Why Hope Is Disappearing from America

There are several reasons we're reluctant to talk about or have overlooked. The debasement of higher education is right up there.

Paul's most recent post takes a look at the state of hopefulness in America, and finds it wanting.  I see and feel the same things Paul does, and would add a few observations.  Some of the causes for the current gloom are obvious; some not so much. We need to say them all out loud.

Perhaps the most obvious, and fortunately the one we're in the best position (although not a great position) to change, is that we're facing a Presidential election next year in which the most likely major party candidates are unfit to serve and dangerous to the country if returned to office.  Let’s just come right out and say it: Both Biden and Trump have significant deficiencies of character and respect for law that are incompatible with holding the powers of the Presidency.  In addition, it's increasingly clear that Biden is just too old (80)  --  mentally and physically dilapidated.  But neither Republicans nor anyone else should be happy about this, because the prospects are that soon enough this will be true of Trump as well; DJT turns 77 this week, and would be in his eighties by the time he finishes his term in office. 

With this as the choice, who wouldn’t be short on hope for the country?

And there's a longer term backdrop for the waning of America’s optimism.  Most of the people running the country (and, I suspect, reading this newsletter) are Baby Boomers, now in their very late Fifties to mid-Seventies.  We grew up in the afterwash of WWII, when the United States stood alone as the colossus of the world.  England and France were spent; Germany and Japan were largely destroyed; the Soviet Union was a Third World country (albeit one with nuclear weapons) and so was China.  America was the wealthiest and most powerful country by a huge measure.  It was Pax Americana, and even as middle school kids, we more-or-less understood it.

That's the way we grew up.  It's not the way it is anymore, and we're feeling it.

Then there's this:  Part of America's losing its role as world colossus was a natural return to equilibrium, as our allies and competitors recovered from the War.  But part was our carelessness with our success and our doubts, inflamed by the civil rights struggle and Vietnam, about whether we deserved it.  As is often and correctly observed, decline is a choice, and it's the choice our culture made in the Sixties and Seventies, either unopposed or only weakly opposed.  Although the Reagan/Bush years were a pause, there was never a true reversal of the surrender to debased standards and toxic skepticism about America's goodness that took root roughly 60 years ago, and whose descendants in left-wing extremism and Wokeism we see poisoning so much in America today, in politics, education, "entertainment," and corporate life.

There is one part of America's debased standards that's particularly damaging  --  more so, I think, than the others.  That would be the carefree devaluation of honesty and the consequent, and inevitable, loss of trust (see Ringside posts here and here).

When I was growing up, if you called someone a liar, that was the start of a fistfight.  If you call someone a liar now, it's more likely the start of a conversation about how different people have different perspectives, and we need to be broadminded and tolerant, blah, blah, blah.  The idea that there's truth out there, and that we can and should find it and then conform to it, has just disappeared.  As I noted, along with Paul, our culture's now-routine acceptance of dishonesty does incalculable damage, and not just because it makes trust impossible.  Before long, it makes communication itself impossible.  When words can mean anything, when they have no anchor in real world definition, you get all the genuine communication you get with animal noises.

In few places has the triumph of dishonesty been more costly than in K-through-12 education, since that’s where we shape the minds that will determine our future.  It's bad enough when we start teaching our kids that boys can be girls (or cats) and vise versa, all depending on how you "identify."  This undermines kids' trust in their teachers, and that's bad, but I doubt it does much long-term damage, because even children know it's complete hogwash.  (It's similar in this way to children's baseball games in which the adults are careful not to keep score, lest members of the losing team take a hit to their "self esteem."  The kids of course have enough sense to frustrate this idiotic scheme by keeping score themselves).

More dangerous is the abandonment of honesty in higher education, where normal common sense won't necessarily bail you out. Much of the abandonment has been done in the name of replacing education with Wokey propaganda — much but not all.  For example, it was recently reported that a Harvard behavioral sciences professor specializing in the study of honesty fabricated her data (and no, I'm not making this up):

In an ironic twist in the world of behavioral science, a Harvard professor who studies honesty has been accused of data fraud.

Over the last few weeks, allegations have surfaced against Francesca Gino, a prominent Harvard Business School professor who has been accused of falsifying results in several behavioral science studies.

On 16 June, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Max Bazerman, a HBS professor and co-author who published a paper in 2012 alongside Gino, said that Harvard informed him that it believed one of the studies overseen by Gino had falsified results.

The paper in question is on findings published in – and later retracted by – the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bazerman said that the university provided a 14-page document that included “compelling evidence” of data falsification, including the discovery that someone accessed a database and added and altered data in the file....

A day later, a blog called DataColada and run by three behavioral science academics published a four-part series of posts that detailed extensive evidence of the alleged fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Gino.

“We discovered evidence of fraud in papers spanning over a decade, including papers published quite recently (in 2020),”…

It’s hard to tell whether this kind of dishonesty is better or worse than Harvard’s false, Woke-driven, and repulsive claims revealed in discovery in the recent affirmative action cases that Asian applicants have “dull personalities.”

It might be a coincidence, although I doubt it, that just yesterday, Gallup published this piece, titled, “Americans' Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply.”

Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to 36%, sharply lower than in two prior readings in 2015 (57%) and 2018 (48%).

Upshot: In just eight years, our trust in our colleges and universities has fallen from a secure majority to just over a third. By any reckoning, that is a catastrophic fall.

Gallup adds (emphasis added):

In 2015, majorities of Americans in all key subgroups expressed confidence in higher education, with one exception -- independents (48%). By 2018, though, confidence had fallen across all group, with the largest drop, 17 percentage points, among Republicans. In the latest measure, confidence once again fell across the board.…Even though all subgroups show declining confidence in higher education, significant gaps persist among political, educational, gender and age subgroups. Notably, the only key subgroup with majority-level confidence in higher education is Democrats (59%).

Goodness gracious! The only group that still thinks much of higher education is the group that’s larded such “education” with its party line! But it’s a short-sighted victory, because in the end, the killing off of hope and trust will exact a price even Democrats will regret paying.