Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I found during the past week. I hope they help ground your thinking in the midst of media overload. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:
“How Do You Replace an Elite?”
- at The New York Times reviews a new book by political theorist Patrick Deneen entitled Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. The fact that concepts like “postliberalism” are getting attention in the Times is itself notable, and Douthat does a good job highlighting both the insights and limitations of Deneen’s analysis. This timeline of American elites was also interesting: “Depending on where you slice epochs and ideologies, we’ve had a deist or Unitarian elite (the founding era), then an evangelical Protestant elite (the 19th century), then a liberal Protestant elite (the early 20th century), then an expressive-individualist elite (the post-1960s era) and now perhaps an awokened elite — each operating through the same constitutional mechanisms, but each interpreting its rules and rights differently depending on their distinctive commitments and beliefs.”
“Harvard Dishonesty Expert Accused of Dishonesty”
This Financial Times article summarizes the recent scandal surrounding Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino, a “high-profile expert on ethics and dishonesty,” who has been accused of using fraudulent data in multiple behavioral science papers: “The controversy, which centres on the use of allegedly fraudulent data in published papers, is the latest to hit the field of behavioural science and psychology research. Some well-publicised findings in the discipline have proved hard to replicate, casting a shadow over the highly modish branch of management studies and social science.” This is yet another reason, besides others I have discussed here recently on Handful of Earth, to approach catchphrases like “evidence-based” with a high degree of skepticism.
“Saudi Arabia Sends Top Delegation to China’s ‘Summer Davos’”
Also at The Financial Times, this article discusses the burgeoning economic partnership between Saudi Arabia and China facilitated by the World Economic Forum’s “Summer Davos” hosted this week in Tianjin, China. Such a development shows the serious limitations to a geopolitically outdated understanding of contemporary economic relationships: “Riyadh is keen to look beyond its traditional partnership with the west and strengthen commerce with Asia, especially China. Some of the country’s biggest companies, such as PetroChina and telecommunications group Huawei, are already present in Saudi Arabia. Relations with China were strengthened by a state visit to the kingdom by Xi in December.”
A concise account of the role of novelty and disruption in the intra-class competition of today’s postindustrial professional-managerial class by
at : “What has shifted since 1975 is that the proportion of would-be intellectuals and other Change Merchants in society has grown vastly larger as our manufacturing sector has declined and we’ve steered a greater and greater share of young people into postsecondary education. We face an ever greater surplus of ‘knowledge elites,’ who form a growing portion of our ever more postindustrial economy; therefore, ever more intra-class competition rages as these elites attempt to sell unique theoretical ‘products’ in disruptive new ways. The result is a vastly elevated number of suppliers of social change. And that supply creates its own demand.”
“Lessons in Freedom: Agroecology, Localization and Food Sovereignty”
Colin Todhunter makes an inspired case for localized agroecology grounded in traditional knowledge at Internationalist 360°. He notes that “Western corporations and foundations are jumping on the ‘sustainability’ bandwagon by undermining traditional agriculture and genuine sustainable agri-food systems and packaging their corporate takeover of food as some kind of ‘green’ environmental mission.” In contrast to this approach, Todhunter reviews the promising evidence for agroecology from Cuba and Africa and argues that “creating securely paid labour-intensive agricultural work in the richer countries, it can address the hollowing out of the economies of the likes of the US and UK as well as the displacement of existing indigenous food production systems by global agribusiness and the undermining of rural infrastructure in places like India.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.