The Banality of Evil

We are in a mess. Sure, after almost falling off the cliff a few years ago, the U.S. economy has stabilized. But the lives of most Americans have not improved. Looking at our society as a whole, it seems just the opposite, that more and more Americans are dejected about the direction our country is heading. Wealth and power have become increasingly centralized into the hands of a few, our schools have been hijacked by a bunch of number-crunching bureaucrats, and most folks don’t see things improving, either for themselves, their children, or their communities. Meanwhile, the people who run this country view the average American as good for three things: As votes that can be bought, as consumers who can be sold to, and as soldiers to go fight and die in their wars. Welcome to the American Empire.

How did we go from a nation of neighborhoods, where rich and poor lived in relatively close proximity, where everyone watched out for one another, where there was a comparatively small difference between rich and poor, to one where the economically and culturally advantaged have segregated themselves into a handful of elite communities?

To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, true evil is more often than not a mundane affair, hiding its impact in well-intentioned orderliness and pedestrian execution. In looking for culprits to tar and feather, I find no Stalins or Pol Pots, those agents of evil who, like Brazilian soccer stars, need only a single name to evoke their posterity. My list of indicted are a comparatively dull lot. But that’s the sad thing about evil: It often doesn’t even have the good grace to be interesting. In this light, here are the three figures I find most to blame for the erosion of the American dream:

Bill Gates

There are many sins upon which I could accuse him, but there is one that cuts me close, and that is how Bill Gates has elected to use his astronomic wealth to have an out-sized influence on how we teach our children.

Gates is an advocate of national standards. Specifically, the kind of standards that his button-down brain can understand, the kind that can only be measured through an ongoing battery of standardized tests.  The bureaucrats in Washington D.C. have decided that national education policy only works if they can be in control of the outcome, and that they can only be in charge of the outcome if they have a way to measure what is being learned. And Gates has the perfect tool to assure this centralized control. He calls it the Common Core curriculum. Every teacher, in every community in every state, is expected to teach to this Common Core. And there are standardized tests that judge how well each student, each teacher, each school, each district meets these standards. As 45 states have signed on to this Common Core curriculum and its incumbent testing, it means pretty much every public school in the country is teaching towards having their children master these tests.     

Last week, I attended my first meeting of parents at my son’s school. Most of the other parents had absorbed the language of their oppressor. They were focused on how they wanted more computer skills taught in the classroom. I felt compelled to declare that I wanted less emphasis on computers, that I’d rather have them learning how to deal with their fellow human beings. They were worried about how to effectively implement all the new state and national requirements. I argued for the importance of art and music, of critical thinking, of spending less time learning how to take a test and more on how to live creative, productive, well-balanced lives. I felt pretty alone that night, and a little sad for the state of public education.

Just like in the business world and in our government, Bill Gates and his ilk are winning the battle over the nation’s educational policy, convincing the general public to accept the regimentation of the American mind, as the public schools churn out millions of mid-level white collar drudges to fill their cubicles and buy their products. Meanwhile, the kids of the ruling class get an entirely different kind of education, one that fosters creativity and independent thinking as well as personal discipline and an abiding respect for others, as the rich are wise enough to know these are the skills that will get you ahead in this world. But Bill Gates doesn’t want my child or yours to get ahead. He wants the nation to get ahead. And, to Gates, that can best be achieved if our masses become even more efficient drudges than the ones in China.

I hate Gates for how he transformed the software industry into his own image, making it a dull yet cut-throat endeavor where everyone watches out for the bottom line. I hate him for being such a soulless nerd. I hate him for a dozen petty things. But when Gates and company start fucking with the mind of my kid, that’s when it gets serious.

Ayn Rand

Like Gates, Ayn Rand is guilty of a multitude of sins. But I only hold her responsible for one: Having lured a good percentage of the financial overachievers in our society into believing that they would be better off without all of us riff-raff around, and through this perpetuating and extending the move of those with wealth and power into boutique communities, where they don’t have to deal with their fellow citizens, other than of course when they need someone to plump their pillows and service their needs.  

I’ll start with what I don’t accuse Rand: She is no idiot. There is this tendency within academia to make Rand somehow intellectually inferior to their conceits, but there is nothing de facto illogical in her approach.

My problem with Rand comes not from her mind but from her soul. She is a cold heart, one that beats fast at innovation and the ideas of the chosen ones but that has little use for the foibles of human nature. When the millions of thoughtful, industrious young people who have been reading Atlas Shrugged over the past fifty years are attracted to her ideas, they are unlikely to be dissuaded by academic ridicule, because logically there is really nothing to ridicule. It’s no wonder she remains so popular. To paraphrase Swift, you figure that a genius must have entered the world when all the dunces have aligned themselves against her.   

Perhaps because of this, Rand’s peculiar brand of individualism, one without God or virtue, has weaved its way into the fabric of American conservatism. Ever since the early 1970’s, the titans of commerce have been captivated with the idea that they aren’t really responsible for anything but their own vision and the pocketbooks of their shareholders. Much like the “creators” in Atlas Shrugged, the creative minds of America have now gathered in their shiny burgs, peppered across the continent but generally someplace soft and comfortable, within shouting range of a major body of water, out of sight of the lives of most of America, free to redefine themselves as they see fit. Meanwhile, the country is drained.

There was a time not that long ago when an owner of a factory in Cleveland probably lived somewhere in town. No more. More likely, he lives on the Florida coast or maybe in the concrete canyons of Manhattan. He has no real connection to the factory, the town where it is located, or its people. It is all just numbers on a balance sheet. So when the numbers so dictate, it is an easy decision to do what is right for the balance sheet and not for the people and the town.

During the last age of the robber barons, at least the great industrialists and philanthropists gave back to their local communities, helping to build our libraries, fund our charities, found our schools. But when your community is an island in the Caribbean accessible only by private jet, it is easy to forget about the folks back home. And the view is not much different from your private dude ranch in the California hills.

In Rand’s master work, Atlas metaphorically shrugged, shaking off the burden of the planet and thus relieving himself of the responsibility to aid the worthless sacks of flesh otherwise known as his fellow man. It is a vision much of today’s meritocracy has taken to heart.

        

Woodrow Wilson

Like Gates and Rand, Woodrow Wilson is guilty of a series of crimes. Here is a short list: He got us into World War I, possibly the most inexcusable war in the history of the West, despite running as a candidate of peace and neutrality just months before; after the war, he helped slice up the planet in such a way as to virtually guarantee a century of war and conflagration; with his extended detentions of hundreds of anti-war advocates, some of whom were guilty of nothing greater than writing an opinion piece in the local newspaper, and whose detentions extended well past the end of the war, he is probably America’s most egregious violator of civil and individual rights.

But also much like Gates and Rand, there is one crime that I blame Wilson for most of all, as it still impacts the daily lives of many Americans: Wilson developed the doctrine of Moral Diplomacy, providing the ideological justification for a century of global interventionism.

The American Empire begins with Woodrow Wilson. He popularized the idea that we had a moral obligation to perpetuate and extend democracy around the globe.  Sure there were plenty of generals and politicians who had dreams of American glory before Wilson became President, but it was Woodrow Wilson who gave this ambition a global directive. Wilson gave imperialism its raison d’etre: Making the world safe for democracy.

All the while, President Wilson was sick. He suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919 while in the process of campaigning to have Congress ratify the Treaty of Versailles. But medical records indicate that Wilson also suffered smaller strokes in 1896, 1906, and possibly 1915, and it has been speculated that his sometimes erratic behavior at Versailles stemmed from another bout of hemorrhaging in his brain.

The Disease of the Righteous

Wilson’s physical and mental trials bring me to the moral of my story: Righteousness, even when it is couched in the dry terminology of the businessman or the theories of a philosopher, is often observationally indistinguishable from a disease, and should be treated as such. Of all the weaknesses and failings of the human psyche, the most insidious of all may be the hubris of the righteous, convinced in the justness of their cause.  It is at the root of the failings of all three protagonists in my tale of devolution. And when the cocksure idealists take over, confident they know how to make a better world, it is usually the common man who pays the price.