In his inaugural speech, Joe Biden referred to "this uncivil war."
One of the weirdest things about today's conflict is the role of conspiratorial beliefs. It is not enough to refute global warming; Trump supporters believe that Chinese troops are in Canada and Mexico, poised to invade the US, that the military is actually running the country now and Biden is simply a figurehead, that COVID is not real or if it is real it is the product of a global conspiracy to dethrone Trump and that the world is run by pedophiles. As it turns out, global warming denial was simply the gateway drug to a vast web of odd conspiracy theories that millions find compelling. It makes you wonder what kind of republic we can sustain when millions reject facts and embrace conspiracies.
I have a suspicion about one reason this has happened.
In 1860, we had an aristocracy of race in this country. Blacks and natives had fewer rights than European immigrants - and in some cases had no rights. It's complicated and drawn out and was tragically derailed by Lincoln's assassination but the Civil War was about ending this aristocracy of race just as the American Revolution a century earlier was about ending the aristocracy of royalty.
Today we have an aristocracy of education, of intellect. (And yes – still a strong residue of the aristocracy of race.) We are in an information economy and the people who can transform data into economic value have power in it. And as with the aristocracies of royalty and race, it is unfair and largely determinant by an early age.
By second grade, there is a gap of four years between the top and bottom students. Years ago, we had darling family spend a few days here. He's an MIT grad. She's a graduate of our California university system. Their preschooler was already hungry for - and fairy adept at - academic exercises of various kinds. My daughter was chuckling the other day about a video call they'd had with a family with children 4 and 2. The dad is a physician and the mom a clinical psychologist. The 4-year-old was obsessed with the latest word he'd learned: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, the very definition of polysyllabic. The 2-year old's favorite word is ukulele. Meanwhile, my wife who teaches in a neighborhood with many poorer families in San Diego has kids show up for class who've clearly been talked to rarely, for whom language is more of a mystery than a familiar comfort, who’ve experienced little that could be classified as academic prep. By second grade, some kids are two grades behind and others two grades ahead, a gap of four years in second grade.
As Alfie Kohn (author of No Contest and Punished by Rewards) points out, teachers have this tendency to throw out questions designed to provoke competition. "Who can tell me ...?" "How would we approach this problem ..." And by no later than fourth grade, the kids in the class know which two or three kids have the best shot at providing the answer that will make the teacher happy. School is about grading kids, about sorting them into different lanes. And then we invest differently in those kids, admitting some into UC Berkeley and admitting others into community college, both community investments but of very different magnitudes.
And the whole time we are telling all the kids, "If you want to get ahead you had best go to college. Get into a good university and do well in school and you'll do well in your career." That would be a more inspiring message if the kids in class didn’t already know which kids had a shot at that future and which did not.
The most academic kids may get a tuition-free education at the state's top school. The least academic kids - who have heard the same "go to college if you want to do well" admonitions - may not get into a state university at all. If they take the advice to get a college education to heart, they might find themselves spending a lot of money at a private school that doesn't have the same, tough admissions requirements. As it turns out, the admissions requirements are partly about predicting which kids will actually be able to complete the degree. Without meeting those admission requirements, a lot of kids get into college programs but don't complete them. So, these kids who've never excelled in school and have been turned away from the government subsidized universities have spent thousands pursuing a degree that eludes them. They're left with the worst of all worlds: carrying a heavy load of student debt while making no more than they likely would have without taking college classes. Even more frustrating is the plight of the kids who doggedly completed their degrees while taking on a lot of debt only to find that their job options haven't changed given the nature of their degree or the college they got it from.
Meanwhile, those who graduated from the best schools and with the best educations are thriving. They are working a lot of hours but are engaged in meaningful work that pays incredibly well. More than 166,000 Americans collect wages of more than a million dollars per year - more than 650,000 who make more than $500,000. Thomas Jefferson believed that the natural aristocracy was composed of smart people. That aristocracy now runs our country.
So, we've created a new, information economy in which we reward bright, educated workers. What might we expect of the folks excluded from this economy, folks who literally were not invited into its entryway through university education?
Can we be surprised that in the face of experts telling them about the long-term consequences of a reliance on fossil fuels, explaining how masks, seat belts, and cutting back on red meat and cigarettes saves lives they might find YouTube videos alluring when those videos tell them that all those experts are deluded? Those kids who have been made to feel worse about themselves since fourth grade now feel enlightened. The conspiracy theories give them a sense of superiority that public school never did.
There is a tangle of problem-solving to get us past the point that a reality TV star can convince millions that experts are wrong. I think that one big shift has to be creating an economy less dependent on the academic success that is largely predictable by age 7, of doing away with this aristocracy of intellect and education.