I don’t like either design, to be honest. The first one is what a Soviet antiquarian would have. The second one is the antiquarian’s nouveau riche son after 1991.
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Building An Elite
They are meant to be special, privileged. It is their default, as failure is the default of their less affluent contemporaries. A network of adults will nourish them, cultivate them, pass them on to other adults. It is a world of recommendations. It is a world of reputations. But in this world their lives can be derailed, overturned. If they cross a certain line. If they make a serious blunder, and are caught. By instinct they know to placate some adults more than others. Adults who wield power, and are willing to use it.
Joyce Carol Oates, Fox
Oates is speaking about students at expensive private schools. They are nurtured and groomed to be the elite. Their admittance and permanence in that class hinges entirely on their capacity to absorb, retain, reproduce, and enforce the behavioral and linguistic norms of the elite. These norms are designed to be abstruse and counterintuitive in order to weed out as many people as possible. They are also—and in this the new elite differs from the way elites were historically—highly mutable.
Every society has an elite. That is not in itself bad. Egalitarianism is rooted in a fantasy, and not a particularly smart one. Historically, an elite was one by birth. This is “unfair” but the positive side of this unfairness was that the elites did not exist in a state of abject terror that their elite status would be taken away. Today, you get expelled from the elite for one wrong word uttered years ago. Like everything else, status has become highly fluid. People live in fear of losing theirs.
Terrified elites are destructive. They flail about, embracing every fad that makes them look exceptional and deserving of their status. Everything new eventually becomes not new. This requires more fads to be invented because the inner circle isn’t stable. It gets redrawn all the time, and ideological obsessions, newspeak, and boutique beliefs are the crayons used to redraw it.
We threw away the idea of birthright aristocracy because it was “unfair” but the system we created in its place is hardly any more fair. Access is still barred to people who can’t empty themselves completely in order to adopt any shape that serves as a ticket to entry at any given moment.
That people who do manage this kind of fluidity are highly neurotic is a given. The human brain appreciates stability and routine above all. The need to throw away all certainty and wipe off all content in order to retain your membership in the elite is psychologically destructive.
The whole point of having a birthright elite was to have a class that was rooted in tradition. It had to maintain the cultural legacy of society because that maintenance work was its reason to exist. Today’s elites do the exact opposite. They erode, take apart, and destroy. Having an elite that works to unmake the culture instead of preserving it is the only thing we gained by pursuing fairness.
We Are Booming
Orthodoxy is, indeed, experiencing a boom. The majority of our parishioners are now very young men. Two of them are African American.
Orthodox Christianity has no roots in the African American community, so these young men must have really wanted to be there. As an Orthodox parish in a very white town, you know you are getting popular when black people make a point of seeking you out.
All we are missing is some young women. Sadly, we are not in a place culturally where young women do the sort of seeking that brought their male peers to our parish.
Knocker-upper
In Victorian England, most people didn’t have clocks or watches. They had no way of knowing when to get up. This brought into existence the profession called knocking-upping.
A knocker-upper walked down the street and tapped on the windows with a long pole or a broom.
People paid him a penny a month. AI tells me that it’s around 50-75 cents in today’s money.
For some reason, I’m finding the existence of a knocker-upper to be very endearing.
Recipe for Happiness
We have embraced this strange belief that every person should spend their entire twenties and probably also thirties choosing their way to a highly individual, boutique and bespoke recipe for happiness. The idea is that there’s absolutely no playbook you can follow. The previous generations didn’t leave us any knowledge regarding what works for people. Everybody always starts from scratch and flails completely alone in efforts to construct a tailor-made lifestyle that reflects every aspect of their complex and different individuality.
People waste years or even decades of their lives chasing after an individual formula for happiness only because the belief in its existence flatters their ego.
A Bad Name
Eight years ago, in August of 2017, ESPN decided to remove announcer Robert Lee from calling a football game because his name was similar to that of the Confederate Civil War General Robert E. Lee.
We should never forget how easy it is to slip back into this recent insanity.
JCO Stand-in
Seriously, people. And there are pages and pages of this.
Read three sentences from a novel by JCO and tell me how this airhead word soup could possibly come out of the same person.
By the way, last month JCO published the whitest American novel in 15 years and in that novel she used the word redneck several times without asterisks.
Q&A about Being a Boss
I don’t know if this is going to help you or not, but they will feel exactly like this towards you no matter what you do. You can drip with the milk of human kindness all day long but then one day you will refuse to be somebody’s personal secretary or simply inconvenience somebody by taking a sick day, and they’ll pout up a storm.
What I’m saying is that they’ll be unhappy no matter what. It’s not the austerity decisions. It’s that you are not the perfect mommy they always wanted.
I had two colleagues with a very underenrolled section each. I told them, “Look, we have a week left before the beginning of class. If we sit very quietly and don’t attract attention to ourselves, the administration will probably forget about us and won’t make us cancel.”
“Oh yes. Please, please, please. I’m really counting on the money. I really need the section not to be cancelled.”
Two days later, one of these people sends a group email to me, the other underenrolled colleague (they are the only two teaching this language), and five people in the administration. The email goes like this:
Hi! I have a very underenrolled section, and the classroom I was assigned is too large for such a small section. It would be more convenient for me to take classroom XYZ but it’s occupied. I asked the person teaching there to switch but she refused. Can you help?
At this point the other underenrolled colleague chimes in with how his section is also very underenrolled and if classroom switches are being made he also wants one because he doesn’t like the furniture in his classroom.
Eleven cumulative emails along these lines later, and the administrator who was trying to be kind and not notice the underenrolled sections had to notice. Too many people became involved and the endless repetition of “my section only has 5 students” demanded action.
What does this remind you of if not how toddlers behave? You are torturing yourself but they’ll self-destruct whether you exist or not. What’s the point of having a bad time over this?
Not Socialism
People can feel about this in many different ways but, for the name of everything holy, do not call it socialism. Socialism and fascism are not terms that should be used to describe “something I vaguely dislike and don’t know why”. Socialism means there’s no private property over the means of production. In socialism, the government would expropriate Intel, Starbucks, Amazon, and your local diner. It would take over completely. That’s socialism. And the results of it I described in the preceding post.
People need to stop being hyperbolic and dramatic. It’s not creating good results for us.
Canned Green Peas
In the USSR, when you got your hands on a can of green peas, you’d treasure it. You’d hide it and keep it safe for months. You’d fall asleep calm in the knowledge that your can was secure. That for this year, you had fulfilled the goal of finding your can. Next year, the battle would resume but for now, you were in the clear.
Canned green peas are an ingredient in the Olivier salad, the main dish of the Soviet New Year celebrations. No canned green peas meant you were the kind of abject loser who couldn’t give your family one evening of eating well in a year. People went out of their way to make sure that New Year was celebrated as it should.
Those who somehow snagged several cans of green peas would use them as currency. People valued by the regime would get food packages as a form of recognition. We didn’t have such people in our family but from others I heard that a can of green peas was often part of these special foodstuffs. These people could sit in comfort, knowing that their peas were waiting for them.
Of course, you can’t celebrate New Year’s with canned green peas only. There are many, many other ingredients that you had to gather during the year to make the whole puzzle come together. Canned sprats, mayonnaise, alcohol, and many other things. You had to gather them, treasure them, make calculated decisions about what would be swapped for what else.
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