Quotation Of The Day: Creativity And Artistic Vision Edition

From this Charles Murray essay in the New Criterion:

To generalize my argument regarding the importance of the transcendental goods, I believe that when artists do not have coherent ideals of beauty, their work tends to be sterile; when they do not have coherent ideals of the good, their work tends to be vulgar. Without either beauty or the good, their work tends to be shallow. Artistic accomplishment that is sterile, vulgar, and shallow does not endure.

Charles Murray On Class Inequality

In the Wall Street Journal, Charles Murray has written a provoacative analysis about inequality in America.

America is coming apart. For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. "The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. "On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day."


Americans love to see themselves this way. But there's a problem: It's not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.

He enunciates his core thesis as follows:

. . . .What we now face is a problem of cultural inequality.

When Americans used to brag about "the American way of life"—a phrase still in common use in 1960—they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace. It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.

It can be said without hyperbole that these divergences put Belmont and Fishtown into different cultures. But it's not just the working class that's moved; the upper middle class has pulled away in its own fashion, too.

If you were an executive living in Belmont in 1960, income inequality would have separated you from the construction worker in Fishtown, but remarkably little cultural inequality. You lived a more expensive life, but not a much different life. Your kitchen was bigger, but you didn't use it to prepare yogurt and muesli for breakfast. Your television screen was bigger, but you and the construction worker watched a lot of the same shows (you didn't have much choice). Your house might have had a den that the construction worker's lacked, but it had no StairMaster or lap pool, nor any gadget to monitor your percentage of body fat. You both drank Bud, Miller, Schlitz or Pabst, and the phrase "boutique beer" never crossed your lips. You probably both smoked. If you didn't, you did not glare contemptuously at people who did.

I don't want to just cut and paste the whole piece, and I don't have time this week to comment the way I should, so I'll make one short comment and urge everyone to read the piece. 

The dividing of America seems to me to be more important and pernicious.  The rich and poor have always been with us, but now they live apart.  Politically, we see conservatives and liberals refuse to watch the same news programs.  Murray now shows that Americans seem to be abandoning unifying institutions.  I find it a bit ironic and disconcerting that Murray a libertarian is making a similar point that communitarian Robert Putnam made about a decade ago.  Lincoln and the gospels tell us that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Big boy bloggers Daniel Larison and Rod Dreher have commented here and here.

Some Basic Thoughts about Education

This is the third or fourth or fifth effort to try to blog regularly. Let's see how it goes.

Thought #1: I agree with Charles Murray (mostly), at least this time.

Last spring, I read a Charles Murray article about the philosphy that he described as educational romaniticism. A version is here. Murray makes at least three trenchant points and one mistake.

Trenchent point #1

"Many laws are too optimistic, but the No Child Left Behind Act transcended optimism. It set a goal that was devoid of any contact with reality."

To quote the great philosopher Stan Lee, "Nuff said."

Trenchent point #2

"To sum up, a massive body of evidence says . . .that we do not know how to change intellectual ability after children reach school. . . ."

Once again, "Nuff said."

Trenchent point #3

"In public discourse, the leading symptom of educational romanticism is silence on the role of intellectual limits even when the topic screams for their discussion. Try to think of the last time you encountered a news story that mentioned low intellectual ability as the reason why some students do not perform at grade level. I doubt if you can. Whether analyzed by the news media, school superintendents, or politicians, the problems facing low-performing students are always that they have come from disadvantaged backgrounds, or have gone to bad schools, or grown up in peer cultures that do not value educational achievement. The problem is never that they just aren't smart enough." (Italics mine)

This is tricky ground. No one wants to claim that disadvantaged students are inherently less intelligent than middle-class or upper-class students. I am certain that a smart student who comes from a disadvantaged background has more hurdles to overcome than a smart student with wealthy student. Even with that caveat, a smart student from any background will usually be more successful in school than a less intelligent student, and Murray is correct to assert that schools ignore that fact. (I'll put off the success in school does not equal later success discussion for another day.)

The mistake (and I think it's a whopper)

"The good news is that educational romanticism is surely teetering on the edge of collapse."

I wish and I pray, but unfortunately, Lake Woebegone is here to stay. I don't think there's a teacher in the system that I work in that could keep her job is she uttered the phrase, "I don't think your child has the intellectual capacity to earn an A in my class." Further, I doubt that there are more than a handful of teachers who believe its OK to utter that phrase, even though they may think it quietly. Finally, I haven't seen any young teachers who have been taught that they should even think it.

Thought #2: On-line grading programs suck.

Change the brand names, but the problems this post outlines reflect my experience.

Thought #3: I wish I had the answer to this problem

Dennis O'Neil correctly observes,

"Over the past few years, I’ve come to believe that not everyone gets the same education, even if schools and transcripts are identical. Some folk mentally compartmentalize: church goes here, family here, school stuff here, life in general there. So when they pass tests on what they’ve heard in classrooms, and at the end of a span of time, usually16 years and some august personage hands them a rectangle full of fancy lettering, they’re done with it. No more schooling, and no learning above what’s needed to live comfortably. Schooling in its compartment yonder, not touching this compartment, which is where we live."

And

"The problem, I think, is this: There might be information over in the school compartment that is relevant to the contents of the living compartment. It might supply answers, or at least stimulate thinking.

"Left in the ghetto of the school compartment, denied access to other compartments, and it is useless, and it will die. Worse, its lack might cause you to blunder."

I see the compartmentalization every day. School is in a box that gets shelved the second students walk out the door to their real lives. In fact, all school seems to be is an interruption to the lives they want to lead.