Modern medieval maidens

Even through the few years of my existence, I have been witness to a phenomenal change--for the better--in the treatment of women.  From a grandmother, who was condemned to live a life of widowhood from the age of eighteen to her death at 67; to a mother and aunts who graduated high school and went to live in cities far away from the old village; to a sister and cousin sisters and schoolmates who went to college not only for an undergrad but also for graduate and professional degrees; to a daughter and niece and other young women whose professional accomplishments are so stratospheric that even most men cannot dream of ...

Yet another reason why I cannot ever agree with people who talk about the good old days, when the old days were good only to the fewest of few males somewhere.

Against such a background, I have been increasingly troubled by the recent uptick in American colleges and universities to "protect" young women.  Of course, we need all the education about good practices like treating genders equally and not harassing women, for instance.  But, we seem to be going way overboard to such an extent that the system seems to want treat young women as helpless maidens in some medieval literature.  The more I listen to the chatter, the more I am amazed at the prevailing sentiment to equate women with damsels in distress..

It is a shame that young women seem to be characterized that way.  Even the female students in my classes are such a contrast to all that.  Most women in my classes seem a lot more together, confident, and purposeful, compared to the typical male student who comes across as an overgrown adolescent.

Of course, I am not the only one who is upset these days about how the system is caricaturing young women as ones who need all the parental guidance.  My favorite feminist, Camille Paglia, says that and more with her usual blunt talk.

I am continually shocked and dismayed by the nearly Victorian notions promulgated by today’s feminists about the fragility of women and their naïve helplessness in asserting control over their own dating lives. Female undergraduates incapable of negotiating the oafish pleasures and perils of campus fraternity parties are hardly prepared to win leadership positions in business or government in the future.

Now, that is some criticism, eh!

Paglia takes it up another notch:

If today’s young women want to be passive wards of the state, then that is their self-stultifying choice.

Ouch!

I have complained enough (like here) that young women and men seem to want a lot more rules and not fewer rules.  And even more bizarre that they seem to be all too eager to obey those rules.  Paglia's phrase of "passive wards of the state" can equally apply to young men too.  But, our interest in this post is about feminism and young women.  So, what would Paglia like to see happen?

Too many people, both men and women, have foolishly conflated their personal identities with their jobs. It’s a bourgeois trap and a distortion of the ultimate meaning of life.
The childless Gloria Steinem, who was unmarried until she was 66, has never been sympathetic to the problems faced by women who want both children and a job. Stay-at-home moms have been arrogantly disdained by orthodox feminism. This is a primary reason for the lack of respect that a majority of mainstream citizens has for feminism, which is addicted to juvenile male-bashing and has elevated abortion to sacramental status. While I firmly support unrestricted reproductive rights (on the grounds that nature gives every individual total control over his or her body), I think that the near-hysterical obsession with abortion has damaged feminism by making it seem morally obtuse.
I want universities to create more flexible, extended-study options for young women who choose to have earlier (and thus safer) pregnancies, and I want more public and private resources devoted to childcare facilities for working parents of every social class.

I have no disagreement there.  Well, I don't have the cojones to disagree with Camille Paglia ;)

Source

Which part of "copying homework assignments is wrong" don't you understand?

Are the following true?

— Copying homework assignments is wrong.
— Cursing in school is inappropriate behavior.
— All men are created equal.

You are perhaps thinking, "of course these are true.  Is there a catch?"

Don't overthink this.  Are those three statements true?

I think they are true. I believe them to be true.

What if I were told that those are merely my opinions?  I will get pissed off.  Don't tell me that copying homework is ok.  And, dammit, to curse in school is one f*ing bad behavior!  Ok, I will grant you this much--the third sentence suggests gender issues, which we can then modify to "all humans are created equal."

Happy now?

Don't be.

In each case, the worksheets categorize these claims as opinions. The explanation on offer is that each of these claims is a value claim and value claims are not facts. This is repeated ad nauseum: any claim with good, right, wrong, etc. is not a fact.
In summary, our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts. And if there are no moral facts, then there are no moral truths.

Yes, join me in yelling out "WTF!"

All that was from this NY Times piece, in which the author--a philosophy professor--writes:

When I went to visit my son’s second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:
Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.
Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

Finally, it all makes sense.  Now I am beginning to understand why some students over the years have responded with "well, that's your opinion."  Some of these students think that there are no absolutes and everything is relative and everything is merely a personal opinion.  And that's even before they get indoctrinated into the postmodernism/post-structuralism bullshit, right Professor Camille Paglia?

Post-structuralism is a system of literary and social analysis that flared up and vanished in France in the 1960s but that became anachronistically entrenched in British and American academe from the 1970s on. Based on the outmoded linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and promoted by the idolized Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, it absurdly asserts that we experience or process reality only through language and that, because language is inherently unstable, nothing can be known. By undermining meaning, history and personal will, post-structuralism has done incalculable damage to education and contemporary thought. It is a laborious, circuitously self-referential gimmick that always ends up with the same monotonous result. ... Post-structuralism has destroyed two generations of graduate students, who were forced to mouth its ugly jargon and empty platitudes for their foolish faculty elders. And the end result is that humanities departments everywhere, having abandoned their proper mission of defending and celebrating art, have become humiliatingly marginalized in both reputation and impact.

Because, that's what the K-12 system tells them?  Back to the philosopher:

 If it’s not true that it’s wrong to murder a cartoonist with whom one disagrees, then how can we be outraged? If there are no truths about what is good or valuable or right, how can we prosecute people for crimes against humanity? If it’s not true that all humans are created equal, then why vote for any political system that doesn’t benefit you over others?

Exactly!

 Facts are things that are true. Opinions are things we believe. Some of our beliefs are true. Others are not. Some of our beliefs are backed by evidence. Others are not. Value claims are like any other claims: either true or false, evidenced or not. The hard work lies not in recognizing that at least some moral claims are true but in carefully thinking through our evidence for which of the many competing moral claims is correct. That’s a hard thing to do. But we can’t sidestep the responsibilities that come with being human just because it’s hard.
That would be wrong.

In my opinion, that is so true!  

What would a Libertarian-Democrat platform look like?

I suppose I run into problems with unprofessional obnoxious arrogant ideological loud faculty leaders on campus not because I am from the conservative right, but because I am a libertarian-Democrat.  The flavor of libertarianism that runs counter to many of the issues that are near and dear to the social-Democrats and self-professed Socialists ....

What might be in brief the guiding principles of a libertarian-Democrat approach to social organization and governance?  Here is Terry Michael:

The government should assure liberty by staying as far away as possible from our bank accounts, our bedrooms, and our bodies. Spread pluralistic democracy and free markets by example, understanding that neither can be planted by force on political real estate lacking indigenous cultivators for their growth. Restore the moral authority of mid-20th century civil rights, fashioning public policy around individuals, not tribal identity groups.

More here on Michael's manifesto

My favorite libertarian-Democrat public intellectual? Camille Paglia, of course ... too bad for people like me that she has taken time off from public discourses ...

The liberal arts is dead. Long live the liberal arts.

There is nothing else I want to do but be immersed, the way I am, in liberal education.  To those who say put your money where your mouth is, well, I have: I gave up what would have certainly been a fantastically remunerative career in electrical engineering, which is more than enough evidence of my mouth and money.

This commitment and belief in liberal education is also why I am terribly disappointed with the contemporary state of liberal education.  Self-aggrandizing faculty through their endless intellectual Onanism have converted liberal education into a process to clone as many of their like-minded replicants as possible.  One unfortunate result of all this, among many, is that liberal education now arrogantly and systematically disses any kind of professional training--the trades, as Camille Paglia refers to them.

I have written about this and have, in the process, earned more enemies than I ever imagined would be possible.  But, it is an important issue that we cannot ignore--because, we are screwing up the futures of hundreds of thousands of youth.

Paglia's latest commentary is too good to merely provide an excerpt.  So, here is the entire piece--a short one to commemorate the ten year anniversary of the Chronicle Review.  (Only now do I realize then that my own essay that was published there in 2001 was in its infancy. Cool!)  Camille Paglia writes on "Revalorizing the Trades":

Vanishing of jobs will plague the rest of this decade and more. Meaningful employment is no longer guaranteed to dutiful, studious members of the middle class in the Western world. College education, which was hugely expanded after World War II and sold as a basic right, is doing a poor job of preparing young people for life outside of a narrow band of the professional class.

Yes, an elite education at stratospheric prices will smooth the way into law or medical school and supply a network of useful future contacts. But what if a student wants a different, less remunerative or status-oriented but more personally fulfilling career? There is little flexibility in American higher education to allow for alternative career tracks.

Jobs, and the preparation of students for them, should be front and center in the thinking of educators. The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense. The humanities have been gutted by four decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics. They bear little relationship to the liberal arts of broad perspective and profound erudition that I was lucky enough to experience in college in the 1960s.

Having taught in art schools for most of my four decades in the classroom, I am used to having students who work with their hands—ceramicists, weavers, woodworkers, metal smiths, jazz drummers. There is a calm, centered, Zen-like engagement with the physical world in their lives. In contrast, I see glib, cynical, neurotic elite-school graduates roiling everywhere in journalism and the media. They have been ill-served by their trendy, word-centered educations.

Jobs, jobs, jobs: We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted. Concrete manual skills, once gained through the master-apprentice alliance in guilds, build a secure identity. Our present educational system defers credentialing and maturity for too long. When middle-class graduates in their mid-20s are just stepping on the bottom rung of the professional career ladder, many of their working-class peers are already self-supporting and married with young children.

The elite schools, predicated on molding students into mirror images of their professors, seem divorced from any rational consideration of human happiness. In a period of global economic turmoil, with manufacturing jobs migrating overseas and service-sector jobs diminishing in availability and prestige, educators whose salaries are paid by hopeful parents have an obligation to think in practical terms about the destinies of their charges. That may mean a radical stripping down of course offerings, with all teachers responsible for a core curriculum. But every four-year college or university should forge a reciprocal relationship with regional trade schools.

The carbon economies

I rarely walk around with ideological lenses. One result is, I suppose, most faculty colleagues who are way more ideological than me prefer not to interact with me. I am the "infidel" to them. To quite an extent that at least one faculty colleague openly asked me what I think most others think within: whether I am a Republican.

I thank Camille Paglia for helping me out; well, not personally, but through one of her essays. I liked the phrase "libertarian Democrat" that she uses to describe her political leanings. Which is what I am. Paglia, of course, ticks off people, even within the same Democratic fold, when she does not adopt an ideological framework and instead talks as an honest intellectual, and an honest individual.

Life can get difficult for a "libertarian Democrat" in a world of ultra-left Democrats. And more so when every once in a while I include ideas from Cato, or the Manhattan Institute. But, of course, "they" conveniently forget that I gather ideas from The Nation, too. And for the most part, I am straddling somewhere in the middle--the Brookings Institution, for instance, is one of my favorite policy research source.

A specific example to illustrate these dynamics? Take the case of the global use of carbon. The rare occasions I am asked for my opinion, I think I might tick some off with my concerns that the billions in India and China do not have inexpensive options that can replace the use of coal. And that we can, therefore, expect them to increase coal consumption even as we change light bulbs here in the US. And, given the sheer number of poor people there, merely forcing a carbon limit on those countries might be equivalent to trying to keep them poor. A new form of imperialism cloaked by a honorable idea of environmental concerns. Yes, it does not win me friends!

So, imagine if I were to distribute the following excerpt from an essay in the City Journal:

The oil-coal economics come down to this. Per unit of energy delivered, coal costs about one-fifth as much as oil—but contains one-third more carbon. High carbon taxes (or tradable permits, or any other economic equivalent) sharply narrow the price gap between oil and the one fuel that can displace it worldwide, here and now. The oil nasties will celebrate the green war on carbon as enthusiastically as the coal industry celebrated the green war on uranium 30 years ago.

The other 5 billion are too poor to deny these economic realities. For them, the price to beat is 3-cent coal-fired electricity. China and India won’t trade 3-cent coal for 15-cent wind or 30-cent solar. As for us, if we embrace those economically frivolous alternatives on our own, we will certainly end up doing more harm than good.

By pouring money into anything-but-carbon fuels, we will lower demand for carbon, making it even cheaper for the rest of the world to buy and burn. The rest will use cheaper energy to accelerate their own economic growth. Jobs will go where energy is cheap, just as they go where labor is cheap. Manufacturing and heavy industry require a great deal of energy, and in a global economy, no competitor can survive while paying substantially more for an essential input.

In the first place, I will be asking for excommunication given the (ill)reputation that the Manhattan Institute and the City Journal have among most academic social scientists who are generally way left of the Manhattan Institute. And then the content itself--about coal and carbon.

Sometimes I wonder whether many of the hard-core academics who are committed to a rapid elimination of carbon from our energy lives have ever been to India. Or China. It is one thing to talk about these things from the comforts of our own living rooms in the US, and is another to see and experience the remarkably poor lives that hundreds of millions lead all over the planet. Those hundreds of millions would love to get out of poverty, and telling them that they cannot burn coal simply won't work.

Quote of the day

"The American system of higher education has become an insane assembly line -- bankrupting families to process hapless students through an incoherent, haphazard and mediocre liberal arts curriculum."
Camille Paglia

So, what is the alternative to sweatshops?

It was in my second year as a grad student at USC that I first interacted with Professor Harry Richardson--I was enrolled in his class.  A fellow student complained about the labor conditions in the maquiladoras.  Harry, who later was my dissertation adviser, asked what the alternatives were if those factories were ordered closed because of conditions that are not ok by our standards.  I can even now picture the class in my mind, and the student who brought up the point had no answer--she seemed kind of stunned that somebody could ask such a question.  Kristof's column on sweatshops essentially is a restatement of Harry's remarks.

Maybe I remember it so well because I think that was the year I know I started losing belief in ultra-left policy alternatives--like many, I too quite seriously sympathized with leftist idea(l)s when I was in India.  Graduate school was the time I read and discussed a whole range of political/economic/philosophical ideas, starting with my roommate, Avu, who was in the doctoral program in the business school.  The facts didn't quite match up with the rhetoric of the left.  Slowly I started drifting towards the middle.

The political journey hasn't ended yet, and for all I know I might hit the reverse gear too.  As of now, and thanks to Camille Paglia, I now have a label to describe myself--a Libertarian Democrat!  (Can't remember where I read it a few years ago, and I can't seem to track it down.  She said that before Kos used that phrase.)