Boethius

@PepperBlossoms The gamification of learning seems to be pretty effective. And as a college professor myself, I will say that students seem to value getting a good grade above all else (even above meaningful learning, unfortunately). That said, I do think schools should get better at incentivizing students beyond just a letter (A, B, C, D, F, W) that they receive at the end. I've tried this with making "interesting" assignments and giving students some choice over what they can do to receive course credit. Unfortunately this (a) requires a LOT of work on my end and (b) is difficult to mesh with a system that is by design about credentially students and providing an arena for competition (where a student with a 3.9 is more likely to get a job than a student with a 2.5, let's say)

Apparently the Netherlands are potentially entering into the 2nd tier (as a society). I haven't found a great many resources online for describing this, but I do find this David Brooks article on the NYT to be suggestively interesting: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/opinion/scandinavia-education.html "They look at education differently than we do. The German word they used to describe their approach, bildung, doesn’t even have an English equivalent. It means the complete moral, emotional, intellectual and civic transformation of the person. It was based on the idea that if people were going to be able to handle and contribute to an emerging industrial society, they would need more complex inner lives." "Today, Americans often think of schooling as the transmission of specialized skill sets — can the student read, do math, recite the facts of biology. Bildung is devised to change the way students see the world. It is devised to help them understand complex systems and see the relations between things — between self and society, between a community of relationships in a family and a town." “Bildung is the way that the individual matures and takes upon him or herself ever bigger personal responsibility towards family, friends, fellow citizens, society, humanity, our globe, and the global heritage of our species, while enjoying ever bigger personal, moral and existential freedoms.” "Their intuition was that as people grow, they have the ability to go through developmental phases, to see themselves and the world through ever more complex lenses. A young child may blindly obey authority — Mom, Dad, teacher. Then she internalizes and conforms to the norms of the group. Then she learns to create her own norms based on her own values. Then she learns to see herself as a node in a network of selves and thus learns mutuality and holistic thinking." It's pretty amazing, actually, that an entire society has figured all that out. Meanwhile, we in the USA are stuck with the comparatively adolescent Libertarian view of "greed is good" and "every man for himself".

I think we should remember that Graves, Beck, and Cowan have been very clear in saying that no one stage is "better" than another, but instead some stages are better suited for meeting the challenges of life circumstances than are others. So another way of looking at this is by asking why the US has not, until now, been forced to develop Green consciousness. Similarly, how is it that the US has been able to goose a Blue/Orange combination for as long as it has? I'm reminded, in particular, of Alexis de Tocqueville who said that the US experiment in democratic governance (Orange) would succeed so long as the American populace held tight to its Christian religion/morality (Blue). Perhaps it is with the disintegration of traditional Christianity in the United States that we are losing touch with a communally "binding" ideology & we are searching, as a culture, for its replacement (Green). I do not believe, however, that we should expect its replacement to be any more secular in nature than Christianity -- take a look at white people taking the knee to Black people during the George Floyd protests, for example, to get a flavor of the spiritual overtones of Social Justice. An interesting book on what these developments might look like is Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World by Tara Burton, which just came out last month. I'm slowly working my way through that book myself.

What is "politics" about in the first place? If politics were about the creation & distribution of material resources then there should be a great amount of space for differing opinions and perspectives. Political discussions these days, however, are not really about wonky policy details but instead about issues of identity. This is true whether we like it or not, and this is what leads to what may well feel like heavy-handed accusations of privilege and prejudice. While I understand (and have some sympathy for) the arguments you are making with regards to the 2020 presidential election, you might want to consider how your advocacy of Trump comes across to your peers.

@Boethius I should add, however, that all of these issues are hotly contested inside of Christendom with the various branches and denominations in deep disagreement on them. What I presented above is the Catholic/Orthodox view that I have learned through engagement with Rod Dreher's work. If you were to go to a liberal/progressive Christian church (like the United Church of Christ, for example) you would hear a radically different message. Probably the main reason Millennials have fled Christian churches in the US is over the church's views on homosexuality. So even more than secularization, these hot-button cultural issues are the ones to watch in seeing how Christianity develops in the 21st century.

Christianity has traditionally had a very demanding sexual ethic, one that is now at odds with the sexual norms of contemporary US culture. This would include prohibitions on fornication, cohabitation, oral sex, abortion, & homosexuality. Also, there would be no support given for individuals who wish to undergo gender reassignment surgery & transition from one gender to another -- let alone explore more gender expansive forms of identification. The theology of these teachings has been worked out in some detail in Christianity. You can read the Catholic Church's Humanae Vitae from 1968 to get a flavor for this type of argument. The basic thrust, so far as I understand, is a high respect for the "givenness" of the human body along with an Aristotelian understanding that the human body was created by God with a specific set of Ends in mind (procreation being first and foremost amongst them). Deviations from these norms then is indicative of humanity's tendency toward selfish rebellion, a mere symptom of our being sinful creatures in a fallen world. Rod Dreher (author of The Benedict Option and the upcoming Live Not By Lies) is one of the best proponents of these views. His articles on The American Conservative give the reader a sense of the concerns of Traditionalist Christians, and possibly the shrillness of their catastrophist complaints. Quite a few people -- and especially those centered at Green -- would read his work and be repulsed by his writing & believe him to be full of "hate". I myself used to believe this back in the first half of the 2010's when marriage equality was being contested. After marriage equality was settled in 2015, however, I started to read his work and the work of other conservatives and came to understand that he wasn't quite the "enemy" I understood him to be. As a gay man, I can actually understand some of the concerns he has for society and have sympathy for at least some of them. For example, I don't think that scantily-clad drag queens should be putting on shows for children that are rich in sexual innuendo. I would not be willing to celebrate being urinated on in public (as apparently happens in Brazil) as a form of personal liberation. And I have seen in my own community how the hedonistic pursuit of objectifying sexual gratification can tend to degrade and dehumanize people. So to my mind some sort of Balance is required between acceptance/embrace of the wide diversity of human beings & understanding that we are all bound by some sort of moral/dharmic code of conduct. Coming to understand this was probably the main thing that helped push me beyond Green with its comparatively naive ideas about "love vs. hate" and "acceptance vs. bigotry".

What are the mechanisms in place offline that keep people in-check & prevent accusations of wrongdoing from spiralling out of control? Some that come to mind for me are (1) enforceable community rules & norms (2) commonly understood social contexts (3) the presence of authority figures (4) personal relationships that develop between individuals (5) the power of social ostracism Even in some offline spaces (like academia & activist spaces) things can become heated and spiral out of control, but I think this generally does not happen offline so much because of how profoundly context-rich most of our social situations are. Online spaces/communities are generally context-poor by comparison and are much more prone to actions/reactions that are lacking in balance, perspective, proportion, etc. This is exceptionally true once we start to introduce issues of violation and trauma (like sexual harassment) into online spaces. My guess is that over time our online spaces have and will conitnue to become more context-rich so that these responses become more controlled and measured.

@Parththakkar12 I have a black face mask I bought online that has a zipper in place of a smile. A few people have found this to be humorous. I like that I have been able, in this small way, to brighten people's day.