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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Joel Kotkin
Read between
September 6 - September 10, 2020
a study of fifty-one top-rated colleges found that the proportion of liberals to conservatives was generally at least 8 to 1, and often as high as 70 to 1. At elite liberal arts schools like Wellesley, Swarthmore, and Williams, the proportion reaches 120 to 1.33 The skew is particularly acute in fields that most affect public policy and opinion.
This political skewing has the effect of transforming much of academia into something resembling an ideological reeducation camp.
The new university-minted activists tend to look for “moral purity” on issues surrounding the doctrine of “intersectionality,”
According to recent studies of cognitive behavior, the products of today’s universities are inclined to maintain rigid positions on various issues, confident of their own superior intelligence and perspicuity, and to be intolerant of other views.
One recent study of American college students found that more than one-third “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” in four years of college.44 Employers report that recent graduates are short on critical thinking skills.45 Equally worrying is that students in the West are not acquiring familiarity with their own cultural heritage.
Book reading outside of school or work has declined markedly among the young in particular.
A decay in the teaching of history and civics may help explain why millennials, despite their higher rates of university education, are far more likely than previous generations to be dismissive of basic constitutional and civil rights. They are also far more likely than their elders to accept limits on freedom of speech, which is a natural result of the political culture on campuses.
As traditional churches have lost influence in the modern era, a space has opened for the growth of new spiritual affiliations to serve similar purposes.
In the United Kingdom, there are as many Muslims now attending weekly prayer as Christians attending church.
In Catholicism, Reform Judaism, and various mainline Protestant denominations, orthodox beliefs are being supplemented or even supplanted by what could be called a gospel of social justice activism.8 This trend reflects the changing character of universities and theological seminaries, where faculties lean heavily to the left.
The “woke” members of today’s progressive churches are changing religions from within, and the churches most committed to the progressive course are in the most serious decline.
As traditional faiths are waning, environmentalism is coming to resemble a faith for the new age.
Like medieval Catholicism, the green faith foresees impending doom caused by human activity.
today as in the past, there is an element of hypocrisy among some of those who tell others to be content with poverty or extol its virtues.
environmentalists aim to impose austerity on the masses while excusing the excesses of their ultra-rich supporters.
Today, open discussions on the environment and how best to preserve the planet are about as rare as open debate over God’s existence would have been in the Catholic Church of the eleventh century.
all too reminiscent of the medieval Inquisition.
Another contender to be the new faith of the oligarchy is “transhumanism,” the search for eternal life through technology.
a distinctly secular approach to achieving the long-cherished religious goal of immortality.
Religious institutions have long brought together people of disparate backgrounds and economic status, building social bonds between them and serving as unifying transmitters of tradition and cultural identity. In contrast, the new forms of religion seem likely to divide people along political and cognitive lines. Without a physical basis in local communities, they don’t encourage the mingling of diverse people, but tend to be self-selecting for those who see themselves as both morally and intellectually superior to the vast majority of the population.
study covering the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States shows that all three saw a rapid decline in the concentration of wealth from the 1820s up to the 1970s.19 Never before had so much prosperity and relative economic security been so widely enjoyed.20 And with more prosperity came a stronger political voice.
In the last four decades, the wealth gap between the rich and the middle class has grown to levels not seen since the dawn of the industrial era.21
A comeback of democracy depended principally on a property-owning middle class and on respect for commercial enterprise, which was widely viewed as ignoble in the Middle Ages.
today a new generation, in the United States and much of the high-income world, faces diminishing prospects of owning land or advancing into a comfortable middle-class life. Instead of a progressive, woke, egalitarian age, we may be entering an era that is more feudal in its economic and social structure.
In the United States, a country built on aspiration, the fading prospects for the new generation are painfully obvious.
The same pattern appears in virtually every advanced country.
rate of homeownership
regulating land use in ways that elevate the price of real estate beyond the reach of far too many people.
regulations designed to encourage development in the inner urban rings and discourage or even ban construction on the more affordable periphery.
artificial shortage of developable space, which generates wealth for current homeowners while making it far harder for younger people to own property.28
In the next generation, inheritance may play a bigger role in the social order than it has since the nineteenth century. The children of property-owning parents are far better situated to own a house eventually (often with parental help)
Today a symbiosis between the economic oligarchy and the clerisy poses the biggest threat to the future of the middle class, as it serves to promote values and advance policies harmful to their well-being.
leading oligarchs in today’s tech and finance sectors are often inclined to support the heavy-handed “progressive” policies embraced by the dominant elements of the clerisy—as long as it doesn’t threaten their own fortunes.4 Thus the real cultural power lies in the “Brahmin left,” to use Thomas Piketty’s term.5
Many business leaders—and the vast majority of students at the Harvard Business School—favor what the philosopher John Gray calls “hyper-liberalism,” defined as a “mixture of bourgeois careerism with virtue-signaling self-righteousness.”
A large proportion of top CEOs see it as their responsibility to influence public attitudes and policy, rather than simply meet the needs of shareholders or serve customers.
well-educated managers of major companies and their technical staff are naturally attracted to the idea of a society ruled by professional experts with “enlightened” values—that is, by people much like themselves.10 This trend among corporate leaders brings the oligarchy closer to the elements of the clerisy—lawyers, academics, the media—that have long looked down on the middle orders.
The “Brahmin left” and their allies in the oligarchy are in conflict with the yeomanry on environmental issues above all.
The understandable concern over climate change today has tightened the alliance between the clerisy and the oligarchs.
Many of these policies are directly injurious to the middle class and working class, by inflating energy and housing prices, for example, or by stifling industrial development.13 The oligarchs and the clerisy are generally better able to afford the costs of environmental radicalism.
the clerisy typically are cloistered in institutions—such as academia, the media, or government—that are relatively unharmed by regulatory burdens.
The wealthy can demand strict environmental policies to curb climate change because they can afford
James Heartfield, a Marxist historian, says that “green capitalism” represents a new ruse for the upper classes to oppress those below them.
The “Brahmin left” essentially employ a concern for global ecology to force the middle and working classes to absorb the costs of centrally imposed scarcity, under the pretext of “human survival.”
While the middle classes are being squeezed by policies they have had little ability to shape, their future is still largely within their own hands. But that depends on maintaining or recovering the values and habits that gave birth to a strong middle class, including literacy and a commitment to learning.
common culture is now fraying from both directions. Cultural creators are inclined to gear their products not so much to the tastes of the mass market as to the particular concerns of the clerisy.
Reading for enjoyment is in decline among the young today,
cognitive skills seem to be weakening too.
growing concerns about the affects of social media on the minds of young people.
Family culture is eroding today, especially in high-income countries. What is emerging is a post-familial society, in which marriage and family no longer play a central role.
Many people have come to regard children as a luxury, since the costs associated with childrearing, including school and housing, have risen far faster than incomes.
