Public School History - Lofty Idealism and Patriotism or Critical and Cynical Realism.

Evilroddy said:

Myth, marketing, and history are melding into many different and discreet Frankenstein sub-realities, and that is disturbing to me. Common reality and common ground are subducting under the immense weight of ersatz realities being hard sold to different facets of the American population.

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Conservatives do not have the capacity to sell their take on historical events like people on the left do because they do not have a hold on the academia and the media like the left does. It doesn't mean that you cannot find conservatives making dubious claims. It means that dubious conservatives claim do not constitute the background assumptions animating contemporary discussions. When there are bogus claims that are replicated in research, textbooks, the media and even in movies, it's almost certainly convenient for the left.

Some of it is especially pernicious because they're not outright lies. They are convenient omissions or phrasing that smoothens out important detail. On the left, especially on the far left, there is a large temptation to portray American origins as racist, in large part because it taints conservativism. It lets people on the far left blow conservative arguments and ideas out of the water as rooted in racism or even in white supremacy. For example, a historian recently published a book on the relationship between segregation policies and Nuremberg Laws in Nazi Germany. It's absolutely correct, except for one tiny detail that changes everything. The title of the book is "Hitler's American plan." From the moment Democrats went from defending slavery to defending segregation, Republicans opposed them. It's completely dishonest to lay the blame on America as a whole when millions disagreed, one of the two dominant parties opposed it and eventually dismantled it. It's even more dishonest since the arguments Republicans made were conservatives: racism violates the principles behind the foundation of America.

Of course, there are more blatant lies. For example, Antifascists in the US are behaving more or less like European Fascists of the early 20th century. Mussolini was a prominent socialist in Italy. He wrote in socialist magazines. Roosevelt sent some of his staff to study his regime because he liked his economic policies and Mussolini praised the New Deal in an Italian magazine. Antifascists also dress in black head to toe to intimidate people with whom they disagree, pushing for boycotts and censorship... They might as well start speaking Italian and call themselves blackshirts. They claim to fight fascists, but they are fascists themselves.

Mussolini wrote that fascism is about the centrality of the State: "Everything in the State. Nothing outside the State. Nothing against the State." The common thread is not hard to see, but you only see it if you have those facts in your hands.

Evilroddy said:

But common ground and enlightened compromise are the glues which hold a free society together.

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Of course. If negotiating an agreement is not possible, we are left with only two options: I force my way on you, or you force your way on me. That's part of what makes freedom of speech so fundamental: it's part of this intention to rule out violence as a legitimate way to coordinate our interactions.

Evilroddy said:

However being a non-American looking into the giant fishbowl of America, I am struck by how polarised even the historical facts have become in America (...).

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I was initially driven to look into cultural and historical issues because of the rise of political correctness. Though I am not American, I did have the luxury of time to read about these issues, mostly using audiobooks during traffic jams. It is also the case that we tend to import some of the habits of our neighbors in Canada, so we do have issues of our own with political correctness.

A very noisy minority of radicals on the far left are trying to normalize ideas and behaviors designed to preempt discussion. To anyone who is not completely lunatic, this should sound suspicious. If they're so obviously right and others are so obviously wrong, why not let others speak and remove all doubt as to their mistake? It's only when you think you'll get a beating that you don't get into the ring. So, when someone tries to silence other people or drown them in noise, it says everything: censorship is the silent concession of defeat. It also got to me when I read people calling for "freedom of speech but not for hate speech." It speaks volumes to the naivité of the people who hold those views: why would popular speech need to be protected? People don't call for censoring ideas they like. They always censor what they don't like. The whole point is to protect unpopular ideas. Even ideas you find disgusting should be spoken if only so we have the opportunity to explain in public why they are wrong.

All of that nonsense seems to make sense because it is pressed against assumptions about how history played out. Without the background information, it would be very hard to convince any sane person that someone who speaks like Abraham Lincoln about the value of freedom and the equality of human beings is a racist, a bigot or a xenophobe because he's attacking segregated dorms or affirmative action.

TheEconomist:

TheEconomist said:

Conservatives do not have the capacity to sell their take on historical events like people on the left do because they do not have a hold on the academia and the media like the left does. It doesn't mean that you cannot find conservatives making dubious claims. It means that dubious conservatives claim do not constitute the background assumptions animating contemporary discussions. When there are bogus claims that are replicated in research, textbooks, the media and even in movies, it's almost certainly convenient for the left.

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I disagree with the presumption that Conservatives/the right are marginalised by the left on university campuses. My experience is that the left are well entrenched in most social science departments, music and/or fine arts departments, religious studies and comparative religion departments, women/gender studies departments, social work departments some geography/geology departments and in Law schools. But conservatives reign supreme in most economics departments and business schools, are well represented in medical schools, in applied science programmes and engineering (theoretical science in more concerned with spin and charge than left or right and thus are truely out there) and most importantly in the administration of universities and in the alumni societies. So I do not believe that most universities are dominated by radical left wing or right wing agendas. There are some so dominated for sure but these donations are not occurring in the preponderance of post secondary schools. I admit I am old but I am still in contact with many aspects of university life in my parts of Canada, and my sense is that a cautious but receptive conservatism still holds sway in most universities most of the time. My economics professors used to drive me to desperation with their arch-conservatism, but that was in the 1970s so perhaps they are more avant garde these days. In contrast my history professors and math professors were more polarised between left and right wing world views.

Some of it is especially pernicious because they're not outright lies. They are convenient omissions or phrasing that smoothens out important detail. On the left, especially on the far left, there is a large temptation to portray American origins as racist, in large part because it taints conservativism. It lets people on the far left blow conservative arguments and ideas out of the water as rooted in racism or even in white supremacy. For example, a historian recently published a book on the relationship between segregation policies and Nuremberg Laws in Nazi Germany. It's absolutely correct, except for one tiny detail that changes everything. The title of the book is "Hitler's American plan." From the moment Democrats went from defending slavery to defending segregation, Republicans opposed them. It's completely dishonest to lay the blame on America as a whole when millions disagreed, one of the two dominant parties opposed it and eventually dismantled it. It's even more dishonest since the arguments Republicans made were conservatives: racism violates the principles behind the foundation of America.

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I think the tendency is to lay blame on the American Federal State, the various states and their ruling or more influential elites. Not on Americans as a whole unless they participated in it actively like for example Virginia. America was late to the Western World's anti-slavery boom which occurred somewhat cynically as a result of the Industrial Revolution which rejected chattel-slavery which it found difficult to compete with for the newer and less obvious wage-slavery adopted in the craft shops and factories of the rural and later urban industries.

As to the essence of your critique, I agree and thus wonder should the emphasis of history teaching be shifted more towards developing the effective reading, analytical and critical skills at the expense of rote teaching of facts, dates, names and paradigms of history or the "we are great - feel-good history" which has been taught in the past. If students are taught to question the historical facts they are presented with they will get better at debunking these half-truths and omissions which are endemic and as you say pernicious to an informed electorate. As a non-American, I don't like to colour history with Democrat or Republican or Whig or any political perspective. If you supported slavery, you supported slavery. Why you did so is interesting but is not central to the historical reality. All political persuasions have really bad and really good ideas and policies under their belts and deciding the good or the bad should be part of the curriculum only as. Long as the students cannot arrive at their own decisions unassisted. Once they can they should immediately start question what their teachers/professors have taught them.

Continued next post.

Of course, there are more blatant lies. For example, Antifascists in the US are behaving more or less like European Fascists of the early 20th century. Mussolini was a prominent socialist in Italy. He wrote in socialist magazines. Roosevelt sent some of his staff to study his regime because he liked his economic policies and Mussolini praised the New Deal in an Italian magazine. Antifascists also dress in black head to toe to intimidate people with whom they disagree, pushing for boycotts and censorship... They might as well start speaking Italian and call themselves blackshirts. They claim to fight fascists, but they are fascists themselves.

Mussolini wrote that fascism is about the centrality of the State: "Everything in the State. Nothing outside the State. Nothing against the State." The common thread is not hard to see, but you only see it if you have those facts in your hands.

Click to expand...

Mussolini started off as a socialist but by the mid-1920s neo-Roman nationalism, racism towards Africans and Albanians, very close relationships with big business/finance and a growing disregard for the Rule of Law (being supplanted by the Rule of Man and brute force) left him a a pro-corporation (corporatist - his term), statist, militarist with a racial superiority complex and thus a full blown right-wing fascist.

Of course. If negotiating an agreement is not possible, we are left with only two options: I force my way on you, or you force your way on me. That's part of what makes freedom of speech so fundamental: it's part of this intention to rule out violence as a legitimate way to coordinate our interactions.

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Compromise and a willingness to compromise, knowing you will never get a perfect solution for either side in a fair deal is the life-blood of a liberal democracy. Once a national project becomes so absolute that there can be no compromise either deadlock, corruption or authoritarianism are the results of pursuing the absolute national project without compromise.

Yours was a very good post, so thanks again for taking the time and making the effort to produce such a thoughtful and thought-provoking post. Now it's on to your next one.

Cheers.
Evilroddy.

TheEconomist:

TheEconomist said:

I was initially driven to look into cultural and historical issues because of the rise of political correctness. Though I am not American, I did have the luxury of time to read about these issues, mostly using audiobooks during traffic jams. It is also the case that we tend to import some of the habits of our neighbors in Canada, so we do have issues of our own with political correctness.

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Yes, political correctness bothers me too up to a point. I do however see a need for declaring some speech as unprotected speech because of the harm it does to others. So incitement to violence, fraudulent advertising, lying to the public under certain circumstances, perjury, criminal and civil libel and several other limitations on free speech are needed in a society if peace, order and good governance (POGG) are to be maintained in a society. Adopting good foreign ideas is usually a net positive for any society and avoiding bad foreign ideas is often necessary and wise. The trick is figuring out what's good and what's bad.

A very noisy minority of radicals on the far left are trying to normalize ideas and behaviors designed to preempt discussion. To anyone who is not completely lunatic, this should sound suspicious. If they're so obviously right and others are so obviously wrong, why not let others speak and remove all doubt as to their mistake? It's only when you think you'll get a beating that you don't get into the ring. So, when someone tries to silence other people or drown them in noise, it says everything: censorship is the silent concession of defeat. It also got to me when I read people calling for "freedom of speech but not for hate speech." It speaks volumes to the naivité of the people who hold those views: why would popular speech need to be protected? People don't call for censoring ideas they like. They always censor what they don't like. The whole point is to protect unpopular ideas. Even ideas you find disgusting should be spoken if only so we have the opportunity to explain in public why they are wrong.

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As they are a noisy minority they can be marginalised and removed from private university campuses at least temporarily and can be barred or removed from public university campuses as unruly and riotous disrupters if they develop a habit of suppressing the free speech of others and being a public nuisance. It's not an insurmountable problem, even in a society which has grown as litigious as modern-day America.

All of that nonsense seems to make sense because it is pressed against assumptions about how history played out. Without the background information, it would be very hard to convince any sane person that someone who speaks like Abraham Lincoln about the value of freedom and the equality of human beings is a racist, a bigot or a xenophobe because he's attacking segregated dorms or affirmative action.

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Well, honest Abe did suspend habeus corpus during the civil war, so even he saw the need to limit classical liberal freedoms in an emergency. But your point is well taken. Anything is possible if you can control others' perceptions of history or reality. That's the basis of all modern advertising/propaganda since Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann unlocked Pandora's Box in the 1920s. Now reality is no longer experienced so much as manufactured, as are we!

Cheers.
Evilroddy.

TheEconomist said:

For example, are you aware of the argument laid out in the majority opinion of the Dred Scott decision? Roughly speaking, it argues that the Founding Fathers did not mean to include black people when they declared all men to be equal. It's a very interesting proposition given that slavery survived almost a century after the Declaration of Independence. Do you know who made the best argument against this? Lincoln did it in his 1860 Cooper address. He shows that of the 39 Founders who signed the US Constitution, 23 of them had an opportunity in their office to vote on abolishing or restricting slavery. 21 of them voted in this direction, a clear majority. Lincoln also makes mentions of what the Founders wrote on top of what they did. That sounds like a crucial bit of history to me. His argument was not "let's radically change the country." His argument was "this is the foundational ideal of this country.

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TheEconomist:

Among almost all post-bellum constitutional scholars, Dred-Scott v. Sandford is considered to be the worst decision ever rendered by the US Supreme Court. It has been cited as the most blatant and egregious example in this court’s history of wrongly imposing a judicial solution on a political problem, with disasterous results. Years later chief justice, Charles Evans Hughes, famously characterized the decision as the court’s greatest “self-inflicted wound.” So Dred-Scott vs. Sandford was, to use the modern parlance, an "Epic Fail". The historical and legal fact that it has been recognised as such and repudiated by almost all informed Americans may not have helped Dred-Scott himself, his wife and their two children, but it goes a long way to expiating the folly and craven nature of a foolish Supreme Court terrified at the prospect of a war between the states in part over slavery. Official America (the state) learned its lesson well in this case.

I read the Lincoln Cooper Institute speech in part and agree it is powerful and well crafted.

I haven't yet checked out the voting restrictions on the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments but I'll get to that.

Cheers.
Evilroddy.

Evilroddy said:

Mussolini started off as a socialist but by the mid-1920s neo-Roman nationalism, racism towards Africans and Albanians, very close relationships with big business/finance and a growing disregard for the Rule of Law (being supplanted by the Rule of Man and brute force) left him a a pro-corporation (corporatist - his term), statist, militarist with a racial superiority complex and thus a full-blown right-wing fascist.

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Nationalism is not a monopoly of the right, nor is it a distinctive feature of fascism. Mandella and Gandhi, for example, were profoundly nationalist. The same is true of racism. Some prominent figures on the left in the United States were racists. President Wilson and Johnson are two examples some four decades apart. The defining questions, insofar as we want to draw parallels with how we understand the terms left and right, are about economic policies and the proper role of government.

Moreover, you missed a very important point: he praised the New Deal, a series of welfare programs introduced starting in 1933. His views on economic policies clearly were on the left. The man never even contemplated for a second the idea that capitalism was morally superior to an order a government would forcibly bring about.


Now, let me solve the riddle of attacking unions, parsimoniously attacking businesses, the disregard for democracy and for the Rule of Law. I'll show you precisely where this comes from.

In direct opposition to the doctrine of fascism, we have the liberal doctrine proposed by John Locke which was by far best expressed in the Declaration of Independence. It reads: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights (...). " The key here is that rights are endowed by a creator: it is part of the dignified existence of a human being that some of his claims must be absolutely respected by all others. It is because rights come before the social contract that we cannot contractualize them away. It hangs over the head of all leaders of our countries, this idea that even they can do wrong.

With fascists, things are different because rights are not natural. The government creates rights, so rights cannot be invoked to restrain the actions of the government. Everything in the State. Nothing outside the State. That's part of what that sentence means. Mussolini had no regard for the rule of law, like all good radicals before or since his time. Socialists certainly had little use of the rule of law: their doctrine openly yearns for a revolution. If a politician in the United States today made a comment about property rights, explaining that rights are not God-given, but State-given, would you bet on him being a Democrat or a Republican? It sounds like a Democrat trying to explain why your income can be taxed massively. Who believes "hate" speech should be regulated? Antifascists certainly do. They are disposed to slander you, doxx you, intimidate you, assault you, send false threats to public places to raise security concerns, to try to get you to lose your job and, if all else fail, to drown you out when you speak... Nothing against the State. That's why they brutalized unions and violated laws on mass. They believed their ends were righteous and thus justified the means. You don't need an opinion. We don't need debates. The State will decide and the State will tell you what is your opinion.

It doesn't strike me in the least as a pro-free market, pro-freedom kind of view.

Out of curiosity, what do you teach exactly?

TheEconomist said:

Nationalism is not a monopoly of the right, nor is it a distinctive feature of fascism. Mandella and Gandhi, for example, were profoundly nationalist. The same is true of racism. Some prominent figures on the left in the United States were racists. President Wilson and Johnson are two examples some four decades apart. The defining questions, insofar as we want to draw parallels with how we understand the terms left and right, are about economic policies and the proper role of government.

Moreover, you missed a very important point: he praised the New Deal, a series of welfare programs introduced starting in 1933. His views on economic policies clearly were on the left. The man never even contemplated for a second the idea that capitalism was morally superior to an order a government would forcibly bring about.


Now, let me solve the riddle of attacking unions, parsimoniously attacking businesses, the disregard for democracy and for the Rule of Law. I'll show you precisely where this comes from.

In direct opposition to the doctrine of fascism, we have the liberal doctrine proposed by John Locke which was by far best expressed in the Declaration of Independence. It reads: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights (...). " The key here is that rights are endowed by a creator: it is part of the dignified existence of a human being that some of his claims must be absolutely respected by all others. It is because rights come before the social contract that we cannot contractualize them away. It hangs over the head of all leaders of our countries, this idea that even they can do wrong.

With fascists, things are different because rights are not natural. The government creates rights, so rights cannot be invoked to restrain the actions of the government. Everything in the State. Nothing outside the State. That's part of what that sentence means. Mussolini had no regard for the rule of law, like all good radicals before or since his time. Socialists certainly had little use of the rule of law: their doctrine openly yearns for a revolution. If a politician in the United States today made a comment about property rights, explaining that rights are not God-given, but State-given, would you bet on him being a Democrat or a Republican? It sounds like a Democrat trying to explain why your income can be taxed massively. Who believes "hate" speech should be regulated? Antifascists certainly do. They are disposed to slander you, doxx you, intimidate you, assault you, send false threats to public places to raise security concerns, to try to get you to lose your job and, if all else fail, to drown you out when you speak... Nothing against the State. That's why they brutalized unions and violated laws on mass. They believed their ends were righteous and thus justified the means. You don't need an opinion. We don't need debates. The State will decide and the State will tell you what is your opinion.

It doesn't strike me in the least as a pro-free market, pro-freedom kind of view.

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TheEconomist:

I did not miss the FDR reference but I am trying to stay on topic; the teaching of history.

To make a long story short, the early New Deal programme was a colossal undertaking of statism in opposition to the free-market which was attractive to fascists like Mussolini and Hitler. It wasn't that the Italian or the German were acting like socialists but that the Americans were acting like arch statists and protofascists. The early New Deal was state driven cororatism administered by many folks sympathetic to the statist aspects of fascism. This brand of the New a deal proved to be a complete failure through 33-35 and was eventually abandoned for a less corporatist and more direct state interventionist new deal by 1935-1941.

https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu...&httpsredir=1&article=1656&context=fss_papers

Cheers.
Evilroddy.

TheEconomist said:

Out of curiosity, what do you teach exactly?

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TheEconomist:

My degrees are in History and Economics as is my teaching certificate. However I have the ability to teach many other courses. Thus over about 34 years of teaching I have taught Maths, General Science, Physics, Human Biology, General Biology, Civil and Criminal Law, History, Economics, Media Analysis, English Language Arts, Woodworking, and Physical Education. These have all been taught at the Grade 7-11 levels except a pre-calculus course for advanced students which while taught at the high school level was part of a collegiate level curriculum.

Cheers.
Evilroddy.

Evilroddy said:

My degrees are in History and Economics as is my teaching certificate. However I have the ability to teach many other courses. Thus over about 34 years of teaching I have taught Maths, General Science, Physics, Human Biology, General Biology, Civil and Criminal Law, History, Economics, Media Analysis, English Language Arts, Woodworking, and Physical Education. These have all been taught at the Grade 7-11 levels except a pre-calculus course for advanced students which while taught at the high school level was part of a collegiate level curriculum.

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Damn. That's a lot.

Evilroddy said:

What happens if the system which Little Johnny is going to inherit is broken and seriously malfunctioning. Do you want Johnny to be blind to that and not to try to change the system?. Would you prefer your little Johnnies to be compliant, hard-working, patriots who bear the yoke of a flawed system on their shoulders or would you prefer acute, critical, fiercely radical Johnnies capable of fixing a fundamentally flawed system (and perhaps screwing you over in the process)?

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Improvement has a chance to succeed if you begin with a fair acknowledgment of the value of what has been passed down to you by your parents and their parents before them. It is not the purview of all of humankind to enjoy a safe and comfortable existence such as the one even relatively poorer citizens get to experience in the western world. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have been born in Canada. Consequently, I approach the question of improving my lot as a difficult problem which requires of me that I first make sure my actions will not make it worse. Proceed with caution and through reforms, not through revolutions.

Nothing is perfect and no one is without sin so that if perfection is the measure of all things good, we shall burn all we have to the ground and damn every soul we know. That is the lot of the ungrateful mind, to be permanently disappointed by the failure of life to live up to immaterial and unearthly standards that it has set itself. That is why they do not appreciate the danger of playing God with the fates of millions through feats of social engineering: they do not understand that there absolutely is something of value that they could lose.

In a free country, your biggest problem is almost always yourself. If you really want to make the world better, begin by putting your own life in order. Clean up your home. Fix what is broken. Categorize everything you left in a pile. Get rid of things you do not need. Put yourself on a career path that will afford you and your family the freedom to live a fulfilling existence. Acquire healthy habits. Get your finances in order. Get your love life in order. If all of this works, you earned the right to dip your toes and you may dare to influence the lives of other people. Help your family, your friends and your relatives. If that doesn't blow right back in your face, move on to your community and your town.

If you did these things successfully and you believe you have a useful idea for solving a complicated problem on the scale of a country, you might actually say and do things which will work. If you're a 21-year-old college graduate who majored in gender studies some 50 thousand dollars and 4 years later living in your mother's basement in a filthy room, maybe you should reflect on how likely your advice is to be entirely useless if not outright dangerous.

Sheepdog said:

Neither, just teach kids how government works and how to get a job to pay their ****ing bills and maintain their house/cars so they are busy being productive citizens instead of marching in the streets like a bunch of ****ing angry morons with masks and bike locks or tiki torches because both sides are stupid as hell.

Historical facts can be learned on your own. Submitting kids to history is about as evil as it gets because bias from the teacher is always imposed.

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You're probably going to get dog-piled for your post but it has some merit. For many years I taught social studies, then math, and finally science. And you are correct; every history teacher I ever had, ever knew, ever taught with, including myself, has a bias. Everybody does, including scientists, engineers, chefs and even plumbers. We all select the facts that we feel are most important, give them more weight, and ignore or at least discount facts that don't fit. What produces wisdom is knowledge; and a person has to read a hell of a lot of history, from various viewpoints, to gain any insight on the subject. Amateur history buffs often are much more well versed than the academics. They are usually much more open minded.

What we do in school is teach just enough of our own viewpoint that our students begin to think they really know something. And if you're good at teaching they will regurgitate that viewpoint the rest of their lives. What should we be teaching? Fundamentals. Basic geography. Basic government. As you say, basic business; kids graduate not knowing how credit works, how insurance works, and how taxes work. You have kids out there protesting not even knowing what they are protesting about. They call themselves Socialists but can't define Socialism. I don't think people can really understand history until at least their late twenties/early thirties. It takes that long to soak up all the different viewpoints, and come to some serious understanding of history.

TheEconomist:

TheEconomist said:

Improvement has a chance to succeed if you begin with a fair acknowledgment of the value of what has been passed down to you by your parents and their parents before them. It is not the purview of all of humankind to enjoy a safe and comfortable existence such as the one even relatively poorer citizens get to experience in the western world. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have been born in Canada. Consequently, I approach the question of improving my lot as a difficult problem which requires of me that I first make sure my actions will not make it worse. Proceed with caution and through reforms, not through revolutions.

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I am not sure whether you're talking about personal improvement or educational systemic improvement here, but I will proceed on the basis of the latter. The problem occurs when different parents/families/ancestors have very different takes on that history. A family from North Vancouver, BC is going to see history very differently from a family from St. Boniface, Man. And they will both be very different from a family tradition in Jonquiere, Que. So when these families' children arrive in a common public school classroom, there will be little common ground upon which to base a curriculum. Therefore the educational authority will have to discount the different familial historical patrimonies and start from scratch to build a common historical base upon which all students can springboard off to follow their own unique historical interests.

The part about caution in demanding and shaping improvements is a point well taken.

Nothing is perfect and no one is without sin so that if perfection is the measure of all things good, we shall burn all we have to the ground and damn every soul we know. That is the lot of the ungrateful mind, to be permanently disappointed by the failure of life to live up to immaterial and unearthly standards that it has set itself. That is why they do not appreciate the danger of playing God with the fates of millions through feats of social engineering: they do not understand that there absolutely is something of value that they could lose.

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Perfection is an ideal, a goal to move towards, but never a destination. It is always out of reach. However ideals and perfections can be useful metrics for directing realistic improvement in an imperfect world. As you said earlier, we should not let perfection be the enemy of the good or functional; but nor should we abandon the ideal of perfection to settle for unnecessary mediocrity. Ungrateful minds and ambitious minds may sometimes appear as similar manifestations. The desire to improve is not necessarily rooted in ingratitude for one's condition. Human hubris and arrogance will always be themes in both progress and folly but that should not paralyse change from within bringing about external change.

Continued next post.

In a free country, your biggest problem is almost always yourself. If you really want to make the world better, begin by putting your own life in order. ... If all of this works, you earned the right to dip your toes and you may dare to influence the lives of other people. Help your family, your friends and your relatives. If that doesn't blow right back in your face, move on to your community and your town.

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Here I disagree. It is not necessary to be a paragon of one type of lifestyle to make positive changes in a society. The Dominion Canada was founded by among other flawed people, a corrupt, vain, alcoholic who excelled as a political bully boy. Sir John A MacDonald certainly did not have his life in order when he changed Canadian history. Nor did PM MacKenzie Yking during WWII nor Rene Levesque, nor Pontiac, nor Joseph Brand. All reshapes our history by their actions as flawed persons rather than well organised technocrats. So the thesis that getting your life in order is a necessary prerequisite for making changes in history is not one I accept, especially since history has a habit of forcing the hands of unprepared and unexpectant people who then were able to wrought great change.

If you did these things successfully and you believe you have a useful idea for solving a complicated problem on the scale of a country, you might actually say and do things which will work. If you're a 21-year-old college graduate who majored in gender studies some 50 thousand dollars and 4 years later living in your mother's basement in a filthy room, maybe you should reflect on how likely your advice is to be entirely useless if not outright dangerous.

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Socrates was a mess personally but he changed Athens and Greek civilisation before they forced him to kill himself. Spartacus, a grubby and uneducated Thracian slave, challenged and almost defeated the Roman colossus during the Servile Wars. Wat Tyler brought down a king to grovelling during the Peasant's Revolt of 1381 and triumphed until murdered by a knight-assassin. Catherine the Great ruled Russia well despite a chaotic and hedonistic personal life. A philandering Martin Luther King inspired an entire nation to be better and to begin healing centuries-old, festering, societal wounds.

Flawed and ill prepared women and men have shaped history and will continue to do so.

Cheers.
Evilroddy.

Evilroddy said:

Perfection is an ideal, a goal to move towards, but never a destination. It is always out of reach. However, ideals and perfections can be useful metrics for directing realistic improvement in an imperfect world. As you said earlier, we should not let perfection be the enemy of the good or functional; but nor should we abandon the ideal of perfection to settle for unnecessary mediocrity. Ungrateful minds and ambitious minds may sometimes appear as similar manifestations. The desire to improve is not necessarily rooted in ingratitude for one's condition. Human hubris and arrogance will always be themes in both progress and folly but that should not paralyze change from within bringing about external change.

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I have no objection to your concern that some change may be desirable and that the desire to change may not be rooted in ingratitude.

Yet, the current stirring among radicals in the United States, Canada and much of Europe come from a place of deep ingratitude. A man who argues that such countries are rotten to their very core and looks down on this lot of his which makes the envy of all matters of people abroad cannot be said to appreciate his luck. People on the far left complain about consumerism and the isolationism introduced by technology on their smartphone.

Evilroddy said:

Here I disagree. It is not necessary to be a paragon of one type of lifestyle to make positive changes in society. The Dominion Canada was founded by among other flawed people, a corrupt, vain, alcoholic who excelled as a political bully boy.

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Thomas Jefferson littered his writtings with the anthropological and sociological speculations of his day, indulging in some of the most racist verbal concoctions we could find. Even more damningly perhaps, the man was a slave owner himself and the country he founded did not abolish slavery until long after his death. On the other hand, one wonders what would have happened of slavery, had the Founders insisted to do away with an institution that was introduced in America more than a century before the American Revolution. The next best thing to abolishing slavery was to bring into the Union slave owners and have this Union be formed on principles that could never be squared with slavery. It was an imperfect deal made by imperfect men which culminated with the liberation of nearly 4 million people from the tyranny of their democratic patrons.

Clearly, I am not a fan of utopian visions.

Knowledge can be acquired via experience, via tackling problems and overcoming burdens, or by benefiting from the wisdom and insights of those who came before you. My advice is to start improving the world locally, with things that you might actually manage to improve. The first reason is that you acquire wisdom by dealing with real issues. The second reason is that you should try your own medicine before selling it to others. The third reason is that when you start working seriously, you will see your life improve over time and you will learn to value of the world you inherited from the past, even if it is not perfect.

The world needs the young for its rejuvenation, not for it to be re-founded anew.

Evilroddy said:

Socrates was a mess personally but he changed Athens and Greek civilization before they forced him to kill himself. Spartacus, a grubby and uneducated Thracian slave, challenged and almost defeated the Roman colossus during the Servile Wars. Wat Tyler brought down a king to groveling during the Peasant's Revolt of 1381 and triumphed until murdered by a knight-assassin. Catherine the Great ruled Russia well despite a chaotic and hedonistic personal life. A philandering Martin Luther King inspired an entire nation to be better and to begin healing centuries-old, festering, societal wounds.

Flawed and ill-prepared women and men have shaped history and will continue to do so.

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For some reason, I am unable to update my previous post.

I have thought about your comment over and I think I did not do it justice. There are tensions in my thoughts that appear to be unresolved. One the one hand, I contend that people should be allowed to speak their mind; and, on the other, I argued not everyone can be taken seriously. Part of it has to do with the tone in which many of those demands are placed. I somehow have this image of a 19-year-old who thinks they're better than Churchill because the man was prejudiced. It's the pretense of deserving a degree of respect and deference they have not earned.

It's also the case, as you point out, that some people are rather disorganized and still made positive contributions. In a sense, the content might be great even if the wrapping is ugly -- and I often make a similar argument. It's not clear how to square what I just said above with freedom of speech and valuing the content of speech over its form.