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"Based on these findings, Peterson recommends junking the "elite culture-mass culture" distinction in favor of an "omnivore-univore" distinction. There is indeed a significant difference in the cultural tastes of high-status and low-status people; but it doesn't correspond to the elite-mass distinction previously postulated."
"I think Murray and I are basically in agreement about the facts here. If you take narrow enough slices and focus on the media, academia, and civilian government, you can find groups of elites with liberal attitudes on economic and social issues. But I’m also interested in all those elites with conservative attitudes. Statistically, they outnumber the liberal elites. The conservative elites tend to live in different places than the liberal elites and they tend to have influence in different ways (consider, for example, decisions about where to build new highways, convention centers, etc., or pick your own examples), and those differences interest me."
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One way to see this is to consider Murray’s political quiz, “How thick is your bubble,” where he challenges his upper-class readers to assess their points in common to the ordinary Americans. One of Murray’s questions is, “Have you ever participated in a parade not involving global warming, a war protest, or gay rights?” The bit about gay rights is cute, but it also serves to separate out the liberals in the audience. After all, lots of non-elites go to gay rights parades. What if Murray had asked, “Have you ever participated in a parade not involving the pro-life or Tea Party movements?” This might not be the best example; my point is that there are lots of ways to separate the elites from the non-elites. Elites are more likely to know a business executive, more likely to buy a new SUV, more likely to fly business class, more likely to attend professional sporting events (those tickets are expensive!), less likely to rent rather than their homes, less likely to ride public transportation, and so on. Murray’s quiz is interesting but he chooses to separate elites from non-elites in a particular way that makes me think he’s sensitive to the attitudes of politically liberal elites in particular.
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The point of these examples is not that Murray is wrong, either in his prescriptions or in his recommendations—much here depends on one’s economic views about taxation and government spending—but rather that his argument keeps going in two opposite directions at once. From one side he argues that the upper class has good habits that they should transmit to ordinary Americans; on the other side he says that the upper class should become more like the rest of the country. But I can’t see how you can have it both ways. This connects to my earlier point that much could be gained by considering the diversity of attitudes among the upper class.
"Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 is an important book that will have large influence. It is unfortunately not a good book—but its lack of merit in no way detracts from its importance. If anything, the book's flaws add to its power, by enhancing the book's appeal to the audience for whom it is intended. Coming Apart is an important book less because of what it says than because of what it omits; less for the information it contains than for the uses to which that information will be put."
"Lovelock, who introduced the Gaia Hypothesis describing life on Earth as a vast self-regulating organism some 40 years ago, also stated that since 2000, warming had not happened as expected.
"The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," Lovelock told MSNBC.com in an interview.
While warming may not have reached Lovelock's expectations, it is clearly happening"
"If we take as a very loose definition of expert “someone who has more exper-ience than you do,” it is hard to imagine any form of learning that does not involve an expert – except pure, unguided, trial-and-error discovery learning. Without reference to any person – or any artifact created by a person – of more experience than ourselves, all learning would be maximally inefficient. We would each be left to rediscover the entirety of physics from scratch. And the entirety of music theory. And the entirety of every other field, without a conversation or a textbook or a Wikipedia article to guide us. "
"By now it is becoming hard to remember that, at the peak of its popularity and influence, classical music carried with it an undeniable intellectual and even moral authority, qualities which would rub off on composers and performers such as Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Albert Schweitzer, Pierre Boulez, Van Cliburn and Igor Stravinsky, all of whom would, in different ways, play leading roles within the social and cultural landscape of the cold war period."
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t a certain point a dominant critical narrative would emerge announcing the death of contemporary classical music at the hands of a cadre of modernist zealots. Working within the legacy of the second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern), figures such as Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt — so the story goes — attempted to reduce the creation of music to a technocratic specialty. More fluent with the manipulation of abstruse arithmetic formulas than with the nuts and bolts of melody, harmonic progressions, audible form, or sonic appeal, they believed that the creation of music could be reduced to autonomous syntactic form at its most cognitively opaque, with little concern as to what, or even whether, a message of any significance was communicated to their audiences.
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Rather than denigrating academic modernism, my objective here is to note that such charges directed against it would come to assume the status of a conventional wisdom and, as such, had an important impact on the ultimate viability of the field and in the capacity of recognized elites to dictate the terms of the broader public’s engagements with musical culture.
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"This paper conducts an empirical analysis of the factors affecting U.S. public concern about the threat of climate change between January 2002 and December 2010. Utilizing Stimson’s method of constructing aggregate opinion measures, data from 74 separate surveys over a 9-year period are used to construct quarterly measures of public concern over global climate change. We examine five factors that should account for changes in levels of concern: 1) extreme weather events, 2) public access to accurate scientific information, 3) media coverage, 4) elite cues, and 5) movement/countermovement advocacy. A time-series analysis indicates that elite cues and structural economic factors have the largest effect on the level of public concern about climate change. While media coverage exerts an important influence, this coverage is itself largely a function of elite cues and economic factors. Weather extremes have no effect on aggregate public opinion. Promulgation of scientific information to the public on climate change has a minimal effect. The implication would seem to be that information-based science advocacy has had only a minor effect on public concern, while political mobilization by elites and advocacy groups is critical in influencing climate change concern. "
"Following stable, tepid concern from 2002 to 2005, apprehension began to climb in 2006, peaked in late 2007, and then fell back to where it was in 2002. But the team of three sociologists, led by Drexel University’s Robert Brulle, wanted to know why, so they gathered data on five likely influences: extreme weather events, scientific information, media coverage, congressional attention, and advocacy groups on both sides of issue. They also looked at four control variables: unemployment, gross domestic product, war deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the price of oil. The team then compared that data to changes in the Climate Change Threat Index.
They found the most important factors that influenced public concern were public statements by Democrats in support of addressing climate change; anti-environmental votes by Republicans; unemployment; GDP; and the number of times The New York Times mentioned the film, An Inconvenient Truth."
"To summarize the thesis: ordinary people hate partisanship, and elites hate ideology. Hence the elite is constantly attempting to misrepresent the latter as the former. And the masses sometimes respond by repudiating ideology when they mean to reject partisanship. "
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When I applied, I thought it would be great because I would get to meet lots of smart people. Those were the kinds of people I liked to be friends with, and I thought there would be more of them there. That was the main reason I thought it would be a fun place to be. I don’t think I was super ambitious or professional minded or even a very good student.
The thing I figured out soon after I applied was that, on Gilligan’s Island, it wasn’t the Professor who went to Harvard, it was Mr. Howell, the rich man. That was something of a revelation.
It’s funny, because what a lot of people talk about when they talk about going to Harvard is being really intimidated by the place when they arrive. I wasn’t at all intimidated by the place when I arrived—but I was really intimidated after graduating.
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A thing that’s very nice and very terrible is that those class differences are very rarely talked about at Harvard. So you might have some sort of movie image where the snobs are sort of looking down their noses at the poor kids, but the reality is that once you’re at Harvard, no one’s a poor kid anymore. You’re all, instantly and at that moment, in one of the most privileged positions of the American upper class.
Among other things, professional wrestling works as a kind of folk satire — and well meaning progressives and professionals like Mr. Gore are among its targets. The clownish referee represents exactly the well intentioned bumblers who seek to arbitrate and rationalize the endless competition between the good and the bad guys. It is the way much of the working class looks at ivory tower intellectuals, nanny state do-gooders and what in Mark Twain’s day people could still call “the old women of both sexes” who fussed self-importantly around like New York Times editorial writers, levying moral judgments and thinking they were accomplishing something.
In other words, the referee in a professional wrestling match strikes a chord in popular culture in part because he is a representation of the class which sets itself up in our society as the arbiter and judge: the professional elite, the expert and the chattering classes. The referee at a wrestling match is a populist portrait of the FCC, the NLRB, NPR, the New York Times editorial board and everyone else who does exactly what Al Gore would like to spend his whole life doing: judging mankind impartially and ruling them well. The referee is part of the entertainment who is funny in part because he thinks he is above the fray.
"The key questions are, of course, why is it so hard to inform the public that intellectual elites disagree with them on such issues, and if being informed of this fact would be enough to change their minds."
"I have, however, become increasingly concerned in recent years - not about the talent of the applicants but about the education American universities are providing. Even from America's great liberal arts colleges, transcripts reflect an undergraduate specialization that would have been unthinkably narrow just a generation ago. "
A.O. Scott responds to Neal Gabler
"It is perhaps telling that Blankfein is the son of a Brooklyn postal worker and that Hayward—despite his U.S. caricature as an upper-class English twit—got his start at BP as a rig geologist in the North Sea. They are both, in other words, working-class boys made good. And while you might imagine that such backgrounds would make plutocrats especially sympathetic to those who are struggling, the opposite is often true. For the super-elite, a sense of meritocratic achievement can inspire high self-regard, and that self-regard—especially when compounded by their isolation among like-minded peers—can lead to obliviousness and indifference to the suffering of others. "
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