"As has been pointed out, this is a total vindication of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. In his book, often misunderstood, he warned that among the threats facing western democracies would be a lack of meaning driving people towards zero-sum prestige competitions, especially through thymos, broadly defined as a ‘desire for recognition"
Another remarkably prophetic quote (particularly in the context of COVID-19) was that elites may turn against the ideals of liberal democracy out of simple boredom and the need to struggle against something:
"But supposing the world has become “filled up”, so to speak, with liberal democracies, such as there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy."
I couldn’t believe that even in the UK could a community be so insane as to cancel an air show due to climate concerns. I had to see it for myself and there it was:
On your cheating point - yes, AI makes cheating easier. But cheating was always possible for those motivated to do it -- one of the top grades in my high school physics class went to the class bully who sat at a lab table with 3 very smart students, copied off all 3 during tests going with the majority answer when they disagreed and so outscoring all 3 of them, and let them run the labs, so getting a good grade. In return, he didn't beat them up. As an associate dean, I had to handle multiple cheating cases, many of which involved much more work than actually learning the material would have.
I now tell my students that they can certainly manage to pass my classes (undergrad and master's level) courses without learning anything if they work hard enough at that. But I also tell them that if they want to learn, I've built the classes to enable them to do so, which includes using AI tools when appropriate. (Notebook LM is both free and an amazing tool, for example. Most LLMs write terrific computer code that enables doing more sophisticated analysis of quant data.) I think we just have to (a) realize that top down policing of students isn't going to work any more (and was always less effective than we thought it was) and (b) focus our efforts on those who want to learn. That should be paired with not using outdated education methods of having everyone learn at the same pace from kindergarten on, instead rethinking the structure of education. That is happening on the margins, where efforts like micro-schools are showing promise.
I was thinking about Fukuyama's idea about a coming lack of meaning (and the Sally Rooney rant). While I haven't turned to activism and don't believe I'm overly concerned by a lack of recognition from the world, I do now find it almost impossible to read novels. I suspect this is because they now seem so beside the point to me, 'the point' being, how on earth do we extractate ourselves from this cultural, societal, political and economic mess we now find ourselves in. My 'meaning' has now become the same as for those fanatical, pink-haired, septum-pierced lefties, only reversed. All else seems trivial by comparison.
Will reading novels make the threat from Islam disappear? Would reading more novels have helped the Jews in 1930's Germany? Isn't it rather like whistling in the graveyard so as to distract yourself from having to think about where you actually are?
Was Wilfred Owen distracting himself from the trenches by writing poetry? Of course, his poems didn't prevent him from dying. But they enabled him to understand the experience through which he was living, and they bore witness to it so that we, in a more distant and partial way, can understand it too. Maybe that's a small thing against the enormity of war, but it's not nothing.
My original retort was, of course, facetious. Poets are not, contrary to Shelley, the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Reading novels, or indeed writing them, won't erase the threats we face. But, and for me this is a big but, the wise and beautiful things we have created are part of what defines our civilisation and makes it worth championing and defending. So I'll keep reading.
Nice reply and in theory I agree with it. I think C.S. Lewis said something similar, something about us always being in an emergency and thus you can always make a case for 'now not being the time for culture'. It's just that I personally would find it hard to concentrate on a Robert Frost poem if my son or daughter were on a life support system. I realise that's an overly dramatic analogy but reduce it by a factor of ten and you get the idea.
This is the passage from Lewis' sermon - preached in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford in October 1939:
"The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself.
If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life”. Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies.
Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but, significantly, the Funeral Oration. The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffold, discuss, the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature."
Yes, C.S. Lewis has some really interesting things to say about a lot of things. I recently read 'Surprised by Joy' and the only bit I didn't nod my head along to was the bit where he suddenly, inexplicably became a Christian. It seemed to me like he'd exhausted all other avenues and so rather than leave his mind on an indecision or choose atheism he became a devout Christian, for no good reason I could see.
You read up on prehistoric and even some medieval and early modern violence stuff and it's always "attack the brain."
It's funny because in fictional depictions of old times combat it's never "force someone to kneel then whack them in the back of the head", but that seems to have been the default.
I think there's a really interesting post to be done on 'history explained by traumatic brain injury'. Henry VIII and Stalin were both badly whacked on the head.
The tragedy underlying the increasing chasm between the mainstream and the populists in Europe is that both believe that they are fighting to save ‘the West’.
Although I may proudly refer to "Western Civilization", I do not like to use the term "the West" with a definite, singular article. Definite, singular articles are used too often more broadly in my view in a manner that makes subjects appear uniform and monolithic when they shouldn't be. But "the West" is particularly improper as it appears to refer to a single, monolithic entity when in reality, a great deal of the reason for Western Civilization's success was its fragmented, non-monolithic nature (except in regards to religion) that created the conditions for dissent and innovation:
Fukuyama's "men seek not just material comfort, but respect or recognition, and they believe that they are worthy of respect because they possess a certain value or dignity," is pleasantly reminiscent of Adam Smith, who said nature had bequeathed mankind “not only with a desire of being approved of, but with a desire of being what ought to be approved of; or of being what he himself approves of in other men." The desire for recognition that Fukuyama spoke of becomes productive if it's turned towards something of value. "The first desire could only have made him wish to appear to be fit for society," Smith continued, "the second was necessary in order to render him anxious to be really fit.”
CA Lewis: “Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”
I agree that bundling makes sense. For those of limited means, such as myself, subscribing to a single writer costs as much as subscribing to a whole magazine in the past.
Going further, a bundled substack could divide subscription income in proportion to the popularity (clicks?) of each of its contributors. Conceivably the most popular writers could make more money than they do now. [On the other hand, gaming the system might be a problem. Would need a way to measure the length of engagement of each clicker on each article.]
Dear author, I have given you a hard time before for being anti-Trump. This lady captures my spirit as per pertains Trump. I believe her judgement is brilliant. Only the Trump monster:
My main take on Trump is that he is fascinating, the most consequential individual of our time and also representative of so many aspects of his generation, most bad, some good, all interesting.
In a manner that seems utterly jaw-dropping in hindsight, when William Strauss and Neil Howe first put forth their generational theory in 1991, they explicitly named Donald Trump in their section on the Baby Boom Generation on embodying the negative stereotypes of their generation!
Very well said and I agree with your take on Trump and my generation I’m 63 years old, our selfishness is epic.
Was that as well judged as I think it was: I say bullseye by the lady author.
Trump is the only leader of our age. My God, his personal quirks are so offputting to people. This is his greatest liability. He is simply a bridge too far for half of humanity.
All of humanity should pray this works because if he tames Iran, the Middle East may finally have peace and Islam can finally emerge as the lovely moral code it is - devoid of the aggression.
I would add that managerialism is a monster, and it takes a monster to go against it: the cathedral is certain to be our undoing just as it is certain Trump will fail. He is an interregnum, a detour born of will and temerity but a dead end. We have created Leviathan; leviathan is set to win. JD Vance doesn’t have what it takes. It takes a monster to fight a monster.
Leftism is essentially criminal in nature:
“So you ask your Priest: if not God King and Church what would I believe? Who is against God and Kimg and Church? And your priest said: Satan. And so thinking logically you became a Satanist. This probably happened to you except it wasn’t a priest but a guidance counselor. The way the world works, never changes. “ Curtis
The Middle East will only have peace after the Second Coming. No, I am not being theological there-- just being practical. That place has been endemically violent since the days of Gil-Gamesh.
Re: It takes a monster to fight a monster.
Taurine byproduct! The world has had any number of leaders who managed to be successful and still retain a reasonable degree of integrity and virtue. Whatever one can say about Churchill or FDR, neither were monsters-- though they fought one. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher saw to the extinction of the USSR (AKA"The Evil Empire") were both were decent people whatever their flaws.
Addendum: it would take 10 more Trumps in a row to undo what we have done to ourselves.
The future will be just like the past : kinetic.
“A basic fact of human relations: the foundation of authority is the ability, when persuasion fails, to compel obedience.”
Mary Harrington
Resource competition between tribal affiliations within nations , low level kinetic engagements this is the future: it is foretold. The Yookay, today - exhibit A - or do you have a different conclusion about what you’re looking at?
"‘While the main reason for France’s low TFR was secularization predating the revolution, inheritance laws reduced the TFR further.’ If true, this must have been one of the most consequential laws of modern times."
You have noted how the collapse of French fertility was a major reason for the turmoil of 1871-1945. The best case study for how it may have gone otherwise would be in my country, Canada. Canada has the unique experience of a large population of French-descendents who were isolated by France proper before the Revolution and subsequent upheavals. The Catholic Church used to hold a VERY potent influence on French Canada until the 1960s. Perhaps more so than Ireland as it controlled all the hospitals and schools even as late as the 1950s.
Subsequently, as late as the 1920s, it was still common in Quebec for there to be families with a dozen children.
"The democratisation of cheating." - As someone working in higher education, I have been thrown into despair by the AI problem. The refusal of university management even to attempt to deal with it is perhaps the most infuriating thing - a return to exam-based and viva-based assessment rather than coursework would go a long way to solving the problem, and a prohibition on bringing mobile phones into the classroom would help too. But nobody in authority will countenance these things.
The discourse surrounding employability is a problem too. We are also constantly told that we need to teach students how to use AI since they will use it at work. Students already know how to use AI and if they need to use it in specific ways for specific jobs, they will learn to do so on the job. All we can tell employers is whether a particular student is clever and creative; or at least we could, before AI made it almost impossible.
Having said that, it's only the latest iteration of a problem that's been bubbling along for a while now. A student's "job" - in the humanities, at least - is to read books. The reason we ask students to quote from scholarly sources is to demonstrate that they have read them. But for at least ten years, a quotation from a source hasn't actually shown that a student has read the source. Rather, it shows that he downloaded an online copy and did a quick search for key terms.
The real question, of course, is how and why we have created a generation of young people who have no hesitation about taking short cuts and no qualms about cheating.
See my comment below. My answer is to show them how to use AI without cheating. Or sometimes just to explain to them that much of what they're doing is cheating, because they don't know how not to cheat at this point. I suspect many of them not only succumb to peer pressure, but they also let AI take the lead. It helps when students learn that they, not AI, are in charge of their work. Of course I'm hoping that a number of students don't want to cheat, which I don't think is unrealistic.
I tell my students (not an original thought on my part, incidentally; it's an internet meme I borrowed) that using AI to write an essay is like using a forklift truck in a gym. The weights don't actually need to be moved from place to place. The work is what happens inside you!
I'm also confident there are plenty of students who don't want to cheat. But the problem is that some of them do want to cheat, and the way we currently structure assignments and assess them makes it easy and advantageous to do so. Most citizens don't want to commit crimes; the problem is with the few who do. And what happens if they can commit crimes undetectably?
If anything, the AI problem has made me think about how many other problems there are with the model we have adopted, in which we rely on coursework for summative assessment. Apart from anything else, it means that students only have to learn part of a syllabus. The great advantage of exams is not just that they are much closer to being AI-proof, but that, since students don't know what the questions are going to be, they need to study everything that might come up. It would be wonderful if the AI issue could help expose some of the other problems with the model of assessment we've adopted, and spur a return to more traditional methods.
I'll use that meme when I'm working with students. As a librarian I provide guidance but don't evaluate students' work. But that meme will come in handy. I think many students want to do their own work, but AI is so glib and officious and overhelpful that it doesn't leave room for the student to contribute anything. My hopefully helpful analogy is that AI is the research assistant and you, the student, are the boss. As the boss you shouldn't take credit for your assistant's work but you must take responsibility for it (even when it's bad work -- so use AI carefully.)
As regards cash in circulation, I from time to time find myself having to take out a tenner or twenty quid for some reason, and I end up with change, that I put in a box in my bedroom. It's usually coins and I rarely take them out again. I've never in my life been one to save cash at home, but I've currently probably got the best part of £250 at home in coins. Could that be an explanation?
"Michael Young warned that a system of ‘meritocracy’ would be far more psychological brutal towards the poor, and we’re still working out ways to resolve the fact that he was right"
As much as I consider myself "anti-woke", I am perhaps even more irritated by the kinds of people who say or seem to imply that the main threat of wokeness to civilization is that it threatens "meritocracy". I want to respond, "Sure, let's have a meritocratic, totalitarian feudalism rather than a victimhood-based totalitarian feudalism!"
Since "meritocracy" was originally used as the title of a... dystopian science fiction novel in 1958, I'm not sure what you are lauding. The term literally doesn't appear before the late 1950s!
Today, many "meritocracy" obsessives are kind of people who, IMO, would gladly suffer torture in the Ministry of Love from 1984...so long as they knew the torturer had been evaluated under the right metrics!
I don't give a flying f*** about the threat to "meritocracy" to the extent that I care about freedom and democracy!!!
If I am living under a tyranny, I want it to be as non-meritocratic as possible so it will collapse sooner or at least not be effective in social control measures. The head of the secret police in particular, I want to be the kind of person who can't fart and chew gum at the same time!
"As has been pointed out, this is a total vindication of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. In his book, often misunderstood, he warned that among the threats facing western democracies would be a lack of meaning driving people towards zero-sum prestige competitions, especially through thymos, broadly defined as a ‘desire for recognition"
Another remarkably prophetic quote (particularly in the context of COVID-19) was that elites may turn against the ideals of liberal democracy out of simple boredom and the need to struggle against something:
"But supposing the world has become “filled up”, so to speak, with liberal democracies, such as there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy."
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10161514-but-supposing-the-world-has-become-filled-up-so-tou
very true. that would have been a better quote to put in the post.
I couldn’t believe that even in the UK could a community be so insane as to cancel an air show due to climate concerns. I had to see it for myself and there it was:
https://www.sunderlandecho.com/news/people/update-council-confirms-no-plans-to-run-sunderland-airshow-in-the-future-as-2023-event-cancelled-citing-global-climate-emergency-as-key-factor-3883077#
On your cheating point - yes, AI makes cheating easier. But cheating was always possible for those motivated to do it -- one of the top grades in my high school physics class went to the class bully who sat at a lab table with 3 very smart students, copied off all 3 during tests going with the majority answer when they disagreed and so outscoring all 3 of them, and let them run the labs, so getting a good grade. In return, he didn't beat them up. As an associate dean, I had to handle multiple cheating cases, many of which involved much more work than actually learning the material would have.
I now tell my students that they can certainly manage to pass my classes (undergrad and master's level) courses without learning anything if they work hard enough at that. But I also tell them that if they want to learn, I've built the classes to enable them to do so, which includes using AI tools when appropriate. (Notebook LM is both free and an amazing tool, for example. Most LLMs write terrific computer code that enables doing more sophisticated analysis of quant data.) I think we just have to (a) realize that top down policing of students isn't going to work any more (and was always less effective than we thought it was) and (b) focus our efforts on those who want to learn. That should be paired with not using outdated education methods of having everyone learn at the same pace from kindergarten on, instead rethinking the structure of education. That is happening on the margins, where efforts like micro-schools are showing promise.
I was thinking about Fukuyama's idea about a coming lack of meaning (and the Sally Rooney rant). While I haven't turned to activism and don't believe I'm overly concerned by a lack of recognition from the world, I do now find it almost impossible to read novels. I suspect this is because they now seem so beside the point to me, 'the point' being, how on earth do we extractate ourselves from this cultural, societal, political and economic mess we now find ourselves in. My 'meaning' has now become the same as for those fanatical, pink-haired, septum-pierced lefties, only reversed. All else seems trivial by comparison.
We can extricate ourselves from it in part by reading novels! And by learning and applying the wisdom that they teach.
Will reading novels make the threat from Islam disappear? Would reading more novels have helped the Jews in 1930's Germany? Isn't it rather like whistling in the graveyard so as to distract yourself from having to think about where you actually are?
Was Wilfred Owen distracting himself from the trenches by writing poetry? Of course, his poems didn't prevent him from dying. But they enabled him to understand the experience through which he was living, and they bore witness to it so that we, in a more distant and partial way, can understand it too. Maybe that's a small thing against the enormity of war, but it's not nothing.
My original retort was, of course, facetious. Poets are not, contrary to Shelley, the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Reading novels, or indeed writing them, won't erase the threats we face. But, and for me this is a big but, the wise and beautiful things we have created are part of what defines our civilisation and makes it worth championing and defending. So I'll keep reading.
Nice reply and in theory I agree with it. I think C.S. Lewis said something similar, something about us always being in an emergency and thus you can always make a case for 'now not being the time for culture'. It's just that I personally would find it hard to concentrate on a Robert Frost poem if my son or daughter were on a life support system. I realise that's an overly dramatic analogy but reduce it by a factor of ten and you get the idea.
This is the passage from Lewis' sermon - preached in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford in October 1939:
"The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself.
If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life”. Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies.
Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but, significantly, the Funeral Oration. The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffold, discuss, the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature."
Yes, C.S. Lewis has some really interesting things to say about a lot of things. I recently read 'Surprised by Joy' and the only bit I didn't nod my head along to was the bit where he suddenly, inexplicably became a Christian. It seemed to me like he'd exhausted all other avenues and so rather than leave his mind on an indecision or choose atheism he became a devout Christian, for no good reason I could see.
Primo Levi took comfort from Dante in Auschwitz. "Fatti non foste a viver come bruti."
Unfortunately my Italian is a bit rusty.
Cranial trauma, cranial trauma, cranial trauma.
You read up on prehistoric and even some medieval and early modern violence stuff and it's always "attack the brain."
It's funny because in fictional depictions of old times combat it's never "force someone to kneel then whack them in the back of the head", but that seems to have been the default.
I think there's a really interesting post to be done on 'history explained by traumatic brain injury'. Henry VIII and Stalin were both badly whacked on the head.
The tragedy underlying the increasing chasm between the mainstream and the populists in Europe is that both believe that they are fighting to save ‘the West’.
Although I may proudly refer to "Western Civilization", I do not like to use the term "the West" with a definite, singular article. Definite, singular articles are used too often more broadly in my view in a manner that makes subjects appear uniform and monolithic when they shouldn't be. But "the West" is particularly improper as it appears to refer to a single, monolithic entity when in reality, a great deal of the reason for Western Civilization's success was its fragmented, non-monolithic nature (except in regards to religion) that created the conditions for dissent and innovation:
https://books.google.ca/books/about/Escape_from_Rome.html?id=bs_9DwAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y
I quite like 'the West', but there's probably a psychological reason for that
It is your name for starters I imagine. You could announce it to villains in a way.
"Who is it?"
"It is the West!"
They might think he was Batman, as played by the great Adam West!
Fukuyama's "men seek not just material comfort, but respect or recognition, and they believe that they are worthy of respect because they possess a certain value or dignity," is pleasantly reminiscent of Adam Smith, who said nature had bequeathed mankind “not only with a desire of being approved of, but with a desire of being what ought to be approved of; or of being what he himself approves of in other men." The desire for recognition that Fukuyama spoke of becomes productive if it's turned towards something of value. "The first desire could only have made him wish to appear to be fit for society," Smith continued, "the second was necessary in order to render him anxious to be really fit.”
CA Lewis: “Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”
I agree that bundling makes sense. For those of limited means, such as myself, subscribing to a single writer costs as much as subscribing to a whole magazine in the past.
Going further, a bundled substack could divide subscription income in proportion to the popularity (clicks?) of each of its contributors. Conceivably the most popular writers could make more money than they do now. [On the other hand, gaming the system might be a problem. Would need a way to measure the length of engagement of each clicker on each article.]
https://sjquillen.medium.com/spotify-wrapped-lists-and-todays-global-language-trends-7f621cc1f010
Here's another article on the subject you referenced regarding how Anglophones are no longer as dominant in top music lists.
re the search for meaning, see here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
I only wish I were a better writer.
Dear author, I have given you a hard time before for being anti-Trump. This lady captures my spirit as per pertains Trump. I believe her judgement is brilliant. Only the Trump monster:
https://www.peachykeenan.com/p/the-last-boomer-drops-the-bombs?r=j0s6f&utm_medium=ios
very interesting.
My main take on Trump is that he is fascinating, the most consequential individual of our time and also representative of so many aspects of his generation, most bad, some good, all interesting.
In a manner that seems utterly jaw-dropping in hindsight, when William Strauss and Neil Howe first put forth their generational theory in 1991, they explicitly named Donald Trump in their section on the Baby Boom Generation on embodying the negative stereotypes of their generation!
https://www.amazon.ca/Generations-History-Americas-Future-1584/dp/0688119123
Very well said and I agree with your take on Trump and my generation I’m 63 years old, our selfishness is epic.
Was that as well judged as I think it was: I say bullseye by the lady author.
Trump is the only leader of our age. My God, his personal quirks are so offputting to people. This is his greatest liability. He is simply a bridge too far for half of humanity.
All of humanity should pray this works because if he tames Iran, the Middle East may finally have peace and Islam can finally emerge as the lovely moral code it is - devoid of the aggression.
I would add that managerialism is a monster, and it takes a monster to go against it: the cathedral is certain to be our undoing just as it is certain Trump will fail. He is an interregnum, a detour born of will and temerity but a dead end. We have created Leviathan; leviathan is set to win. JD Vance doesn’t have what it takes. It takes a monster to fight a monster.
Leftism is essentially criminal in nature:
“So you ask your Priest: if not God King and Church what would I believe? Who is against God and Kimg and Church? And your priest said: Satan. And so thinking logically you became a Satanist. This probably happened to you except it wasn’t a priest but a guidance counselor. The way the world works, never changes. “ Curtis
The Middle East will only have peace after the Second Coming. No, I am not being theological there-- just being practical. That place has been endemically violent since the days of Gil-Gamesh.
Re: It takes a monster to fight a monster.
Taurine byproduct! The world has had any number of leaders who managed to be successful and still retain a reasonable degree of integrity and virtue. Whatever one can say about Churchill or FDR, neither were monsters-- though they fought one. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher saw to the extinction of the USSR (AKA"The Evil Empire") were both were decent people whatever their flaws.
Trump is a decent man. You just don’t like his style. He’s too honest for you.
Addendum: it would take 10 more Trumps in a row to undo what we have done to ourselves.
The future will be just like the past : kinetic.
“A basic fact of human relations: the foundation of authority is the ability, when persuasion fails, to compel obedience.”
Mary Harrington
Resource competition between tribal affiliations within nations , low level kinetic engagements this is the future: it is foretold. The Yookay, today - exhibit A - or do you have a different conclusion about what you’re looking at?
"‘While the main reason for France’s low TFR was secularization predating the revolution, inheritance laws reduced the TFR further.’ If true, this must have been one of the most consequential laws of modern times."
You have noted how the collapse of French fertility was a major reason for the turmoil of 1871-1945. The best case study for how it may have gone otherwise would be in my country, Canada. Canada has the unique experience of a large population of French-descendents who were isolated by France proper before the Revolution and subsequent upheavals. The Catholic Church used to hold a VERY potent influence on French Canada until the 1960s. Perhaps more so than Ireland as it controlled all the hospitals and schools even as late as the 1950s.
Subsequently, as late as the 1920s, it was still common in Quebec for there to be families with a dozen children.
"The democratisation of cheating." - As someone working in higher education, I have been thrown into despair by the AI problem. The refusal of university management even to attempt to deal with it is perhaps the most infuriating thing - a return to exam-based and viva-based assessment rather than coursework would go a long way to solving the problem, and a prohibition on bringing mobile phones into the classroom would help too. But nobody in authority will countenance these things.
The discourse surrounding employability is a problem too. We are also constantly told that we need to teach students how to use AI since they will use it at work. Students already know how to use AI and if they need to use it in specific ways for specific jobs, they will learn to do so on the job. All we can tell employers is whether a particular student is clever and creative; or at least we could, before AI made it almost impossible.
Having said that, it's only the latest iteration of a problem that's been bubbling along for a while now. A student's "job" - in the humanities, at least - is to read books. The reason we ask students to quote from scholarly sources is to demonstrate that they have read them. But for at least ten years, a quotation from a source hasn't actually shown that a student has read the source. Rather, it shows that he downloaded an online copy and did a quick search for key terms.
The real question, of course, is how and why we have created a generation of young people who have no hesitation about taking short cuts and no qualms about cheating.
See my comment below. My answer is to show them how to use AI without cheating. Or sometimes just to explain to them that much of what they're doing is cheating, because they don't know how not to cheat at this point. I suspect many of them not only succumb to peer pressure, but they also let AI take the lead. It helps when students learn that they, not AI, are in charge of their work. Of course I'm hoping that a number of students don't want to cheat, which I don't think is unrealistic.
I tell my students (not an original thought on my part, incidentally; it's an internet meme I borrowed) that using AI to write an essay is like using a forklift truck in a gym. The weights don't actually need to be moved from place to place. The work is what happens inside you!
I'm also confident there are plenty of students who don't want to cheat. But the problem is that some of them do want to cheat, and the way we currently structure assignments and assess them makes it easy and advantageous to do so. Most citizens don't want to commit crimes; the problem is with the few who do. And what happens if they can commit crimes undetectably?
If anything, the AI problem has made me think about how many other problems there are with the model we have adopted, in which we rely on coursework for summative assessment. Apart from anything else, it means that students only have to learn part of a syllabus. The great advantage of exams is not just that they are much closer to being AI-proof, but that, since students don't know what the questions are going to be, they need to study everything that might come up. It would be wonderful if the AI issue could help expose some of the other problems with the model of assessment we've adopted, and spur a return to more traditional methods.
I'll use that meme when I'm working with students. As a librarian I provide guidance but don't evaluate students' work. But that meme will come in handy. I think many students want to do their own work, but AI is so glib and officious and overhelpful that it doesn't leave room for the student to contribute anything. My hopefully helpful analogy is that AI is the research assistant and you, the student, are the boss. As the boss you shouldn't take credit for your assistant's work but you must take responsibility for it (even when it's bad work -- so use AI carefully.)
That's a nice analogy too!
As regards cash in circulation, I from time to time find myself having to take out a tenner or twenty quid for some reason, and I end up with change, that I put in a box in my bedroom. It's usually coins and I rarely take them out again. I've never in my life been one to save cash at home, but I've currently probably got the best part of £250 at home in coins. Could that be an explanation?
Is the "omnicause" that different from anti-semitic conspiracy theories?
They try and put a different spin on it, but it seems identical.
"Michael Young warned that a system of ‘meritocracy’ would be far more psychological brutal towards the poor, and we’re still working out ways to resolve the fact that he was right"
As much as I consider myself "anti-woke", I am perhaps even more irritated by the kinds of people who say or seem to imply that the main threat of wokeness to civilization is that it threatens "meritocracy". I want to respond, "Sure, let's have a meritocratic, totalitarian feudalism rather than a victimhood-based totalitarian feudalism!"
Since "meritocracy" was originally used as the title of a... dystopian science fiction novel in 1958, I'm not sure what you are lauding. The term literally doesn't appear before the late 1950s!
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=meritocracy&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
Today, many "meritocracy" obsessives are kind of people who, IMO, would gladly suffer torture in the Ministry of Love from 1984...so long as they knew the torturer had been evaluated under the right metrics!
I don't give a flying f*** about the threat to "meritocracy" to the extent that I care about freedom and democracy!!!
If I am living under a tyranny, I want it to be as non-meritocratic as possible so it will collapse sooner or at least not be effective in social control measures. The head of the secret police in particular, I want to be the kind of person who can't fart and chew gum at the same time!