- Gelernter, David.
America-Lite.
New York: Encounter Books, 2012.
ISBN 978-1-59403-606-4.
-
At the end of World War II, the United States bestrode the world like
a colossus. All of its industrial competitors had been devastated
by the war; it was self-sufficient in most essential resources; it
was the unquestioned leader in science, technology, and medicine; its
cultural influence was spread around the world by Hollywood movies; and
the centre of the artistic and literary world had migrated from Paris
to New York. The generation which had won the war, enabled by the
G.I. Bill,
veterans swarmed into institutions of higher learning formerly
reserved for scions of the wealthy and privileged—by 1947,
fully 49% of college admissions were veterans.
By 1965, two decades after the end of the war, it was pretty clear to
anybody with open eyes that it all had begun to go seriously wrong.
The United States was becoming ever more deeply embroiled in a land
war in Asia without a rationale comprehensible to those who paid for
it and were conscripted to fight there; the centres of once-great cities
were beginning a death spiral in which a culture of dependency spawned
a poisonous culture of crime, drugs, and the collapse of the family;
the humiliatingly defeated and shamefully former Nazi collaborator
French were draining the U.S. Treasury of its gold reserves, and
the U.S. mint had replaced its silver coins with cheap counterfeit
replacements. In August of 1965, the Watts neighbourhood of Los
Angeles exploded in riots, and the unthinkable—U.S. citizens
battling one another with deadly force in a major city, became the
prototype for violent incidents to come. What happened?
In this short book (just 200 pages in the print edition), the author
argues that it was what I have been calling the “culture crash”
for the last decade. Here, this event is described as the “cultural
revolution”: not a violent upheaval as happened in China, but a
steady process through which the keys to the élite institutions
which transmit the culture from generation to generation were handed
over, without a struggle, from the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant)
patricians which had controlled them since Colonial days, to a new
intellectual class, influenced by ideas from Continental Europe, which
the author calls PORGIs (post-religious globalist intellectuals).
Now, this is not to say that there were not intellectuals at top-tier
institutions of higher learning before the cultural revolution; but
they were not in charge: those who were saw their mission in
a fundamentally conservative way—to conserve the grand tradition
of Western civilisation by transmitting it to each successive generation,
while inculcating in them the moral compass which would make them worthy
leaders in business, the military, and public affairs.
The PORGIs had no use for this. They had theory, and if the facts
weren't consistent with the theory and the consequences of implementing it
disastrously different from those intended, well then the facts must be
faulty because the theory was crystalline perfection in itself. (And all of
this became manifest well before the cognitive dissonance between
academic fantasy and the real world became so great that the intellectuals
had to invent
postmodernism,
denying the very existence of objective reality.)
The PORGIs (Well, I suppose we can at least take comfort that the intellectual
high ground wasn't taken over by
Corgis;
imagine the chaos that would have engendered!) quickly moved to
eliminate the core curricula in higher learning which taught
Western history, culture, and moral tradition. This was replaced
(theory being supreme, and unchallenged), with indoctrination in an
ideology unmoored to the facts. Rather than individuals able to
think and learn on their own, those educated by the PORGIs became
servomechanisms who, stimulated by this or that keyword, would spit
out a rote response: “Jefferson?” “White slaveowner!”
These, the generation educated by the PORGIs, starting around the mid
1960s, the author calls PORGI airheads. We all have our own “mental
furniture” which we've accumulated over our lives—the way we
make sense of the bewildering flow of information from the outside world:
sorting it into categories, prioritising it, and deciding how to act upon it.
Those with a traditional (pre-PORGI) education, or those like myself and
the vast majority of people my age or older who figured it out on their own
by reading books and talking to other people, have painfully built our own
mental furniture, re-arranged it as facts came in which didn't fit with the
ways we'd come to understand things, and sometimes heaved the old Barcalounger
out the window when something completely contradicted our previous
assumptions. With PORGI airheads, none of this obtains. They do not have
the historical or cultural context to evaluate how well their pre-programmed
responses fit the unforgiving real world. They are like parrots: you wave
a French fry at them and they say, “Hello!” Another
French fry, “Hello!” You wave a titanium billet painted
to look like a French fry, “Hello!” Beak notched from the
attempt to peel a titanium ingot, you try it once again.
“Hello!”
Is there anybody who has been visible on the Internet for more than a few years
who has not experienced interactions with these people? Here is my own
personal collection of
greatest hits.
Gelernter argues that Barack Obama is the first PORGI airhead to be elected
to the presidency. What some see as ideology may be better explained as
servomechanism “Hello!” response to stimuli for which his mentors have
pre-programmed him. He knows nothing of World War II, or the Cold War,
or of colonialism in Africa, or of the rôle of the British Empire
in eradicating the slave trade. All of these were deemed irrelevant by the
PORGIs and PORGI airheads who trained him. And the 53% who voted for him were
made a majority by the PORGI airheads cranked out every year and injected into
the bloodstream of the dying civil society by an educational system almost
entirely in the hands of the
enemy.
What is to be done? The author's prescription is much the same as my own.
We need to break the back of the higher education (and for that matter, the
union-dominated primary and secondary education) system and replace it with
an Internet-based educational delivery system where students will have access
to courses taught by the best pedagogues in the world (ranked in real time not
just by student thumbs up and down, but by objectively measured outcomes, such
as third-party test scores and employment results). Then we need independent
certification agencies, operating in competition with one another much like
bond rating agencies, which issue “e-diplomas” based on examinations
(not just like the SAT and bar exams, but also in-person and gnarly like a
Ph.D. defence for the higher ranks). The pyramid of prestige would remain, as
well as the cost structure: a Doctorate in Russian Literature from Harvard
would open more doors at the local parking garage or fast food joint than
one from Bob's Discount Degrees, but you get what you pay for. And, in any
case, the certification would cost a tiny fraction of spending your prime
intellectually productive years listening to tedious lectures given by
graduate students marginally proficient in your own language.
The PORGIs correctly perceived the U.S. educational system to be the “keys
to the kingdom”. They began, in
Gramsci's
long march through the institutions,
to put in place the mechanisms which would tilt the electorate toward their
tyrannical agenda. It is too late to reverse it; the educational establishment
must be destroyed. “Destroyed?”, you ask—“These are strong
words! Do you really mean it? Is it possible?” Now witness the power of this
fully armed and operational global data network! Record stores…gone! Book
stores…gone! Universities….
In the Kindle edition (which costs almost as
much as the hardcover), the end-notes are properly bidirectionally linked
to citations in the text, but the index is just a useless list of terms
without links to references in the text. I'm sorry if I come across as
a tedious “index hawk”, but especially when reviewing a book
about declining intellectual standards, somebody has to do it.
August 2012 