Equality; I won’t be going to the Space Command conference

View 718 Friday, March 30, 2012

The demand for equality has two sources; one of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of superiority. At the present moment it would be very unrealistic to overlook the importance of the latter.

There is in all men a tendency (only corrigible by good training from without and persistent moral effort from within) to resist the existence of what is stronger, subtler or better than themselves. In uncorrected and brutal small men this hardens into an implacable and disinterested hatred for every kind of excellence. . . .

Equality (outside mathematics) is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind. Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless. Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favours.

Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death. A truly democratic education—one which will preserve democracy—must be, in its own field, ruthlessly aristocratic, shamelessly "high-brow."

C. S. Lewis “Democratic Education” (1944) as quoted in “Notable and Quotable” WSJ 03/30/2012

Of course Lewis speaks from a classic point of view, in which “moral effort” has meaning. These matters are presented in more detail in his classic essays which were combined into a volume called “The Abolition of Man”, available on Amazon in paperback or Kindle edition. If you have not read it, you should; Lewis asks hard questions in that book as he tries to reason his way to morality and the desirability of moral effort.

But the quote above contains a great truth, and should have been read by everyone involved in the national debate on “No Child Left Behind.” Alas, I suspect that not one of the Congress creatures who debated that bill had ever heard of it, such is the nature of our education, both higher and lower. When I was called to conduct the annual Scholar/leader program for selected graduating high school seniors in Oklahoma a decade or so ago (I was asked on the sudden disability of the professor who had set it up) I added Lewis’s Abolition of Man to the seminar text list. I only wish I could have got the state’s Senators and Members of Congress to read it. But that’s another lecture.

The demand for ‘equality’ is one of those inherent defects in democracy, and one of the reasons that the Framers in 1787 rejected a ‘democracy’ in favor of a Republic. As Lewis observes, Virtue and Truth are not democratic; of course to admit that you must admit that Truth and Beauty exist. And therein lies the key question for our times.

The notion that a majority should rule – that the votes of 50% + 1 should decide all political issues – makes no more rational sense than the notion that kings should rule, or aristocrats should rule. Not that this is an original observation; it has been debated by political philosophers for millennia, and was very much a part of the debate in the Convention of 1787. The American intelligentsia has accepted the notion that government ought to favor the lowest and most downtrodden, not as an act of charity but as simple fairness. The problem is that this is expensive, and unless the society is extremely rich it cannot afford to shower benefits on everyone, and worse, the attempt to achieve equality by leveling – by bringing down the successful so that they have no more than the unsuccessful – generally produces ruin, as the first settlers in the New World learned to their sorrow, and as economic history has shown for – well, for millennia, but it was also a lesson of the 20^th Century. See the history of Soviet agriculture.

If Education is an investment, then it ought to work to maximize return; meaning that more resources ought to be devoted to improving the education of the best and brightest than to bringing the just below normal up to normal. Yes, there is an economic advantage to improving the ability of everyone, but at the margin, and certainly under the current circumstances, we put way too much effort in that and way too little into making the top 15% more productive. The only way to achieve No Child Left Behind is to be sure that No Child Gets Ahead, and in many places that is relentlessly applied – and worse, where it is not, there is sure to be a charge of discrimination.

And of course that’s true. It is discrimination to devote more resources to the best and brightest. It is also necessary if we are going to have the resources to devote to improving the lot of the wretched of the Earth.

Enough. It is time for lunch.

Steve Feigenbaum of New Jersey, I need your email address.

I have had to cancel my trip to Colorado Springs. No doubt Air Force Space Command will get along without me. I was more looking forward to going for what I might learn than imagining I had much to contribute. I will have more on this another time, but apparently the airlines are so desperate now that they charge you about half what the trip costs just to have held a reservation for a few days; apparently I get to pay about $200 to Orbitz and the airlines for having made the reservations. Partly that is due to my having used Orbitz in the first place, I guess.

There was a time when I would have had American Express simply make the reservations for me and let them take care of cancelling if it turned out I couldn’t go, but I guess they don’t do that sort of thing any more. At least there are still competent and sympathetic people on the telephone – assuming that you can trick the nice computer voice into letting you talk to a human being – but the executive services young lady didn’t think there was much we could do about this; the airlines are just being desperate. 

I once had half million or million mile club cards in several airlines, and I have life memberships in all the VIP lounge clubs, but none of that matters. When the computer age started I imagined a story in which everyone had to deal with artificial intelligences all of them operating at about IQ 90, and all working through rules like any other bureaucracy, all passing a Turing test – can you tell if this is an AI or a human bureaucrat – Damn You! “Sir, it is unlikely that any curse you put on me will be effective. Have a nice day”.  I gave up the story as too depressing.  Now I am finding it coming true. The good news is that some of the AI entities are smarter than the humans they replaced. Or at least care more.

We have Windows 8 running. Eric named it Alien Artifact, largely because the handsome Thermaltake case is so spectacular. Windows 8 has some trickiness, as does the high end ASUS motherboard we ended up with, but it is becoming a pleasant experience.

I’ll use the time I have ‘saved’ by not going to Colorado to do a very belated first of the year/last of last year Chaos Manor Reviews column and trying to catch up with some of the routine maintenance of Chaos Manor.  I’m really disappointed at not getting to participate in the Space Command symposium and do some sight seeing at the Command and at the Academy. I used to be on one of the academic boards of visitors of the Academy and get there several times a year, but that was long ago; haven’t been there in a while. I am sure it has changed a lot since I was last there.

At least I am not still frantically working on stuff for the trip and conference. Not that I have much time to relax.

 

I have some dialogs over the equality/debt/deficit issue that I will get up shortly; they are informative.

We have got the new machine – Alien Artifact – working, but with Windows 7, not 8. Windows 8 works fine on less advanced machines, but on this one the ASUS board has some advanced features that haven’t had the drivers perfected yet; since it’s months to the release of 8 this isn’t really a problem. The system is fast, and all appears to be well. We had an interesting time for a while: my local network understood that a machine names Alien Artifact existed and had a login name and password that worked with Windows Live, since Windows 8 works that way. Which meant that machines on the net which had accessed the new system under the Windows 8 name could not longer find it and of course told us access was denied and we should see the system administrator and when told to trouble shoot that it told us, breathlessly, that we were denied access, and the remedy was to see the system administrator – in other words, Microsoft Help is about as useful as it ever was. Also Help doesn’t tell us how to delete a system from the Network according to this particular system.  Machines that had never accessed Alien Artifact before had no trouble doing it now that it had me as a local user with a password. Conversion from Windows 7 to 8 will be a problem for people who keep older Windows 7 or XP systems around. Boy will they ever. We managed it. Story in the column.

 

Bed time. The system is very well behaved in Windows 7; it’s a bit advanced for Windows 8 but I am sure that will all be taken care of over time. It’s drivers, and particularly the huge silicon cache boot system. Again more in the column I am doing. But all is well, there are 16 GB memory, and wow is this system fast. It’s also really cool looking and it runs cool. I love Thermaltake.