Catching up on reading – March 27, 2021

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Some noteworthy pieces from the past couple months:

Every sector of modern life drips with the language of innovation. Technological progress, disruptive innovation, and economic growth remain unquestioned, continually parroted by entrepreneurs, city planners, educators, and countless others. In The Innovation Delusion, Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell challenge the entire innovation narrative and make a strong case that the mundane reality of maintenance is actually what sustains economies, schools, homes, and communities in the long run.

Modernity imperils another set of virtues… I suppose I’d call them the yeoman virtues. I have in mind the qualities we associate with life in the early American republic—the positive qualities, of course, not the qualities that enabled slavery and genocide. In 1820, 80 percent of the American population was self-employed. Protestant Christianity, local self-government, and agrarian and artisanal producerism fostered a culture of self-control, self-reliance, integrity, diligence, and neighborliness—the American ethos that Tocqueville praised and that Lincoln argued was incompatible with large-scale slave-owning. Today that ethos survives only in political speeches and Hollywood movies. In a society based on precarious employment and feverish consumption, on debt, financial trickery, endless manipulation, and incessant distraction, such a sensibility seems archaic.

“Displacement is a psychological defense mechanism in which a person redirects a negative emotion from its original source to a less threatening recipient. A classic example of the defense is displaced aggression. If a person is angry but cannot direct their anger toward the source without consequences, they might “take out” their anger on a person or thing that poses less of a risk.”

Last month, San Francisco’s Board of Education voted, 6–1, to change the names of forty-four schools, including schools named after Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. A committee formed by the board in 2018, in the wake of the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, had determined that any figures who “engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” should no longer have schools named after them and had recommended which names should be changed.

This past spring and summer [of 2019], political correctness—perhaps inevitably—took a full turn and became a campaign to erase the worst things that dead white men have done in our history. This latest twist in our culture wars was set off not by Republicans or Proud Boys but by the San Francisco school board, social-justice warriors all, who managed to convince themselves that the past was so terrible we dare not even look at it.

In [movies], I found a vision of the future I wanted, a series of aspirations — to have opinions, to write, to go to book parties but also to make fun of people who approached those things too seriously. The hope was to inhabit the world the way Woody Allen did, as both conspirator and judge.

Environment

At nearly twenty tons per person, American carbon dioxide emissions are among the highest in the world. Not every American fits this statistic, however. Across the country there are urban neighborhoods, suburbs, rural areas, and commercial institutions that have drastically lower carbon footprints. These exceptional places, as it turns out, are neither “poor” nor technologically advanced. Their low emissions are due to culture.