Posts Tagged ‘ Cultural Influence Professions ’

Attend a Tea Party, Support the Arts

April 6, 2010
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Attend a Tea Party, Support the Arts

Bill Whittle is a clever, erudite and indefatigable proponent ofliberty and limited government. His latest PJTV video, entitled “Support Your Local Tea Party: Vigilance & The Siren Song of the State,” is a must-see, especially if you’re on the fence about attending a Tax Day Tea Party near you. Whittle’s video and the political movement it endorses are incredibly important. At the 2 minute 30 second mark, however, note his list of fields “the enemies of freedom have … taken over.” “Things have gotten this bad because we’ve allowed them to get this bad. We’ve been busy minding our own business for forty years, while the enemies of freedom have slowly and surely taken over academia, newspapers, movie studios, comedy, music, and politics. Now a huge slice of our own people long to escape the responsibilities brought on by the freedoms our forefathers gave their lives for. We can’t let that happen.” As usual, Whittle’s analysis is spot on, but one of those fields doesn’t quite jive with the rest. Everything that Whittle ticks off in his list influences that final item. Politics is a lagging indicator to these cultural influence professions. You can’t change Washington DC and

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Pop Culture’s Impact on a Three Year Old

March 19, 2010
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If you don’t think working in the cultural influence professions is important when it comes to shaping the next generation, check out this video. If you’re one of the more than 14 million who have seen this already, it’s worth a second look. That incredibly cute clip says something about pop culture’s impact and, over time, its influence. The next time someone dismisses movies, television, or most genre fiction as frivolous pursuits, think about that three year old girl reciting back to her parents what happens in Star Wars. “But don’t talk back to Darth Vader. He’ll get ya.”

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The Mount Vernon Statement – Well-intentioned but Short-Sighted

February 19, 2010
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The Mount Vernon Statement – Well-intentioned but Short-Sighted

Conservative leaders got together and decided, “What we need to do now is pretty much what we’ve been doing since 1955.” These leaders seem to have declared that what happens in Washington DC will be their raison d’être for another 60+ years. The US Marines have an unofficial motto when facing dire circumstances, “Improvise, adapt and overcome.” If only the conservative movement would take this saying to heart. The Mount Vernon Statement is a document by conservative leaders to “recommit to the ideas of the American Founding.” It is a well-intentioned assertion that what we need is “a restatement of Constitutional conservatism grounded in the priceless principle of ordered liberty articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” With all due respect to the smart folks who put this document together, haven’t conservatives been articulating these “priceless principles” since William F. Buckley Jr. created National Review in 1955 and Young Americans for Freedom put out the “Sharon Statement” in 1960? What, exactly, will change if they continue down this path for another six decades? The problem with the Mount Vernon Statement is not the reform it seeks. The document’s authors are spot on when they write, “The change

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Why Are Conservatives Rare on College Faculties? Blame It on the Conservative Movement

February 12, 2010
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Why Are Conservatives Rare on College Faculties? Blame It on the Conservative Movement

There has been a bit of internet discussion on this question the last week or so, and a good question it is. It was prompted by a paper by Ethan Fosse of Harvard and Neil Goss of the University of British Columbia entitled “Why Are Professors Liberal?” Their answers are typically self serving in their ignorance and blindness, but what does one expect from leftist academics. Since the beginning of the progressive era in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, such statist liberals have always been convinced of their moral and intellectual superiority, even though there is very little evidence it is deserved. The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, an excellent organization fighting to improve higher education in North Carolina put together brief responses to this question from a handful of conservative and libertarian academics. Everything they say would be familiar to anyone who has attended a college or university in the United States or knows about them. Before I state my frustration at the right for this situation, let me quote from one respondent who tells of a situation I can relate to. Here is Mark Bauerlein of Emory University commenting on the left wing

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The Narrative that Drives American Politics Is Sustained by Culture

February 6, 2010
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The Narrative that Drives American Politics Is Sustained by Culture

In an almost excellent article at the Weekly Standard, Jeff Bergner tells us that the only way Republicans can govern is if they challenge and change the overarching narrative that drives politics.  I say almost, because he unfortunately does what most political commentators on the right do: They acknowledge the powerful influence shaping characteristics of cultural influence professions , but they imply by neglect that these professions will always favor The Narrative of the left. In this paragraph early in the piece he obviously gets how powerful the influences of these professions are on the basic beliefs of Americans on the nature of the American experiment: That The Narrative should move many Republicans as well as Democrats is hardly surprising. It is, after all, pervasive. This is the story presented to children at school by teachers and textbooks all across the nation. And, while the left-leaning American professoriate may think of itself as contrarian or skeptical, it operates in lockstep to offer The Narrative as the official view on virtually every college campus. It is reinforced at every turn by the print and electronic media, in the arts, and in every mainstream avenue of American culture. Granted the title of

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Who’s to Blame for Dearth of Conservative and Libertarian Professors?

February 3, 2010
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Who’s to Blame for Dearth of Conservative and Libertarian Professors?

That is a very good question asked by Daniel B. Klein at Minding the Campus. Two researchers offer a new twist on an old question—why do college professors overwhelmingly lean to the left? Bias against conservatives is not the main reason, nor are the allegedly higher IQs of liberals, say Neil Gross of the University of British Columbia and Ethan Fosse of Harvard. Instead they suggest a theory of “path dependence” –few conservatives are attracted to work in scholarly fields dominated by the left, just as few males want to be nurses in a traditionally female field. People tend to giggle when a man wants to become a nurse, they say, and conservatives tend to feel similar embarrassment in entering leftist academe. This giggle theory underrates what leftist domination does to faculties. In the recent book The Politically Correct University: Problems, Scope and Reforms, Charlotta Stern and I discuss groupthink mechanisms. The majoritarian procedure of each department means that once a majority leans left, the department will tend toward leftist uniformity. The pyramidal structure of each discipline means that publication, awards, grants, recommendations will follow the pyramid’s apex, and if the apex goes left it tends to sweep leftists/neuters into

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Denying Hollywood’s Agenda Prohibits a Culture of Liberty

January 7, 2010
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Denying Hollywood’s Agenda Prohibits a Culture of Liberty

The only explanation I can come up with to explain those who deny Hollywood’s left-wing agenda is that they want to remain on the “Above the Line” cocktail party invite list. Either that or they are lying to themselves, and are nothing more than useful idiots to left-wing ideologues. The Washington Post recently reported on Hollywood’s turn toward films promoting spiritual themes. The litany of spiritual themed movies includes Avatar, The Road, The Invention of Lying, The Lovely Bones, The Blind Side, The Book of Eli, Legion, and The Last Station. While many might pause at the “spirituality” the Dream Factory promotes in some of these films, I was struck by this opening quote from Greg Wright, editor at HollywoodJesus.com: “The more paranoid elements of our culture tend to think Hollywood has a proactive agenda, that producers have a grand scheme to use movies to shape the thinking of audiences. I don’t subscribe to that school. I believe that Hollywood gives audiences what audiences want to see. If people don’t want to see movies with certain messages, they won’t buy tickets. So if there’s a trend out there, it’s one reflecting what people are already thinking and feeling.”

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"Culture is the expression of the guiding philosophy of the day."—Murray Rothbard
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