Above is housing on Ft McNair, the home of National Defense University (NDU).
I went back to work today at IIP/P. My job will be interesting since my group is supposed to act as an incubator, take ideas and then spin them off for others. That suits my preferences. My strength is that I am good at innovating, but that comes with a corresponding weakness that I am not great at doing things that require me closely to follow established procedures. Most strengths have corresponding weaknesses and if somebody tells you what he is good at doing you can often guess where he has troubles. The trick is work with your strengths. You really cannot eliminate your weaknesses, but you can deploy your strengths in such a ways to minimize them.
Above is Marshall Hall at NDU.
But I found out that the job will be different than I thought, at least at first. In the first months, I will be working down at NDU. I have to take the green line to waterside mall and then walk about a mile down to NDU.
Below – apartments become condos. We lived in this building when it was Oakwood temporary housing.
I lived around there in SW when I studied Norwegian back in 1988. It was kind of a strange mix. Some of it was very nice and some very bad because it sat on the edge of the gentrifying district. In the last decades, the nice part has expanded. It still retains some of the seedy parts, but it is not scary as it was in 1988. Of course, 1988 was still the time of Mayor Berry, when Washington in general was a scary place. Things have really improved. Of course, some of the improvement is just making up for earlier attempts at improvement.
Evidently in the 1960s, SW was – in the parlance of the times – blighted. Using Federal dollars, they drove out the inhabitants and built those 1960 style structures we all love so much. It is hard to believe this is what they WANTED to accomplish. In the 1960s, our country and much of the world seemed to have lost its good taste. Were any attractive buildings constructed during the 1960s? The worst part of the area is L’enfant Plaza. I will have to wander down there and take some pictures for a future blog.
On the plus side, they did a good job planting trees and so after forty years there are lots of nice big trees. Even better, many of the 1960s buildings are being torn down and replaced. When we lived in SW, we used to go to Waterside Mall. It was a sad place. In 1988, there was a CVS (I think still called People’s Drugs), a Blimpie, Roy Rogers and some record stores. Outside was a Pizza Hut and a Safeway. Over time, everything flickered out, until finally only Safeway and CVS remained. I used to go down there sometimes and get a salad at safeway. The Mall itself provided a shortcut to Safeway and had a bunch of “outdoorsmen” hanging around outside, but was otherwise abandoned. Sometime in the last year they tore down the Waterside Mall. Safeway is still in business outside, so there is no real loss, except now you have to walk all the way around the block. Now that there is a metro stop, the neighborhood is improving.
Above – the former site of Waterside Mall.
Above – parking costs. I guess this is a good deal. It is “special” after all.
Veterans’ day is one of the few Federal holidays held on the actual date, even when it is not on a Monday, because it commemorates the specific occasion on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month when the armistice went into effect in World War I. I went to Arlington Cemetery to think about what the day signifies.
I used to pass through Arlington Cemetery on my bike when it was still possible to cut through Ft Meyer on the way to Washington. After 9/11 this was closed off and they also banned bikes and runners in the cemetery. I understand that but I don’t really agree. It is not a sign of disrespect to pass through the place. I made a special effort to pass through Arlington. It was a little out of the way, but worth it. When you see something regularly, it becomes more a part of your consciousness. That is the way I also feel about museums, art and monuments in general. These things should be part of your life, not place you go only on special occasions.
Arlington National Cemetery overlooks the Potomac and Washington. Before the Civil War, it was Robert E. Lee’s estate. Lee decided to resign his commission and offer his services to the State of Virginia. The next day, he went to Richmond and never returned to Arlington. The Union used it to bury the dead from local battles, which is how it started to be a cemetery. Before the ceremony, I went up to see Robert E. Lee’s house, stopping off at the Kennedy memorial with the eternal flame. Bobby Kennedy is there too. Below is the eternal flame on Kennedy’s grave.
Below – the Kennedy monument is flat, so you cannot see it over the visitors. The simplicity is impressive.
At 11am Dick Cheney laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown. I couldn’t get close enough to see the ceremony. In fact, I could not get a place generally in the amphitheater. I don’t know when you had to show up, but it was earlier than I got there. I really didn’t care if I could see Dick Cheney, but Bo Derek was the master of ceremonies. I would have liked to get a better look at her. All I could see were columns and the crowd as I hung around the periphery of the ceremonies.
Above is the entrance to Arlington. On top of the hill is Robert E. Lee’s house. In the foreground is the women’s monument.
Above is the view out of Robert E. Lee’s window looking at a beautiful old cedar.
Above – some of the older parts of the cemetery have more elaborate monuments. This one caught my eye. It memorializes a Julius Szamwald. He was a Hungarian freedom fighter who came to the U.S., where he helped organize the 8th New York infantry regiment and became a general during the Civil War. He finished his career in the Foreign Service. He did great a service to America, which put him in the company of the heroes around him. All of them have their own stories.
Above is the veteran color guards.
Above is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Above – Washington with the telephoto. You can see the Lincoln Memorial over Memorial Bridge. Of course, you recognize Washington Monument.
Since I am talking about old stuff, I thought I would put up a picture of my bike. I had to take it to the shop and get new back sprockets. The guy at the shop commented that he rarely saw one of them actually worn out, but mine was. I got that bike in 1997. I rode it a lot. Best bike I have ever owned.
My walks to the Metro and to FSI plus the Metro rides take more than two hours a day and I have had a lot of opportunity to listen to my I-pod. I have a really good program from the Teaching Company about Roman history. (The History of Ancient Rome, by Garrett Fagan of Penn State)There are 48 half-hour lectures and I have gotten as far as the assassination of Julius Caesar. Studying Roman history is a good way to learn about leadership, good & bad, and the fall of the Roman Republic provides examples of what happens when the traditions and institutions of order break down. The Founding Fathers were well versed in Roman history and our own Constitution is very much influenced by the Romans. We tried to address the fatal flaws that played out in the ancient city. Besides that brief unpleasantness in the 1860s, it seems to have worked out okay.
Look at a dollar bill to see the persistence of Rome. On the great seal, we have the Roman style eagle holding a scroll that says “e pluribus unam” – from many, one. The other mottos are “novus ordo seclorum” – new order of the ages and “annuit coeptis” – he (God) favors, taken from the Virgil’s Aeneid. All in Latin. The Roman Empire fell in the west in AD 476. In 1776 it was a profound influence on what for Romans was an undiscoved country.
So much of what I learned more than thirty years ago comes back when I listen to the lectures. I thought I forgot, but now I realize how much I learned, kept & internalized. I just didn’t remember where it came from. I had a seminar in Polybius my first year in grad-school. My major professor, Ken Sacks, specialized in that historian. Polybius wrote in Greek about the rise of the Roman Republic. We read the sources in Greek (at least tried) but the big lessons were in historiography and the nature of evidence. History is constructed by historians and they have a responsibility to follow the sources and not exceed or extrapolate from them.
Polybius discussed the rise of Rome and the Punic Wars. He figured those were events worth investigating. The Romans and the Carthaginians stumbled into the conflict over a bunch of Italian criminals who had taken over a not very important city in Sicily. One lesson I take from history is that events are a lot more illogical than we make them sound later on. A good historian makes a story that hangs together with conditional causalities, most of which would be unknown or unclear at the time AND some of them might actually be only the artifact of the historian’s story telling skills.
One of the biggest pitfalls of the study of history is the overemphasis on agency. Sometimes shit just happens. But we look for some person, persons or particular events to credit or blame for what happens – the agent – and historians always find one. If that person had not already figured out how to make his own contribution look brilliant, his biographers provide him with an ex-post-facto plan more brilliant than than any that could have been concieved in advanced. I believe that history is shaped by human choices and that great individuals have a great influence on events, but it is sloppier and less direct than we have to make it appear when we write up the reports. It makes us too confident that our leaders can solve our problems and creates a systematic bias in our politics.
Scholars and military historians look at the Punic Wars as case studies in conflict and the perils of power. The most studied of the three wars is the second (the one with Hannibal). The Romans should have lost that war, but they just refused to give up. The refusal to be beaten, coupled with the unusually large manpower reserves they could command explains their dominance of the Mediterranean. They were not brilliant strategist, brilliant inventors or subtle thinkers. They just has a talent for doing practical things and they just kept on coming back when most others would have given up.
Pyrrhus of Epirus learned it the hard way. He beat the Romans twice and beat them big. He waited for them to ask for terms but they just raised more armies. Pyrrhus had to give up and go home saying “One more victory against the Romans and we shall be utterly ruined,” hence the term Pyrrhic Victory.
The body of the history of the Republic is patchy and contradictory. Less than 5% of what historians think was available is extant. The author describes the process of finding history like looking at the Palace of Versailles through the keyholes. You see some things very clearly, but there are big places you don’t see at all. Historians know very little about ordinary folks because the ancients, at least those who could write, really didn’t care much about them. They wrote about the important people, i.e. generals, senators, kings and emperors, so even if we had all the sources available in the ancient world we still wouldn’t know much re the common people.
Nevertheless, a lot of historians are trying to write the history of the common man. We can draw clues from archeology, but while archeology can tell us a lot about physical structures, and lately with a sort of CSI archeology even a lot about the physical condition of the people themselves, it doesn’t tell us much about their attitudes or ideas. You may also draw the wrong conclusions. Imagine if a future archeologist knew there was a war with the U.S. on one side and Japan and Germany on the other, but doesn’t know the exact dates or who won. He digs up a Los Angeles from around now and finds that cars and products made in Japan and Germany predominate. Does he conclude that they won the war and colonized the U.S.? In my history seminars so long ago, I learned to assess and judge sources. We did that by the context, the language, the historian’s skill and comparisons with other events. You have to try to assess not only whether the historian THINKS he is telling the truth but whether or not he has the capacity to know the truth. Some things you just cannot know. No matter how troubling this may be, it is the fact. We don’t get to fill in the blank spaces with what we want to be the truth. Polybius, BTW, was a very good historian and his access to leading Roman politicians put him in the position to know lots of things. Still, like everyone else, he has his strengths and weaknesses. A lot of what applies to ancient history also applies to evidence in general and especially all that is proliferating on the Internet. Sure, there is a lot more information on the Internet, but like the ancient sources, you have to assess whether it is true or if it can be true. People just lying are only the start of the challenge. Some honest people are not in postions to know and others cannot figure it out even when they have all the facts in front of them. Not everybody who thinks he is telling the truth IS really telling the truth and many people aren’t even trying very hard. You have to be careful. Those lessons of studying history apply today too.
The study of history does indeed have practical value.
Below – Washington Metro has nice vaulted ceilings.
Below – School of Athens by Raphael, also vaulted ceilings. Both roads to learning (sorry for the hyperbole).
It has never been easier to learn but the options are daunting because there are so many of them. I recently completed the State Department’s leadership seminar, which left me a little disappointed. But my education is my responsibility and I will carry on. There were some lectures I wished to have heard and when I got home I got some of them – on my computer.
Below – oak tree in fall colors
For example, I wished we had talked a little about prospect theory and its effects on decision making. Prospect theory explains a lot re why we make what seem like illogical decisions even when we have the needful information. So when I got home I listened to Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman, who along with Amos Tversky originated the theory. You can watch it too at this link. At the same place, you will find a talk by Peter Bernstein re risk analysis. Bernstein wrote one of my favorite books, “Against the Gods” the story of risk.
You could always just read to all the books, but it is more effective to learn on a variety of fronts. Reading reinforced by the visual or audio of a lecture is great and online even allows for interaction. There are situations where audio works best. I have regularly listened to audio programs for more than twenty years. A long drive can almost be like a college course. My sloppy way of listening enhances learning. I tend to let them play again or pop in repeats. Leadership and management programs are particularly appropriate for audio programs, IMO.
Online education opens many more possibilities and variety. What it lacks is the social aspect of education. Discussing ideas with others helps fix them in the mind, sort out the pluses and minuses and make the learners see the bigger picture. You cannot replace that. I think that is why self educated people often have an uneven knowledge base. The autodidact chooses what he wants to emphasize and will inevitably introduce bias. Online learning exacerbates this, since you can find what you want very precisely and not come into even superficial contact with anything else. The advantages outweigh the costs, IMO, but it is something to be aware of.
Other great sources of education in the Washington area are think tanks and the Smithsonian. Most sponsor regular lectures and seminars on a variety of topics and they are usually not only free but you often get a free lunch. These have the advantage of being in a social setting. You can talk to people before and after the lecture and just being there in person adds something to the educational experience. I took advantage of these things when I was last in Washington & will do it again.
Most learning isn’t done in formal settings and FS provides more opportunities than most jobs. You learn most from your colleagues and fellow citizens and just by observing events and things. In other words, you learn from experience, but learning is not automatic. It is great to notice the trees and take time to smell the roses, but it is important actively to seek out and think about information and lessons from experience otherwise it just washes over you, runs into the mental sewers and is lost. Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living. I think we could extend that to say that an unexamined experience is not worth having.
I lived near the Clarendon Metro when I first came to Washington in 1984. A that time the area around the Metro was mostly covered in parking lots, cheap restaurants and pawn shops. It wasn’t nice. The area around the Courthouse Metro was a forest of construction cranes. The Metro only went as far out as Virginia Square, which had a shopping center, used car lots and (again) pawn shops. I really cannot explain the pawn shops; I just remember noticing a lot of them.
Below – Ballston
Today all these places are really nice. Arlington, VA did a good job of planning for transit oriented development around the Metros at Rosslyn, Courthouse, Clarendon, & Virginia Square . The area near the Metros are built up with high rise apartments, offices and shopping areas. There is less need for cars and pedestrians can feel reasonably comfortable. The Metro has pushed out to Vienna, with stops at Ballston, Falls Church East & West and my stop Dunn Loring/Merrifield. Transit oriented development is strong in Ballston, but it is just developing at Vienna and Dunn Loring and is not doing very well at all in Falls Church. Fairfax has a plan too.
Below – Construction near Ballston
I am most interested in Dunn Loring, because that is where I live now. They are building a town center served by the Metro. It is still in the planning. Chrissy has taken part in many of the meetings. A lot of the “town meetings” are just a show. The people from around the area come and make demands on the developers. Many of the demands are silly and some are designed just to slow the process. We favor density. It is the only way you can have a useful transit system. Many of our neighbors want to keep things low profile and spread out. It is a waste of Metro, IMO, but the public hearing process gives activists opportunities to make trouble. In any case, when we moved it, the area was not as good as it is now. It was parking lots, open lots and a few apartments. I think the town center will make it better.
Below – everywhere you go you find the guys with the leaf blowers, uselessly pushing leaves and grass, while making noise and pollution.
I think we can take credit for a little prescience in buying here. We bought a lot that was only red clay where they promised to build town houses. Today we have a developing neighborhood. The walk to the Metro, from my door to the platform, takes seven minutes, so we don’t have to worry much about traffic. We wanted to find a place near both the Metro and bike trails. Fortunately, the two are parallel, so during the warmer months I can ride my bike to work. It is seventeen miles. In my old age, I have become lazier, so I ride down and take the Metro back. You can take your bike on the Metro after 7pm, so I hang around at work until that time. I tell people that I am not really that ambitious and I am only at work in order to wait for the Metro, but people don’t believe me and it makes me look like a hard worker. In all candor, I do get a lot of work done after 5pm. The other advantage to the transit orientation is that Gold’s Gym sits between my work and the Metro stop, so I can stop by on the way home. It takes away the excuse for not working out.
Anyway, the availability of transit means that I can go for days or weeks w/o really needing to drive the car, except to go to Safeway for groceries. In the 24+ years I have worked for the Federal Government, I have never used a car to get to work only around five times.
Below – Arlington did a good job a long time ago planning. These places used to be inexpensive housing but now are trending upscale.
A have been attending the SETS seminar at FSI, so I take the Metro to Ballston and then walk to FSI. It is a nice walk, takes a little less than a half hour. Some pictures are included with notes. I like the fall colors and I would like to share the beauty.
Above are honeylocusts near my house. They grow slowly and although they are in the legume family they do not fix nitrogen in the soil. I was unaware of this until last year. I wrongly assumed that it behaved like other members of the family. I guess we need to plant some clover.
Above – Newly renovated apartment/condos with a big laurel oak in the yard. Planting trees pays off long after. Laurel oaks do not have the nice russet fall colors most other oaks have.
Above – Fall color among the condos near Ballston Metro.
We talked today re managing various generations in the workforce. Postwar baby boomers are still the most numerous of government employees, but there are still a very few from the WWII veteran generation, a growing number of generation X and the up and coming millennial. All my kids are Millennial. They sometimes call this generation the baby boom echo generation since these are mostly the kids of us boomers. Most of us thought the idea was useful but that it was easy to overdo the generation analysis. There are some general patterns. For example, the veterans as a group are not very comfortable with technology, while the millennials are digital natives. But some of it just depends on where people are in their careers. The literature we read on the topic was a couple years old and the people at my table, boomers all but one, agreed that we were starting to look more like the veteran generation, with concerns about retirement and leaving a legacy.
Generations make a difference in the government, since such as big percentage of us are or soon will be eligible for retirement. We have to plan for a big turnover that has already begun and will continue for around ten years. Besides the general challenge of simply hiring so many new workers, making sure the experience and knowledge is passed along.
There was an interesting lecture on possible futures. This one was called the “Seven Revolutions” and it analyzed trends such as population, resource shortages, tech innovation, movement of data, global economic integration, conflicts and the challenge of governance. The last one of these refers to the increasing inability of governments to cope with or even understand the other trends mentioned.
Predicting the future is difficult. When you think re all the predictions of the past it is easy to see the problem. Think of all the apocalyptical predictions of the late 1960s and 1970s. According to those guys we were supposed to have starvation in the streets during the 1980s and even global cooling by now. “Soylent Green” was set in 2022. I don’t think that future is very likely anymore, but it scared me at the time. I think the trouble with predictions is that we have to project from what we have today. Many of what will make the future better than the past has not been invented yet, or at least not developed for their eventual uses. Developments like nanotech, biotech and alternative energies are just at past the starting line. We really cannot make accurate projections.
We cannot predict the details of the future, but we can think about possible scenarios and how we might react. Tomorrow we have scenario simulations. It should be fun.
I got one good ironic saying. In government we always talk about the dangers of stove piping in the organization. Somebody renamed this. They are now “cylinders of excellence.” We sometimes talk like that. I am not entirely sure it was supposed to be a joke.
Below – unrelated to my post below is a picture of my thinned pines, a food plot and the tall trees from the SMZ in the background.
I bought gas at BP in Petersburg, just south of Richmond and paid only $1.97 a gallon. That was below the price I saw advertised on the electronic board at Pilot. They were offering regular at $2.03, but when I passed going home around nine hour later the price had dropped to $1.99. I have never seen anything like that before, but it is not all good.
High prices encourage conservation and alternatives. Low prices do the opposite. We had a chance to do the right thing in the 1990s and we blew it. The right thing, BTW, is to raise taxes on gasoline as the price goes down. We need to keep the prices high to put a floor under conservation and alternatives and to drop the floor out from under despots and potentates who control much of the world’s oil. I know that I could never run for political office with a “raise the gas price” platform, but it is the right thing.
Countries like Venezuela, Iran & Russia depend on high oil prices to fund their adventures. It is probably better if they don’t get them. I am not enthusiastic about any sort of taxes, but gas taxes serve the salutary purpose of dampening demand for oil. There is no painless way to a more independent energy future. We use oil for a very logical reason: it is cheap. But the price we pay does not reflect the price of sending cash to despots in the most unstable parts of the world. Nor does it include the mitigation of the greenhouse gases it puts into the air.
It gets worse. Not only does cheap oil keep us from a more independent energy future, it also leads – paradoxically – to high energy prices. The oil despots, IMO, drop prices periodically in order to drive alternatives to bankruptcy and make conservation look like a dumb idea. I know this sounds like a silly conspiracy theory and it is the only one I suspect might be true. The solution is simple, but not easy.
I drive and I use gas. That is how I know the prices. I understand that we will be using oil for a while to come. I am not advocating quitting cold turkey, but it would help to get the incentives right and price is one of the biggest incentives I know. Of course, I can say all this because I won’t be running for office.
I don’t have a real theme for what I learned in the seminar today. I enjoyed it more than playing games in W. Virginia. I will just list a few take away snippets. Most are not new but it is good to think about them again. Below, BTW, is a unrelated picture, again from my tree farm. This is the last of my pictures from my visit yesterday. I have posted them all now.
We took all did a survey that divided us into three categories: conservers, pragmatists and originators. The names imply what they are. Conservers are careful and circumspect. Pragmatist do what they think will work and are flexible. Originators are change catalysts. Each has weaknesses that are the mirror images of the strengths. I fall right on the edge between pragmatists and originators, a little into the originator and I am not surprised. I understand that I sometimes can be a little too enthusiastic, which is why I always try to make sure that I have conservers on my team. That was the lesson. A team is strong to the extent that it embodies diversity. The team is stronger than the sum of its parts because members fill in for each others’ weaknesses. It is like a diverse portfolio. I remember reading “Founding Brothers” by Joseph Ellis. Each of the founders had his flaws and strengths. The flaws could have ruined anybody as an individual. Together, however, they made a great team and produced a great result. The other lesson is that they didn’t have to TRY to work together. In fact their disagreements and even their animosity made the result better. It is uncomfortable to have disagreements, but it can produce better outcomes.
I also thought about “Decision Traps”. That is a great short book about how to come to decisions. The author talked about group decisions. It is kind of a Goldilocks and the three bears situation. If you have too much diversity and discussion, you never reach a conclusion. If you have too little, you get groupthink and a rush to judgment. You need the just right, but that is easier said than done. Beyond that, the longer a group stays together the more group think comes in. Finally, I thought about “The Wisdom of Crowds” and how the author says that you can often improve group decisions by introducing individuals with LESS expertise but also different viewpoints.
When working to foster useful change, you work with a combination of pushing and removing obstacles. It usually takes more energy to push than to clear the path and remove obstacles. The book that helped me understand this process was “The Fifth Discipline.”
I count the seminar successful to the extent that it makes participants think and I thought back to a lot of the decision literature I had read over the years. I was happy with the seminar today.
We also talked about the Embassy of the future and the differences between risk management and risk -avoidance. I thought those were interesting subjects, but I didn’t have any strong take-aways. You can download the PDF file re Embassy of the Future at this link.
Below – I drove Espen over to Falls Church HS to take his SAT test. Sorry for the dim. It was just before sunrise.
The SAT test is an annual ritual for HS seniors. College admissions have gotten harder and more complicated over the years. Some families are hiring consultants to get them through the experience and many kids take various SAT course to improve their scored. I have very little confidence that the process has gotten better for its new intricacy. In our quest to make everything fair & equal (often mutually exclusive goals), we have mostly made it capricious.
Standardized tests were designed more than fifty years ago in to create fairness and give poor but smart kids a chance to compete with the sons and daughters of the rich and well connected. They worked. That is one reason I like them. In interests of full disclosure, these sorts of tests revealed my hidden talents and abilities and helped me jump the socio-economic divide. W/o the Foreign Service written test, I never could have gotten a job like the one I have. The rich and privileged can help their kids by massaging their resumes and using their contact networks. Working class kids don’t even know they are playing that game until they have already lost. Standardized tests are less subject to manipulation. They level the playing field.
I am convinced that many educators and politicians dislike standardized test because they actually do work to differentiate fairly among applicants, and fair doesn’t mean equal – something they really don’t want. Standardized tests are also difficult to influence politically and they stubbornly fail to produce politically correct results. No test is perfect and opponents attack from that angle. They abuse the reasonable argument that we should not overemphasize one measure and try to devalue to whole judgment process. They point to the exceptions that prove the rule.
We should use multiple criteria, but let’s not pretend there are no valid criteria or that some criteria are not better than others. If a kid has high grades and high test scores, he/she is almost certain to have the ability to do well in college. If a kid has bad grades and bad test scores, he will certainly be challenged in school. That does not mean he/she cannot eventually excel at school. It just means it will be a stretch and the odds are long. It definitely does not mean he/she will not be a success in life. Success in school and success in life are not the same. It is possible to be an educated fool and not everybody finds his best self at university. But among those who are college-bound, the kids we should find most interesting and give more consideration are those who have poor grades and high test scores or the reverse. This is where the testing has value.
I object to the “whole person” concept in college admissions. It is in fact a way for admissions to introduce bias into to process. The combination of grades and test scores provide the necessary useful information. When dealing with eighteen-year-old applicants, with virtually no work history, additional information will not provide valid basis for decision. There are some exceptions, but they would be rare. The only case I can think of off-hand is when a kid has a unique talent that shines through an otherwise mediocre record.
IMO the rejection – proponents would say the broadening – of criteria is just a way to cheat. The rich and privileged are unhappy that objective criteria weaken their influence, so they make a tacit alliance with “the underprivileged.” That helps account for the statistical anomaly that elite universities have lots of rich kids and a good representation of poor kids but not so many middle-working class kids, relative to their representation in the actual population. These are the ones who would provide the real completion to the privileged.
At my first post in Porto Alegre I met a woman who hated me. She was the American wife of an expatriate banker. I couldn’t figure out how I had provoked such a strong reaction in someone I hardly knew. Finally, I asked her. It turned out that she didn’t like me, or my colleague the Consul, because of what we were. Both of us were from working-class backgrounds and both of us had gotten ahead through the standardized Foreign Service test. As it turned out, her brother wanted to be a diplomat. He had taken the test on several occasions, but was unable to pass.
She explained to me that her ancestors had come to America on the boat right after the Mayflower and that her family had been leaders and diplomats ever since. It was only in the most recent generation that they were pushed out of their ancient redoubts by upstarts like me and those darned standardized tests that breached the walls. People like me, she said, didn’t really deserve or appreciate the exalted jobs we had. I am not saying her argument was completely w/o merit. I am sure her brother came with all those social graces that I had painful and imperfectly to learn. He knew what jacket to wear and what fork to use, but we were smarter, or at least had a better memory for tests. It depends on what traits you value most. The “whole person” approach to recruitment would have preferred him.
Above is Bay View HS where I went to school in Milwaukee. I got a good education there, but as far as I recall nobody ever mentioned FS as a career option. I think if someone had asked me if I was interested in a career at State Department, I would have asked “State department of what? Roads? Parks?” BTW – the school was badly damaged by another “fairness” social engineering – bussing. That was one of the dumbest ideas ever, unless the goal was to destroy neigborhood schools, but that is another story.
It is as blessed to receive as to give. Giving w/o some expectation sets a man down the road to perdition & too much self-esteem destroys self-respect. If we are going to do welfare and charity, we ought to learn to do it right.Americans are the most generous people in the world both in absolute terms and per capita. Some see this merely as a failure of government. Charities, they say, must step in where the safety net is frayed. This misses the point. The act of charity is beneficial for both the giver and the receiver. When the government steps in with its coercive power, it often destroys much of the good because it neglects most of the aspects I mentioned in the introduction.
I never give anything without the expectation of getting something from the recipient and I think anybody who does is craven. My motivation is sometimes altruistic; sometimes not. If I give something to an individual, I expect that he will become a more productive citizen and maybe do something for someone else later on. If I give to a charity, I expect some useful and desirable result.
You can show no greater contempt for a person than to believe that he cannot in some way repay a gift you have bestowed on him, no matter how poor. You are doing him no favors if you just fill his stomach, better to let him hunger physically than to break his sprit and self-respect. When government programs have really worked to alleviate poverty it is usually because they came with stings attached. Take the GI Bill, which successfully brought lots of poor people into the middle class and was probably the single most successful government social program in history. The government provided help in return for good behavior, first by serving the country and second by going to school and studying. It was not an entitlement that you got because of who you were. It was a benefit you earned by what you did.
Charity (in both the original and modern sense of the word) is transactional and always has been. When Jesus saved the adulteress from the mob he told her to, “Go AND sin no more.” In the parable of the candlesticks, the Bishop tells Jean Valjean to become an honest man. There would have been no redemption if they had talked about victim status and made no demands for behaviorial change.
One of the most successful development schemes has been the Grameen Bank, whose founder Muhammad Yunus recently won the Nobel Prize. The bank LENDS money. The loan recovery rate is 98.85%. It does not give it away, although the recipients are certainly poor and downtrodden enough to “deserve” it. If it gave money it would be another worthless giveaway that destroyed the sprit of the people it was meant to help.
Our government once understood this concept too. Most of the New Deal programs, including Social Security, required some contribution from the individuals involved. They were based on behavior, not membership in a group. We lost sight of that during the 1960s, when we found victims everywhere. We were supposed to feel guilty for their plight. Guilt is a foolish emotion which makes people do foolish things and too many people assuage their guilt at the cost of someone else’s self-respect.
I say self-respect and not the more PC self-esteem. A lot of losers have high self-esteem. They think they are worthy and entitled. Most abusers enjoy very high self-esteem. They will not accept any insults or slights. What they lack is self-respect. They know they are rotten and hollow inside. That is why they demand outside respect.
Government is learning the lesson. Welfare reform explicitly took behavior into account. It went against 40 years of PC orthodoxy and it worked. We are also experimenting with self help/government support mechanisms such as the earned income credit, thrift savings plans & IRAs, as well as health savings accounts. The Lord helps those who help themselves and government should take the hint.
When the history of charity in our times is written, they may say that we lost our way for a while and let the government behave like an indulgent parent, ensuring physical comfort but neglecting character. For nearly a half century, we let guilt and foolishness dominate our relationships with our less fortunate fellow citizens. But I hope historians will also record that we came to our senses and remembered to care for the sprit as well as the body.
PS – Speaking of being poor, take a look at the growing list of necessities. We can never overcome poverty, since it is a moving target.
PSSS – Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and all he will want to do is sit out on the lake and drink beer.
