Dumbing Us Down . . . On Purpose?

For the break, Alex and I have decided to read a book together: Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James W. Loewen. Last night (Christmas Eve) Alex gifted me my copy, and I have so far read through the introduction. The sense I got from this section was that textbook usage is not conducive to student learning and that many of them contain outright falsehoods. Indeed, it is almost suggested that the textbooks are agenda-driven, bearing titles that allude to American greatness. Reading through this introduction made me think about an idea that a number of educational reformers have, that the education system in America is designed to dumb down and indoctrinate our children in either progressivism or statism. A good example of this thinking is Samuel Blumenfeld and Alex Newman’s book Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America's Children, where they suggest that the Common Core State Standards and other curriculum changes, such as the turn away from phonetic reading education, are purposeful actions to dumb down Americans.* Even the great John Taylor Gatto buys into this theory to some degree, as demonstrated in his books Dumbing Us Down and The Underground History of American Education.

Now, while I can wholeheartedly agree that the current structure and practices of modern compulsory schooling is hurting students intellectually, especially in the areas of creativity and critical thinking, I do not think that this is the result of some master plan to turn the masses into sheep. This is not to say that school was not designed for a purpose, and that that purpose was not the flourishing of individuality. The school system was created to turn the masses into productive factory workers.** However, that is very different from saying that the masses were to be purposefully made stupid, and, indeed, the history supports the notion that school was meant to filter out the stupid students, but did convey knowledge for as long as the students remained. Still, the destructiveness of schooling does seem awfully suspicious.

The reason I believe that there is no subcommittee of the Illuminati or what-have-you that has deliberately designed the school system to indoctrinate and dumb down the population is the same reason I believe that centralized public schooling can never actually educate the masses successfully: because central plans don’t work. If the results we see today were indeed the original intent of the school builders, than school would be, astoundingly, be the first successful centrally planned government institution. How likely is that? No, what I suspect is going on here is that those who are calling out the unseen wolf at the top are falling prey to their own constructivist mindsets, where they believe that everything is the outcome of conscious design. They fail to appreciate the power and pervasiveness of spontaneous orders in society. 

It takes no great stretch to see how progressive educators can create a self-sustaining cycle of progressive education (I mean this in the political sense, not the reform sense), wherein the longer students stay in school, the more leftist they become. Since our educators have often been in school longer than other members of society, they would tend to be more leftist, and the cycle continues. Furthermore, the intellectually destructive effects of school glaringly follow from many of school’s most common practices. However, given the defenses offered by all types of people for these practices, it seems unlikely that these practices were meant to, or are widely seen as, hurting students intellectually. Negative secondary consequences are far more common to a central plan, which public schooling is, than achievement of a plan’s goals. I think, therefore, that there is no evil boogeyman in the shadows that reformers are fighting against. More likely, our struggle is merely against ignorance, and inertia, and special interests. That, of course, is struggle enough. 

*The spelling of the word “phonetic,” however, suggest that Blumenfeld and Newman’s position may not be as secure as they imagine. 

**There is some small debate on this point, which fails to overcome the consensus view for my purposes.

The Growth of Free Speech Protection

Upon reading a relatively new article up at Areo Magazine, "How Did Free Speech Get Here?", by Max Diamond, I discovered an interesting perspective on the right to free speech. Apparently, the extremely strong free speech rights that we have today are a relatively new phenomenon in the legal world. In fact, just the other night I was writing a paper wherein I described Brandenburg v. Ohio as an adherence to old principles. I suppose that if I thought about it a little more, I would remember that the first few free speech cases at the turn of the twentieth century often went the wrong way (upheld restrictions of speech), with Holmes and Brandeis filing their fiery dissents. Still, the right to free speech in America is so absolute, and such an integral part of American culture, that it’s hard to think that it doesn’t have its roots deep in the common law tradition. But no, according to the article, our current American free speech absolutism “is alien to the Anglo-American tradition.” Of course, I knew that Great Britain did not have as strong protections for free speech as the United States, or for the press, etc., but I had assumed that this was just because Britain has succumbed more fully to the progressivism of the twentieth century. The fact that the Englishman John Stuart Mill, the paragon of liberal free speech rights, published On Liberty in 1859, doesn’t help the confusion. 

The interesting issue raised in this article was that “in America today no effectual political disagreement about free speech is possible.” That is, the current law of free speech, where speech can never be restricted based on its actual content, is so absolute that there cannot be any experimentation with other speech codes. So, if Mill and the U.S. Supreme Court are wrong about the virtues of free speech in all places and all times, we are not really allowed to discover this error. As Diamond put it, “No county or state can experiment with more restrictive policies for the apparent benefit of young people, to fight racism, or in defense of religious views. . . . The Court, apparently in service of a doctrine that promotes different viewpoints, has outlawed the political consequences of every [other] philosophy of free speech.” Now, if you happen to be a fan of the classical liberal free speech doctrine, like myself, then this seems like an okay thing. But the nature of this doctrine changes slightly when it takes on the sanction of law. Because what’s the point of free speech if we can’t come to different conclusions on it? This is something I had never considered before, the tension between the principle of free speech and the enforcement of it; the conflict between the libertarian’s desire for widespread liberal policies and radically decentralized sovereignty. 

The article goes on to discuss the current liberal and conservative attitudes towards free speech, given the state of the law on the topic. The conservatives must favor a liberal theory of free speech due to their inclination to support precedent (which I don’t know is really a priority of theirs, but I’ll come back to that in a second), and the liberals must have a more subversive attitude, supporting non-legal means of silencing views in pursuit of their progressive social ends. But the point that really captured me was almost a throw-away, the mention of the recent Janus decision, where conservatives used free speech to overturn precedent. This idea of “first amendment judicial activism” is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while now, although without such a clear label. For example, in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, Thomas’ concurrence, which did not avoid the actual issue in the case, resolved it in favor of the baker on free expression grounds. I think that most justices of the U.S. Supreme Court are rather partisan, and so it’s no surprise to see the conservative justices making use of available doctrines to justify their ideologically conservative conclusions on various cases. The real question is, why do they have to? Make no mistake, the freedom of speech is one of, if not the most, potent right of Americans in the current age. And, as just discussed, this level of protection for expressive activities is unprecedented in the history of the common law. 

The Masterpiece Cakeshop case may prove instructive. The conflict in that case was a baker’s refusal to bake a wedding cake for a gay wedding on the basis of his religious beliefs. However, the case was argued and decided, at least by Thomas, as a free speech case, about the baker’s right to not express a particular sentiment (support for gay marriage) through the creation of a cake. This case was not decided on the basis of the baker’s freedom of religious expression because, ever since Scalia’s decision in Oregon v. Smith, constitutional protections for religious expression are virtually nonexistent. Thus, we see that as free speech protections have expanded, other protections have contracted, and perhaps the free speech protections are extending to fill the gaps left by the loss of the other protections. Perhaps that is why free speech is such a robust right in the United States is so powerful, because it represents the libertarian spirit of American compensating for the government encroachments on other fundamental rights (which our conservative Supreme Court has been allowing more and more of in recent decades).

It would be interesting to trace out the history of expanding free speech protections and to compare it with the development of other rights. For example, how much comparative progress did free speech make under the Warren Court, when a great many criminal rights were extended? Furthermore, it will be interesting to watch how the concept continues to develop in the future, and to see how far it will be stretched, for, as the freedom of speech, especially today, is almost the freedom of the mind, there is conceivably still room.

Escaping Poverty

Alex recently loaned me a book, Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America, by Linda Tirado. The ostensible purpose of the book is to describe the daily life of people living in poverty in America, for all those middle- and upper-middle class Americans who do not really get what it is like when it is discussed abstractly in the news or in cozy college classrooms. I gather that the book was rather eye-opening for Alex, who comes from a more privileged background than me, but I have so far been rather unsurprised and, to be honest, unimpressed, by the plight of America’s working poor. Many of the situations that she describes I have been in before. That being said, I am only a few chapters in; I have not yet reached the parts about child-rearing and conflicts with landlords, for example, which are experiences that I know I do not have. Still, I have found the book interesting thus far, and what is remarkable to me is how much it seems to confirm Mullainathan and Shafir’s theory and observations in their book on behavioral economics, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. The theme of both Scarcity and Hand to Mouth seems to be the struggle to escape from a situation, poverty, that by its nature keeps you trapped.

Indeed, Tirado says as much in her introduction: “We know that the very act of being poor guarantees that we will never not be poor.” Now, the point of this book is “that poverty is not a ‘culture’ or a character defect; it is a shortage of money.” I’ve long regarded poverty as a symptom of high time preference. That is, poor people do not build up the capital they need to escape poverty, instead living in the moment. I have seen countless examples of this present-orientedness at work since I have started looking for it. So, I do believe that lower-class people tend to be more present-minded, while higher-class people tend to be more future-oriented, and that this mindset is what keeps people in their respective classes (see Rothbard). I think Tirado essentially admits this: “Poverty is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain. . . . I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor.” However, I am less certain about how to explain this phenomenon. I do know whether to believe that this present-mindedness is caused by an ideological superstructure (see Marx), genetics (see Hoppe), isolation (see Sowell), or scarcity itself (see Mullainathan and Shafir). Most likely, the true cause is a combination of these factors, among others. Hand to Mouth, however, seems to come down firmly on the side of scarcity.

Now, what this book has done for me is to convey the difficulty of escaping poverty. It is very much a trap. Tirado notes that, when everything is going well, the poor have about $10 of disposable income each day. Now, at first, that seems like a lot of money. But, think harder, and you realize that if a poor person saved that $10 every day for an entire year, they would have a grand total of $3,650. Which, while a lot for someone who only makes $20k/year, is hardly enough to lift one out of poverty. And how likely is it that one would be able to save every $10? Or, as the book puts it, who’s lucky all the time? So, there does seem to be a problem here, with working your way out of poverty. What, then, is the solution?

Some might suggest that capitalism is to blame. While Tirado claims to be unopposed to capitalism, she does admit that she is opposed to “the sort of capitalism that sucks the life out of a whole bunch of the citizenry and then demands that they do better with whatever they have left.” She evidently does not understand that the economy is not a buffet where one may choose which elements of capitalism to keep and which to discard. However, what she describes is not capitalism. Capitalism has no agency with which to do anything to people. Moreover, poverty is the natural state of mankind; it is capitalism that has allowed so many of us to escape its trap already.

I think that the solution lies in that last sentence. It is capitalism which increases productivity, lowering prices and raising wages, improving people’s real standards of living. Critics will be quick to remind us that this is only true if the gains from capital go to workers, rather than the already-rich capitalists. But, of course, the already-rich capitalists spend their money, investing in new projects and buying new consumer goods, which can, in turn, send money down to the poorer classes. Another criticism, one that I feel acutely, is that this dependence on the economic growth fueled by capitalism is a long-term solution; it does not much help all the working poor today. But what alternative is there? Interference in the market economy only hinders its ability to generate greater wealth, and once we allow for any redistribution, at what arbitrary line should we end it? 

There is a problem here, the poverty of America’s working poor, and the near impossibility of escaping it given current conditions. Some of the problem might even be a systemic flaw, a product of past interventions in the economy. But I can think of only one way of solving the problem: let the free market work. We can certainly take steps to speed it up: end occupational licensing laws, drastically reduce regulation of business, end labor laws that restrict the poor’s options, stop inflating the money supply, cut taxes, etc. Ultimately, however, there is only one way to cure poverty; anything else is just shifting it around, which is an acceptance of it’s inevitability.

A Hayekian Perspective on Earl Warren

*The following is adapted from a recent paper I wrote for Supreme Court Watch*

We may seek to better understand the judicial role in a spontaneous order, and the inherent difficulties of such a position, by using Hayek’s theory elucidated in his book Law, Legislation, and Liberty to evaluate the judicial philosophy and performance of Chief Justice Earl Warren.

While Chief Justice Warren’s approach to judicial decision making appears unorthodox and inconsistent, in that he had no great reverence for precedent, respect for other government institutions, or formal method of constitutional interpretation, his judicial philosophy seems, in the final analysis, to have been a coherent one. Warren believed that the Constitution was the embodiment of a set of ethical values that were fundamental to the existence and continuance of a good society, and that he, as a judge, was vested with the power to protect those values against any threat. He decided his cases, therefore, on the basis of his understanding the ethical structure underlying the Constitution as much as on the explicit language of the Constitution.

Warren presented his view of constitutional law in his essay, The Law and the Future. There, he explained that “our legal system is woven around the freedom and the dignity of the individual,” and that, through our constitutional system, “the fundamental law [is] above the will of the government.” Warren viewed the Bill of Rights as an enumeration of the natural rights of human beings, and thus these amendments could be used to defeat government attempts at encroaching upon the fundamental rights of individuals, no matter what form they took. Moreover, Warren viewed the American legal system as an attempt to institutionalize a sense of justice and fairness inherent in human nature, and that loyalty to the fundamental tenets of the system, rather than merely the explicit expressions of it, required adherence to the demands of this justice. 

This is not to say that these principles could not change. In fact, Warren recognized that the pursuit of justice was a continuous process, and that the Bill of Rights would need to be revised in the face of changing circumstances. “We will pass on,” he said, “a document [that] will not have exactly the same meaning it had when we received it from our fathers.” Through a regular application of the principles embodied in the Bill of Rights, the document could be improved, “burnished by growing use.” 

Warren, in this and other writings, used sufficiently broad and vague language so as to not arouse much attention from other jurists of the time. Regardless, two essential themes of his jurisprudence were sufficiently clear in them. The first of these was Warren’s “identification of the language in the Bill of Rights with the protection of the natural rights of man against the arbitrary actions of government.” The language he used to articulate this belief was broad: “he set no doctrinal limits on the protection of individual rights against the state, and he mentioned no institutional limits on the power of the judiciary to protect these rights.” The second of these themes was the need for regular and creative application of the language in the Bill of Rights to new situations. The purpose of such an exercise was to ensure that the meaning of that language could evolve along with the society it governed, and to ensure that its full meaning at any particular time could be known through extensive elucidation. 

As mentioned, many of the cases for which the Warren Court is known were landmarks precisely because they overturned established precedents, thereby disrupting the expectations of the individual elements which comprised American society. These cases reflected Warren’s belief that the principles embodied in the language of the Bill of Rights were meant to change with time. While these cases were no doubt disruptive of the social order at the time they were decided, their aim was almost always to create a new set of expectations for the members of society going forward. Indeed, when Chief Justice Rehnquist surprisingly upheld the constitutionality of the Miranda warning requirement, he did so on the basis of such warnings having “become embedded in routine police practice to the point where the warnings have become part of our national culture.” Furthermore, Hayek himself admits the difficulty of interpreting and articulating the rules implicitly governing spontaneous orders; judges are liable to err, and when they do so, it seems not inappropriate that subsequent judges attempt to rectify the mistakes of their predecessors. Warren did not ground his landmark decisions in his own subjective value judgments, but in an ethical system that he discerned underlying the American legal culture, which may well be a part of those inarticulate principles to which individuals spontaneously adjust their behavior to generate social order. 

Still, this type of decision-making hints at constructivism, and Warren’s belief that he knew better what principles and practices society should be based upon than the spontaneous development of society to that point had manifested may make his judicial philosophy incompatible with the proper role of a judge in a spontaneous social order. Nevertheless, there are other elements of Warren’s judicial philosophy that Hayek might have approved of. The belief in natural rights, for example, was an element that may be considered a beneficial trait of a judge for the free development of a spontaneous social order. Warren’s further willingness to defend this natural law against by the enacted law of other governmental bodies is another aspect required of a good judge operating in a spontaneous social order. 

In conclusion, Chief Justice Warren cannot be viewed with unqualified approval from a Hayekian perspective. But an analysis of his judicial philosophy, along with his judicial record, reveals the difficulty any judge may face in trying to conform to the requirements of a spontaneous social order. What should a judge do when he believes that the precedents he is supposed to follow do not accurately reflect the principles on which society is based without disrupting the expectations that have been formed from the language of those past decisions?

Genocide vs. Economics

*The following is adapted from a recent paper I wrote for International Law of War & Crime.*

Genocide, as a form of human action, constitutes a rational act, in so far as its perpetrators have reasons for engaging in it, and thus is susceptible to economic analysis. Economics, as a science of the means applicable to all human action, asks not only whether genocide is the most cost-effective method of eliminating the targeted group, but also whether eliminating the targeted group is the most appropriate means for the attainment of the actor’s ultimate end, increased happiness and well-being. At a more fundamental level, all action can be seen as an attempt to overcome the limitations on human happiness imposed by natural scarcity. Genocide, therefore, can be considered a response to the effects of scarcity.

Consider the attempts that have been made to classify the various definite motivations for genocidal acts into broad categories. The sociologist Helen Fein, for example, has proposed the following four categories: developmental, where the object of the genocidal actor is to destroy obstacles to the exploitation of resources; despotic, where the object of the genocidal actor is to eliminate real or potential political opposition; retributive, where the object of the genocidal actor is to destroy a long-term enemy; and ideological, where the object of the genocidal actor is to eliminate those who it considers to be evil persons. 

One of Fein’s categories, developmental, is explicitly related to the scarcity of resources. But a closer examination of the other categories reveals their intermediate nature. Why is it important to have political power, if it does not ensure one greater access to other desired resources? Why harbor a long-standing enmity against another group unless one believes that they were harmed by that group in the past, perhaps in a struggle for power or resources? Why classify certain persons as evil unless one believes that they pose a threat to one’s well-being? 

People fight over the control of scarce resources. This is what one gains from an economic view of human action, wherein it is recognized that man seeks the maximization of psychic profit through the acquisition and utilization of economic goods. At some level, it all comes down to scarcity. People want more, and they resent the people who get in their way. Indeed, the regressions that have been run on the available data indicate that one of the major causes of genocide is inequality, either economic (inequality of resources) or political (inequality of power). In other words, situations where one group is markedly better off than the other group, such that the disadvantaged group can see clearly what it imagines it is being denied by the advantaged group. Such situations can lead to either envy or dehumanization, creating conditions where genocide may seem like a viable possibility. Ultimately, however, this environment is created by the fundamental struggle over scarce resources. 

While the idea that the costs of genocide could be artificially increased so as to make it a less attractive course of action is certainly a compelling one, it is important to note that, in light of fundamental economic theory, genocide is already quite costly. Drastically so, for genocide threatens the very foundations of civilization in ways beyond the obvious. First of all, violence is clearly not conducive to cooperation and without cooperation society will begin to fall apart: the division of labor becomes increasingly limited, and this reduces productivity and living standards, potentially leading to mass starvation and death. 

In the same way, it is not economically wise to eliminate people, not only because of the direct productivity loss, but because it makes less specialization possible. This is especially true if a specific type of person is eliminated, as is the aim of genocidal acts, because it is one’s unique traits that makes one more valuable in a complex economy. It is the differences between people that really make the division of labor so powerful and thus create the conditions for increased productivity and economic growth through peaceful cooperation. Whether the targeted group is natives in what became Latin America, teachers in Cambodia, or property-owners in South Africa, eliminating groups with different ideas, knowledge, practices, functions, and skills makes all of society poorer, including the genocidal actor. This impoverishment is, of course, contrary to the genocidal actor’s more fundamental intent to become better off.

A similar confusion existed in the arguments of the Social Darwinists of the early twentieth century. These individuals argued that the theory of evolution demonstrated that in nature there is only struggle between living beings, and that the annihilation of the weak is the natural order of things, leading to a species more suitable for dominating its environment. In making such arguments, these individuals demonstrated their own ignorance of social theory. The teachings of Darwin indicate only that living things actively struggle against forces detrimental to their life and well-being. This struggle, in order to be successful, “must be appropriate to the environmental conditions in which the being concerned has to hold its own.” For human beings, the most appropriate method of surviving and prospering is through peaceful cooperation and the division of labor. There is some value, therefore, in every member of the human species, even if one seems weaker in every sense, because it allows for further specialization and increased productivity. 

Genocide, therefore, appears to be a misguided means of achieving the genocidal actor’s ultimate end of increasing its state of well-being. It is undeniable that, given the constraints one faces in particular situations, genocide sometimes appears to be a viable solution to an apparent problem. A proper understanding of economics, however, reveals that this short-term solution is ultimately self-defeating. This suggests that one way of reducing the frequency of severity of genocide may be to simply educate people about fundamental economic principles. As Mises sums up these lessons: “He who wants to preserve life and health as well and as long as possible, must realize that respect for other people’s lives and health better serves his aim than the opposite mode of conduct.”