.

   On the other hand…well, I could go on at length here but suffice it to say that the list of failed multi-cultural states is not a short one.

9. Teens are required to take driver’s ed and driver’s training, but schools don’t offer it. Once they get their license, under 18 year olds can’t drive with passengers in the car for 6 months to a year, depending on the state.

   So yes, more of them wait until 18 because there’s really no point. I suspect you’ll find more teen drivers in Montana, who gives mostly full privileges at 16, or North Dakota and Kentucky, who allow driving at 14 (temp license).

   As for the rest, Americans have never been particularly well-informed, and “elites” have been griping about it for at least 80 years. In math and science, teenagers are far better educated than they were pre-Sputnik, particularly in math.

   The leftist dogma of history and English teachers isn’t particularly effective; kids just have to pretend because otherwise they’ll get lower grades.

   I’m sure elite colleges are hotbeds of unthinking liberalism, but remember that those kids are all the little snowflakes of the professors, “intellectuals”, politicians, and business leaders. The schools that determinedly pursue those kids don’t look a millimeter outside the kids whose parents’ money they want. The people judging “kids today” are suffering from a serious restriction of range and should perhaps refrain from judgment.

   • “As for the rest, Americans have never been particularly well-informed, and ‘elites’ have been griping about it for at least 80 years. In math and science, teenagers are far better educated than they were pre-Sputnik, particularly in math.”
     Brazilian writer Erico Verissimo, who was lecturing at American universities during WW II, wrote that American students were not keen on general culture and were way more interested in crafts and professional instruction (one of them asked him what an adjective was) and American manual laborers—a class carrying much more representative weight 70 plus years ago– only heard of Pasteur when Hollywood made a movie out of his life. I am not sure, I do not have the book with me and I read it many years ago, but I think he compared the European citizens’ knowledge of painting, music and philosophy with the Americans’ one and found the latter lacking (although, as he emphasized, the common man was much more prosperous in the USA than in, say, France and lived under a regime of political freedom worthy of emulation).

     • If being ignorant of a narrowly defined set of signaling trivial means I know how to sweat a pipe, I’ll take it.

       • By the way, he was impressed with American knack for mechanics and said that Hitler made a terrible mistake challenging America to a mechanized warfare.

10. My thought, which has no deep intellectual basis, but rather a feeling for what I see unfolding, is that a good number of passionate people put forward strong ideas to change the way things are done so that these things are better suited to them. In the process, as with all things; others took up the cause and more passionately, desiring change beyond those who had merely sought to tinker with the established order. More people are pulled by the sway of altering destiny, even if they don’t know exactly why or where it will all end. Children, with no sense of self-determination, or knowledge of why that even matters are consummate pawns.

    To put into process something which, perhaps even with the best intentions, turns into a thing which nobody controls. It has become mobbism, the sad aspect of crowds is when they follow an idea of change, knowing that this change may alter the future for worse, but hopeful that it will not happen in their lifetime.

    I would liken it to a person taking out a loan with the intent of defaulting and declaring bankruptcy, but it’s far worse than that.

    • “the sad aspect of crowds is when they follow an idea of change, knowing that this change may alter the future for worse, but hopeful that it will not happen in their lifetime.”
      It is a straw man. You think the change will alter the future for worse and want to believe your adversaries think the same thing, but are too evil to change their ways (by the way, it is how Global Warming Skeptics-aka Deniers- are usually portrayed) . Just saying you disagree with them and they may be wrong just do pack the same punch even if it is a more honest way of conveying the disagreement.

11. Or Bryan Caplan might say do not worry, very little of what is acquired in schools is retained.

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