One sign of societal decadence is shying away from clear explanations because they are too easy. So here we go: American universities do well because they have a lot of intellectual and practical resources. British universities perform round about what you would expect for a country of that size and resource level, maybe a bit better. Both societies benefit from liberal goods – positive immigration, individual competition and institutional cooperation, societal tolerance, rule of law, relatively free discourse and the rest. However these kind of explanations do not confer status advantage on the person hewing to them. That is why there are incentives on the right to explain the track record of these socities on complex cultural explanations and on the left to look to historical injustice. The reality is just not interesting enought to be diverting to participants in the The Discourse.
You do not gain kudos by stating the obvious – UK society is fairly tolerant, especially compared to most of Europe, and we all benefit from it. We have problems with economic growth and productivity, to which the solutions are also fairly clear – build more houses and infrastructure, get hold of reasonably cheap energy, make good things like investment cheaper. But that scripture does not help anyone differentiate themselves in the political marketplace, unless there are votes in sounding like a General Dynamics programmed spad-bot 2.0. You gain kudos from saying that liberal tolerance is mask for structural racism or the globalist whittling down of our national uniqueness. Hyperbole is part of the attraction.
The more these goods are attacked as manipulative, unjust or irrelevant, the more they fray and will disappear. It is parochial to think that because the UK has been relatively rich up to now, it will be always be so. It would be psychologically satisfying to say these goods are under attack by both right and left, but they are under attack by the centre as well.
Bad ideas survive. We were told that Russia was a great power. It isn’t. We were told that Russia had clear red lines and breaking them would lead to nuclear catastrophe. It didn’t. That France and Germany were a bridge to Russia. They aren’t. The failure and complacency of Western analysis is nearly catastrophic for NATO. I want to consider that as an aspect of a common occurrence. Bad ideas continue despite repeated failure. There are businessmen whose refusal to pay their debts is effectively part of the business model. Yet banks and private equity continue to lend them money, in defiance of all microeconomic theory. Why is that? If I don’t lend them money, someone else will.
How long does it take debunked ideas to be removed from the curriculum? It should be immediate. Something we are not good at. Mostly we are encouraged to focus on one idea and reiterate that for the rest of our careers. We are not rewarded for removing bad ideas from the curriculum. Doing so introduces professorial panic. What shall I put it in its place?
