In a recent Manifold Podcast, Steve Hsu and his guest were somewhat shocked that schools in Taiwan seat students by class rank, with the top student in the front left, and that reminded me of Robert McNamara describing his small-town school in California in Fog of War:
My class in the first grade was housed in a shack. A wooden shack. But we had an absolutely superb teacher. And this teacher gave a test to the class every month, and she reseated the class based on the results of that test. There were vertical rows, and she put the person with the highest grade in the first seat on the left-hand row. And I worked my tail off to be in that first seat.
Now the majority of the classmates were Whites, Caucasians, so on — WASPs, if you will. But my competition for that first seat were Chinese, Japanese, and Jews. On Saturday and Sunday, I went and played with my classmates. They went to their ethnic schools. They learned their native language, they learned their culture, their history. And they came back determined on Monday to beat that damn Irishman. But, they didn’t do it very often.
The preceding anecdote was apropos a few years ago:
My earliest memory is of a city exploding with joy. It was November 11, 1918. I was two years old. You may not believe that I have the memory, but I do. I remember the tops of the streetcars being crowded with human beings cheering and kissing and screaming. End of World War I. We’d won. But also celebrating the belief of many Americans — particularly Woodrow Wilson — we’d fought a war to end all wars. His dream was that the world could avoid great wars in the future. Disputes among great nations would be resolved.
I also remember that I wasn’t allowed to go outdoors to play with my friends without wearing a mask. There was an un—Godly flu epidemic. Large numbers of Americans were dying. 600,000 and millions across the world.
More on his education:
I applied to Stanford University. I very much wanted to go. But, I couldn’t afford it, so I lived at home and I went to Berkeley. $52 dollars a year tuition. I started Berkeley in the bottom of the depression. 25 million males were unemployed.
Out of that class of 3500, three elected to Phi Beta Kappa at the end of the Sophomore year. Of those three, one became a Rhodes Scholar. I went to Harvard. The third went to work for $65 dollars a month and was damn happy to have the job.
The Society was on the verge of — I don’t want to say “revolution.” Although, had President Roosevelt not done some of the things he did, it could have become far more violent. In any event, that was what I was thrown into.
I never heard of Plato and Aristotle before I became a Freshman at Berkley. And I remember Professor Lowenberg — the Freshman philosophy professor — I couldn’t wait to go to another class.
I took more philosophy classes — particularly one in logic and one in ethics. Stress on values and something beyond one’s self, and a responsibility to society.
After graduating University of California I went to Harvard graduate school of business for two years and then I went back to San Francisco.
After his stint as war brain-trust, the damned Irishman graduated to the status of world banker. Ironically, makers and watchers of documentaries and writers and readers of biographies resonate more with bullets and bombs than bonds and notes.
My father lived through the depression. He told me that commercial activity seemed to have stopped dead. People were terrified. His parents lost their little grocery store and went on the dole. He, like McNamara, credits Roosevelt with preserving the social contract. It wasn’t anything particular that he did, it was just that he trying lots of things, was active and seemed confident. At least somebody was doing something.
Off-topic. I have been reading your blog for years and I wanted to thank you. The texts you choose are always very interesting. When I see a new post of yours, I know that I am going to learn something.
Thank you, really. I will keep on reading you
I’ve always found McNamara baffling, along with many from his generation. Ambitious, energetic, detail-oriented, and totally lacking in perspective.
It’s like we took our best and brightest, and completely failed to inculcate them with any semblance of history or culture, just a vague childish understanding of geopolitics, a vast arsenal of wealth, and the belief that the US was somehow impervious to the trappings of empire. Like Kissinger.
”But my competition for that first seat were Chinese, Japanese, and Jews.”
Hmm. First grade. Circa 1922. So this ethnic/racial consciousness started… with the Big Bang?
Thank you kindly, Nobody!
It’s wild to think that the pattern was already clear in California in the 1920s.
Not “failed to inculcate them with’” but “succeeded to inoculate against.”
If attempts to dig into something harder than the usual end product of mental Augean stables at Hollywood result in «JFK, aliens, lol», wooden_laughing_track.wav and moving on? It’s but another implementation of good old crimestop.
Complemented with what Moldbug calls addiction to the smell of power. Bad cases are easy to notice, since a patient misuses “we” often, while obviously not being a monarch, editor or host of a tapeworm. Whether it’s a lackey “we”, a wannabe “we” or some mix does not matter much IMHO.
Faze:
It is substantially accurate to say that commerce stopped dead. It is substantially inaccurate to say that Roosevelt was part of the solution.
To understand the Depression, one must understand that the business cycle is driven by bank credit expansion and contraction. Please read the foreword and introduction to Irving Fisher’s 100% Money (1935).
https://cdn.mises.org/100%20Percent%20Money_Fisher.pdf
(Read it, gentle reader. I insist.)
In particular:
The Depression was in large part a land-grab by the banking order, which desired to consolidate the supermajority of agricultural production into a few corporate hands, an objective since achieved.
They who own the land make the laws.
Fixed block quote: