Writing in The Weekly Standard, David Brooks gives us an instructive anecdote about the perils of PC muddlethink, this time manifest in the convoluted logic of seemingly sane adults during a VA school-naming debate:
I was struck by a little story in the local section of the Washington Post. The Prince William County, Virginia, School Board has just completed construction on a new school and they had to figure out what to call it. Four thousand local people signed a petition saying it should be named after Jeff Simpson. Mr. Simpson was an emergency medical technician from the area who happened to be visiting lower Manhattan on September 11. He rushed four blocks to the World Trade Center and was killed in its collapse.
All the speakers at the school board meeting were in favor of naming the school after Simpson. But the school board decided instead to name the school after the local development, Ashland. The school board officials said that it wouldn’t be right to single out one victim of September 11, when so many suffered.
This strikes me as idiotic, even for a school board. Children learn from exemplars. Jeff Simpson behaved heroically and his example truly is a lesson for future school kids. But there is a radical egalitarian mentality around that says nobody is better than anybody else and nobody is worse, so no individual should be held up before others. Not to sound like Ayn Rand or anything, but this truly is an ideology of the mediocre.
The Prince William School Board really should reconsider.
Exacty.
Either that, or just admit that we’ve given up on the idea of a meritocracy altogether, and start naming every new building “Benetton World” and give it a number (eg. “Benetton World 11878867”). At least we’d know what we’re getting in that case…
Wait, wait, wait. How do you get from “it wouldn’t be right to single out one victim of September 11, when so many suffered” to “nobody is better than anybody else and nobody is worse, so no individual should be held up before others”? They seem to be two totally different concepts to me, and Brooks is just inserting a caricature of liberalism into an incident where it isn’t really applicable.
It’s wonderfully easy to score points if we’re allowed to write others’ motivations for them (see Peggy Noonan’s “The Case Against Hillary Clinton”), but it’s not much of an argument.
The same way that you claim the right to discount the wishes of 4000 petitioners because you claim to know better. Seems to me that the school board was doing some mind reading of its own. Regardless, the school board’s reason—“it wouldn’t be right to single out one victim of September 11, when so many suffered”—conveniently omits the fact that, while so many suffered, only <b>one</b> of those who suffered (Mr. Jeff Simpson) was from the town where the school was being built!
Brooks may not have walked all the way through the semantics of the argument, but the force of the argument remains, I think.
I probably should have added that I think that the board made the wrong decision, and I would have signed the petition if I lived there. I think that (a) 4000 resident taxpayers should have a loud voice indeed in the naming of a public building, (b) “Ashland” is a generic, lame-ass name, while “Jeff Simpson” is a unique, inspiring one with a genuine connection to the community, and (c) the explanation of the school board defies common sense in exactly the way you describe.
It is, however, a _different_ explanation than than the one Brooks creates. This is an illogical form of argument; it’s just too easy. Watch:
– Why did John Walker Lindh join the Taliban? Because there’s a mentality among liberals that hates America and wants its destruction.
– Why do conservatives oppose affirmative action? Because there is a mentality around that is opposed to the progess of minorities.
– Why did Bush reject Kyoto? Because there is a mentality in the Bush administration that doesn’t believe that business interests always trump environmental interests.
You can “prove” anything about anyone by just applying unappealing motives to them. That’s what I objected to.
Well, I see what you’re saying, Ted. But sometimes you need to draw inferences based on actions (interpretation is all about ascribing an intention to words and/or actions), and I think Brooks IS ascribing to the school board a motivation (as you suggest), but I think he’s doing so because he believes that to ascribe such a motivation is the best way for him to explain how the board came to the decision it came to. He could be right, he could be wrong—but it’s a sensible guess, given the circumstances. After all, <i>some</i> ideology underpins the school board’s decision (however consciously or unconsciously that ideology is deployed), so Brooks’ interpretation is quite plausible, don’t you think?
I think we’re approaching the squishy center. The interpretation is not insane, but I think he’s tacking a reasonable point (radical egalitarianism is bad) onto a situation where its relevance is questionable at best. I can see where he’s coming from, but I still think it’s a too-easy rhetorical trick.
@mika yeah, that was stupid from your side