The Rift Between the Finest Minds & The Limp Academics Now in Power
SPOILED AMERICANS, SOFT PROFESSORS & STUNTED STUDENTS
Sidney Hook, the dead white male philosopher, once told me over dinner how during his impoverished boyhood in Brooklyn he threw himself in the path of a streetcar to shake down the company for damage money.
Grim necessity defined that epoch: Our immigrant ancestors were driven by potato famines and pogroms to come to America and struggle, as Sidney did, for dignity, along with a certain “competency.” Grim necessity followed them not only onto farms and into factories, but into the teaching profession, where still in my early days, around World War II, I taught huge loads for miserable pay.
Almost all institutions reflected this austerity: Home discipline and the schools were far stricter and more demanding than they are today. But there was more joy, too, as old-timers vividly recall.
It was such necessity that helped keep most families together over lifetimes, along with affection, and made communities warmly close. Those communities maintained sustaining customs — the corner drugstore for decorous juvenile meeting between the sexes and village-square boxing matches for healthy male bonding. Normal folks — I mean those outside the academy — often wax nostalgic about all that, and I only rehearse these familiar facts to point up the dramatic contrast to post-Second World War America. No people in history have been so spoiled as Americans since the mid-1940s.
You May Also Enjoy
Rob Henderson defines "luxury beliefs” as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.”
Nowadays the old notion that a Catholic college ought to teach Catholicism to undergraduates seems not even to be seriously considered.
For good, bad, and mediocre reasons I tend to be proud of my Harvard degree…