Men Checking out of College

The Wall Street Journal today has an article called "A Generation of American Men Give Up on College".  In it, we find such statistics as: women make up 59.5% of college students today.  In fact, for the 2021-2022 school year, 3,805,978 women applied to colleges compared to just 2,815,810 men.  That's just under 1,000,000 more women than men, despite the fact that men actually make up 51% of the college-aged population in the US.

White it is true that women have a higher enrollment rate than men for nearly every racial and economic group, the most impact is found in the lack of white men enrolling.  As the article states, "Enrollment rates for poor and working-class white men are lower than those of young Black, Latino, and Asian men from the same economic backgrounds." Given the demographics of the United States, the fact that white men aren't even bothering to enroll in college while white women are is enough to result in the numbers we see.

The article goes on about how perhaps there needs to be support groups for men too, despite the fact that the objection has been, "Why would you give more resources to the most privileged group on campus?"  I find it ironic that the article actually quotes this without realizing the quote itself gives the reason why white men aren't going to college.

After spending K-12 being told that you are responsible for all that is evil in the world for free, why would you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to be told the same thing for four more years?  Higher education made an environment intentionally focused on preaching hatred of white men, and now they discover that white men don't want to be there.  Insert surprised Pikachu face here. Furthermore, why would anyone willingly subject themselves to such psychological abuse when the classes taught in universities have, by and large, made a university degree completely worthless anyway?

You want a specific demographic to show up in a place? Start by not hating them. A lesson that can be applied in all areas of your life too, if you really want to.

“White Privilege” and “Dum Diversas” – the Papal Bull that Authorized the African Slave Trade

I posted this article more than a year ago, but with race violence fairly prevalent right now, this seems like a useful bit of information that can help us get our bearings with respect to race issues in the western world.

The left-wing popular culture wants to attribute racism and slavery to “white European males”, and in fact there is now a whole derogatory category called “white privilege” that exists and that seeks to castigate every white person for the evils of racism and slavery by positing an ongoing “systemic racism” that still exists today, sort of like a headwind to “people of color” but a tail wind to those of white European descent.

But they ignore the fact that human slavery is as old as the human race itself, and that the Black African slave trade within that continent long pre-dated the arrival of “white European males”. It was, in fact, a concerted effort by more than a few “white European males” (for the most part, Protestant Christians) that ended the slave trade and eventually abolished slavery in the Western world (but not in the Muslim world). A little discernment will go a long way toward modifying and even dismantling the left’s narrative on this topic.

At this point, I don’t believe that too much qualification or explanation is needed to define “the political left” in the US. There is a stark and quite evident divide on the political spectrum. One qualification that is needed is to distinguish what I’ll call “classical liberalism” from “the political left”. “The political left” seems to have very little concern for “classical liberal” ideals such as “advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press [and speech], and international peace based on free trade.” If anyone has any questions about this, I’ll be happy to comment further on it.

I myself am for the most part a second-generation American. My parents were born in the US, but three of my four grandparents were born in eastern Europe and migrated to the US prior to World War I. My maternal grandmother, who was born in the US, was the third child of grandparents who had their first child in Slovakia. More, this part of the world knew nothing of enslaving people, but it knew all about being enslaved, primarily by Muslim invaders of the Ottoman empire, who historically had made a number of incursions into that part of Europe.

My hope here is to try to provide some broader context for some of those fires that continue to rage on in our day.

A Brief History of the African Slave Trade

Smash the patriarchy!

Screw white men and their...
*Squints*
Disproportionate likelihood to put their lives at risk in order to save others. https://t.co/keSj4JZasq

— Lauren Chen (@TheLaurenChen) December 18, 2018

The privilege paradigm

The status of white privilege is a big issue in Democrat politics. But before we can analyze white privilege (assuming that's a meaningful category), we need to grasp the concept of privilege in general. Let's consider a few examples of what might constitute people from a privileged background. Terence Tao is on the short list of greatest living mathematicians. His mother received a first-class honors degree in physics and mathematics at the University of Hong Kong. Actress Anjelica Huston is the daughter of renowned American director John Huston. Harpsichordist Igor Kipnis was the son of renowned opera basso Alexander Kipnis. The father of mathematical physicist Roger Penrose was a geneticist and Fellow of the Royal Society. Ed Witten was the son a theoretical physicist.

What these example have in common is how the background of these individuals contributed to their success in their chosen field. It's not coincidental that they had that kind of background. Their background proved to be advantageous in their career choice. In that respect we might say they were privileged kids.

Suppose we compare that to a cowboy in Montana. Let's say he grew up on a ranch, adjacent to a small town. He was cut off from "civilization" growing up. So it might well be said that he's underprivileged. He never had the advantages enjoyed by the individuals I just mentioned.

But here's where the definition of privilege becomes relative or circular. The privilege paradigm is goal-oriented. It reasons back from success in a particular field to the background of the individual, which in some cases gave them an unearned competitive advantage.

So our cowboy is underprivileged, at a disadvantage, provided that his dream is to become a movie star, physicist, mathematician, or classical musician. Suppose, though, that was never his ambition in life. He hates big cities. He loves horseback riding. Loves the out of doors. He drinks in natural beauty. Rivers. Fields and streams. The Grant Tetons. The starry night, undiminished by light pollution from the big city. He relishes the freedom to make his own schedule, rather than punching a clock.

So in that respect we can reverse the comparative advantages. In relation to what he cares about, what he finds fulfilling, he has a privileged background in contrast to Kipnis, Penrose, Witten, Huston, and Tao, who–by comparison–are underprivileged. If the aim is to enjoy the lifestyle of a Montana cowboy, then their background puts them at a nearly insurmountable disadvantage, by prejudicing them against ever considering that alternative.

Put another way, your background often has a conditioning effect, not only on what you're likely to succeed at, but on what you wish to succeed at. They'd have to overcome their background to appreciate ranching in Montana. And they wouldn't have any skills, honed from childhood, suiting them to that lifestyle.

It's striking how much of the American mythos is bound up with what progressive academics would regard as an underprivileged background. Take Mark Twain's valorization of his childhood as a country boy. Nostalgic memories of summers at his uncle's farm. Life on the Mississippi. Exploring the local caves. Or consider the Western in American mythos. Admittedly, that's often romanticized. 

My father grew up in small-town Yakima, in the 20s-30s. He was dying to escape that and make it to "civilization" in Seattle. Because we had relatives in E. Washington, we made frequent trips there. It was a nice change of pace. Stretches of E. Washington are bleak and barren, but it also has some majestic landscape, like the Columbia river gorge. Spokane is a handsome town. 

I was once talking to a cousin who grew up in E. Washington. He waxed wistful about hunting and horseback riding. A different lifestyle. But for him, that was good.

I didn't grow up in Seattle, and I dislike the urban lifestyle. On the other hand, some folks revel in the urban lifestyle. So there's no one-size-fits-all ideal. "Privilege" is person-variable. 

So the privilege paradigm is analogous to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, where you begin with the outcome, where the dart lands, then draw a circle around the dart, exclaiming that it retroactively hit the bullseye. By the same token, the privilege paradigm begins with a hypothetical ideal outcome, then reasons back to an advantageous or disadvantageous initial conditions, where achieving or missing the outcome is impeded or facilitated by one's background. That, however, typically trades on a provincial and elitist preconception of what is best in life. If, to get the best out of life, it's be better to be a movie star or physicist than a cowboy, then a boy with a rural background is underprivileged. But the assignment of what's ideal is arbitrary. It tacitly mirrors the values of academics who formulate the privilege paradigm.