Hopeless Naiveté

In recent weeks the question has been asked many times.  Pundits on both the left and right have wondered aloud if president Barack Obama is pursuing his Syrian policy because he is utterly naïve.  Most answer that at least in part this seems to be true.

My question is, why did it take them so long to discover this?  Barack Obama’s foreign policy has borne the mark of inexperience since before he began running for president.  Right from his first moments on the national stage he has been advocating guileless solutions to difficult problems.

Recall that this was the man who wanted to bring the Iranian mullahs to reason by the simple expedient of sitting down and talking with them.  Once they realized that he was prepared to respect their interests, they would obviously cease being belligerent.

This was also the man who went on an apology tour through Muslim lands to reach out the hand of friendship.  Here too he believed that once people who mistakenly distrusted us realized we no longer had aggressive intentions, they would embrace us as fellow human beings.

Obama likewise seriously advocated reducing our atomic weapon stockpile to nearly nothing in the expectation that this would set a good international example.  Other nations would be so impressed by our sincerity that they too would dismantle their nuclear programs.

But Obama’s naiveté was not confined to foreign policy.  It also permeated his domestic initiatives.  After all, this was the man who gave us a trillion dollar stimulus in order to jump-start the economy.  That it was loaded with pork for his political cronies somehow escaped his attention.

But then he argued that these funds would get out into the economy to do the job because they featured “shovel-ready” projects.  Folks on the other side of the aisle warned that this was not true, but he scoffed at them for being obstructionists.  Then, when shovel-ready turned out not to be shovel-ready, he merely laughed off the inconvenience.

And, of course, there is the ObamaCare debacle.  The president’s “affordable care act” was supposed to supply quality medical services to tens of million more people while simultaneously lowering costs and making zero changes in the medical insurance programs that were functional.

This too turned out to be an adolescent mirage.  As, needless to say, were the president’s promises to cut the deficit in half by eliminating waste and fraud, and to make the government more transparent by opening its internal operations to public scrutiny.

But the real mystery is why have the American people been so naïve as to swallow this grab bag of unsophisticated misadventures.  Remember, it has been less than a year since they re-elected Obama after having experienced four years of inflated gobbledygook and economic stagnation.

Why specifically didn’t young people notice that there were fewer jobs available to them when they graduated college?  Forced to return to their childhood bedrooms, just as Paul Ryan warned, weren’t they mature enough to connect the dots and realize that Obama’s policies had something to do with this?

And why didn’t women appreciate the fact that free contraceptives did not compensate for having to postpone marriages and families because these were too costly to manage during what was turning out to be The Great Recession?

As for minority members, their love affair with a Black president was understandable, but could they not recognize that they were paying dearly for their loyalty?  As the first to be fired and the last to be hired, they were falling further behind their fellow citizens with each passing day.

Childishness can be charming when exhibited by children.  When, however, a president and those who voted for him manifest it, it can be frightening.  In this case, it places the rest of us in mortal danger—both at home and abroad.  Growing up is apparently difficult, but a nation converted into a romper room is in deep trouble.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

Complete Nonsense

I was going to lambast Barack Obama for his latest silly proposal for improving higher education.  Somehow in between the Syrian Crisis and the ObamaCare debacle, he found time to take a bus trip during which he proposed to make a college education available to all by lowering costs and raising quality.

This was yet another example of our president’s free lunch mentality, but I soon found it topped by a local example of political vacuity.  It was only upon receipt of a memo updating Kennesaw State University’s fiscal situation that I realized how absurd were Georgia’s plans for higher education.

Governor Nathan Deal is promoting a policy called “Complete Georgia.”  This is theoretically designed to increase the completion rates for those attending the state’s colleges, but it really seems to stand for “complete nonsense.”

Deal tells us that he wants to see the percentage of Georgians obtaining a post high school education rise from 42% to 60%, while at the same time improving the quality of what they learn.  Why, presumably, should any Georgians be left behind?  Don’t they all deserve to be winners?

Despite what appears to be the governor’s generous impulse, there is a very good why.  In fact, there are several of them.  To begin with, not everyone is college material.  Not everyone has the intelligence or the motivation to benefit from a genuine college education.

People who believe in social justice poo-poo this observation.  They, along with traditional Marxists, believe that accomplishment is solely a matter of preparation.  Everyone, they assume, has equal potential.  The difference is merely in how they are brought up.  Provide all with equal advantages and all will turn out equally well.

However, since not all families are equally competent at raising their children, the state must correct any deficiencies by providing the appropriate schooling.  It doesn’t matter whether their homes are mad-houses or their neighborhoods are snake pits, teachers are expected to do magic.

To date, we have seen how well this has worked in K-12.  Now this strategy is to be applied at the university level.  As a result, we certainly can’t allow students to drop out.  Nor must we challenge them with materials above their IQ levels.  This might be a tragic blow to their self-confidence.

Not long ago I was told about Graduate students at a Georgia college (not KSU) who objected to the lessons they were taught on the grounds that they were too intellectually demanding.  They believed that as “customers” of higher education, they should only be asked to do what made them feel comfortable.

The point is that if we are to have higher education for all (i.e., 60%), the only way to achieve this is by lowering standards.  Like it or not, we cannot expand our university programs to include everyone without lowering quality.  To conclude otherwise is specious reasoning and/or an egregious form of wishful thinking.

For political reasons, both Deal and Obama are trying to sell their constituents on the idea that we can all be Chiefs without anyone having to be an Indian.  They appeal to our vanity—or perhaps our kindness—with visions of everyone climbing to the top of the social ladder.

Although I understand this instinct from the neo-socialist Barack Obama, I am mystified when it comes from a Republican office holder.  What is even stranger is that at the very time Deal is demanding state colleges live up to this fantasy objective, his government is cutting their financing.

Hasn’t anyone in the capital learned math?  Don’t they know that doing more with less doesn’t add up?  Nor did their lessons in psychology take if they believe that everyone is equally talented and uniformly dedicated.

About all they seem to have learned is how to make promises that cannot be fulfilled.  Sadly, it will be the students they seduce who take the biggest hit.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

Land of the Weak; Home of the Losers

You’ve probably heard the news.  The Cato Institute found that in many states people can earn more money from government welfare programs than they can if they take a paying job.  Evidently in Hawaii a family of four can make the equivalent of sixty thousand per annum on the dole.

What you may not be aware of is that this underestimates the amount of money the poor have available.  When, several decades ago, the sociologist Christopher Jencks decided to study the “out-go,” as opposed to income, of the underprivileged, he found that they spent almost twice as much as they theoretically earned.

How, you may ask, is this possible?  The answer is that not every dollar received came in over the table.  Nor were all of them legal.  Many even came from friends and relatives.  This then explained all that “bling” and those large-screen TVs.

Once upon a time Americans took pride in their “can-do” abilities.  Prepared to meet virtually any challenge, they assumed they could do whatever needed doing.  Was there a continent to be tamed?  They were ready to take it on.  Could they construct a rocket to the moon?  No sweat!

But now we seem to regard ourselves as a nation of weaklings.  We require someone else—preferably Uncle Sam—to take care of us.  The question is not what we are going to build—our president has already assured us that we do not personally build anything—but how we are going to divvy up the spoils.

Ours, we have heard over and over again, has become a dependency, or some say, an entitlement culture.  The issue is what will we be given, not what will we achieve.  He or she who can persuade the federal government to cough up the most loot is the winner in this race to the bottom.

In fact, winners must win.  They must take on difficult tasks and succeed in accomplishing them.  Only then do they deserve the respect that has traditionally been accorded victors.  Otherwise they are losers—no matter how loudly they crow about deserving the best.

Despite this, millions of Americans apparently feel too weak succeed on their own.  They whine, and wail, and gnash their teeth about how unfair life is and demand that the winners be taken down a peg or two.

Not long ago our national motto was “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” whereas today it is more accurately “the land of the weak and the home of the losers.”  It isn’t that we do not boast millions of young people prepared to defend our freedoms; rather it is that the protesters and lay-abouts are currently setting the national agenda.

Still, when I ask my students at Kennesaw State University how many of them aspire to be losers, not a single arm goes up.  On the other hand, when there is reading to be done or papers to be written, a large proportion look for the easy way out.  As long as they can pass a course, they do not worry about passing with flying colors.

Plainly, hard work is for chumps.  Nevertheless, as Malcolm Gladwell observed in his book Outliers, truly successful people dedicate years of concerted effort to becoming good at what they do.  Because they want to win, they devote themselves to becoming strong enough to prevail.

We must never forget that if our objective is for everyone to do equally well, we must set standards everyone can meet.  That means we must become a nation of less than mediocrities.  Because half of us are always below average, this half can only be accommodated by very low benchmarks.

The truth is that not everyone can win; yet if we are to be a nation of winners, we must both work at it and acknowledge those who come out on top.  The false God of victory for all merely ensures defeat for all.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

A Progressive Time Warp

It has become a science fiction cliché.  Sooner or later the plot is apt to boast an excursion into the past or the distant future.  As it happens, my wife and I recently experienced an episode of the former when we attended the annual conference of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) in New York City.

Virtually all of the attendees would happily have described themselves as “progressive,” or maybe “radical,” in their political orientations.  An odd collection of aging hippies and earnest young disciples, their principal objective was to develop exciting new ways to cure the ills of our society.

And yet, if a visitor from outer space paid attention to what was said in many of the sessions, she could not avoid feeling caught in a time warp.  Here were the 1960’s (and sometimes earlier) brought back to life with gusto.  Nuggets of “wisdom,” I heard as a young man, were breathlessly re-uttered as if freshly discovered.

One of the favorite topics was “victimhood.”  Thus in a session devoted to drug use, we were told that women addicted to methamphetamines were losing their identities because of misguided government programs.  Instead of having their status as mothers affirmed, this was undermined by taking their children away.

These women were therefore double victims; victims of a frightful drug and of professional insensitivity.  Even though they loved their children and found comfort in their roles as mothers, the officials did not care and callously separated families that should be kept intact.

While this exposition was well received by the audience, it was a bit too much for me to bear and so I rose to tell two stories from when I worked as a methadone counselor.  The first concerned a woman I helped get her children back after they had been placed in protective services.

My heart had gone out to her when she tearfully explained how her children were all she lived for.  Then when she subsequently came to see me with her youngsters in tow, almost the first thing that happened was that she rapped her little girl across the face with the back of her hand when the child plaintively expressed a desire for candy.

This woman was sincere in expressing her love, but that did not mean she was a good parent.  Nor were the social workers that sought to protect her children entirely mistaken in their concern for their welfare.

In another instance, a woman whose children had been removed from her care bore a fourth baby by a different man and then moved in with a third.  Soon thereafter, he, in a fit of pique, threw this infant against the wall when he could not get it to cease crying.  The child in question shortly died.

Upon concluding these tales, I made the point that morality mattered.  These women were not merely victims; they were agents who needed to be held accountable for their actions.  To do less was to invite dire consequences.

To this an audience member responded by suggesting that my comments were ill-advised.  I was told that I should not be invoking “morality” because the concept was too contentious.  We needed to find another word that would not invite the authorities to act as self-righteous busybodies.

So here we were with tired relativistic platitudes being used to justify failing to protect the innocent from abuse.  The alleged victimhood of the mothers was to prevent us from intervening for the sake of their children.  Because the investigator felt sympathy for the women she interviewed, we were to ignore the plight of sufferers she never meet.

All of this is defended in the name of compassion.  Somehow it is supposed to be “progressive” to jettison moral standards.  Social discipline is to be thrown out the window because those forced to behave in ways they do not like might be offended.

Were this to become the conventional attitude, chaos would surely reign.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University