The Democratic Establishment Also Believes, and Trembles

 

This is pretty good, but I think it's misleading to take all the "Red Wave" predictions from Fox. I don't watch Fox. I do listen to NPR every morning, and they were just as sure as Fox News that the GOP would win big last November; also as disappointed when it didn't pan out. And I can't help wondering what Chris Hayes was saying before the fact. Don't misunderstand me, I think the lefty-Democratic resurgence is great news and I hope it continues. But corporate news coverage is mostly terrible, and Hayes himself as a booster of "meritocracy" is opposed to democracy.

This morning, for example, NPR's Morning Edition aired a brief interview on the UAW strike with Bernie Sanders, which they sought to balance with comments from a guy from the Brookings Institution. Does NPR "balance" its interviews with right-wing politicians and pundits by talking to people from the left? They do not.  If they can, they'll talk to commentators who are further to the right.

Know Your Place

Clarence Thomas bestie Harlan Crow has so many friends testifying to his good character.  As Law Boy Esq. put it on Twitter, "incredible to watch everyone on the right chime in with 'I am also financially intertwined with the billionaire Nazi guy'."

Among these friends is the notorious Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve and other modern classics.  Murray declared that Crow's "decency, integrity, and kindness" are recognized by everyone who knows him, "[i]ncluding people of the left." (It would be interesting to know who some of those "people of the left" are, but it's not really important.) Murray even dedicated his 2020 book Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class to Crow.

I have to admit that much of what I'm seeing online about Thomas, Crow, and Murray is basically ragegasms, the opiate of liberals and the left.  The people throwing these tantrums don't know how mainstream Murray's views are, by which I mean that they are held not only by the right but by liberals and many leftists.

As I've pointed out before, people who are outraged by scientific rationalizations of race and sex are likely to embrace biological explanations of sexual orientation, gender and other "identity", mental illness, and alcoholism and other addictions.  Racial essentialism is making a comeback too, as shown by the popularity of DNA testing to trace people's "roots."

Murray has sometimes tried to minimize his interest in race, and to foreground the application of his methods and arguments to class.  It's on that issue that liberals agree with him, even if they're not aware of it.  Chris Hayes, the liberal pundit for MSNBC who occupies probably the farthest "left" position in American corporate media, wrote in his 2012 book on meritocracy, "First, kids are not created equal.  Some are much smarter than others.  And second, the hierarchy of brains is entirely distinct from the social hierarchies of race, wealth, and privilege.  That was the idea, anyway" (35), of Hunter College High School's competitive entrance exams to select superior students.  I pointed out in my discussion of his book that Hayes assumes that unequal smartness has something to with how kids are "created," and that the superior kids deserve an elite place in society. Not all liberals would agree with Hayes, but I don't have the impression that many even noticed the problematic position he took here.

It's not true that "the hierarchy of brains is entirely distinct from the social hierarchies of race, wealth, and privilege."  The privileges of wealth, race, and sex have always been justified on the basis of innate virtue.  If they weren't just naturally superior (so goes the claim), the rich, the male, the white wouldn't be on top of the heap; but a look at the Bushes, the Trumps, the Kennedys, the Buckleys, and other American elites should be enough to show that money buys the mediocre and even the inferior a lot of influence and power.  Charles Murray isn't the first social scientist to try to justify those social hierarchies on the basis of biology, and he won't be the last. Many have toiled in that vineyard, and though their fruits have been discredited many times over the past century, there's never a shortage of money to keep them toiling, nor of sensitive journalists who will promote their claims. 

I think that even fewer leftists would agree with Frederik DeBoer, who wrote in 2017 a tortured defense of biological stratification.  Soon after posting it, he deleted it and almost all of his online writing up to that point, so I'll draw here on the extensive quotations I used in my discussion.

To me, the hard political question is the gap after the gaps — the question of what to do with differences in academic and intellectual potential after we have closed the racial and gender achievement gaps. What do we do with differences in academic achievement after they no longer fall along traditional lines of inequality?

I've been trying to find some quotations I remember from Charles Murray that looked very similar to this; no luck.  Murray admits that racism and sexism are real and deplorable, but they are receding, so differences in status and wealth will increasingly be due solely to innate and immutable differences in ability.  The result will be a 'natural' stratification in society as the genetically superior marry and live among their own kind.  It's all rather sad, but some are destined to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, and presumably to live in squalor.  Being enlightened scientists, we don't blame them, but we can't pretend that they are as good as we are.

This is, of course, the traditional defense of racial and other hierarchies.  DeBoer was aware that the optics of his position were unfortunate, and he hastily denied that he had any such position in mind,  However:

The bad news is that there now appears to me to be overwhelming evidence that there are profound individual differences in academic potential, that different individual human beings have significantly unequal likelihoods of ascending to various tiers of academic performance. Educational philosophy for centuries has assumed great plasticity in the academic potential of any particular student, that given good teachers and hard work, most anyone can reach most any academic pinnacle. And the case that I would someday like to make, that I have been tinkering with making for many years, is that this appears to be substantially untrue. Instead, it appears that in general and on average, human beings are remarkably static in how they are sorted relative to others in all manner of metrics of academic achievement. In education, with remarkable consistency, the high performers stay high, and the low performers stay low. And it seems likely that this reflects some complex construct that we might call academic talent, which whatever its origins (whether genetic, environmental, parental, neonatal, circumstantial, etc) is far less mutable than has traditionally been understood,

All this may or may not be true.  But first, it's evasive.  While DeBoer strenuously distanced himself from racist or sexist or even classist interpretations of his "case," he seemed to be assuming that low-performing students pop up at random in any population.  How is society to know which kids should be encouraged, and which kids left to their own devices? He didn't say.  Later in this article DeBoer acknowledged that our "metrics" for academic talent are inadequate; he went on hiatus soon after he posted it, but he has returned, and has published a couple of books which apparently (judging from their Amazon listings and reviews) extend his position.  Maybe I'll get to them, maybe I won't.

A few years later I began reading the English novelist Miss Read, whose stories are set in a rural English village and narrated by a kindly but conservative English schoolmarm.  I think Miss Read would have agreed with DeBoer.  She's on the alert for the talented few who can be prepped for advancement to grammar school, but is content to teach most of her pupils no more than the three R's, because they just aren't capable of any more than that. If she were right, England should have remained a rural backwater, populated by barely literate farmers and shopkeepers and the schoolmarms who stuffed the ABCs into their reluctant brains.

But she was wrong.  Most of the kids I went to school with in the 1950s and 1960s, in a semi-rural Indiana town, looked to me like Miss Read's pupils looked to her.  But many or most of them went on to community college and beyond, learned accounting and computer and other skills, which if not intellectual are certainly academic.  What Miss Read and Frederik DeBoer don't seem to realize is that although you can map "achievement" on a graph and individuals may stay much the same relative to each other, the average goes up.  The mediocrities of today know a lot more than the mediocrities of a century ago.

[P.S. When I was much younger, I read some mid-20th-century popular books on the theory of relativity.  Their authors said that when Einstein first published his paper in 1905, it was considered so difficult that only a very few physicists could hope to understand it, but as time went on that changed, and relativity became a comparatively routine college physics subject.  Part of this was improved teaching as instructors assimilated the theory.  Part of it was due to the perceived difficulty of any new idea, which familiarity made easier to grasp.  Part of it may even have been guild protectionism, claiming that only the elect could or ever would understand.]

Another related example: When the first digital computers were developed, they were programmed by women - women who essentially created the field of programming.  What they did was considered easy, albeit drudgework that men shouldn't have to bother themselves by doing.  But eventually men moved into the field and women were driven out.  At that point programming came to be regarded as a very difficult, advanced intellectual task beyond the ability of women, something only men were capable of, and women fought their way back into the field with great difficulty against that assumption.  It wasn't the task that changed, or the academic abilities needed to carry it out.  For details, see Claire L. Evans, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet (Portfolio, 2018).

There's also the little matter that some more intellectual subjects, like reading, writing, history, and others, are taught systematically so as to bore most students.  I say "systematically" because I don't know that anyone sat down and planned it that way, but the results are consistent.  When students are taught with better methods, they learn a lot more, and they learn it eagerly and with interest.  Whether DeBoer would consider that "plasticity," I don't know.  Nor does it matter.  

What matters here is that though DeBoer considers himself a leftist, he basically agrees with the educationally conservative (though condescendingly liberal, in a sense) Miss Read and the right-wing Charles Murray.  Murray's position, however much liberals may deplore it, is in reality one that they hold themselves in many cases.  That's why they react to the mere mention of his name with fury: it's easier than informing themselves and thinking about it.

Individual differences, however "profound," are not a problem.  Society needs differences.  If everybody were Einstein, there'd be no one to do everything that an Einstein doesn't, won't, or can't do.  Schooling should be oriented, not to finding the few who can tolerate boredom enough to learn intellectual skills, but to finding out what each student can do and helping them to learn to do it.  I cheerfully concede that there would be a lot of opposition to doing that, but it's not the result of individual differences.  I also think that DeBoer, Hayes, Miss Read, and their ilk exaggerate the difficulty of most of what must be learned.  The "metrics" we have can't tell us in advance what a child is capable of, though that's the holy grail of certain researchers (and mocked by Michael Young in his satirical novel The Rise of the Meritocracy). Such people are not the friends of human potential, but its opponents, and they can be found all over the political spectrum.

Move 'Em Up, Head 'Em Out

I finally finished Chris Hayes's Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, which turned out to be even less meritorious than I expected.  Hayes's ongoing misuse of the word "meritocracy" annoys me like a stone in my shoe: "institutions that create meritocratic elites" (64), "the energetic force of meritocratic competition" (75), "American political economy during the meritocratic age" (142), "several decades of failed meritocratic production" (155), "the class of meritocratic overachievers" (201), "the meritocratic era" (203), and the like.  What meritocratic era?  He can't seem to make up his mind whether meritocracy has been an aspiration, or a brief shining moment that has alas faded, or some combination of the two. 

He even quotes someone else's misdefinition:

Adam Michaelson, a former advertising executive who worked in Countrywide [Financial]'s marketing division, recalls the atmosphere of the business this way: "Countrywide fashioned itself a meritocracy, that is, whoever generated the most value or profit for the firm would be granted the greatest rewards, growth and prestige."  As happened in so many places over the past decade, the institutional definition of merit inside Countrywide became thoroughly perverse [97-8].

But the "institutional definition" didn't become "perverse," it was perverse in itself.  Those who generated value and profit for the firm weren't running it (the -cracy part of meritocracy again): the upper ranks of executive officers did that.  Those upper echelons skimmed off immense wealth for themselves from the "value and profit" their underlings generated:

Between 2001 and 2006, [cofounder Angelo] Mozilo managed to arrange for himself a staggering $470 million in in total executive compensation.  The most cynical interpretation of these actions, though also the most plausible, is that Mozilo was looting the company he'd built as fast as he could before the markets or regulators caught up with him [97].

Earlier in the book Hayes wrote, "In a meritocracy, people are judged not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character" (51).  Leaving aside the fact that we have no way of judging the content of people's character directly, before they are granted access to money and power, it seems fair to say that Mozilo showed his character all too well as he squirreled away vast amounts of money.  In the end the Securities Exchange Commission caught up with him, but he managed to avoid trial or jail by reaching a settlement in which he "agreed to pay $67.5 million in fines and accepted a lifetime ban from serving as an officer or director of any public company ... The terms of the settlement allow Mr. Mozilo to avoid acknowledging any wrongdoing.  In February 2011, the U.S. dropped its criminal investigation into the facts behind that civil settlement."

This isn't, contrary to Hayes's repeated lament, a new crisis of authority and public trust in the US.  What bothers me is that he really thinks that it's important that we believe authorities, and that they used to or even theoretically could deserve unquestioning trust.  He seems to think, for example, that the "mainstream" corporate media used to be reliable, or ought to be treated as if they were.  It "wasn't just the rise of technology that produced the explosion of the blogosphere; it was the perceived failings of the mainstream media" (118).  That word "perceived" bothers me.  It could mean that those failings became manifest and so were perceived; but in context it seems to mean that people only thought they discerned those failings.  If Hayes has ever heard of I. F. Stone, he doesn't let on.  As he concedes,

It turned out that ... someone sitting in a basement in New Jersey, using the Internet, reading from a diverse set of sources about WMD intelligence, could actually get closer to the truth than the beat reporter with the inside sources at Langley [118].

That's essentially what Stone did.  Expelled from the Washington press corps in the late 1940s, he started his own newsletter and worked by close reading of corporate media and government publications.  He didn't even need the Internet.  Access to government insiders, that consummation devoutly to be wished among most American journalists, has more to do with wanting to rub elbows with the powerful than with doing serious journalism.

Critical thinking makes Hayes uneasy, for some reason.  He admits that authority figures have made lethal mistakes, and that professional "consensus" can be and has been completely wrong.  But he still seems to think that somewhere there's a meritocratic elite who will be right and can be trusted, if we can just find them.  That, it seems to me, is the root of the problem.  No one individual can know everything, so we have to delegate learning to other people.  But if we expect to find someone who knows everything and never errs, we're bound to be disappointed when our elites turn out to have feet of clay, and then go looking for the next true authority.  It's not necessary to be cynical about it, just realistic, but that option seems not to have occurred to Hayes.

Hayes assumes that competition selects for merit, and that is probably his biggest mistake.  In some cases it may do, where merit can be narrowly and specifically defined: as the fastest runner or the highest jumper.  But that applies only to a very small part of worthwhile human endeavor.  When merit is defined as making as much money as possible for your hedge fund, you get into trouble.  Or consider this example:

[Economist Sherwin] Rosen argued that certain technological trends had radically expanded the demand for services for those who were the best in their field: in 1950, a top basketball player could only monetize his talent with an endorsement deal that would sell sneakers to Americans; today, LeBron James is featured on billboards from Florida to Turkey to China [142-3].

I think "market" would be more accurate than "demand," but the real fault here is the assumptions that there is one indisputable "best in their field," and that no one else can "monetize his talent."  Many elite athletes have their fans, who'll buy products endorsed by their favorite stars, and those fans disagree about who is the best.  You don't have to be the top basketball player in the world to become rich, or even financially comfortable.  And again, sport is a field where excellence is relatively easy to define and detect, compared to the arts, let alone politics.  Hayes goes on:

The same goes in a whole host of domains: the best opera soprano can, with the advent of MP3s and the Internet, sell to anyone in the world with an iPod, which spells trouble for the fifth best soprano. If you can buy the best, why settle? [143]

This assumes that people seek out the best, or the world's best, singers, and that they agree who is the best.  Neither is true.  A fan may have his or her favorite diva, and argue that she's the best against the fans of rivals, but there is room (and a need) for more than five great sopranos in the opera world, just as there's no reason why New York City can't offer excellent educations to more than 185 new students each year.  Those who aren't the top 185 still have a claim on learning, and something to contribute.  (P.S. I think that Hayes's remarks here could only be made by someone who doesn't much like it, and knows next to nothing about it.)

I realize that I'm probably not a typical music listener, but I don't think in terms of seeking out the best singer, or songwriter, or guitarist, or pianist, or band in the world.  I look for music or other art that gives me pleasure, or moves me emotionally, and I'm drawn by a range of artists.  Sure, there are fans who root for their band or their singer against all others -- I remember with distaste the divide between Beatles and Stones fans in the 60s, for example -- but it isn't necessary to denigrate all other singers than your personal fave.  The mindset that does so is fed by the competitive ethos of capitalism, but that's what is wrong with it.  Few of even the most fanatical fans have records by only one performer in their collections.  And none of this has much if anything to do with merit, let alone meritocracy.

Hayes structures his book around a few hot-button stories that many writers and pundits can agree are important -- the Roman Catholic abuse scandals, steroids use in baseball, corruption in business and finance and politics -- but they don't have much to do with "meritocracy."  That's not too surprising, since he doesn't have a very clear understanding of what meritocracy is or might be, and Twilight of the Elites is a frustratingly insubstantial discussion of some serious problems.

The System That Dare Not Speak Its Name

I'm not sure I'm going to make it all the way through Chris Hayes's Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (Crown, 2012).  I know I said I was going to read it, but I got sixty pages into it yesterday and got so dispirited that I didn't want to go on.  I think he's mapped out his assumptions by the point I've reached, and they are what's wrong with the book.  Put simply -- and Hayes is not a complex thinker -- he believes that the United States is a meritocracy: that our rulers are people who showed that they were qualified to run a complex society and its institutions.  He keeps referring to our elites as "the meritocracy," begging repeatedly the question that they actually have merit.

This emerges very clearly in the second chapter, "Meritocracy and Its Discontents."  Hayes begins:

Whether we think about it much or not, we all believe in meritocracy. It is embedded in our very language: to call an organization, a business, or an institution “meritocratic” is to pay it a high compliment.  On the portion of its website devoted to recruiting talent, Goldman Sachs tells potential recruits that “Goldman Sachs is a meritocracy.” It’s the first sentence [31].

I presume that by that first sentence Hayes means that "we" all believe a meritocracy is an ideal to be worked toward.  If so, he may be right, as when he wrote a few pages earlier that meritocracy "is an ideal with roots that reach back to the early years of the Republic" (21), that people should achieve wealth and status through disciplined hard work, not have them assigned by accident of birth.  Or, as he also puts it, "In a meritocracy, people are judged not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character. This crucial distinction between the contingent and essential features – between skin color and intelligence – appeals to some of our most profound moral intuitions about justice and desert" (51).

He goes on to offer what he considers a "compelling" argument, that meritocracy is not "necessarily fair, but rather that it is efficient. By identifying the best and brightest and putting them through resource-intensive schooling and training, we produce a set of elites well equipped to dispatch their duties with aplomb. By conferring the most power on those equipped to wield it, the meritocracy produces a better society for us all. In rewarding effort and smarts, we incentivize both."  He goes on to concede that "meritocracy in practice is something different.  The most fundamental problem with meritocracy is how difficult it is to maintain it in its pure and noble form" (52-3).  Before you can "maintain" a meritocracy, however, you have to achieve it.  Hayes only assumes that it has been achieved (for a few bright shining years in the Sixties, I gather), and this is not something that can be assumed; you need to provide an argument and evidence, which he doesn't do.

Instead he begins with a case study, the Hunter College High School in New York City, of which he is an alumnus.  (Along with many other well-known people, including Florence Howe, who wrote about her experience there in her memoir A Life in Motion.)  Rather flustered, Hayes describes how Justin Howard, a graduating senior at Hunter, delivered a commencement address in 2010 that challenged many of the school's pretensions.

Hunter, Hayes explains,

embodies the meritocratic ideal as much as any institution in the country.  It is public and open to students from all five boroughs of New York City, but highly selective.  Each year, between 3,000 and 4,000 students citywide score high enough on their fifth-grade standardized tests to even qualify to take Hunter's entrance exam in the sixth grade.  Only 185 are offered admission ...

Hunter is routinely ranked one of the best high schools in the nation.  In 2003, Worth named it the highest-ranking public feeder school, and Newsweek, in a 2008 evaluation of high schools, named it one of eighteen "public elites."  In 2007, the Wall Street Journal identified Hunter as sending a higher percentage of its graduates to the nation's top colleges than all but one of its public peers.  That year, nearly 15 percent of the graduating class received admission to one of eight elite universities that the Journal used for its analysis.  The school boasts an illustrious group of alumni, from famed Civil Rights activist and actress Ruby Dee, to writers Cynthia Ozick and Audre Lorde, to Tony Award winners Robert Lopez (composer and lyricist, The Book of Mormon and Avenue Q) and Lin-Manuel Miranda (composer and lyricist, In the Heights), to West Wing writer and producer Eli Attie, to Supreme Court justice Elana Kagan [32].

Where do I begin?  Well, first and I hope most obviously, Hayes takes standardized tests very seriously: he seems to think that they actually measure merit.  In reality they measure ability to choose correct answers from multiple-choice options under intense time pressure in a competitive environment.  Marking in bubbles on an answer sheet -- neatly, neatly, don't get outside the bubble! -- while the clock ticks is indeed a skill of some kind (I did quite well at it myself in the day), but I'm not sure it is equivalent to "merit."  Hayes is sure it is.  He considers the SAT, for example, "an objective measure of the 'merit' of the applicant" so that "the nebulous subjectivity of the admissions procedure would be eliminated in favor of an equal, accessible, and objective metric" (37).  There is quite a large literature which explains why this isn't so, but Hayes seems not to be aware of it.  Well, nobody's perfect.  (For now I'll refer the reader to two articles by Alfie Kohn, available online, and to his book The Case Against Standardized Testing [Heinemann, 2000].)

Notice that the famous alumni Hayes names are not, in fact "crats," however much merit they have, except for Justice Kagan.  Poets, composers, writers: they contribute to our society, no doubt, but they don't rule it.  This is a problem that runs throughout his discussion.  Not only is he confused about what merit is, he consistently ignores the "-cracy" in meritocracy.  He's far from alone in doing so, of course.

Hayes also seems to want to impress the reader by how selective Hunter is.  Thousands apply, but only a few, the best! get in.  The best!  If only a few are let in, they must be really good, right?  And it proves that the school is good, right?*  He's so attached to this idea that he misunderstands Justin Howard's critique of the Hunter system -- or rather, of the system that produced Hunter, the system Chris Hayes mistakes for meritocracy.  Howard's entire speech is available online; I'll mainly stick to the portions Hayes quotes.  "I feel guilty," Hudson said,

... because I don't deserve any of this.  And neither do any of you.  We received an outstanding education at no charge based solely on a test we took when we were eleven-year-olds, or four-year-olds.  We received superior teachers and additional resources based on our status as "gifted," while kids who naturally needed those resources much more than us wallowed in the mire of a broken system.  And now, we stand on the precipice of our lives, in control of our lives, based purely and simply on luck and circumstance.  If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city, then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside, and Flushing, are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvestant, and Washington Heights, and I refuse to accept that [quoted by Hayes, 33].

Hayes reports that the "parents in the crowd were, not surprisingly, a bit taken aback.  The teachers offered a standing ovation.  Jennifer J. Raab, the president of Hunter College and herself a graduate of Hunter College, stayed seated" (34).  Hayes himself is indignant: "Unlike elite colleges ... entrance to Hunter rests on a single 'objective' measure: one three-hour test.  If you clear the bar, you're in; if not, you're not.  There are no legacy admissions, and there are no strings to pull for the well connected.  If [NYC Mayor] Michael Bloomberg's daughter took the test and didn't pass, she wouldn't get in.  There are only a handful of institutions left in the country about which that can be said" (34).

But Hayes is missing the point, partly I think because Howard didn't make it clearly enough.  I think he'd have preferred to miss it anyhow.  In one sense, I disagree with Howard: I think he and his fellow students do deserve the "outstanding education at no charge" that they received at Hunter.  But every other child in New York City, and indeed in the US and around the world deserves an outstanding education at no charge.  Not the same education, mind you, but an outstanding education that would bring out and nurture the capacities each child has.  Most children in New York don't get anything like that unless their capabilities match those valued by elite universities, which Hayes, begging the question, assumes to be merit.  This is the source of Howard's survivor's guilt, and Hayes misses it entirely.

Only 185 children are offered admission to Hunter each year.  That seems an arbitrary number, but I suppose it's the capacity of the school.  There is no reason why there couldn't be other good schools in the city, each admitting another 185 of those who've scored high on the entrance exam; even those who take the test in the first place have already been selected from the mass of students by the preliminary test they took in fifth grade.  There are other elite schools in New York, of course, like the Bronx High School of Science attended by Samuel R. Delany.  I imagine there could be even more, if there were the will to spend the money to establish them.

It's good that such schools exist, but there also need to be good schools for all the other children.  There aren't, and that's the root of Justin Howard's guilt and anguish.  This is especially true because we can't know in advance what any given child is capable of, though the testing industry and many educational "professionals" are built on the premise that we can.  Michael E. Young satirized this belief in the 1950s in his The Rise of the Meritocracy, which Chris Hayes has read but whose satire he can't quite grasp.  Young mocked the pretense of psychometricians to be able to identify children's potential at ever earlier ages.  Though it's well established that there is no measure, "objective" or otherwise, that can really do this, Hayes, like other believers in meritocracy, wants to believe that there is, or could be.  And one of the core features of meritocracy as an ideology is that those who rise in the hierarchy must be willing to accept the values of the rulers and leave behind the lesser, lower orders from which they came.  The values of the rulers must be meritorious, because they are the rulers' values and the rulers wouldn't be rulers if they didn't have merit, right?

"Hunter's approach to education rests on two fundamental premises," Hayes declares in his apologia.

First, kids are not created equal.  Some are much smarter than others.  And second, the hierarchy of brains is entirely distinct from the social hierarchies of race, wealth, and privilege.  That was the idea, anyway.  But over the last decade, as inequality in New York has skyrocketed and competition for elite education has reached a fever pitch, Hunter's single entrance exam has proven to be a flimsy barrier to protect the school's meritocratic garden from the incursions of the world outside its walls [35-6].

Hayes makes several blunders here.  First, different is not the same as unequal.  That people are not equally intelligent does not mean they are or should be unequal in terms of rights; Hayes's allusion to the opening of the Declaration of Independence shows that he either doesn't understand the difference (more likely, I suppose) or that he's deliberately blurring it (in which case he isn't as smart as he likes to think).  Second, there is not really a "hierarchy of brains" distinct from the "social hierarchies of race, wealth of privilege," especially since (as Hayes uncomfortably admits) the two are intimately connected, even intertwined where Hunter is concerned.  The percentage of black students entering Hunter dropped from 12 percent in 1995 to 3 percent in 2009, he reports on page 36.  Have black New Yorkers gotten 75% dumber in 14 years?  I doubt it very much, and even Hayes can't quite bring himself to say so.  (No doubt because of the "open-minded, self-assured cosmopolitanism that is the guiding ethos of the current American ruling class," that he says he "absorbed" at Hunter [35].)  Hunter isn't responsible for the growing economic inequality, with all its destructive consequences, of the world outside its walls -- or is it?  After all, its graduates are disproportionately represented among the elites who are responsible for the increase in inequality.  It appears likely that something important wasn't covered in that outstanding education they received.

I don't find that surprising.  Hunter isn't an alternative approach to education, it's a portal that admitted a few people who wouldn't have gotten past the old aristocratic sorting methods of the elite schools.  Hunter was founded at a time when the prevailing sorting methods were frankly racist and sexist; basing admission solely on test results was a good start, but it was only a start.  Its aim is to assimilate its students into the values of the ruling elites.  Remember that it was very intelligent, highly-educated products of the system represented by Hunter -- the "best and brightest" -- who invaded Vietnam and devastated Southeast Asia in the name of anti-Communism.  Just as George W. Bush's staff 'fixed the intelligence' to justify the US invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon Papers revealed that the Eisenhower administration fixed the intelligence, despite the absence of supporting evidence, to prove that Ho Chi Minh was a Kremlin agent; Kennedy's men bought this fabrication and ran with it as if it were a game of touch football.  Of course, very few of them died as a result of their brilliance.  (Most of the casualties, American or Vietnamese, didn't merit an elite education.)

Ursula K. Le Guin put it neatly in words she invented for the philosopher Odo in her novel The Dispossessed, originally published in 1974 (reprinted by Perennial, 2003, p. 358):

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger.  Have we not eaten while another starved?  Will you punish us for that?  Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate?  No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

These words leapt out at me when I first read them decades ago, because I'd recently encountered the same idea in Walter Kaufmann's Without Guilt and Justice, where he attacked "the idea of deserving" at length.  I don't expect Chris Hayes to have read either of these books, of course.  But he needn't have read them to have encountered some enlightening alternative views of ability, education, and social justice.

Hayes alludes a couple of times to the metaphor of the cream rising to the top.  So does the scum, but he prefers not to think about that.  In either case it is a metaphor which has dubious relevance to education or the running of a society.  He eventually claims that at Hunter, "over time the mechanisms of meritocracy have broken down. With the rise of a sophisticated and expensive test-preparation industry, the means of selecting entrants to Hunter has grown less independent of the social and economic hierarchies in New York City at large. The pyramid of merit has come to mirror the pyramid of wealth and cultural capital" (54).  This is all wrong.  There is no pyramid of merit, not even figuratively.  The "mechanisms of meritocracy" were never in place.  Perhaps Hayes believes that Hunter's entrance exam could be revised so as to weed out the kids who've been prepped for it, leaving only the truly, innately excellent -- but there is no reason to think so.  Hunter isn't to blame.  The fault lies with the system Hayes mistakenly buys into, no doubt because he has benefited from it: the hierarchy of wealth and power that justifies itself by declaring itself a meritocracy.  The merit involved can only be instrumental, the ability to carry out efficiently tasks whose value isn't open to question.  Should we invade this or that country?  Don't ask: the only question is whether we can do it efficiently.  I think Hayes is obscurely and uneasily aware of this, but isn't ready to challenge the values of the society that raised him up and gave him a platform to write books like this one.

Speaking of which, it looks like the next chapter will focus largely on professional baseball's doping scandals.  The ability to play baseball well is a merit easier to measure than the ability to govern a country well and wisely, but baseball players don't rule the country either.  I have to remind myself that what concerns Hayes is that our elites have let us down.  Say it ain't so, Joe!  I'm going to have to steel myself to keep reading.

* P.S.  On rereading this it occurred to me that while it was obvious to me that Chris Hayes was wrong to assume that Hunter's extreme selectivity was evidence of its merit, and of its students, it might not be obvious to everyone else.  Sarcastic rhetorical questions, while fun, aren't an argument.

So: suppose that Hunter still only admitted 185 new students each year, but did so purely on the basis of a lottery, a random drawing.  It would still be very selective, but no one would claim that this proved the "merit" of the 185.  Or suppose that admission was based on the ranking of the students' parents among New York City's wealthiest families.  (Or its poorest, if you like.)  There are probably people who'd argue that the richest have demonstrated their merit and their children have demonstrated theirs by choosing good parents to be born to, but I don't think Hayes would be one of them.  Selectivity by itself doesn't prove much; consider the negative associations of the word "exclusive," as in "exclusive country club."

Hayes claims (or assumes -- after all, he passed it, so it must be good!) that Hunter's entrance examination is an "objective measure" of the students' aptitude for the Hunter experience, but I doubt it: could it be any better than IQ tests or the College Board examinations, both of which are seriously flawed as measures of intelligence, intellectual ability, or scholastic aptitude?  If so, Hunter should share it with the world.  But here I'm only really concerned with his evident belief that selectivity is a good in itself.

"What Is Truth?" Said Jesting Pilate

Another fun tidbit: FAIR has a blog post by Peter Hart about Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes fussing over new polling data which showed that a majority even of Republicans believe that there is "too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations." Fifty-three percent of Republicans believe this, compared to 91 percent of Democrats and 80 percent of Independents, or 77 percent of all respondents. (I find it significant that 80 percent of Independents agree, since the Independents are the mythic Center that Democrats like Obama are always trying to placate by moving to the right.)

I've written about this before myself:

Now, the White House is obsessed with the opinion polls. It is not possible that Obama and his people don't know what most Americans think and want. For that matter, the Republicans must know it too. So, when Obama sold out a public option in his health-insurance bill, when he put the deficit rather than jobs front and center, when he put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block, when he extended and escalated US military adventures, he knew that if public opinion meant anything, he was chopping away at his chances of re-election with every budget cut. Yet he avowedly defied his base. Maybe he believes and hopes that he can spend his way into a second term; and maybe he can.

(To clarify: I know that although professional politicians watch the polls, they don't let them guide policy or practice. My point is that you can't claim they aren't aware of them.) The difference between me and those MSNBC stalwarts is that they thought that these poll results reflected a new development, even though (as FAIR showed) similarly large majorities of Americans have said the same thing for decades.

HAYES: What's amazing to me is how unresponsive Republican state level officials are and how much they're responsive to all of their ideological priors, all of the interests that they promised fealty to before they got into office, and how little trimming of the sails they've done.

True, but what about the Democrats, who, as I pointed out above, must have the same polling data? As the FAIR blogger pointed out, "the first question to ask is whether you really believe politicians are actually sensitive to public opinion at all--read about Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of politics for another take." The only connection between the Democrats and "populist" Americans came later, when Maddow said: "But I think right now, if they [Democratic politicians] were calculating the domestic political cost of ending the Afghanistan war, there would be none. I do not think that the Republican Party has either the credibility or the energy on foreign policy to resist Democratic White House if they wanted to end the Afghanistan war sooner." Of course, Obama has no intention of ending the war in Afghanistan until he's damn good and ready, political cost or no -- he has no Bush-era Status of Forces Agreement to push him, as he did in Iraq.

So anyway, another good commentary from FAIR. What prompted me to write this post was a comment below the post, from someone who wrote:

Perhaps if we demand that a requirement be made into law that news broadcasts and public political meet a minimum threshold of honesty we might see things change. They manage to do this in Canada and yet here Fox News was able to win a lawsuit by claiming they had no legal requirement to tell the truth. Demand Honesty.

He included a couple of links to online petitions which he had evidently started. (The one on Facebook has 4 likes so far!) I was disappointed, because I was looking for evidence that they "manage to do this in Canada." Judging by right-wing Canadian politicians' ability to be voted into office, I am skeptical.

But the real question is, what would a law look like which required "that news broadcasts and public political [sic] meet a minimum threshold of honesty"? Who would decide what is honest and what isn't? I wouldn't trust any government to make that decision. Much as I dislike Fox News, I'm glad they won the right to lie; "We Fought in Court for Our Right to Lie to You" should replace "Fair and Balanced" as their tagline. The alternative would be that the government can decide that any news outlet wasn't meeting "a minimum threshold of honesty" if it published information -- about the economy, say, or about American war crimes -- the government disliked. Before anyone advocates such a law, they should imagine it being enforced by the Bush administration, though I'm sure Obama would love it just as well. In the real world it would replace journalism with government and corporate propaganda. Indeed, the corporate media already "meet a minimum threshold of honesty," with the stress on "minimum."

The problem, as far as I can see, is that too many Americans don't "demand honesty." There are plenty of alternative media in the US. Nobody is required to listen to the corporate media; just about everybody complains about them; but they refuse to look at the alternatives. When I ask people about this, they say things like "Gee, I know I should, but I just don't have time ... Someday I'm really going to inform myself better ... Someday ..." Yet they do have time to watch reality TV shows and hour upon hours of professional or college sports; I think that reveals their real priorities.

Myself, I don't have time to watch the corporate media; most of my news-reading time is taken up with alternatives: FAIR, Democracy Now!, my community radio station, and a lot of places on the web, which I read critically. And I've noticed that once you begin to inform yourself, you can read behind what the corporate media say, so that even if you must watch CNN or read the New York Times, you can spot their distortions. That is your responsibility as a citizen: to think for yourself. If you want the media and the government to decide for you what is true, you might as well just listen to Rush Limbaugh; he at least openly claims to think (or something) for his audience. No free citizen should abdicate the responsibility of thinking to anyone, government, corporation, or individual, but that is what the commenter was advocating: let the government determine a "minimum threshold of honesty" — and come to think of it, we already have that, a minimum — so that we can just sit back and let ourselves be filled with government-approved truth. Yummy! Why, we could even have a Department of Truth! Then we could finally trust the media; they wouldn't dare step out of line.

A law like the one that commenter wants would make a difference, though: it would wipe out alternative media, or at best drive them underground. Right now you have alternatives to the corporate media, who distort the news in directions agreeable to their corporate owners. But if the government can require the media to tell the "truth" as determined by the government, who do you think would be shut down? Not the New York Times for dutifully passing along Obama's claims about Iran's nuclear weapons, you can be sure of that. More likely it would be little magazines and websites who shoot his claims full of holes. If the commenter doesn't like the First Amendment, which forbids government interference with the press, he can always move somewhere more to his liking, like Canada or France or -- what the hell, why not? -- Iran.

Are You Or Have You Ever Been a Negro, Dr. King?

This (via) is fascinating. Thanks to FAIR for posting it on their blog.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The full program is divided up into segments, so if you can, click on the second one where there is some very intelligent discussion. What particularly struck me about the excerpts from Meet the Press in 1960 and 1965 is that in a just world they'd put an end to certain liberals' yammering about the bygone days when the media spoke truth to power, and were adversary, dammit! They were objective instead of putting their opinions into everything! As you can see, Meet the Press was adversary in those days, all right -- but not to the powerful.