A guy who signs as “Community College Dean” writes the following in the IHE:

Given how lopsided the market is, why are we still subsidizing so many graduate programs? The first order of business should be for states to shift the burden of proof on graduate programs from “why should it be shut down?” to “why shouldn’t it be?” At a really basic level, apply “gainful employment” to graduate school.

You see what he’s doing,  right? The poor stupid lemming is actually cheering on the destruction of state-sponsored higher education. I’m sure he feels profoundly proud of championing a great cause.

So my stylist’s salon kept getting robbed. And the neighboring small businesses also kept getting robbed. The police wasn’t managing to catch the criminal because the robberies were done very professionally and there were no clues left. 

So the stylist decided to take matters into her own hands, bought a secret surveillance camera online* and installed it in the salon. The next time the robber came, the camera filmed him.

And who do you think it was? It was a local police officer. He was so professional precisely because he was a professional. His colleagues had no knowledge that was superior to his, so they couldn’t catch him.

We have no crime in this town, so you can’t say that our police is overextended. It’s just that they don’t want to be bothered a whole lot, and citizens have to take matters into their own hands. At least, they did wake up for five minutes and arrested the robber after the stylist caught him.

* Somebody was asking who will do the policing work in the future. Here is the answer.

It really bugs me when people say there is no social mobility when what they really mean is that they don’t have the guarantee of the same middle – class lifestyle their parents had.

In reality, what they bemoan is actually the existence of social mobility.

Absent a complete withdrawal into itself, any foreign policy that takes a more active position will have to use measures that will be coercive to some degree. There is no way of ensuring environmental controls or nuclear nonproliferation without coercion and strategy. And strategy will have to involve some secrecy if it is to function.
But that doesn’t seem very possible in a society that is as profoundly Oedipal* as the American. While the citizens revel in the Oedipal joys offered by the Assanges and the Snowdens, they fail to notice that the only foreign policy they are effectively promoting is the extremely isolationist one.

* My theory is that it’s so Oedipal because it’s a society of immigrants.

I just read another collection of impotent mewlings from yet another clueless blogger on mandated open access. And I have finally figured out why nobody but me is angry about these policies. People simply don’t have an intellectual framework where to place these developments. They sincerely don’t know whether these policies are good or bad.

So here is a way to figure that out. Do you believe that the state should issue laws mandating what food you eat, how and when you reproduce, what books you should read, in which cities you should open a branch of your company,    etc? Or do you believe that you should be trusted to figure all this out on your own?

If you think you can figure all of this out on your own, why can’t you accept the possibility that academics are capable of figuring out how to disseminate their own research? Especially since they’ve been managing this task for as long as academic pursuits have existed?

Humiliated, beaten down people won’t produce any ideas or create any intellectual output. Let’s trust academics to make these routine, trivial decisions on their own.

I’m starting to harbor a suspicion that my incessant harping on the subject of the nation-state is creating an impression that there were no state forms before it.

Of course, there were. They were all successful for their time and served the needs of the moment. Machiavelli, Conde – Duque de Olivares, Cardinal Richelieu, Charles V – these were all great statesmen who would have found the rhetoric of nationalism bizarre.

I don’t speak of these preceding state forms because I’m not extremely interested but they have a long and glorious history. A moment would always come when they stopped serving the purposes of the times, and a new state form would arise.

So here are the approaches to US foreign policy. Which one sounds the most reasonable to you? There is no correct answer to the question since this all lies in the realm of personal preference. I have traveled through pretty much all of these positions in the course of my life, so I won’t judge anybody for liking any of them.

1. The US should concentrate on its own internal problems and stop trying to “improve” the lives of people around the world. It’s the children of the working poor in the US who are sent to die in Mogadishu for causes that don’t in the least benefit them. We should concentrate on fixing poverty at home and let everybody else sort out their own issues. The rich and the powerful keep involving the US in these endless foreign adventures because it isn’t their kids who will die in Iraq and Afghanistan.

2. The well-being of other countries is a fundamental national goal for the US. It is crucial that all countries enjoy growing prosperity because that’s the only thing that will create conditions for global stability. The US should promote international organizations that will control multinational corporations, protect the global environment, and stop nuclear proliferation. Economic stability on the global scale is needed for international peace. The US has neither the legitimacy to be the world’s policeman nor the money to be the world’s banker. Only multilateral institutions (like the UN or NGOs) can carry out these crucial tasks.

3.We can’t know what the “correct” political system is for non-Western countries, so it’s best to just leave them alone and stop promoting democracy in them. All we can realistically hope for is the stability of the system of states. Nobody should be the unilateral leader of the world. It is crucial that no single state becomes powerful enough to tip the balance of the entire world system. It’s best for the US to stay out of the “Third World” and let the people there decide on what works best for them. The US should closely watch the global scene and manipulate it in a way that will prevent any single state from becoming too powerful.

4. It is crucial to bring democracy to every country in the world because that is the only way to guarantee world peace. Democracies don’t go to war against each other, so if the US wants to prevent war, the best thing it can do is promote democracy everywhere. Since there is no democracy without free markets, they also should be promoted. The old adage that states have no permanent friends, only permanent interests is not true! Democratic states are by their very nature each other’s permanent friends irrespective of which party comes to power in them. Now that the US is somewhat in decline, it makes every sense to surround ourselves with states whose political system and values are aligned with ours.

5. The NATO and the UN are just a fiction, a fig leaf that conceals the indisputable reality that the US is the world’s sole remaining superpower. American global dominance should be promoted and maintained through selective military intervention. Sometimes military intervention is good just to show the rest of the world who the boss is. There is no possibility that the US will prosper economically without maintaining world hegemony. Want to maintain your own personal standard of living? This will only be possible if the country remains the world’s only dominant force. America’s foreign wars are the pillar of the country’s prosperity.

6. The world has grown too complicated for a single policy to exist. Situations arising on the world arena should be approached on a case-by-case basis. We are wasting out time trying to develop a coherent strategy in the face of a reality that is getting more complex and unpredictable every day. Let’s just see what happens and then proceed to react.

See whose ideas you share under the fold.

Continue reading “Approaches to the US Foreign Policy: A Quiz” →

So. Who wants to guess how long my weekends will be next semester?

Yes.

The compulsory free education provided by the state was conceived as an idea in the late XVIIIth century and started coming into existence, painfully and slowly, throughout the XIXth century. It was created by the Enlightened thinkers of Europe and the Americas who were trying to come up with ways to solidify the nation-state model.

What is a nation-state? It is a myth, a fantasy that “we”, the imagined community of people residing within these completely arbitrary borders, have something in common. According to the myth, “we” have resided here since times immemorial and that history gives us a claim to the land*. The borders that separate us from the “not we” are not arbitrary lines drawn in the sand but meaningful divisions that always existed. They are so meaningful that “we” should be ready to defend them to the last drop of our blood.

“We” share some innate characteristics that unite us in the face of the enemy (an external and internal one). “We” owe more (actually, we owe our lives) to the defense of this sacred communion with other members of the nation residing on our sacred land. Our union has the blessing of “our” great artists, philosophers, and sacred figures produced by our land. If “we” weren’t great, would “we” have produced such greatness? Our great artists and thinkers all knew that they were part of the “we” (even though the “we” was created five minutes ago and the artists lived 600 years ago.) But they knew about the “we” because our “we” is eternal. 

This is obviously a bunch of complete and utter baloney. 

Trying to sell the baloney to people requires quite an effort. Especially when you are expecting said people to go die in enormous numbers for the baloney.

History books have to be rewritten, archives have to be sifted through and tightly controlled, works of art need explanations attached to them that will serve the process of this myth-making**. And then all of these bizarro-land ideas have to be communicated to every member of the “we.”

And how can that be done?

Easy-peasy. Get them at a young age when they are still likely to believe in such fairy-tales, put them together in a room, and fill their heads will all of this day after day after day. Teach them to read so that they can access the newspapers delivering the same message on their own.*** Make sure that they are instructed in the language of the nation and not in the funny and strange “dialects” they might speak at home. The “we” need to be united by language as well.****

Has anybody ever wandered where the idea comes from that small children need to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at school every day? Why at school and not the gym, the picnic, the street, etc.? Because that was the whole point of having everybody in a school.

* Remember the ridiculous debates as to who lived first in Israel? That’s exactly what nation-building does.

** How and when do you think literary criticism came about? And why do you think a literary critic (me) is so obsessed with the subject?

*** The massive appearance of newspapers and magazines in the XVIIIth century is also part of the whole process of nation-building.

**** This was not always entirely successful but the nation-state’s battle on language has always been and still is fierce. Why do you think Quebec is preventing the children of immigrants from attending schools in English and has even floated the possibility to control the language in which school-children conduct their private conversations?

Bobbit’s vision of the post-nation state (that he calls “the market state”) is much more optimistic than mine. He believes, for instance, that not every society will adopt the most aggressive form of the new order. Some societies will fight to retain some of the vestiges of the nation-state (such as the 100% free public education for everybody, for instance) and will even succeed. (This is not my position but Bobbitt knows a lot more about it than I do. Besides, optimism is attractive.)

According to Bobbitt, the society that will not even try to hang on to the welfare state* and will, instead, embrace the new model completely and whole-heartedly, kicking away every last trapping of the nation-state, is the United States. He says that this is a country that always resisted centralization. Its citizens are historically suspicious of the government. Everybody will be only happy to see the weakened government lose its power to do anything of great value. 

I think he’s right. Look at what’s happening. Academics are cheering Bill Gates’s attempts to wrestle control of academic publishing from academic institutions. Nobody even tries to wonder what the privatization of scholarship will mean in the long term.

But forget about higher ed. At this point, there is a huge question as to whether the 100% free public education for everybody will survive the changes. And what do people do? They are battling Common Core – the state’s last, pathetic effort to hang on to secondary education. And they will win, too. This will be a Pyrrhic victory because, for the first time since the consolidation of the nation-state 100 years ago, we will have huge groups in the population that will get no secondary or even primary education at all. But ooh, we will have beaten the big bad gubmint and taken away its right to tell us what to do.

Sorry for sounding bitter, folks, but 100% literacy and the free secondary education for all is one of my most favorite achievements of humanity. It arose because it was desperately needed by the nation-state**. And now that the nation-state is fading away it’s at risk of dying away. 

I’m also sorry for plunging into the heavy stuff right on the first day of the new year but this is the year of working on my second book and I have to be in good intellectual form. On the positive note, I’m traveling to Montreal on Saturday and there will be many opportunities for uplifting posts about shopping and restaurants.

* Every nation-state is a welfare state by definition.

** I can explain why the nation-state needed it so badly if anybody wants to know.