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Sands through the hourglass

Or, Hey! You got pluralism in my diversity!

Hidden in plain, if at times dour, sight, an interview with Jill Lepore in CHE. She hits a couple of critical notes, per usual:

We’re in this appalling situation where civics education has a political balance that leans right, while the discussion of the diversity of the American past has a political balance that leans left. The problem with a civics education that leans right is that its version of the American past is inevitably going to be the story of the march of progress and prosperity and freedom. And the story that leans left is the story of atrocities and ongoing systematic inequalities. Both of those accounts of America are true, but neither of them is the entire truth. No child is equipped for life in a democracy if they are asked to receive either story as canonical.

One thing that really troubles me is that it’s now politically safe to talk about pluralism, but it is not politically safe to talk about diversity. Sure, those terms have different histories, and you could disambiguate them if you really wanted to, but ultimately they are kind of the same thing. I wish that civics initiatives would embrace the word “diversity” to depoliticize what they’re doing. And I wish that DEI programs that are still standing, of which I’m sure there are still some, would embrace the words “pluralism” and “civics.” There actually is a common project there. It’s possible to hold a common purpose across those different initiatives and to refuse to allow them to be politicized and demonized by the other side. To allow such a basic matter as what children learn in the third grade about their country to be determined by who’s won a seat in the Legislature in the last midterm election is outrageous. Those people should be ashamed of themselves.

[Narr: they are not ashamed of themselves]. And later, she suggests the reason people are unable to understand any common purpose beyond the accumulation of riches – which would lead to a downfall, except for the puny heights native to such  ambitions:

I teach at a university where the preponderance of our undergraduates go into finance, consulting, and tech jobs that they are recruited for almost the moment that they arrive in Cambridge, and whose time, instead of being devoted to academics, is devoted to securing positions in those industries. The pleasing of their parents, and the pleasing of those students, is the economic engine of the college and therefore of the university, in a way that I do not think is consistent with what a university is for. There are universities now that are creating centers for open inquiry. What is a university if not a center for open inquiry? Why would we need such a center? That anyone suggests such a center should raise a lot of eyebrows.

Successful marketing smears against the liberal arts notwithstanding, the underlying timidity about culture and civilization result in the increasingly inability to differentiate the real from the fake. It’s so complicated and new that people exchanged ideas on it using stone tablets. Adherents of classical learning become defensive  in conversations about earning potential, meanwhile West Point and the other three service academies continue to require philosophy, languages, history, and literature. Can you hold those competing notions in your head?

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Local motion

On the energy front, that is. LA Times lays out the situation of subsidized commercial rooftop solar vs. private investment. Much of the action is going to be on the regulatory front.

Consumer activists object. They say Edison should be looking to cheaper sources of renewable power, such as large solar and wind farms and geothermal plants. They contend that Edison International shareholders, not utility ratepayers, should finance the company’s huge bet on photovoltaic rooftop solar, one of the most expensive forms of clean energy.

An independent advocacy group has asked the Utilities commission to reject the ratepayer-financed plan, fearing unfair advantage over private sector entrepreneurs. But isn’t it the case that if the Edison plan creates demand for materials (and the power these materials generate), more materials and their power will appear? What is the uniqueness of renewable energy production that it will not obey or at least adhere to the rules of the marketplace? While not perfectly analogous to coal-fired power production, is it really exceptional?

Again, as much of this will be decided through sober, commission-type deliberations as will have to be amended later, as we learn more about and become familiar with the nature of distributed power generation. But the pre-conceived notions (free-marketeer or egalitarian) that guide these at the beginning will mean a lot.

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Watch the birdy

It’s no stretch to say that a controversy might erupt were the consensus theories about peak oil production or climate change shown to be misstated or, worse, wrong. Green would be the new red, as in red-faced, and yet another potential crisis ( Y2K) will have been proven to be a marketing construct. As much as there are deniers and refusniks of climate change and peak oil, these folks are generally construed to be shills, or worse.

But, s’up with gas prices dropping? What’s that all about? OPEC is not going to stand around and do nothing as prices fall. But it gets complicated in a stagnant economy, and their options are limited. Will low(er) gas prices kill the electric car again? All of these are related and work together: the limited supply of oil, the oversupply of housing and the widespread accumulation of bad, bad debt. The “deterioration” of prices is all that concerns the oil producers. With all the upturns and the downturns, we need to worry about how it all works together. For instance, will the nascent and baby-teeny-weeny progress on alternative energy initiatives be snuffed out by world economic turmoil?

It is important to unpack and disconnect some of these issues, otherwise we will never escape the way we have been driven by them and them alone onto hyper-consumptive paths of lease resistance and their ecological consequences. Can we continue to use less oil/gas even if the price drops back into the neighborhoods we grew up in? What about the infrastructure and economic development plans based on reduced carbon footprints and homegrown renewable energy? There were are many more reasons than running out of gas to change the way we’ve been doing things.

The question is whether we will have enough discipline toward the self-preservation instinct, even if it’s not immediately cheaper. Green is all about keeping your eye on the ball – the big blue one we’re living on.