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:
Michael Lind investigates the post-1970s homogenization of American elites at Compact Magazine. In the last half century, Lind observes that the American elite has come to look more and more like the elite in countries such as the United Kingdom, France, and Japan. Its structure “resembles a candelabrum: Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation, including the arts, outside of the military and the clergy.” I wrote an extended review of Lind’s 2020 book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite. It’s one of the better analyses of emergent political divisions in the United States that I have read in recent years.
“Conservatives Go to Red States and Liberals Go to Blue as the Country Grows More Polarized”
Speaking of political divisions, The Associated Press reports that “Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history.” Online polarization gets a lot of media attention, but the increasing geographical political divides in America are just as (if not more) significant: “The split has sent states careening to the political left or right, adopting diametrically opposed laws on some of the hottest issues of the day. In Idaho, abortion is illegal once a heartbeat can be detected in a fetus — as early as five or six weeks — and a new law passed this year makes it a crime to help a minor travel out of state to obtain one. In Colorado, state law prevents any restrictions on abortion. In Idaho, a new law prevents minors from accessing gender-affirming care, while Colorado allows youths to come from other states to access the procedures.”
“The West Must Recognise Its Hypocrisy”
Martin Wolf at The Financial Times notes that “if the west is to have the influence it hopes for, it must realise that its claims to moral superiority are neither unchallengeable nor unchallenged. Many in our world view the western powers as selfish, self-satisfied and hypocritical. They are not altogether wrong. We must do far better.” It seems unlikely that this kind of conversation would be happening in the pages of the FT without undeniable American decline and the related emergence of a multipolar world order. Both of these connected realities that are increasingly recognized in the mainstream press. This graphic on global greenhouse gas emissions was also noteworthy:
“Who Needs Chinese Scientists? America Does”
Mel Gurtov at Counterpunch highlights the striking fact that around 1400 top Chinese scientists have recently given up their American academic posts to work in China. That list now includes renowned biophysical chemist, Xie Xiaoliang, who left his professorship at Harvard University earlier this year to work at Peking University in Beijing. Besides clearly illustrating the academic impacts of multipolarity, this trend also demonstrates just how dependent the United States has become on immigrant researchers: “‘So much of our intellectual technological power is from immigrants,’ said Steven Chu…a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Stanford University and a former U.S. secretary of energy. ‘We’re shooting ourselves not in the foot but in something close to the head.’” Instead of relying on elite immigrant labor, the U.S. could invest in its own poor and working class to fulfill its economic objectives. But this seems unlikely since, as Lind argues the previously linked article at Compact, America increasingly relies on a “single national elite” whose members are “to be selected in their late teens or early 20s.” This single national elite often has more in common with parallel elites in other countries than it does with the majority of the American population.
“Santa Clara University Students Must Take COVID Vaccines or Withdraw”
- at reports on the draconian continuation of covid vaccine mandates at some American college and university campuses: “In a March 2022 lawsuit filed against SCU, Harlow Glenn, one of the student plaintiffs, claims that she had serious adverse reactions to her primary series COVID vaccines, including an emergency room visit due to leg paralysis and abnormal bleeding. According to the complaint, Osofsky refused to grant her a medical exemption for the required booster and actively interfered with her doctor-patient relationship by contacting her private doctors to persuade them to retract their medical exemption documentation.” I have written about college and university covid vaccine mandates previously on Handful of Earth and continue to believe that the struggle against these mandates “is about the pursuit of truth in America’s colleges and universities, which has been all but abandoned in favor of a blind allegiance to the dictates of the two biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic: Big Pharma and Big Tech.”
- at draws on the thought of social critic, Ivan Illich, to argue that “the triumph of modern institutions is that they have schooled us even to desire our own obsolescence. If a job, a task, a role, or an activity becomes so thoroughly mechanical or bureaucratic, for the sake of efficiency and scale, say, that it is stripped of all human initiative, thought, judgment, and, consequently, responsibility, then of course, of course we will welcome and celebrate its automation. If we have been schooled to think that we lack basic levels of latent competence and capability, or that the cultivation of such competencies and capabilities entails too much inconvenience or risk or uncertainty, then of course, of course we will welcome and celebrate the displacement of our labor, involvement, and care.” This is an important intervention into the debates surrounding artificial intelligence which, not unlike my recent essay “Telos or Transhumanism?,” probes the philosophical presuppositions underlying much of the contemporary discourse on AI.
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
Thank you Vincent