When life was simple and everything you were supposed to know was contained in a single book. Also: why The Lord of the Rings is so appealing to the right; media libel laws; policing; and a lagniappe about a real flying saucer.
NY Times, Paul Krugman, 16 Feb 2023: The Right Don’t Need No Education
Ron DeSantis, who is currently governor of Florida and wants to become president, has been trying to position himself as America’s leading crusader against wokeness. And lately higher education has become his most visible target. He picked a very public fight with the College Board over its new advanced placement course in African American studies, and in the past few days has broadened that attack into a suggestion that Florida might stop offering A.P. classes in any field.
What’s going on here? It’s easy to get drawn into debating accusations about particular courses or institutions, but that’s missing the fundamental context: the extraordinary rise in right-wing hostility to higher education in general.
Think back to the dramatizations of the Scopes Trial. Protestors carrying signs that read “Read Your Bible!”
It is true that college faculty members are much more likely to identify themselves as liberal and vote Democratic than the public at large. But this needn’t be evidence of anti-conservative bias. Much of it surely reflects self-selection: What kind of person decides to pursue academics as a career?
A point I’ve made before. Conservatives tend to think the important things to be known are in the Bible or have been solved before (by the Founders, typically); what’s the need for research? Similarly journalists, who skew liberal because they know more about the world and how it works than do most people. The exceptions both in academia and journalism are conservatives who found journals or institutions with the conclusions already in mind, as we saw yesterday in the item about the “cost-of-thriving index”, not to discover what’s true or learn new things.
More Krugman:
So what’s really driving the attacks on higher education? … What happened was that MAGA politicians began peddling scare stories about education — notably, denouncing high schools for teaching critical race theory, even though they don’t. And right-wingers also greatly expanded their definition of what counts as “liberal propaganda.”
[…]
And once that’s your mind-set, you see left-wing indoctrination happening everywhere, not just in history and the social sciences. If a biology class explains the theory of evolution, and why almost all scientists accept it — or, for that matter, the theory of how vaccines work — well, that’s liberal propaganda. If a physics class explains how greenhouse gas emissions can change the climate — well, that’s more liberal propaganda.
[…]
In any case, one sad thing is that this turn against education is taking place precisely at a time when highly educated workers are becoming ever more crucial to the economy. …
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Then there’s this, which is not, as it might seem, so different from the above topic.
Salon, Jeremy Lindenfeld, 16 Feb 2023: Right-wing rings of power: The far-right’s bizarre obsession with Lord of the Rings, subtitled “Right-wing Lord of the Rings fans find archconservative lessons in Middle-earth. Why?”
Offhand, before reading this piece, I’d note that fantasy in general is deeply conservative. So many of its worlds depict clearly delineated good vs. evil, so many are about defeating evil or returning a sullied world to a glorious past when magic worked. Revealing the same (almost childlike) motivations that drive many people into the warm blanket of conservative political thinking. Things were so much better in the old days! When we were young and innocent (and uneducated!).
For most Lord of the Rings fans, hobbits are the portly little folk of Middle-earth who live in homes carved out of hillsides and spend quiet lives smoking pipe-weed, singing songs and drinking ale.
But some influential hard-right figures in our world see the lives of those endearing “halflings” — free from government intervention and overreach — as close to societal perfection.
Examples of Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey.
So, what do conservative libertarians find so appealing about Tolkien’s fantasy world?
“No government tells the free peoples [Elves, Men, Dwarves, and the sentient-tree people called Ents] what to do,” James says. “There really isn’t much government at all.” Instead of a bureaucratic committee, an independent coalition correctly decides to send a fellowship to destroy the One Ring and stop Sauron from establishing a dictatorship over Middle-earth.
Libertarians see that when crisis comes to Middle-earth, good people willingly share resources without explicit government mandates. Public investment largely goes toward defense, so when foreign hordes invade, there are usually enough swords and shields for willing fighters to take up arms against them. Charismatic leaders usually rise to the top thanks to their heroism and overcome immense hardship to fulfill their destinies.
This is, of course, a fantasy world where right and wrong are objective, there is little reference to any complex sexuality, and people hurt in battles either heal quickly or die fast.
And life was short, and primitive, and simplistic. Is that really what libertarian conservatives want? Are they thinking this through?
The article goes on. One point is that some see
that each of Tolkien’s races benefit from the “value of specificity,” meaning they had particular cultures and identities that were worth preserving. She extended the same logic to the people of Europe’s sovereign nations. Italians — like hobbits and Elves and Dwarves — are unique and should protect against anything that threatens their identity, she suggests.
And thus anti-Globalism, even racism, in the idea that different groups have their own identities and should not mix.
It’s fantasy, people! The hobbits and elves and dwarves are different species! (I assume.) Enough.
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Vaguely related.
Washington Post, Erik Wemple, 15 Feb 2023: Opinion | Ron DeSantis’s latest culture-war target: Media libel laws
Now Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential GOP presidential candidate, appears to have his own approach to tearing down barriers protecting news organizations from defamation suits. “Stay tuned,” DeSantis said at an event last week in which he guided a panel discussion on media regulation. During an hour of discussion, DeSantis, an ace practitioner of GOP media-bashing rhetoric, showed why some critics view him as a more dangerous embodiment of Trump’s two-bit authoritarianism. He’s smarter, more informed and more disciplined.
Though no less wrong.
Make it easier to sue media outlets for libel, to indirectly suppress their expression of free speech, and promote official government indoctrination. This is sort of the flip side of “fake news”; DeSantis and similar conservatives aren’t worried about media outlets spreading flat-out misinformation about vaccines or elections or the shape of the earth, they’re worried about media outlets telling a truth that contradicts the official government version of reality.
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Digging a bit deeper.
Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 16 Feb 2023: America’s most enduring myth, subtitled “Policing is inherently conservative and authoritarian as an institution”
With examples of recent police shootings, and how quickly they are forgotten.
There is an entire political, economic, and cultural machinery in America that is dedicated to laundering, almost quite literally, the reputations of the country’s police and law enforcement. The result— “copaganda” —is to make America’s police and other law enforcement immune as an institution from suffering any substantial and enduring negative consequences when they abuse the public, especially if the people who are being targeted are Black, brown, poor, mentally ill, immigrants, or members of other marginalized groups.
“Culture” consists of all the things that a people in a given society do without thinking or much reflection because it is deemed to be “normal”. In that framework, copaganda is a cultural force that is so omnipresent that most people in America can recite its elements without much effort.
The vast majority of police are good and hardworking and want to “protect and serve” the public.
It is only a few bad apples who abuse the public; most cops are good people.
Most police use violence as a last resort. If you just do what the police tell you then you will not be hurt or killed.
Being a police officer is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country.
The article goes on to challenge, with data, these truisms, which President Biden recycled in his State of the Union address.
I’m not so much interested in the specifics here, as to wonder why America cannot examine the policing methods of other countries and see how policing might be done better. The first problem is that Americans seem to think their country is already the best at everything, and so whatever other countries do is irrelevant. The second problem is that maybe the US really is different, given its history of racism, precisely the kind of thing the governor of Florida doesn’t want high school students to know about. The third problem is that policing practices of other countries simply might not work, given the saturation in this country of guns by a paranoid, racist, minority.
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Lagniappe
Boing Boing, David Pescovitz, 16 Feb 2023: This is the US Air Force’s real flying saucer (video)
