‘The master and his apprentice worked side by side. The latter living with the master and therefore subject to the same conditions. When these apprentices rose to be masters there was little or no change in their way of life. There was, substantially, social equality – and even political equality – for those engaged in industrial pursuits had little or no voice in the state. Before the industrial revolution, we were all pretty equal. But that changed with the first gilded age.
‘ “Today,” according to Andrew Carnegie, “we assemble thousands of operatives in the factory and in the mine of whom the employer can know little or nothing, and to whom he is little better than a myth. All intercourse between them is at an end. Rigid castes are formed and as usual mutual ignorance breeds mutual distrust.
‘That shift was particularly profound in America, one reason that even today the national mythology doesn’t entirely accept the existence of those rigid castes of industrial society.’
“The Air Force says it can no longer afford to scan the sky for extraterrestrial threats that could doom the planet, all because of the sequester cuts Washington forced on itself when it failed to rein in the exploding national deficit. Called the Air Force Space Surveillance System, it’s “critical” to defense, the Air Force has said. By October 1, they’ll have to pull the plug.”
Apparently the extraterrestrial threats include about 1,000 asteroids large enough to “potentially unleash global catastrophic devastation to the planet upon impact.”
Kind of a big deal, yes? From this bit of asteroid news you probably shouldn’t expect much of a reaction from our elected officials. Last spring, when one asteroid actually did hit earth and one closely missed us on the same day, Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) asked NASA chief Charles Bolden what NASA would do if a large asteroid was expected to collide with earth in three weeks.
“The answer to you is, ‘if it’s coming in three weeks, pray.’ The reason I can’t do anything in the next three weeks is because for decades we have put it off.”
Robert Putnam writing about his hometown in Ohio, in the New York Times:
‘As successive graduating P.C.H.S. classes entered an ever worsening local economy, the social fabric of the 1950s and 1960s was gradually shredded. Juvenile-delinquency rates began to skyrocket in the 1980s and were triple the national average by 2010. Not surprisingly, given falling wages and loosening norms, single-parent households in Ottawa County doubled from 10 percent in 1970 to 20 percent in 2010, while the divorce rate more than quadrupled. In Port Clinton itself, the epicenter of the local economic collapse in the 1980s, the rate of births out of wedlock quadrupled between 1978 and 1990, topping out at about 40 percent, nearly twice the race-adjusted national average (itself rising rapidly).’
‘…The crumbling of the American dream is a purple problem, obscured by solely red or solely blue lenses. Its economic and cultural roots are entangled, a mixture of government, private sector, community and personal failings. But the deepest root is our radically shriveled sense of “we.” ‘
“The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have ‘too much information’ is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.”
Welcome to the usual tribal dance. You know, the dance we’re so busy with that we’re not noticing that “asteroids” are approaching earth and we’d better roll up our sleeves, cross the partisan divide and work on diverting them.
Conservatives – particularly well-equipped to see threats to the moral communities and social structures that make our highly improbable civil society possible – are sounding the alarm on one of the Asteroids Club’s four inaugural “asteroids” – breakdown of the family. Maybe they’ve stopped keeping company with liberal friends who might gently tell them their argument (made by a panel of men, sheesh) is coming off just slightly lunkheaded… Comments like Erik Erickson’s “having moms as the primary breadwinner is bad for kids and bad for marriage” and “when you look at biology… males are the dominant role.”
If the Fox panel’s goal was to communicate their alarm to others who aren’t seeing the problem, they didn’t get it done – more likely, they may have set recognition of this asteroid back a year or two. Arguments get weak and mushy when the only practice you have making them is to people who already agree with you. These guys would have been bounced from a first grade debate team.
Predictably, the asteroid zooms right past liberal ears. They’re covering it as a cause for action over at the liberal Media Matters for America media watch organization. Thread comments include the usual culture war fare like “strong women scare them to death.” When we’re in full tribal mode, no one seems willing to ignore the brain dead commentary and linger a moment on the underlying numbers.
Here’s what they might have said: the marriage rate has plunged to an all-time low. 7 of 10 black children are being raised in a single parent household, 5 in 10 hispanic children and 3 of 10 white children. Marriage is the structure around which civil society has been built and children have been raised – it’s the fundamental cooperative relationship in society – so we’ve got to stop and look at the potential damage this is doing to families and children.
Here’s what they did say that critics aren’t paying any attention to: “systemically something is going terribly wrong in our society and it’s hurting our children” “we as people in a smart society have lost the ability to have complimentary relationships and it’s tearing us apart.”
We suggest you might want to ignore the circus and look up.
We were delighted to recently meet Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, co-authors of The Start-Up of You. Apart from offering superb career advice (after I finished reading it, I shared my copy with my young adult daughter), it included an astute understanding of civics. Here’s just one story that caught our attention – and something we could use a lot more of: Ben Franklin’s “The Club of Honest Whigs.” Reid and Ben write:
In 1765 Joseph Priestley, a young amateur scientist and minister was running experiments in his makeshift laboratory in the English countryside. He was exceptionally bright but isolated from any peers, until one December day when he traveled into London to attend the Club of Honest Whigs. The brainchild of Benjamin Franklin, the club was like an eighteenth-century version of the networking groups that exist today. Franklin who was in England promoting the interest of the American colonies, convened his big thinking friends at the London Coffee House on alternating Thursdays. Their conversations on science, theology, politics, and other topics of the day were freewheeling and reflected the coffeehouse setting. Priestly attended to get feedback on a book idea about scientists’ progress on understanding electricity. He got much more than feedback. Franklin and his friends swelled in support of Priestly: they offered to open their private scientific libraries to him. They offered to review drafts of his manuscript. They offered their friendship and encouragement. Crucially, Priestly reciprocated all the way; he was committed to circulating his ideas and discoveries through his social network, thereby strengthening the interpersonal bonds, refining the ideas themselves, and increasing the likelihood that his new connections would help him exploit whatever opportunities were found.
In short, Priestley’s night at the coffeehouse dramatically altered the trajectory of his career. (According to author Steven Johnson in his book the invention of air, Priestley went from semi-isolation to plugging into “an existing network of relationships and collaborations that the coffeehouse environment facilitated.) He went on to have an illustrious scientific and writing career, famously discovering the existence of oxygen. The London coffee house went on to become “a central hub of innovation in British society.”
“Our task as citizens whether we are leaders in government or business – or spreading the word – is to spend our days with open hearts and open minds. To seek out the truth that exists in an opposing view and to find the common ground that allows for us as a nation, as a people, to take real and meaningful action. And we have to do that humbly – for no one can know the full and encompassing mind of God. And we have to do it everyday, not just at a prayer breakfast.” — President Barack Obama, at this year’s National Prayer Breakfast
“My goal is to get people to have discussions about things about which they disagree in a civil way, not call each other names and get in all kinds of infantile discussions. We don’t need to do that. We have so many pressing problems in our country and at some point we’re going to have to tone down the rhetoric and move toward solutions for the multitudinous problems or we’re going to go right down the tubes, just like every other pinnacle nation that has preceded us…”
