Supercolliders and Resentment
Last night we watched Particle Fever, a movie about the CERN atom smasher. It was very entertaining and full of suspense. The scientists had worked diligently for decades to bring this incredible machine into reality, firstly so that they could verify the existence of the Higgs-Boson particle. In the end they succeeded, but as often happens, many questions they hoped to resolve were just pushed into the future: the particle exists, but it’s mass is between two theoretical masses that would have pointed to either a super-symmetric universe or the multiverse. The multiverse theory seemed to be viewed with special horror by some of the physicists, particularly the self-styled “experimentalists.” They fear that they’ve hit an opaque wall at the edge of the known universe, and have to decamp to other universes (mostly cold and dead, as the theory goes) to learn more.
So all this is fun. Early in the film there was a sad montage of the now-defunct attempt to build the particle accelerator in Dallas, Texas. We saw abandoned tunnels and graffiti. Then we saw Texas politicians on TV grandstanding about the project and declaring that if the You-rou-peans want to build it, then, why, LET ‘EM! With that Texas washed her hands of the project and presumably is happier with other things. The rest of the film, with it’s inspiring portraits of scientists and vision of thousands of people from all the countries of the world working together in harmony seemed to offer an elaborate response to those short-sided politicians and the constituents they were pandering to.
But I found myself contemplating a different narrative. This scene nagged at me and collected in my mind with other thoughts I’ve had recently. In the fascinating book “Only One Thing Can Save Us,” it’s clear that a politics of resentment operates in America around education. We are told over and over the importance of a 4 year college degree, to the point that alternatives seem horrifying. We’ve seen the income of Americans without college drop. Businesses are eagerly engaged in “de-skilling,” which creates a bleak work environment if you don’t have the credentials to vault over these jobs. From the chapter “Why Demoralize Our Base?”:
In FDR’s day, it was the Democrats who offered the wild, Emerson-like, Whitman-like hope. Now even Democrats believe the grimmest Malthusian-type things:
“You can’t raise wages in a global economy.”
Or “Without a college degree, there’s no hope for you.”
Even when Barack Obama takes a swipe at the 1 percent, his only real answer is to push more of us into college. He complains that Canada and others have roared past us in the number of college graduates.
Mr. President, let it go: it’s a high school nation! Why beat up your base for not having BAs? In the most recent OECD report, only 32 percent of Americans ages twenty-five to sixty-four had four-year college degrees or the equivalent. That means, in effect, for 68 percent of your constituents, you’re saying there’s no hope, give up: pound sand, it’s over.
Democratic politicians, for all their roots in the labor movement, seem to have politely accepted the Republican viewpoint that Labor and Unionism are dirty words. So there is no national counterforce to actual business policies on the ground today that result in deskilling, low wage growth, and isolation of one worker from another. Even Democratic administrations support “neo-liberal” policies that put the market and GDP before people. I can’t help but think that it works out quite well for business when unemployment is miserable but also widespread.
In this environment where the “good life” seems to be reserved for the credentialed, and the cost of credentials spirals out of reach, it’s understandable that boosterism for education sounds like noise, especially when those spiraling costs took place just as much if not more under a Democratic administration. A resentful segment of the population will say to hell with the modern, globalized, technocratic economy and refuse to fund it’s pet projects like particle accelerators. The fact that this segment is being manipulated against it’s own best interest is moot because even “the good guys” speak in terms that leave them behind. Because they aren’t likely to go to college, and business is not going to pay to upgrade their skills, being addicted to a low-skill workforce that they can treat like replaceable cogs.
So, it’s easy to laugh at those Texan politicians, but they are just a symptom of a greater problem. And you don’t help to solve the problem by dismissing them as unintelligent. The forces that create anti-intellectualism in the USA are gathering and getting worse with more inequality, so you can’t imagine that these people represent old thinking, and are old and their ideas will leave the land as they do. Thousands of people are rejecting the “more education” narrative every day because they recognize it rewards people on islands increasingly distant from shore. They are entering the precariat, a land of scrounged work, a lack of dignity in the work, and dispiriting interactions with punitive public and private interlocking bureaucracies.
If you are an American scientist, you need to spend half as much time on trying to push back against these forces as you do looking for new tiny particles. Because even as you represent “the head” of a great society or culture, it’s possible to drift too far from the rest of the body. Eventually, your ideas and goals will be regarded as alien by the greater society because you aren’t traveling together and humans won’t support what they can’t understand. All of this has alarming implications for our current species-wide quandary on global warming. That undercurrent of resentment against the “pointy headed scientists” is being manipulated by the skilled on behalf of the powerful to sow distrust. Once again, you can’t just say how terrible that is and hope it’ll blow over. No…this one will get worse too, and with much more disastrous consequences than whether or not a particle accelerator is built in Texas.
What do we need to do?
We need to support free education everywhere for everyone, all the way to the doctorate. At the same time, we need to provide dignified pathways forward for people who are not eggheads, people who didn’t like school when they were kids and don’t want more of it now. Those people need recognition that they have just as much right to be in the world and can provide just as much value as those who follow all the rules and make straight As. To that end we need to stop the “de-skilling” of this population and set them up as craftspeople, a time-honored tradition that offers lifelong learning, dignity, professionalism, and roles within a community.
We need to recognize those actors in the system who are benefiting from this state of affairs. Often these are globe spanning corporations, full of excellent people who want to do the right thing, but they end up promulgating policies that can’t be understood to be harmful without plenty of thought grounded in ideals of social justice and fairness. Employees are rarely encouraged to think this way. In many cases, these corporations have captured great swaths of governmental policy, and they even write the regulations with which they will be “controlled.”
We need a Labor movement in America, primarily the participation of labor in corporate decision making, the way it works in Germany. After the great recession in 2008, German firms worked with labor and government to reduce hours for a time rather than effect mass layoffs. That was impossible in America because labor didn’t have a voice (anything they said would be “whining”), and government was effectively captured. And this because labor had no power! Like it or not, many of these questions come back to a fundamental imbalance of power.
Am I proud of CERN and her scientists? Undoubtedly. The Swiss don’t have to resent CERN and it’s billions of dollars spent. Because they support policies that share wealth and education broadly. They can afford CERN, not because they have more money in the bank, but because they have less resentment in the bank. Share wealth more broadly and then everything won’t be such a god-damned headache.
