The Schism

First of roughly 1,098,746 parts

Where is our health, and where is our sickness?

Two years ago, we jumped in the car and took a big family camping trip that started in Yellowstone National Park. Because I’m somewhat less enthused about tent camping in grizzly country with nothing but that ridiculous can of bear spray¹, we spent a few nights in the cabins behind Old Faithful Lodge. In the middle of the first night, a family member who will not be named performed an act that will not be named, and that mysterious act clogged the plumbing. The bathroom floor became…a problem. The cabin was too small to ignore it until the morning, so I walked down to the front desk and asked to borrow a mop, a bucket, and a plunger. Oh hell no, the front desk clerk more or less said; if we had a problem, they would fix it for us. I walked back to the cabin and waited.

Ten minutes later, a bizarrely cheerful hotel employee showed up, a young guy dressed like he was headed out for a hike: flannel shirt, cargo pants, hiking boots. For ten minutes, sometime well after midnight, he crawled around in the bathroom and scrubbed our shit off the floor, dumping dirty towels in a bucket and hosing the place down with a bottle of disinfectant. While he worked, he talked to us about our trip: Oh yeah, family trip, right on, that’s awesome! By the time our floor was clean and the toilet was unclogged, we had a detailed rundown of the major seasonal wildlife action in the park, and knew that we needed to go to the Lamar Valley to look for the genetically rare black wolf. We organized our entire trip around the information we got from the hotel maintenance guy who cleaned shit off our floor in the middle of the night, because he loved the park so much and was so glad to be there, and bro, I’m serious, the Lamar Valley, it’s seriously like, so bad-ass, you have to go there!

(Side note: can confirm.)

I meet people like this all the time, all over the country. I see people who do work, sometimes hard and ugly work, with enthusiasm, ability, and a calmly expressed sense of commitment. They take care of other people by doing things well, without performative lawn sign behavior (“In this house we believe in…cleaning shit off the floor while we talk to people about the wildlife in Lamar Valley”) or social media virtue signaling. Things work, pretty much everywhere, because there are people making things work.

And yet the country, as a whole, is really obviously working less and less well, and big pieces of the culture, the economy, and the government are spiraling down into unmistakable failure.

This shouldn’t be possible: widespread competence, broadly distributed common decency, lots of easy social connection, incipient societal failure. But here’s the answer I propose:

We’re healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down.

I may have this printed on t-shirts, ‘cause I’m pretty confident that’s the whole thing.

From an earlier post: “In effect, we’re in a contest of persistence between elite cosplayers and low-status producers.” I’ve explored the roots of that schism, by which I mean that I’ve typed up what Christopher Lasch said…

The Revolt of the Elites

…but I plan to spend the next couple of weeks, or maybe pretty much forever, looking at the current state of that schism. I start with the single thing that I’ve found most shocking over the last year or so, the decline that stands out among all the others: the way school boards talk to parents. It’s not surprising that a governor or a senator or a CEO is disconnected, hostile, or locked inside a bubble. But local school boards are Democracy 101, direct and local, your neighbors overseeing the school on the corner. And school board members all over the country have been seething in a state of rage, silencing speakers so aggressively that they’ve sometimes called on police to drag people away over modest criticism and routine policy disagreement. (Obligatory reference to the batshit NSBA letter here.) Watch the way this school board president responds to criticism:

You’re done! Here, with some commentary and a dumb thumbnail, is video of a school board president in a small town in Minnesota announcing limits on public comment — with the explanation that a school board meeting “doesn’t belong to the public”²:

I could do this all day — here’s a school board member muttering “fuck you” at a parent who argued against mask and vaccine mandates, and here’s a summary of the exceptional weirdness of a parent-hating school board member in Scottsdale. And the examples from Loudoun and Fairfax county schools are almost too well-known to bother discussing.

But what’s striking about all of these examples is the degree to which people way down on the hierarchy in the political order have casually taken on the ruling class assumption — with complete confidence — that all disagreement and criticism are inherently without value and simply shouldn’t be heard. The Mankato, Minnesota school board casually announces in public that you should shut up, peasant; imagine the privately expressed views of White House staff or congressional leaders. They should probably adopt silken top hats and pince-nez, at this point.

How are things in steerage, local parent

We’ve grown a top-down assumption in political discourse that debate is valueless, that criticism is cruel, that dissent is madness — you stupid anti-vaxxer! The hard shell around all forms of policy is a barrier to course corrections; we keep going north because the fucking idiots suggested that we go south, and oh my god these people disagree with us, what trailer park did they crawl out of? The credentialism of IYI fools, and the self-policing mechanisms of credentialing institutions, make discussion — just discussion, just saying what you think and hearing what someone else thinks in return — increasingly impossible. We’re the Asiana tail strike: “Captain Lee Kang Kuk, 45, a veteran pilot who was new to the 777, was flying the plane…A training captain was sitting next to him in the right seat watching his performance. Kuk told transportation accident investigators that he did not immediately move to abort the landing after it became unstable because he felt only the instructor pilot had that authority.”

We’ve learned brittleness from the ridiculousness of people regarding themselves as credentialed elites without being particularly elite, and from the degree to which people who view themselves this way expect deference as they fly the plane into the sea wall. “Oh, right, let’s see your pilot license, moron!” Their certainty that they know better increasingly means that they don’t know much of anything. And so we fight in Afghanistan for twenty years with no measure of success at all, and adopt a long series of pandemic-ending, expert-led behaviors that don’t end the pandemic. Our shackled discourse impedes our action. Yertl the Turtle is quite proud that he can see such a long way.

To be continued.

1. My favorite description of bear spray in grizzly country is that it “gives you something to do to keep your mind occupied in the final moments of your life.”

2. Compare this view to the view expressed by the California legislature in the preamble to the state’s open meeting law: “The people of this State do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies which serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the instruments they have created.”