Chinese immigrant school board candidate Faye Yang denounced CRT, argued black underperformance IQ-based, cited The Bell Curve. Now seems to be backing down. Almost made it, @charlesmurray https://t.co/uHAqn6jCZp
— Peter Brimelow (@peterbrimelow) September 1, 2021
Olivia Rodrigo is at the White House today to meet with President Biden and Dr. Fauci and discuss the importance of young Americans getting vaccinated. pic.twitter.com/s95KtOkrsF
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) July 14, 2021
Thursday night, Uppercut begins its second season on @BattleBots. Please join me in rooting for this machine. My son and his friends at MIT built it! Here’s a promo: #STEM https://t.co/d43e2BGNRl
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) December 17, 2020
My review of Michael Sandel's new book, The Tyranny of Merit https://t.co/Z6McnpKanE
— Matt Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) September 27, 2020
They are also often people of sub-standard quality. Brexit has meant a huge drop in the ability level of the people who govern us. It always mattered that most educated people wanted to remain, however much one is rightly critical of meritocratic dominance and a selfish elite.
— john milbank (@johnmilbank3) September 16, 2020
Meritocracy and its discontents: A book event with Michael J. Sandel | American Enterprise Institute - AEI listening to this now. https://t.co/X48FY7g0ak
— University Bookman (@ubookman) September 3, 2020
What a disgrace. University of Pittsburgh Medical College removed Chinese-American Norman Wang, a cardiologist + associate prof of medicine, as a fellowship director after he argued quotas had failed + advocated for meritocracy. https://t.co/yWFhzzvGNa
— Asra Q. Nomani (@AsraNomani) August 18, 2020
Civil society has been described as an “immune system against cultural disease.” But much of it has been infected by the same virus that produces the disease—a loss of moral integrity and purpose. What is required, then, is not only the revitalization of civil society but its reform and remoralization—the reform of those institutions that parody government agencies, and the remoralization of those that have lost their moral focus.The distinction between civil society and the "state" seems to be a recent one, coupled to the development of the modern nation-state. Is it at all a useful tool in the analysis of polities? Or does the science of politics need to start at, well, with the principles, rather than with the assumption of the nation-state as an ideal form? The classical distinction would be between the community and the ruler(s), no? How are they united into one body? Why should we accept Lockaen liberal political theory as the basis for our analysis of what ails us? Reading Locke should be on my list of things to do, but I can't muster the enthusiasm for it.
This is a formidable challenge, inspiring us to recall those to whom we are indebted for the idea of civil society and whom we now cite in support of it. It is to Locke, of course, that we owe the distinctively modern concept of a civil society that mediates between the individual and the state. But it is not quite the individual and the state that figure in Locke’s trinity. It is the “state of nature” and “political society” that are on either side of “civil society.” This is not a trivial semantic point. The “state of nature,” as Locke describes it, is more fearsome than the “individual,” and “political society” less formidable than the “state.” Moreover, in Locke’s account, civil society has a close relationship to political society, almost overlapping with it, as opposed to the state of nature, which is always in sharp contrast to civil society: “Those who are united into one body and have a common established law and judicature to appeal to, with authority to decide controversies between them and punish offenders, are in civil society one with another; but those who have no such common appeal, I mean on earth, are still in the state of nature.”
Similarly, Tocqueville’s “voluntary associations,” which we sometimes equate with civil society, are not as exclusively within the domain of civil society as we might suppose. Tocqueville has the highest regard for these associations which are unique to America—but not unique to civil society. On the contrary, the genius of American democracy is the proliferation of “political associations” as well as “civil associations,” and, more important, the intimate relationship between them, the civil being dependent upon the vitality of the political. “In all countries where political associations are forbidden, civil associations are rare. . . . Thus civil associations pave the way for political ones, but on the other hand, the art of political association singularly develops and improves this technique for civil purposes.”Tocqueville may be admired by some American "conservatives," but was he not also a liberal? (Just as they are, I suppose.) Can his observations of American society be said to be from the viewpoint of a liberal? In his native Europe was he already born into the loss of true, rooted communities formed through shared history and life? That is to say, does he recognize that a polity must be exist in accordance with the proper scale?
Today, in our anxiety about the excesses of individualism and statism, we may find ourselves looking upon civil society not merely as a corrective to those excesses but as a be-all and end-all, a sanctuary in itself, a sufficient habitat for the human spirit. What our forefathers impress upon us is a more elevated as well as a more dynamic view of civil society, one that exists in a continuum with “political society”—that is, government—just as “civil associations” do with “political associations,” “private affections” with “public affections,” and, most memorably, the “little platoon” with “a love to our country and to mankind.” This is civil society properly understood (as Tocqueville would say), a civil society rooted in all that is most natural and admirable—family, community, religion—and that is also intimately related to those other natural and admirable aspects of life, country and humanity.Civil society refers to families, communities, churches, workplaces, formal and informal associations, in distinction from the state. But is there one sort of community which is superior to the rest? Himmelfarb wants to say that some problems cannot be solved by civil society but must be addressed by the state, and that "civil society itself has turned out to be a more complicated and ambiguous entity than might be supposed. Indeed, it is sometimes complicit in the problems it purports to solve." Are these problems not due to "civil society" but because of the loss of community and any power that it might have within the modern nation-state?
While a wholesale, artificial approach won’t get us to this spot, there are nevertheless things we can do to help this culture along. Foremost among them is to foster real community—meetings of people in the flesh. These should center not simply around discussing ideals, nor the totally banal; they should incorporate objective human goods like food and music, and they should draw from the cultural tradition whence notions of “aesthetic” and “goodness” arose. They should be pockets of humanism, but with a new and very self-aware intentionality.
Part of the problem with parishes as community is that we have much more mobility so that people don't just socialize within their villages or local communities as we once did. It is still evident and very important in more agrarian societies, but not in the urbanised modern world. As such, we have to use new ways to build community, to give a sense of belonging. The Apple video above shows that a community can be formed out of a desire for excellence. In a Christian context, this would mean a love of virtue, and indeed, a love of God who is the Most Excellent. Evangelization, then, would mean letting that excellence be shared and seen and enjoyed by others – acts of charity and of preaching.
Mobility (and mass urbanization) is possible only because of cheap energy. I would prefer the Church be ahead of the curve than behind it when it comes to adjusting to the coming loss of cheap energy, but it may not happen. Community/communion/friendship should be based on excellence but it also requires that one live with the other --"quality time" doesn't make up for lack of time, just as in parenting.He ended with the implicit claim that this was not being realistic: " So, are we going to preach to the world that exists, or do we need to create that ideal world before we preach? I go for the former..."
With social mobility in the UK remaining at the level it was for those born in 1970, and the inequality gap haemorrhaging the aspirations of those at the bottom, a radical rethinking of public policy is needed. In fact, one could go even further and suggest that in order to address the problems of intergenerational deprivation and institutional disadvantage that compounds the lack of opportunities for too many children and young people in the UK, a shift of perspective is needed. Whereas many of the past policy solutions designed to tackle these problems were focused on individuals, new set of measures has to operate on the level of groups and communities as well as individuals.
For instance, the Pupil Premium has been heralded as the central policy tool to address the problem of underachievement for underprivileged students. While it presents a valuable policy intervention to help students from poor backgrounds to get into better schools, it simply does not go far enough in addressing the root causes of disadvantage. Indeed, the effect of the Pupil Premium, as well as many other policies targeted at improving social mobility, set out to move a small number of individuals up the social ladder, but leave their communities behind. Rather than individuals, 'the little platoon we belong to in society' should become the level targetted by policy makers to answer the challenge of social mobility. In order to tackle the problem of intergenerational disadvantage we need a new set of policy measures and a new 'Burkean' approach.
It was liberal reformers– throughout the nineteenth century, and earlier– who were keen to institute meritocracy in the civil services of various European governments. The struggle for existence is an essentially liberal way of conceiving civil society: that’s why laissez-faire capitalists, arch-liberals all, tended to be such fans of the eugenics movement.It seems to me that at the very least, conservatives wish to preserve the constitutional order, even if it is imperfect or even has some evils, because to abolish it would lead to an even greater evil befalling the polity. I would agree more with Aristotle than Miss Black's conservative - those who rule should be qualified to do so precisely because they are better than the others. This is demanded by distributive justice and falls under the natural law. Therefore, liberal meritocracy is judged to be incorrect not because authority is given on the basis of merit but because how merit is ascertained is wrong or unjust.
Conservatives, by contrast, see social solidarity as the normal state of things, and the dynamism or creative destruction that the liberal order fosters, and in which natural law promotes the rule of the “best,” is really quite alien to the conservative mind. Those conservatives who are defenders of aristocracy do so not on the basis that the aristocrats are better than others, but on the basis that aristocrats fill a social role that someone’s got to fill, just as someone’s got to bake the bread and someone’s got to write for the feuilletons, and it might as well be this lot as anyone else.
[T]he thing we call aristocracy in Europe is not in its origin and spirit an aristocracy at all. It is not a system of spiritual degrees and distinctions like, for example, the caste system of India, or even like the old Greek distinction between free men and slaves. It is simply the remains of a military organization… Now in an army nobody ever dreams of supposing that difference of rank represents a difference of moral reality… No one ever says, in reporting a mess-room conversation, “Lieutenant Jones was very witty, but was naturally inferior to Captain Smith.” The essence of an army is the idea of official inequality, founded on unofficial equality. The Colonel is not obeyed because he is the best man, but because he is the Colonel. Such was probably the spirit of the system of dukes and counts when it first arose out of the military spirit and military necessities of Rome.
