Closing the books

“The Vietnam War is now as far in the past as the Second World War was at the beginning of the Vietnam War.”

1945-1964 (give or take) is 19 years.

1972 (give or take) to 2008 is 36 years.

The Vietname War is now twice as far in the past as the Second World War was at the beginning of the Vietnam War.

Another way to look at it: every time you listen to the Beatles or the Who (or when Paul McCartney plays at the Superbowl, etc), it is as if, in 1970, you were listening to folks from 1932-dressing like a flapper, for instance.

That should give you an idea of how stagnant Western Culture has been since 1969. The Baby Boomers latched on and haven’t let go, 20 years past the time they should have.

Sk

I therefore declare 2008 to be officially The Year That We No Longer Have The 1960s To Blame.

Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes!

Singing what?

[errr umm yes, I took the opportunity to correct that sentence fragment – dd]

HOORAH for the God/Evolution resolution, yes, absolutely. The vast swathes of otherwise lively and interesting blogs devoted to snarkily affirming God Does Not Exist and Creationism is Stupid, gaahhh. If shooting fish in a barrel is your chosen hobby, great, but to endlessly congratulate yourself for it: oh, hush up.

Two partial disagreements….

1) Arguments over creationism are not simply about “teaching of evolution to people who don’t want to learn it,” but also about people who do want their children to learn about evolution not having their children lied to in school. There’s also a question as to whether ignorant parents have an inalienable right to keep their children ignorant. At any rate, there’s more here than simply telling people with irrational beliefs systems that they shouldn’t have irrational belief systems, which seems to be the emphasis of your closing book.

2. The Sixties may be dead and gone. But myths about the Sixties remain an absolutely central part of the way many Americans, especially on the political right, understand this country. And those myths, however mythical, are not going away. The Sixties, like World War II and the Civil War, remain enormously culturally powerful, despite the inaccuracy of public memory about them. You can make a good case that the Sixties shouldn’t matter anymore. But they do nonetheless. Perhaps a fall-back position would be to change debates about the Sixties to debates about the memory of the Sixties, which is where the real culture-war action is today.

I’m glad you left space for the latest iteration of “The Lancet study was a vast Sorosian conspiracy” argument that’s now spanning keyboards all the way from Glenn Reynolds to The Corner.

Would it be possible to add links to the prior versions, so I can have a complete list of useless arguments.

I do think I disagree on the 60’s–like the War for Southern Independence, how to remember them is a big deal.

It strikes me kind of … crazy that someone would suggest that listening to 30 year old Beatles records is a sign of cultural stagnation. Only someone who lived in a culture that was in no way stagnant would think 30 years is old enough to put in the rubbish bin simply for being too old. In fact, a culture that is the polar opposite of stagnant, the frigging anti-stagnant.

If people were still reading Beowulf in the original Old English because nothing better had happened in the last 1000 years, that would be a good case. Busting out the White Album once a year cause you like it is not stagnation.

I find prediction markets an obnoxious survival of 1990s market-worship. Down with the Washington consensus!

Also, the big debate is not on what parents teach children, but what is taught by the schools. In which case the debate is whether or not public schools should teach science in science classes, or trim science education to fit certain factions’ (scientifically unjustified) beliefs.

With all respect (born 1978) the Beatles have never really played that large a cultural part in my life I know the songs, as does everyone, but in almost exactly the same sense that I know the songs of Flanders and Swann… I don’t really feel a cultural kinship with it, y’know?

With all respect (born 1978) the Beatles have never really played that large a cultural part in my life

you kids with that noise you call music – why, when i wuzzyer age….grrnbrbleflap…. –> born 1965

soon we will read the following:

With all respect (born 1988) the Clash have never really played that large a cultural part in my life

saints preserve us.

Obvious point: there’s a hell of a lot more kids listening to 40-year old music today than there were in 1967, i.e. listening to the Beatles today (though the White Album is surely one of their worst) than to Rudy Vallee in 1967.

25: when you really think about it, it’s not worth arguing with anybody.

at the end of the day, as with Santa Claus and cannabis, you can teach your children what they like, but in the end they will find out.

At least in some parts of the US this is no longer true. Evangelicals have their own news media, their own art and music (which is asymptotically approaching the mainstream in quality), their own educational materials on nearly any subject — even their own peanut butter. One votes at ones church, and the precinct monitors are fellow church members. It’s now possible to live and die with little more direct encounter with the “secular” world than a quadrennial visit to the DMV, unless one is somehow unable to homeschool ones children or send them to a church-run school. By placing well-indoctrinated candidates on the local school board, the danger of encountering hostile ideas even there can be ameliorated. (It’s generally only when efforts to suppress “secular influences” overreach beyond the local level, such as in Kansas, that organized opposition to this occurs.)

I have strong issues with the approach taken by the self-anointed warriors in the fight against God, but that has more to do with what I believe is the highly counterproductive effects of such an aggressive approach — their fears are, I think, justified even though their tactics are often repellent.

“The Beatles did, in fact, release a version of “Ain’t She Sweet” (composed 1927) in 1964, on the other hand.”

Recorded and released in Germany in 1961. The same year Shane Fenton & The Fentones did “Five Feet Two, Eyes of Blue” (composed 1925).

@30: Evangelical peanut butter? If I make a sammich from it, does that mean I could walk on water?

And yes, the self-congratulatory blithering on about how “I don’t believe in God therefore I am soooooo smart and sooooo kewl” gets old, fast. I find it productive of a happier disposition and lower blood-pressure to concentrate on talking about things I like and believe in.

Why should we not teach evolution to people who don’t want to learn it? What makes that okay for evolution but not history or geometry?

Or are you merely saying that teaching evolution to people who don’t want to learn it isn’t a vital goal of public policy? Then I might agree with you, although I would still say that not “teaching” Intelligent Design as if it were actually knowledge should very much be a vital goal of public policy.

What about that disgusting little ceremony they force on US school kids where they all salute the flag? Isn’t the essence of totalitarian ideology that it be imposed by state decree?

I don’t just find the idolatrous worship of flags offensive on religious grounds, it is offensive on political grounds as well.

Take the famous Abu Ghraib Crucifixion photograph, swap the black shroud for an American flag. Isn’t that what the Bush administration has made it stand for?

Why wouldn’t it be open? It is, however the idea may trouble some, an empirical question, and we’re on the verge of having the tools to settle it on that basis. Declining costs of gene sequencing and improving data analysis are going to reinforcing/overturning a lot of conventional wisdom in the next couple of decades. And we’ll be better for it in the end. But for now it’s all so much sturm und drang.

The amount of time and energy poured into this bottomless pit by passionate, intelligent and liberal individuals who could be doing Avogadro’s number of more worthwhile things is enough to make me want to weep.

Yeah, it’s almost as ridiculous as following a sport.

Teaching of evolution to people who don’t want to learn it as a vital goal of public policy. [DISAGREE]

This is, I think, a misunderstanding of the usual situation. In the US, what happens more often is that, following a concerted stealth campaign by the Discovery Institute or some such organization, a local school board gets packed with sleeper agents who then try to institute the teaching of creationism to people who don’t want to learn it. If this happens in my district I am not going to shut up about it.

I also think it’s important to provide some kind of counterargument when the “creation science” folks try to muddy the waters with misleading pseudoscience. I am not much of a New Atheist type and have a generally live-and-let-live attitude toward other people’s metaphysics, but when they spread bullshit about science I can’t stand it, regardless of whether my time would be better spent on redistributionist economic arguments (a subject on which I sadly lack any sort of expertise). If this is a character flaw so be it.

Am I a masochist–

Stick your balls in a vice, then tell us. And phone up a few journalists to see if they’ll quote you on it, because you seem to do that pretty fucking well.

_Obvious point: there’s a hell of a lot more kids listening to 40-year old music today than there were in 1967, i.e. listening to the Beatles today (though the White Album is surely one of their worst) than to Rudy Vallee in 1967._

Depends on what you’re measuring Tom. An awful lot of kids in 1967 were listening to recycled blues (via the British blues revival) and folk music of uncertain date either given semi-“authentic” performance or adapted.

What percentage of recent American college graduates know who fought in the Vietnam War and what the outcome was? Maybe each one here can do their own personal survey.

Other myths that are beyond debate: the “success” of Reaganomics; America is a xian nation; Reagan “won” the war against the Soviet Union; trickle down works; welfare mothers; Iraq’s WMD’s; Cheney is a human being; cutting taxes for the richest is good for the economy; the “free market” and the invisible hand. Oh, the list is much longer.

In re: educational standards. I think they have slipped slightly and for evidence I present the current Cambridge Maths Tripos Part IA

When I took this just over 20 years ago it included an introduction to Special Relativity and to Quantum Mechanics. The former is now a strictly optional course and the latter appears to have disappeared from the syllabus. It looks like these have been replaced with a Mechanics class that is intended as a remedial for people who didn’t have that in their A level studies. And I think something else must have been added because I recognise the contents of at least one of the Part IB course despite switching to CompSci at the end of Part IA

Given that just about everything else is the same I think I agree that standards (at the top at least) have not slipped much BUT they must have slipped slightly because otherwise it doesn’t make too much sense that these topics would have been moved.

Brett Bellmore: “Why wouldn’t it be open? It is, however the idea may trouble some, an empirical question, and we’re on the verge of having the tools to settle it on that basis. ”

So far, the record is very close to 100% abuse of existing tools by you and yours. Given that (a) your side couldn’t tell the truth to save your lives and (b) ignores any new information which contradicts your arguments, I don’t anticipate your side’s arguments improving; just being spiced up with new buzzwords.

I should of course have written Albert Jay Nock instead of Alfred.
I guess I’ve been thinking too much about either Anglo-Saxon England or Batman recently.

51: well exactly. You would actually have to search quite a long way (or at least you would if you started at my front door) to find someone whose family had been victimised by the NKVD, whereas more or less all decent people would be offended by a swastika.

Regarding educational standards:

(1) Independent of how stupid most students are, it tells us something about how stupid most pundits, journalists and the chattering classes are that not once in my life have I ever seen this issue discussed in terms of distributions.

What is the goal here and what is the claim?
Are standards supposedly slipping across all students, good and bad, or only at the low end or only at the high end? And are we interested in fixing them at the low end (the US fixation on “special needs”) or in the middle or at the high end?

Which leads me to
(2) If you don’t address point 1, then anecdotes about what is or is not happening at universities are irrelevant since you may well now be talking at cross purposes. Obviously what happens at universities only tells us what is changing wrt the upper 20..30% of students, and even there we have distributional issues:
would it matter that fewer students could perform basic calculus if more students at the extreme high end are capable of truly original PhD and post-PhD work?

Do students know less math on their 1st day of university because they spent their teenage years playing XBox, or because the pie of school time marked “science” has grown so much larger (mainly biology, but some earth science and a little physics) that math had to be squeezed out in school?

“With all respect (born 1988) the Clash have never really played that large a cultural part in my life

Finally, we will have:

With all respect (born 1998) Radiohead have never really played that large a cultural part in my life
”

It would be nice to believe that by the time this second comes to pass, we (society as a whole and specifically those who write teen-directed movies and TV) will have finally moved beyond the ridiculous trope that a person is defined by the music they listen to — an idea that became inane even before listening to music became the intensely private exercise defined by walkmans.

@26 tom hurka:

It’s not at all obvious to me that today’s kids listen to more 40 year old music than kids did back in 1967.

This point may or may not be worth arguing endlessly, but, as it isn’t on dsquared’s list, here.

Francist at 52: I studied physics at a poly (sorry, didn’t make Cambridge), so I at least have some understanding of the issues here. I think there’s a case that neither Special Relativity nor Quantum Mechanics are appropriate undergraduate studies. They’re both recondite, difficult, and of limited application to the real world. If you’re arguing something like quantum mechanics underpins modern computing, so it would be good if graduates understood why semiconductors semiconduct (that is, understand understand rather than repeat-formulae understand), I’m inclined to agree. It took 300 years for physics to get there, however. There’s a lot of mechanics one can learn first, and that’s the stuff which put men on the moon and Voyager into interstellar space. Roughly, my position is: both subjects are post-graduate material for prospective specialists. One wouldn’t need them for most graduate jobs. They may have been dropped not because of declining school standards but because the pass marks had to be embarrassingly low.

65: Certainly Mao is still officially revered – his embalmed body is on public display in Beijing, much as Lenin’s is in Moscow. Stalin’s was next to Lenin for a time, but removed & buried by Khrushchev in 1961.

Daniel @58,

You would actually have to search quite a long way (or at least you would if you started at my front door) to find someone whose family had been victimised by the NKVD

See, whilst I certainly agree with your broader point — indeed might well have an old Che shirt in a box in the attic — notsneaky is right: context does matter. Notsneaky, for example, would probably be done with his search much, much faster than you would be.

Ben @59,

Some German prosecutors have in fact tried to use the Hakenkreuz-ban to punish antifascists using the antinazi symbols you describe. See, e.g. (The Stuttgart court’s decision has, you will be pleased to learn, since been overturned.)

There’s a lot of mechanics one can learn first, and that’s the stuff which put men on the moon and Voyager into interstellar space.

I’m a biologist and my knowledge of even basic physics is more than a little rusty, but I’ve long had a feeling that the basics of QM would be more easily learned by students who had first been taught the Hamiltonian formulation of classical mechanics. Does that make any sense?

gdr@62: The more I think about it, the more I think he’s talking about the British controversy over government funding of religious schools that may teach creationism, not the American push to teach creationism in legally secular public (that is, government-run) schools. Some of the same issues come up as in the American case, but the context is all different.

Also, had Lee Harvey Oswald lived to pass on his Free Huey! trading cards to his grandchild, Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain would never have gotten depressed, Nirvana would be viable, we all would have reached it by now, steroids-free, and Isreal would have no reason to stage 9-11, Letterman would still have his hair and Hillary Clinton -who’s always secretly loved him – would not have to choose lesbianism over Presbyterianism. She could then keep her love-child and raise her to be a wholly different Britney Spears, who rescues dolphins and vagrants, including Paul Wolfowitz, before he was recruited by Scoop Jackson’s robot zombie terror cell and went on to launch his murderous rampage utilizing irresistible brainwave ions that compelled an entire political party to start doinking each others eyes out, in the manner of Moe Howard.

But then, I guess Jack Ruby’s mom wouldn’t have had it any other way.

sg, Matt & Backword Dave (@ 65),

Sg makes me go back and look at the course list I posted and the relateted part 1B course list. I’m pretty sure hamiltonian stuff was in the first year syllabus and for sure the Part IB Eletromagentism course was. So yes Cambridge has certainly dumbed down its Maths tripos a bit. The logical assumption is that this is because it’s students simply don’t have the background from A levels that they did when I took mine (A levels in Maths, Further Maths & Physics plus S Level Maths).

To go back to Dave’s point about relevance. The point of the Cambridge Maths Tripos is not exepcted to be 100% practical. It is supposed to be the top end of mathematics courses for people who will probably become very rich hedge fund people, research in to maths at graduate level etc. etc. Direct practicality and applicability to a “regular job” is not its intention.

And yes this is elitist. That should be a good thing. Because the alternative is that you think that we should all somehow accept that a degree in West African Basket Weaving entitles one to become a rocket scientist.

I should note that I switched from Maths to Computer Science at the end of my first year precisely because I realized that the Maths course was neither what I wanted nor needed.

sorry, francist

The more I think about it, the more I think he’s talking about the British controversy over government funding of religious schools that may teach creationism

In the UK just as in the US the argument is about whether it’s right to use public money to teach creationism in science classes, not about whether all pupils should have to study evolution whether they like it or not.

If this is indeed the argument dsquared is referring to, he’s chosen a very misleading way to frame it.

No, I mean the teaching of creationism in schools. Fun fact – I was taught creationism in my school, also the authenticity of the Turin shroud. It didn’t do me any harm, because, like many other kids, I had sources of information other than my teachers. Perhaps (although I doubt it) there were other kids in my class who didn’t have access to libraries and whose parents sheltered them from the dreadful knowledge of evolution and are ignorant of it even today, but I have to observe that the sky has not fallen in.

Perhaps (although I doubt it) there were other kids in my class who didn’t have access to libraries and whose parents sheltered them from the dreadful knowledge of evolution and are ignorant of it even today, but I have to observe that the sky has not fallen in.

I can buy this as far as the UK goes, but the situation in the US is a good deal more worrisome. There is a significant number of such kids, and international comparisons of science knowledge suggest that the sky si at least a little bit wobbly here.

If we’re looking at the general issue of lack of progress since the sixties, the fact that we’re still listening to many of the same songs seems less telling than the fact that we’re still flying many of the same military aircraft. The F111 fighter, bought in the 60s and introduced in 1973, will be in the armoury of the Australian airforce until 2010 or possibly 2012 – nearly forty years; the equivalent of flying the Focker triplane in Korea, or the original Wright Brothers model in WWII. The English Electric Canberra (despite its name, an RAF rather than RAAF thing) did even better, cracking the big 5-0.
Even more impressively, the B52 bomber has now notched up 55 years – Wright flyers in Korea, soon in Vietnam – and no end in sight.
The last time we saw this kind of stability was ship design 1700-1850.

As for the Communist vs. Nazi symbolism issue: the USSR lasted an order of magnitude longer than the Third Reich and killed many more people, the Korean and Vietnam wars are still bitter memories to many Americans whose loved ones were killed or tortured by Communists, while the Tiananmen Square massacre is a quite recent and well-recorded public event.

(And “Americans” includes immigrants from Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, Eastern Europe,….)

Anyone who thinks adopting any of those symbols is funny or innocuous may simply not care about the emotions they’ll provoke. A cold but silent disapproval doesn’t make headlines; and getting shut out from a shop or such is just an opportunity to sue, right?

If we’re being picky about this, Beowulf was in Anglo-Saxon; people might have listened to it in Old English in Geoffrey Chaucer’s day but not before or since.

“Anglo-Saxon” and “Old English” are two names for the same language. The English of Chaucer’s day is generally known as “Middle English”.

I was taught creationism in my school, also the authenticity of the Turin shroud. It didn’t do me any harm

This is rather like saying “I was beaten as a child, and it didn’t do me any harm.” It might be true, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned about corporal punishment as a matter of public policy.

the Korean and Vietnam wars are still bitter memories to many Americans whose loved ones were killed or tortured by Communists

I presume by this logic, anyone who wears a US flag symbol in Vietnam is fair game…?