Weekly Musings 45 11-19-11
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On the Value of Discernment
Thanks to new correspondent Kathy K., I have been pondering the value of discernment, i.e. the ability to sort the wheat from the chaff, the meaningful from mere "background noise" and to compose the proper context.
Anyone trying to make sense of the world via reading/viewing is inundated with images, data and narratives that claim to capture the essence of an issue, as well as a flood of opinion claiming to separate "good" from "mediocre."
The basic intent of a classic liberal arts education was to develop this power of discernment via a broad base of knowledge and the ability to think critically and independently. In other words, the educated citizen no longer needs to accept the opinion of "experts" about the innate quality of cultural expressions such as music, literature, film, etc., nor must they accept the "received wisdom" of preachers, pundits, politicos or various "experts."
Being able to read the source documents with some discernment was, after all, a key sticking point in the Christian world's Reformation revolution: The Powers That Be did not want the believer to be able to read the Bible himself, for the obvious reason that he/she might reach conclusions about the meaning that differed from the Status Quo intepretation.
This is still more or less the case: the PhDs in the Federal Reserve, for example, publicly dismissed econo-bloggers as ill-informed and "dangerous." (Independent, critical thinking is of course always "dangerous" to the Status Quo.)
Though the power of discernment might seem merely cultural in nature, it is actually deeply and necessarily political, as the ability to see through the mists of propaganda, perception management and deliberate misinformation is what separates citizens from sheep.
The more confusing the times, the more value discernment holds, for such eras demand the ability to select the proper contexts ("framing the problem") and critically assess the contexts presented as "explanations."
This exchange has led me to wonder why oftwominds.com has attracted a readership of those with the power of discernment. It's not just that you're smart or well-educated or have moxie (street smarts), it's that you have the power of discernment.
Has discernment as an explicit goal of higher education slipped to merely implicit, or has it vanished altogether in the rush to secure good grades and entree to a secure position in the Status Quo? Has the pressure to excel in one narrow slice of knowledge supplanted discernment as a cultural goal? If so, what sort of nation do we end with if even the "educated" lack the power of discernment?
The Civilian-Military Divide
I wrote on Veteran's Day about the widening divide between the U.S. Armed Forces and the civilian populace. I received email about it only from active-duty and retired service members. That in itself is potentially telling: military matters are out of sight, out of mind for most civilians without an active-duty family member.
As with "education aimed at developing discernment," we have to ask what sort of nation we will end up with if the Armed Forces are sent off by civilians to do the dirty work, and the civilians no longer want to know about the dirty work, or about those tasked to do it.
It's a pernicious side-effect of the volunteer force; the Central State's foreign policy is no longer openly coercive, as the citizens who joined accepted the burden voluntarily. But isn't that just another example of the sophistry that characterizes so much of American life?
Did the volunteers sign up for open-ended commitments with only the most ambiguous goals and yields, i.e. "nation building"? I don't think so; they signed up to defend the nation, which is an entirely different proposition than "nation building," a concept so vague even the "experts" cannot agree upon any useful metrics.
Meanwhile, we are trading the lives of some of our finest citizens for this tenuous and ephemeral "return on investment."
The people being deployed are real; we don't get a sense of that in 10-second video clips. We only understand if that person being deployed is our friend or family member: they are gone, and in danger.
Correspondent John D. (USN, retired) has a grandson flying Apache helicopters in Afghanistan, and longtime correspondent Scott C. (USN, active duty) is deploying to Afghanistan in a few weeks. Please keep these people in mind; we are at war, though that fact is masked, diffused, and ignored, largely because that suits the Status Quo perfectly: no questions asked is their ideal.
Keeping our fellow citizens who serve in mind is perhaps our only duty as civilians, other than voting and paying taxes.
I am ready for a political sea-change in 2012, away from open-ended commitments to ambiguous, "high-minded," lofty-sounding wars. Apparently I am not alone; Foreign Affairs magazine's current issue features an article entitled, "The Wisdom of Retrenchment."
Trends and Price Change on the Margins
I've been mulling over the way that modest change on the margins can quickly move prices of some things while in other cases price resists change until it seeps from the margins into the core and exceeds a threshold that is often only visible after the fact.
Consider the price of oil, for example. A drop in demand of 5% does not drop the spot price by 5%--it triggers an outsized decline of 25% or more. The same is true of a 5% increase in demand or decline in supply: relatively small changes in supply and demand cause wild swings in the price of oil.
Though most of the oil supply is dominated by cartels, the global marketplace is liquid, open and relatively transparent. (For example, futures contracts are marked to market daily.)
Compare that to the price of housing. The price of each home in a 100-home block is certainly set by recent sales, but there is a lag between the first few sales and the eventual acceptance of the reset price as the new default.
If 5 homes sell for $100,000 in a neighborhood where the previous default value was $150,000, then the "stickiness" of the valuation default is understandable; owners will cling to the notion their home is worth $150,000 despite the most recent sales being much lower. But at some threshold they are forced by the market realities to accept the new pricing.
Now compare those markets to the cost of a college education, a service that has skyrocketed in price over the past decade. If enrollment declined by 5%, would the price of a 4-year college education decline by 5%? Unlikely, as higher education operates as a multi-tiered cartel, not unlike sickcare ("healthcare"): costs are toted up and passed on to whomever is still in the system.
At what point would a decline of enrollment start affecting the price of college? 10%, or perhaps 20%? I suspect that young people are losing faith in the legitimacy of the university as a passkey to financial and career security, and such a decline in enrollment may well be an emerging trend that is not yet visible.
If higher education is no longer about securing the big bucks but about learning discernment, how much will it be worth? We won't know until enrollments break through the threshold of "stickiness" set by the ubiquity of gigantic student loans.
Changes in trends also begin at the margins, and then they phase-transition at certain thresholds--dynamics which often track stick/slip or Pareto models.
As I described on the blog, the first attempt to occupy Wall Street attracted a total of three people in July. Now our credit union reports that there is a steady stream of people opening accounts there. Even today, their lobby was jammed with people. As we walked by Chase Bank's lobby, it looked sepulchral in comparison.
Trends begin on the margin, but do not become recognizable until some threshold is breached--it some cases, it may be the 4% Pareto number that exerts outsized influence on the 64%. If 4% of the banking populace closes their TBTF bank accounts and transfers their funds to a credit union or small local bank, might that trigger a cascade of others leaving the TBTF banks, or perhaps even their collapse?
Impending Crisis in Europe
Speaking of phase transitions: there are many signs that the debt crisis in Europe is gathering momentum, and the quietude of the moment is only evidence of how much is being suppressed or masked.
This is "obvious," but it should make us ask: have I done everything I can to protect my family assets from a complete disruption in global stock and bond markets? As the saying goes, cash is a position, too, and a stock "protected" by a dividend or hot technology will go down with everything else once the wheels fall off the euro.
I would be very wary of claims that the U.S. has "decoupled" from Europe. The domino Europe may not hit the U.S. first, but it will topple China, which will then topple the emerging markets, and all three will crash onto the U.S. economy. If the euro falls, no stock market anywhere will be "safe."
The Powers That be are doing their utmost to cloak and disguise the panic and the rising odds of a "credit event" or dislocation. The odds of such an event are increasing geometrically in my view.
From Left Field
Does watching TV encourage debt? Here's some evidence.
"Americans are immature when it comes to honestly accepting failure and maybe that's why so many of us lack the emotional depth to make sense of it."
"This vast stock of infrastructure is resistant to atransition that will either be easy, cheap, or rapid. Instead, as with past energy transitions, the US faces a much slower migration to alternative sources as it struggles to shed oil from its economy."
(Foreign Affairs) This is subscription only, but try to read it at a library. It is a polemic, but it says a great deal about the zeitgeist of the country.
Thanks for reading--
charles