First off, much of the American public is, to put it bluntly, ignorant. In another post you mention the high percentage of church-going Protestants who don’t know who Martin Luther was. In a similar vein, those who benefit from gov’t programs both with direct payments such as Medicare, Social Security as well as indirect payments like sanitation, roads, schools to educate their children, etc. — all seem ignorant that these benefits are provided by the same gov’t they detest. The Reagan mantra repeated so many times, that gov’t is the problem, has sunk in and many people seem incapable of connecting the benefits they enjoy to the gov’t that provides them. Its as if they expect some magic fairy to keep providing them even if nobody pays taxes to fund them.

Not only ignorance, but the lack of the ability to think critically is another strand in the web. Most of the time, for most people, keeping things the same as they were before works just fine. Which matches a populace that can’t or won’t think about issues, but leads to tea-party activists when change is proposed. Grandma is happy to collect her benefits but is terrified they might be cut if the gov’t goes deeper into debt so is frantic about stimulus spending. Is she an anti-Keynesian? No, she’s a Fox news listener. Cut taxes and promise they’ll “pay for themselves” and she’s not worried (and can’t follow the arguments anyway), but propose new spending and she’s marching with a sign. Out here in CA, a failing state, the ads against the ballot measure lowering the 2/3rds requirement to pass a budget don’t discuss anything remotely relevant to the issue; they are painting it as a way for gov’t workers to buy themselves $100 bottles of wine! Seriously. That’s what swings elections.

You should also consider the silent listeners. For example: I do read your blog regularly, but I often don’t say something because it would just be a boring, old argument; as you say, trollish. (I have my tendencies, of course, but they could be worse.) And who knows, maybe I even take some of what you say as sensible? Some incalculable amount of that going on. Do take into account the Dark Matter as well as the Black Holes.

I should say that my own change in thinking in the last few years is not so much to stop thinking that large aspects of modern academia are pernicious bunkum, but to think that those aspects don’t matter so much as all that. The questions of how to prepare a lecture or a class discussion, how to grade or write a letter of recommendation, loom larger; the political/ideological aspects less. The craft aspects of the profession, in short. I certainly do think now, and more than I used to, that critiques of the academy from outside lack a sense of proportion, since they don’t take into account the amount of time you spend thinking about craft matters. On the other hand, I don’t think this refutes those critiques–this is a characteristic weakness of the entire genre of the outside critique, and it doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t make critiques from the outside, or that insiders shouldn’t listen to them. (And since I also continue to think that the academy pushes out conservatives, there aren’t going to be many conservatives who can make the critique from the point of view of internal knowledge; to prevent conservatives from being insiders, and then say one shouldn’t listen to them because they lack inside knowledge, is a somewhat aggravating sequence.) But some sense of proportion in the conservative critique of academia, a sense of the craft and the humdrum and the everyday, wouldn’t hurt.

The Ramsey show I have in mind is his new one this season, Master Chef. It’s explicitly for amateur chefs, home cooks, etc., who want to compete against each other. The opening episode, besides being formulaic, had a lot of this, “But if you want the title of Master Chef, you’ll have to earn it, you’ll have to behave like a professional would, you’ll have to come up to the high standards of professional chefs” and so on. But the stories that the contestants told were about friends, family, home, neighbors–it just seemed to me that the people producing the show didn’t get that there could be other competitive metrics besides the generic narrative of meritocratic difference–that you could want to cook something great because you wanted to make people you love or respect happy, that food could be down-home and good and be very different than what was done in professional kitchen. And I honestly think that a lot of people in very meritocratic-type fields have the same tone-deafness.

I was struck at how tone-deaf Gordon Ramsey?? amateur-chef reality show was when Ramsey insisted on judging people who love cooking for their family using the same narratives that he uses to judge entrepreneurial success.

Is this the show Hell’s Kitchen? Because the thing about that show was that the amateur chefs were in fact competing to become professional chefs — indeed, competing to have the show’s parent company invest a substantial amount of money in their opening their own restaurant — and therefore needed to adopt professional standards and skills that just don’t cut it when cooking for fun or for one’s family, admirable a task though that may be.

It is worth faulting Ramsay for repeatedly failing to make this clear in a patient, sympathetic, reasonable-sounding way, though, as opposed to a constant barrage of screaming insults. He really was a grade-A example of being a piss-poor teacher and manager on that show, by failing to make clear the difference between failing at a specific goal-oriented task and being a worthless human being, though I think this was partly because he really did seem to resent being the host of a reality show and seemed to start with a highly negative opinion of the sort of person who would see a pointless spectacle like the show he was hosting as some sort of fast-track to success. (The fact that the man nominally in charge of the show seemed to hate the very concept of the show made it a surefire recipe for disaster in terms of actually being a good learning or testing environment, but a surefire success in creating “fireworks”, and that’s what reality-show execs want, after all — thus the producers’ acceptance of Ramsay’s attitude of contempt for his situation itself ironically validated said attitude.)

Ramsay is quite a bit more tolerable and open-minded on other shows, like his famous Kitchen Nightmares show (the BBC version — I’ve not seen any of his USA stuff other than Hell’s Kitchen), where he is quite blunt but nonetheless reasonable and sympathetic when he tells people that he understands they became restauranteurs because they genuinely love cooking and should continue to pursue that love, but simply lack the chops (not just culinary but organizational/managerial/interpersonal/financial) to have a restaurant.

withywindle:

Re conservatives and their wicked, wicked ways: would you believe tu quoque?

No. Absolutely not, and this is because I started as someone who was in many ways largely on the fence, and who was quite willing to loudly complain about the ugly abuses and irrationalities of the Left when I was surrounded by them as an undergrad, and nonetheless came out of it a committed leftist precisely because the vacuous black hole that was the conversation of the American right wing had become so yawningly devoid of merit in my eyes I couldn’t tolerate being associated with it anymore.

And the pointless tu quoque “You aren’t being fair to us, therefore fairness is a meaningless virtue” bleating and whining from campus conservatives that Prof. Burke discusses is a huge reason why. When time after time I tried to get at the heart of objections — valid, on the face of them — that the academic Left was hypocritical in its attempts at being non-discriminatory and fair and found that the motivation was the desire to be as discriminatory and unfair as possible (rephrased, of course, as “defending the objectively superior merits of Western culture against its attackers” or some such bullshit) the resulting disillusionment was far greater and more painful than any earlier disillusionment I’d had — of which I’ve had plenty, I assure you — of my mentors on the Left having feet of clay.

I think I would also suggest to you an amiable amnesia, so you can sojourn forth into the blogosphere again, shorn of the map that says Here Be Black Holes.

Telling people to ignore all past experience and try to reinvent the wheel is remarkably bad advice, but it would take little time to reinvent, in this case — the blogosphere has gotten only more and more polarized and the split between the Left and the Right therein more and more obvious in the past election cycle. (Reaching the point where even conservative bloggers admit the liberal blogs are better-researched and -argued, but then turns around with the “But that’s because we have jobs and therefore less time” slam, ironically proving the point under discussion.)

And if tu quoque is acceptable, I suppose we might as well drift into ad hominem — it’s quite difficult to take this whole “But we all have feet of clay! It’s all equivalent!” crap from someone raising the flag for reasonable and intelligent conservative bloggership by, for instance, not knowing that Mexican Independence Day was Sept. 16 and responding to the spate of Mexican flags by fantasizing about burning them (because, you see, Mexicans do not love liberty and Mexican culture should therefore be suppressed).