A School for People

A friend sent me a piece of memetic folk wisdom called "The Animal School":

Once upon a time the animals decided they must do something decisive to meet the increasing complexity of their society. They held a meeting and finally decided to organize a school.

The curriculum consisted of running, climbing, swimming and flying. Since these were the basic behaviours of most animals, they decided that all the students should take all the subjects.

The duck proved to be excellent at swimming, better in fact, than his teacher. He also did well in flying. But he proved to be very poor in running. Since he was poor in this subject, he was made to stay after school to practice it and even had to drop swimming in order to get more time in which to practice running. He was kept at this poorest subject until his webbed feet were so badly damaged that he became only average at swimming. But average was acceptable in the school, so no body worried about that – except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of her class in running, but finally had a nervous breakdown because of so much make-up time in swimming – a subject she hated.

The squirrel was excellent at climbing until he developed a psychological block in flying class, when the teacher insisted he start from the ground instead of from the tops of trees. He was kept at attempting to fly until he became muscle-bound – and received a C in climbing and a D in running.

The eagle was the school’s worst discipline problem; in climbing class, she beat all of the others to the top of the tree used for examination purposes in this subject, but she insisted on using her own method of getting there.

The gophers, of course, stayed out of school and fought the tax levied for education because digging was not included in the curriculum. They apprenticed their children to the badger and later joined the groundhogs and eventually started a private school offering alternative education.

I'd like to criticise the parable on its assumptions.  The idea that we all have different natural abilities as differentiated as flight to an eagle and a rabbit's swiftness suggests a reductivist genetic determinism that eventually leads us down the slippery slope to social Darwinism.  The other extreme that people are blank slates to mold and fashion doesn't hold up either.  

Really, people are like web pages: that is, they are plastic templates onto which nearly anything can be pasted (with a few exceptions, like some aspects of math for instance).  For the purposes of our education system, the ability to compose sentences and paragraphs (English), an understanding of numbers as a language (math: something that I have argued is of utmost importance to societal well-being), a thorough grounding in the scientific method and what we have learned from it (science), a firm grasp of who we are and where we came from as a species, civilization, culture, country, region, or ethnic group (social studies) have all been widely agreed as being important enough for every citizen to learn.  That all citizens may be given access to this important knowledge was a battle hard-fought by progressives at the turn of the century, and the result was the national, standardized, public school system that has provided millions of American citizens with the basic suite of knowledge required to determine their own paths.  The result has been the most technologically skilled workforce in the history of the world.  

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Disney's Rent-Seeking: A Singularity of Suck

According to Alex Weprin at mediabistro.com, Disney has recently trademarked the phrase "Seal Team 6".  Seal Team 6 happens to be the name of the Navy Seal team that took down Osama bin Laden:

The trademark applications came on May 3rd, two days after the operation that killed Bin Laden… and two days after “Seal Team 6″  was included in thousands of news articles and TV programs focusing on the operation.

Disney’s trademark applications for “Seal Team 6″ cover clothing, footwear, headwear, toys, games and “entertainment and education services,” among other things...

...Of course, for all we know Disney has been working on an animated feature about a team of anthropomorphic seals in search of adventure, but given the timing of the application that seems… unlikely.

I'm not quite sure how to interpret this, but I know it needs interpreting.  The part of me that wants to be charitable doubts what this story implies - that Disney has bought the rights to the next FDNY hat in an effort to capitalize on and exploit suffering - as just too disgusting to possibly be real.  Another part of me is too shocked to be disgusted.  A third part of me sees this as affirming all the unsubstantiated horror stories I've heard about Disney from acquaintances who work in the film world.  A fourth part of me sees the burden as falling on the American people for creating a system that tolerates and even encourages this kind of (entirely predictable and inevitable) corporate behavior in the first place.  Finally, a last part of me perceives this as all of the major problems with modern America rolled into one event: the eponymous Singularity of Suck - an event that sucks so much that what kinds of things will suck in the future becomes qualitatively and fundamentally unpredictable.  

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On Talking Past Each Other and World Trade

The League of Ordinary Gentlemen has been hosting a labor roundtable, which has emerged as a combination of spontaneity and directed planning in the way that the blogosphere especially tends to foster.  Participants have included many of my favorite bloggers: E.D. Kain, Jason Kuznicki, Kevin Carson, Mark Thompson, Freddie deBoer, and James Hanley, among others.  At stake is the entire system of American capitalism.  For anyone with a spare afternoon or so, it's worth visiting that London coffee house.

I’ve read through all the articles and comment threads in this labor roundtable thus far, and it seems to me that there are three general issues which have been largely or systematically taken for granted or underserved in the discussion.  I've brought these issues up in comments, but few people seem interested in exploring them, which (being a libertarian) I can't really fault anyone for.  These issues are: (1) libertarianism’s historical relationship to the labor movement; (2) distortions in the ways we usually measure wealth that confuse the debate; and (3) the role of American corporations in globalization.

As for topic (1) - libertarianism’s historical relationship to the labor movement - no one has acknowledged that libertarianism more or less grew out of the union movement in Europe as that faction which proposed a return to the principles of classical liberalism (Adam Smith) in opposition to the coercively entrenched interests of state/capital at the turn of the twentieth century.  Many libertarians shifted focus after the New Deal because the Roosevelt government seemed to represent a greater threat to liberty at that time than corporate regulatory capture; but the base of the movement remains as principally an opposition to the pernicious cartel of that two-headed monster of the wealthy and powerful.

If libertarianism has been effectively subverted to corporate interests in the United States, which is the contention of Noam Chomsky and other anarchist theorists whose intellectual roots lie in the Gilded Age milieu of thoughtful bourgeois discussion, this must be because either: (a) self-described libertarian institutions have been captured by corporate special interests; (b) echoes of the New Deal excesses of central government still seem like a more serious threat to liberty than corporate power; or (c) having strong, collective labor counterbalance strong, unitary capital is no longer considered a necessary evil (due perhaps to the existence of a strong middle class).

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