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Mr. Williams, while "educated, liberal Americans" may in fact be emigrating to other countries, I fear they have for some 30 years now been "immigrating" to large cities and population centers. As Joel Abrams wrote recently in The Conversation on 3/28/23 (<theconversation.com/whe…>) "there has been a "geographic sorting of the two partie…
Mr. Williams, while "educated, liberal Americans" may in fact be emigrating to other countries, I fear they have for some 30 years now been "immigrating" to large cities and population centers. As Joel Abrams wrote recently in The Conversation on 3/28/23 (<https://theconversation.com/when-it-comes-to-explaining-elections-in-congress-gerrymandering-is-overrated-201454>) "there has been a "geographic sorting of the two parties over the past 30 or more years... Democrats have diminished as a presence in rural counties, particularly in the South and Midwest, while gaining numbers in counties with large cities like Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago..Because Democrats live in denser, more tightly packed places, they can’t distribute their votes as efficiently among geographic districts throughout a state...Because Republican support is more evenly distributed geographically, there are more and better options for them to win lots of districts, rather than just lots of votes. Put simply, because of where they tend to live, Republicans are wasting fewer of their votes than Democrats."
Truth. And because those flyover states are largely homogeneous they largely have no experience outside of that bubble. A Carnival cruise doesn’t count.
Gail, do you suppose that with all the book-banning and anti-woke legislation that what the "post-liberal" movement is really fighting is education? ...that education is dangerous to our republic as well as to our souls? Hmmmm...a sad thought.
Perhaps it's just dangerous to Republicans running for election.
I think that the dumbing down of America began in the Reagan years and intensified during the 2nd Bush’s administration. By coupling the declines in funding of public education and the rise of the concept of public funding of private/Christian schools we’ve created a system of dumbed down basic education.
Absolutely. Hence the emphasis on STEM rather than the humanities. I can’t remember the source to attribute but the quote was “I don’t need thinkers, I need workers”.
Massive commercial enterprises want robots, and if the electronic/mechanical variety isn't available, they will settle for the human equivalent. It has seemed to me that since the 1970s there has been a trend toward encouraging our education system to "job training" over systemic critical thinking skills. and the kit that aid the negotiation of the overall vicissitudes of life, including civics.
I get the feeling that STEM is being approached from this robotic perspective, different from the post-Sputnick boost for science that I experienced in my middle and high school years in the 1960's. I have the impression that science is too often taught as a catalog of technical vocabulary, techniques and findings, but the essence of science is careful observation, measurement, and evidence gathering, organized and interpreted by "clean" and unbroken chains of logic. Science professionals do that in a very formal way, but that way of thinking can be applied to some degree by anyone, even small children; and can be of benefit on a trip the the grocery store as well as to Mars. Evidence-based thinking is exactly what despots and swindlers DON'T want.
And while our powers of thinking are always shaped and constrained by being human, science attempts to define the world around what nature (including our own) seems to be telling us; the way it would presumably be even were we not here to experience it.
And yet, we are in the end experiential creatures with inner and interactive sentience. I have thought since college that Descartes missed the target with "I think therefore I am" as experience is meaningless without an emotional/feeling component. The sensation of sunshine on my shoulder is an experiential dimension of it own, apart from, yet related to, thermonuclear photons exciting the the molecular motion of a substrate; or even the neuronal bucket brigade that lets me know it's happening. Science and the arts are not logically hostile or separate, except to keep straight which is which. Science explores and identifies how the world works and the arts explore and share what is means to be an experiential human being.
Yes, change minds by first changing hearts, one heart at a time.
Well, minds and hearts, because I believe they are part and parcel of human awareness. I think that in every moment we assess the validity and the value of all we survey, even in the process of where we next cast and focus our eyes. I believe that wisdom differentiated from "knowledge about" alone accurately senses in human terms what most matters as well as what is real. That is true in the long term of extended consequences and true in the moment with regard to which details are most fruitful to follow and why. I think curiosity, along with trial and error are the main drivers of our insights and our current qualities of life. Curiosity is precious but problematic, and we are reluctant as a society to adequately encourage it. That's a lot more work than teaching to the test, and curiosity paired with evidence-based analysis is kryptonite for entrenched grifters, so they don't like it.
Wow. Beautifully expressed! Thank you.
I can only echo your incites GL. This is a deep and complex train of thought for so many of our Binary thinkers who want to "keep it simple stupid". These people are generally Followers not leaders. It is incumbent for those who understand to learn to speak to those who seek knowledge in a language they can easily comprehend. Don't cha think?
The phrase “Everything must be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” has been attributed to Einstein, although, although he said something similar, there is no proof he was the source. No matter; it seems to make good sense. For sure binary thinking is something we as a society should be looking at, and where people are involved, there is typically a confluence of interactive factors shaping the way things are and to be considered to have much of a chance to steer things the way we would like them to be. Apart form a highly educated venue such as this one, the preceding is not the best way to frame the problem, but I don't think the concepts "simple but not simplistic" is necessarily abstruse, yet a hard sell to those who like or promote unsuitaby "easy" answers.
If you prosper by spreading disease, you're going to hate disinfectant.
Read the book "Whiteshift".
Thanks, looks interesting. Ordered. 🙂