The Weekender: Dogs in Sunglasses
Three stories, perfectly packed for your weekend. Today's edition: be terribly offended by just one thing.
Meet The Weekender, a weekend digest that highlights just three reads from the week and why they’re worth your time.
David Sedaris, in his commencement address to the graduating class of Oberlin College in 2018, tells them, “Choose one thing to be terribly, terribly offended by. This, as opposed to the dozens or possibly hundreds that many of you are currently juggling.”
That got me thinking: what am I terribly offended by? What should I be terribly offended by?
For Sedaris, it’s dogs in sunglasses.
I’m working on it, but I haven’t yet whittled my list down to one. It’s actually still a grocery list of petty grievances, serious offenses, and idiosyncratic peevishness. For example, the petty grievances include things like bright green pants. I had a pair when I was a teenager. As if that wasn’t enough, I often wore them with blue flip-flops. I thought I was the coolest thing on the planet, and I still haven’t forgiven myself for it.
The things I tend to get a bit more up-in-arms about revolve around the decline of education in the U.S., unbridled smartphone use, and mixing church and state. That’s where we’re headed today.
Welcome to The Weekender 🤙
From The Tablet: Twilight of the Wonks
I appreciate writing where I walk away and feel like I am a better person for having read the book, article, short story, etc etc. Walter Russel Mead’s piece does that for me.
It’s sweeping—he traces the history of the merit-based ‘wonkacracy’ we’ve created in the United States from pre-modern Universities to the present day—and it’s insightful, offering a nuanced view of where we were, where we are, and where we’re going.
Not to bury the lede, his point is that modern American society up until present day required a vast army of upper-class managers, bureaucrats, technocrats, and wonks to carry out the administration of an industrial society that quintupled in complexity at an unprecedented rate: mass migration, mass transportation, mass infections and public health, all of this required vast quantities of white collar, smart, mid-level managers capable of administering complex systems:
In the pre-infotech era, all this could only be accomplished by establishing large, rule-based bureaucratic and legal structures. The millions of humans employed by these bureaucracies needed to be educated for and socialized into these roles. These employees were not educated to be leaders. The point of their training was not to create independent thinkers and nonconformists. Bureaucrats are trained to be functionaries—meme-processors who apply a set of rules to a set of facts.
But, he argues, there were gaps. The largest of these gaps has been a focus on ‘wonkish qualities’ that favored intellect and organization over ‘the old gentry virtues associated with social leadership and independent action’ that have ‘faded into the background’. The supreme example—or the moral nadir—of this trend was the inability of three Ivy League Presidents to speak clearly and unambiguously about their own Universities’ codes of conduct and student behavior, especially in relation to anti-semitism and genocide.
Additionally, the Information Age has made the requirements for these brigades of bureaucrats and troupes of technocrats less immediate. Machines will be able to administer these organizations by applications of those same sets of rules faster and more accurately than our white-collar wonk class ever could.
This is a long read, but as I said up front, I actually felt more fulfilled after reading it. Not simply ‘smarter’, but more dense. More substantive. Maybe even fulfilled? It’s that good.
30 min read
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