Sunday roundup

 If it's been a while since you considered the hard life of the man behind Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, check out Christopher Sandford's piece entitled "Two Centuries of Dostoevsky" on the website of the American Institute for Economic Research. After having already garnered some literary acclaim for some essays he'd had published, Dostoevsky participated in a protest against czarist policies in the 1840s and got in big trouble for it, including getting 50 lashes for complaining about prison food, an event that left him with a bad case of epilepsy for the rest of his life. Of course, he then went on to write his major works and enjoy some high regard.

Sandford's an interesting cat in his own right. He's kind of specialized in pop-culture history, writing biographies of Paul McCartney, Kurt Cobain and Steve McQueen, among others. 

Associate editor of New York magazine's Daily Intelligencer Eric Levitz ever so cautiously starts to reconsider a public-policy viewpoint he'd wholeheartedly embraced in a piece entitled "Does Pre-K Actually Hurt Kids?" It seems that findings indicating that any ground gained from pre-K is lost by the midway point through elementary school have had an impact on his thinking. Still, he's clearly keen to hold onto the idea that, with some tweaking of how it's implemented, pre-K can be basically beneficial. 

I found some of the comments on the article noteworthy, such as this one:

None of it matters a bit unless the things and habits these children are learning are reinforced in the home. If no one is responding to the kids’ needs appropriately during the times they aren’t in care, if no one is making them healthy meals and reading to them and caring how they do in school, none of it matters a bit. 

But we can’t say that. Which is a shame because it’s the truth. 

Above practically everything else, possibly with the exception of promptly and appropriately responding to a child’s needs, READING is where it all starts. Reading go a child from the time they’re very small helps them learn to pay attention and focus and start to comprehend. It gives them an almost undeniable edge. But so few people do it anymore, and it’s heartbreaking. 

And this:

“Public pre-K programs may not reliably improve enrollees’ long-term academic performance or social behavior. But they do reliably provide parents with a safe, somewhat stimulating place to put their children while they go earn money. And that’s an important service for parents and children alike.”

^ This.   I taught for 5 years, and by the end I realized that we were just free daycare.  

At the John Templeton Foundation website, Joshua Moritz asks, Is There A God-Shaped Hole at the Heart of Mathematics?  He examines the inquiries of Christian mathematicians and philosophers such as John Philoponus, Gottfried Leibniz and Kurt Godel into a rational basis for concluding that God must exist.

If you could use a good dose of encouragement to be content, check out "In Love With The Life You Don't Have" by Greg Morse at Desiring God.

Robert Tracinski, writing at Discourse, has an essay called "In Defense of 'Workism'": 

“Workism” was defined by Derek Thompson a few years ago in The Atlantic as “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose, and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.”

This last point, pushing back against encouraging work, is where the rubber really meets the road, because it is part of the push to un-reform the welfare reforms of the 1990s, on the grounds that it is cruel and unjust to restrict welfare in a way that requires its recipients to work.

The argument against this emphasis on work is that it is a puritanical moral “obsession” arbitrarily imposed on people, and also that it is all a lie concocted to serve our corporate masters, because the majority will never actually find personal fulfillment in their work. Here is Thompson again:

But our desks were never meant to be our altars. The modern labor force evolved to serve the needs of consumers and capitalists, not to satisfy tens of millions of people seeking transcendence at the office. It’s hard to self-actualize on the job if you’re a cashier—one of the most common occupations in the US—and even the best white-collar roles have long periods of stasis, boredom, or busywork. This mismatch between expectations and reality is a recipe for severe disappointment, if not outright misery.

So you start out thinking you’re going to work to “follow your bliss,” but you just end up working to line the pockets of The Man.

Similarly, Tablet recently carried a broadside against work and career as a source of meaning specifically for women, lamenting that “pop-feminism has continued to lean into the corporate system, devaluing any life choice for women that does not center on economic prosperity.” This is either a radical leftist perspective, with all its railing against “the corporate system,” or a traditionalist-conservative perspective, with its talk about the previous generations of women “who were raised to become mothers and wives.” But who can tell the difference between left and right anymore?

The wider complaint is that we may have greater prosperity and be building and making more things—in other words, we may enjoy material progress—but we face a growing “meaning crisis,” in which we have no clue what gives value and direction to our lives or what can produce a sense of personal fulfillment and happiness. There are various people you can find on YouTube who will tell us how to fill this void with Buddhism, or psychedelics or Stoic philosophy. The fact that none of these solutions is particularly new—the hippies tried two of the three a half century ago—might cast a little doubt on whether this “meaning crisis” is really anything new or whether it is just the human condition.

To state the dilemma: How can we continue to create new wealth, invent new technology and advance human material progress, while also finding something that gives purpose, direction and meaning to our lives?

Put that way, the question kind of answers itself—and “workism” is the answer. Creating new wealth, inventing new technology and advancing human progress is something that gives purpose, direction and meaning to our lives. Or rather, “workism” is a pejorative term—an update of “workaholic”—used to dismiss what is actually a very compelling idea: that solving human problems, building the future and just plain getting things done is, in fact, an important and meaningful activity.

Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute is always good for a chill-your-bones update on how the malignancy of identity politics has further metastasized. In the current issue of City Journal, she looks at the ruination of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Western civilization is likely done for. 

Daren Jonescu is a blogger on whom I frequently check in. I don't always agree with him, and he probably wouldn't have it any other way, given the high priority he sets on the individual rigorously coming to his or her own conclusions about anything. I do find his post entitled "Reasons Not To Drink" worthy of consideration, even though I'm unlikely to cancel cocktail hour, at least presently.