So goes the nation. Not always a good thing, but it would be now:
In the past month, California has been the stage for a series of celebrations of unlikely legislative success — a parade of bill signings that offered a contrast between the shutdown in Washington and an acrimony-free California Legislature that enacted laws dealing with subjects including school financing, immigration, gun control and abortion.
The turnaround from just 10 years ago — striking in tone, productivity and, at least on fiscal issues, moderation — is certainly a lesson in the power of one-party rule. Democrats hold an overwhelming majority in the Assembly and Senate and the governor, Jerry Brown, is a Democrat. The Republican Party, which just three years ago held the governor’s seat and a feisty minority in both houses, has diminished to the point of near irrelevance.
But the new atmosphere in Sacramento also offers the first evidence that three major changes in California’s governance system intended to leach some of the partisanship out of politics — championed by reform advocates — may also be having their desired effect in a state that has long offered itself as the legislative laboratory for the nation. (Yesterday's NYT)
And then there's Texas. But let us not dwell on collective delusion, but rather on sane people grappling with reality. From the philosopher prince Jerry Brown's State of the State address in January:
In the right order of things, education—the early fashioning of character and the formation of conscience—comes before legislation. Nothing is more determinative of our future than how we teach our children. If we fail at this, we will sow growing social chaos and inequality that no law can rectify.
In California’s public schools, there are six million students, 300,000 teachers—all subject to tens of thousands of laws and regulations. In addition to the teacher in the classroom, we have a principal in every school, a superintendent and governing board for each school district. Then we have the State Superintendent and the State Board of Education, which makes rules and approves endless waivers—often of laws which you just passed. Then there is the Congress which passes laws like “No Child Left Behind,” and finally the Federal Department of Education, whose rules, audits and fines reach into every classroom in America, where sixty million children study, not six million.
Add to this the fact that three million California school age children speak a language at home other than English and more than two million children live in poverty. And we have a funding system that is overly complex, bureaucratically driven and deeply inequitable. That is the state of affairs today.
The laws that are in fashion demand tightly constrained curricula and reams of accountability data. All the better if it requires quiz-bits of information, regurgitated at regular intervals and stored in vast computers. Performance metrics, of course, are invoked like talismans. Distant authorities crack the whip, demanding quantitative measures and a stark, single number to encapsulate the precise achievement level of every child.
We seem to think that education is a thing—like a vaccine—that can be designed from afar and simply injected into our children. But as the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats said, “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.”
This year, as you consider new education laws, I ask you to consider the principle of Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the idea that a central authority should only perform those tasks which cannot be performed at a more immediate or local level. In other words, higher or more remote levels of government, like the state, should render assistance to local school districts, but always respect their primary jurisdiction and the dignity and freedom of teachers and students.
Subsidiarity is offended when distant authorities prescribe in minute detail what is taught, how it is taught and how it is to be measured. I would prefer to trust our teachers who are in the classroom each day, doing the real work – lighting fires in young minds.
I know there are some on the left who are critical of Brown. But let's face it, in our current predicament, it's not about left or right, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. It's about sanity, decency, and common sense on one hand and delusion and ideological rigidity on the other.
I hated Obamacare--I was sorely disappointed regarding so many of its compromises with healthcare special interests. I thought the individual mandate was going to create a lot of political blowback. I was outraged that the public option never had a chance, and that a Medicare-for-everyone-single-payer option was never a possibility. And I thought it failed to do what was necessary to get the absurd levels of healthcare inflation under control. But I will admit now what I would not admit back in 2010--it really was the only thing possible, and it is remarkable achievement that it got through. It was the best that sanity and decency could manage in a political environment where both are in short supply.
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Stephen Colbert famously said that Reality has a liberal bias, and it's true not because the Liberal thought framework is philosophically superior to others--it isn't--but because Liberalism is best adapted to the world we currently find ourselves in: the modern world and liberal thought go hand in hand. America is an amalgam of Enlightenment and Calvinist/Whig thinking, but both are through and through modern projects.
I've argued here for years that because we are no longer moderns reality's bias toward liberalism is loosening, and the modern mind in all its forms is anemic and moribund. But sickly though it may be, it is still the framework that provides the backstory out of which a new story better suited to the needs of a no-longer-modern world will emerge. Its decay enriches the soil out of which something new will grow.
I believe that in 500 years (or sooner) people will look back at this period--from 1650 to 2050--and see the secularist/materialist narrative that developed during that time as a bizarre aberration. But from that future perspective people will also see that there were good reasons for intelligent, decent, honest people to reject the traditional narratives and seek a better one in which Reason was the central protagonist.
The challenge now in this liminal time is not to bitch and moan and dig one's heels in, but to develop a more robust narrative--one that accepts the contemporary culture world as the frail, fallible thing that it is, but also understands that all culture worlds are plastic constructions that can be replaced (gradually) with better ones. There's a reason that Christianity emerged out of the ruins of classical antiquity as the dominant narrative of the West, and there was a reason that Reason emerged out of the ruins of post Reformation Christendom. And there will have to be a reason why whatever comes next will emerge out of the ruins of late Modernity.
We just don't know it yet, but it's astonishing to me how little faith and hope conservative Christians have. They are not defending the faith but rather something else,something inessential and as such something that draws them away from what is essential. Christianity in its essence is not at all about clinging to the past, but about looking toward the future expecting the fulfillment of impossible promises. It's the story that began with Abraham leaving Ur and the Israelites leaving Egypt. It's the story of the early Desert Fathers, and the wandering Irish monks. It's the story of loss of something lesser in order to gain something greater; it's the story of death and resurrection.