ACCS conference notes, part 3 (of 5)
The threat of stupid people, and the Leftist infiltration of Christian institutions
I bought a map from “medieval mapmaker”.
Here we go.
Douglas Wilson, Governance in the Garden of Good and Evil
We already think we should budget for sins when we build institutions. But we’re usually watching out for overt moral failure (the dishonest bookkeeper, etc.).
But there are other downstream consequences of the Fall - stupidity, for example, stupidity of the morally culpable sort. The Bible calls this sort of person “fool”.
For example, the sort of person who would fall for Marxism. Marxism is only believed in by people with a graduate degree, you’ll notice. And these same people are often quite shrewd with their personal finances. But they also think that wet streets cause rain.
Or, the sort of people who believe in Darwinism. Grad students think the whale and the canary are cousins. The only people who really believe this nonsense are smart people.
Or, the transgender revolution. Why didn’t the transgender revolution start in veterinary schools? Look, we turned a cow into a bull, now let’s go try it with people. Because the whole thing is ludicrous, and only peer-pressure is making it go.
This sort of stupidity is sinful, and we need to budget for it as well.
There is a cynicism that loves and wants to protect, a positive cynicism. The Bible commends this sort of cynicism. Some Christians think the best way to get through life is to have your BS detector broken. It isn’t so.
Cynicism is only a problem when we turn it into a self-serving exercise.
For example, look at what Judas did. What did he think he was doing? (Now this is, admittedly, speculative.) He’s probably the only disciple from Judaea, based on his last name. He threw the money back when it became clear that Jesus was not going to defend himself, that he was going to die. This is not the response of a man whose plan is succeeding.
Maybe, Judas thought he was the smartest man in the room. He knew Jesus had all this power, had seen him work miracles, but he wasn’t using it to throw the Romans out. Judas thought he would force Jesus into a position such that he would have no choice but to act against the Romans. Didn’t work.
That’s ludicrous, but that’s what sin is, the power of a narrative. We build these self-serving narratives around us. Self-serving narratives can blind smart people.
Gadarene Swine Rule: Just because the group is in formation doesn’t mean they know where they are going.
We need to budget for these realities too.
The three laws of Robert Conquest:
Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume it’s controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
More complex schools will need more complex systems. I am not against having your act together. I am against looking like having your act together, when you don’t. So understand that, as I now speak against some problems of administration.
Nate Wilson aphorism: “In any meeting that goes on for longer than 20 minutes, someone will propose something that, if implemented, will ruin everything”.
Thomas Sowell: “People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.”
Here are three book recommendations, satires with a serious purpose.
One, Parkinson’s Law. Work expands to fill the time allotted for it. You must distinguish between the real work to be done in a school, like teaching kids math in a math class. And tasks like the committee report that just sits on a desk for two years. Or board meetings, for example, will always fill up whatever time you allot for them. So force-shorten the time for meetings.
Two, The Peter Principle. Every employee rises to the level of their own incompetence. If they are competent in a position, we keep promoting them. Once they reach a position at which they are no longer competent, we stop promoting them. So eventually the bureaucracy is filled with people incompetent at their jobs.
Three, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. The laws are as follows:
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
The probability that a certain person will be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person (e.g. amount of educational attainment).
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person, while himself deriving no gain and possibly incurring losses himself.
Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid people.
A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
There are no real defenses against stupid people, you can only avoid them or fire them. Sometimes people are categorized as: intelligent, helpless, bandit, stupid. Bandits are sinful but also rational, you can predict their behavior and protect against them. There is no telling what stupid people might do.
Megan Basham, “Infiltration and Astroturf: How the Left is Attempting to Transform the Church
I’ll just share a few notes here. Basham is a journalist, and a lot of her talk was sharing specific examples that, yeah, it’s true, Leftist billionaires and organizations spend tons of money to get people inside of Christian and conservative organizations and change their course from the inside. It’s not a weird conspiracy theory, it’s true, they do it intentionally, they advertise to their supporters that they do it.
And now some notes.
In undergrad, Basham was a bit of a party girl, she followed the crowd. She was shocked, one day, in literature class by the rebukes hermits gave to Lancelot that he had not properly used the gifts he was given. Neither was she, it shocked her conscience also. She went to church the following Sunday and never stopped going.
So she knows the power of classical Christian texts. And she’s cantankerous at Christian institutions that want to excise those unpopular (to the present world) texts.
Leftists know that true Christians are the last group standing in the way of their ruling ambitions. Their technique is to lure enough pretenders into good Christian organizations to gain control of them.
Classical Christian education is now a major trend in the US. The ACCS is a particularly high profile success. This makes you a target.
Why do organizations drift? Well, people are prone to compromise by increments. But Jude also tells us that ungodly people will slip in.
Infiltrators use our language and lingo but make it mean something different.
[Then shared many examples of good Christian organizations that fell apart with remarkable speed when the original founders departed.]
Sometimes the problem is not the influence of Leftist money, but staff. Take Christianity Today, for example. Not many congregants read it anymore, but pastors do, and they look for social cues from it on how to talk about stuff. Of 72 recent political donations from CT staff, 71 went to Democrats. They recently wrote one article questioning the seriousness of Trump’s faith (OK, perhaps true enough), and another extolling Biden’s Catholicism (yeah right).
CT is a lesson about the allure of institutional respectability. A former employee described how CT staff were thrilled when one of their articles was noticed by the NYTimes or WaPo. Big outlets know the power they have to shape the behavior of others who want that prestige. By contrast, since complementarianism was anathema to secularists, it was anathema to CT too.
It can happen even in places that seem safe. Grove City College recently announced the creation of a diversity council. Gratefully, there has been pushback from students and parents. Kendi spoke *at a chapel service* and said students should consider that everything they learned about their faith was really about securing racial power. The GCC Education Department created a course called Cultural Diversity and Advocacy that used an image of a raised fist in promotional materials. (They have undone some of this after pushback.)
There are similar pressures applied to classical schools - for example, the typical complaint that we teach too many dead white man.
How do we prevent this transformation?
One, beware the corporate mindset. Beware the culture coming out of corporate America and that desire for safety and respectability.
Two, don’t avoid moral issues because they are framed as political issues.
Three, realize that it often takes a lot less than you’d think to keep the protecting walls strong. Inexpensive truth can sometimes neuters billions in astro-turf influence, we have seen it work.
THE END
The Grove City paragraph was intense. I'm reading along at a pleasant pace prior to that and then you drop three strong news-bits of further decay. That is tough to digest.
"How do we prevent this transformation?" Right question to ask. Like you pointed out about CT, the reward is so great for dancing like a monkey (well-educated one of course, like the CT writers are), and it's easy to do because it doesn't involve the mind.
As long as Classic Christian education exercises the mind it will probably last because the providers of it, and consumers see a value that has already discounted the rewards of the Big flashy-easy road. However, the accusation you rose, "teach too many white men" will really sort out the group (unfortunately).