The road to perdition

If you don't know what that happens to be, look it up, because we're all on it.

If you think that we, as a society, just might be in a death spiral these days, you are far from alone. This dismal perspective is relatively new to me, as I came late to it.

Before 2020, you’d have had a rough time convincing me that our best days were behind us. I used to counter that argument with the history of the early 20th century—specifically the dark years of the Great Depression through the end of World War II. Anyone alive during that time might have reasonably believed that the world was on the verge of collapse. Most portents would have indicated that pessimism about the direction of things was warranted.

But that apocalypse never materialized. In fact, humanity made progress in leaps and bounds in the decades after WWII. We achieved significant headway in eradicating the social ills of hunger, bigotry, poverty, and racism and advanced the human condition in numerous other ways. We reached outward with space science and technology to put humans on the moon. We reached inward, manipulating the quantum realm, to invent transistors and chips. We then built computers and connected them with the Internet. While the 20th century may not have had the most auspicious of beginnings, the latter half of it was truly remarkable by any reasonable standard of human achievement.

So, I've always been a better-days-ahead kind of guy—until now. These days, I’m just not so sure anymore. It’s not that the problems that we face now are any greater than before; it’s that our ability to respond to them just isn’t what it used to be. It seems to be mostly downhill since the beginning of the 21st century.

Last week I wrote about the challenges faced by my parents’ generation vs. those faced by my children’s. This piece evidently hit a nerve. Running on Empty is now the second-most-read piece in the 3+ year history of Howlin’. Many, besides just me, are apparently perplexed by the distressing juxtaposition of the struggle against evil that was poised to destroy the free world eight decades ago with today’s existential struggle to figure out which public bathroom to use.

My parents’ generation, after saving the world from tyranny, returned home and set about building the most prosperous, free nation in human history. The United States was a juggernaut in education, science and technology, diplomacy, medicine, and economics, and through all of this, we developed a nation that was the envy of the world.

But that was then; this is now. Eight decades later, our system of public education is an unfunny joke, our economy is faltering from self-inflicted wounds, and we are getting smacked in the head in the fields of medicine, science, and technology by geopolitical adversaries. These days, there are compelling reasons to doubt the efficacy of local, state, and national government across our country. Ronald Reagan was spot on when he said that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

But our failures are not all about government. The factors leading us down the road to perdition are complex. But I’m reasonably sure that one of the first billboards along the way reads, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

A mistake my parents’ generation made was to make life too easy for my generation, the Boomers. We then replicated and greatly amplified that mistake when raising our kids. Not everyone, mind you, but enough to matter. As a result, over the intervening decades between the Greatest Generation and Generation Alpha, many behaviors—greed, dishonesty, cheating, selfishness, indolence, irresponsibility, and general stupidity—things that were once considered vices have now become habits. That’s not good.

You can’t sustain a modern, free society without some ability for citizens to self-regulate. If, sans that, you set about mediating every human interaction with laws and regulations, the length of the scroll where they are all written down would stretch from here to the heliopause at the edge of the solar system. This is a problem. The prevalent but utterly self-defeating ethos that if it isn’t against the law, it must be OK—that’s on us. Government may be generally incompetent and enamored of all the wrong things, but in a democracy, one way or another, we are the ones who let things get out of hand. Our government isn’t anointed; it’s elected. Elected officials are mostly just in the business of making sure that we have plenty of ammo to shoot ourselves in the foot.

We’re pretty good at that. Consider education, once one of our greatest national strengths. I entered first grade in 1962 and graduated high school in 1974. These were the golden years of American public education. During those twelve years, I attended three different schools in two states, but all of them shared high academic standards.

Schools were a lot different back then than they are now. You didn’t miss school without consequences. You did your homework (yes, that was a thing). And if you came home with a report card full of bad grades, it probably wasn’t going to go well for you. You worked hard in school because that’s how you got ahead. That was the social contract: show up, work hard, keep after it when the going gets tough, and in the end you’ll secure a place in society that will enable you to lead a good life. There was accountability, but also reward. And for many decades, it worked.

Then came the Feds and their friends in academia and teachers unions who never heard of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The federal government has been involved in education all the way back to the days of Andrew Johnson in the 19th century, but mostly in a data-gathering role. In the 1970s, the Office of Education had 3,000 employees and an annual budget of $12 billion. Then President Jimmy Carter, in what many saw as a move to garner favor with teachers’ unions, recommended elevating the Office of Education to cabinet-level status. A year later, in 1980, Congress appropriated to the newly promoted Department of Education and its now 14,000 employees an annual budget of $14 billion. The explosive growth and concomitant reach of the Department of Education heralded not a boom in learning and achievement, but a decline. Education has been mostly going the wrong way ever since.

The now $268.4 billion DoEd response to alarming declines in achievement? Figure out what we are doing wrong and fix it? Train teachers more effectively? Examine curriculum? Hold students, parents and schools accountable? Stop social promotion?

Nah. It was to make those problematic standardized tests, the ones that show that our system of education is failing, just go away. In education, according to many professionals, you address problems by denying they exist.

So here we are, five decades later, and the current big accomplishments in education are college graduates who have never read a book and cheating with AI. All of this, of course, is a national disgrace.

When a significant number of college graduates can’t read or comprehend anything much more complicated than a bumper sticker, much less possess some knowledge of art, literature, mathematics, and science, the gig is simply up. If you, as an educator, are unable to prevent your students from cheating, whether it's through AI, plagiarism, or passing notes under the table, you should consider finding a new career.

Academic cheating is a pet peeve of mine. Impotent whining about it still makes me want to drive a railroad spike through my kneecap. Don’t whine; do something about it. I taught at a university for about 25 years. During that time I encountered every type of cheating that you can imagine (and some you probably can’t). If you didn’t find it, it was, in my experience, simply because you weren’t looking.

Cheating has and will always be around. It’s just more prevalent now because it’s a) easier to get away with than ever, and b) seldom a career-ending move even if you do get caught. Neither of these were true in any of my classes. If you cheated, I was probably going to find out about it. And when I did, it was a bad day for you.

I once discovered that a group of international students had paid hackers in China and India to infiltrate testing software that I’d helped to develop with a well-known publisher. We discovered this by observing that a number of students who never attended as much as a single lecture were getting an improbable 100% on exams taken at a testing center. Video footage revealed that these students sat at terminals, pressing the enter key as many times as there were questions to answer. It took a few weeks to diagnose, but it turns out that these students had paid thousands of dollars to create dual login capabilities for their accounts. Someone offsite keyed in the correct answers; all they did was hit enter.

Yes, this took a lot of time to figure out. But it was important. It was going to be a cold day in hell before I’d let students like these get one over on not only me but every student who was doing things the right way. The problem was that I had zero administrative support. They just wanted the whole thing not to interrupt the international student ATM machine. I also discovered that this same software, which was widely used, had been compromised for more than one course. Nobody else seemed to know or care anything about it.

If more instructors and administrators did the jobs they are paid for, cheating wouldn’t be as much of an issue. Student cheating is facilitated by laziness and a lack of ethical standards throughout the system. It’s at least as much of an administrative issue as it is a student issue. It’s less an issue of can’t than won’t.

The faculty member who perennially was voted instructor of the year in the College of Science and Engineering where I taught was popular because his median grade in a gateway course was B+. He accomplished this by allowing students to repeat the exact same assignment any number of times until they were satisfied with the grade. He couldn’t have cared less what his students did as long as the accolades kept rolling in. That’s one way that you manage to graduate students who haven’t accomplished anything.

But let’s just say that cheating isn’t a problem in education. We’re still screwed. Because we have very few, if any, unfungible standards in education these days, our principal educational export is incompetence. And thanks to social promotion, we export this incompetence paired with the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

You can find ample insights into this merely by exploring the comments section of any Internet forum. Why spend years studying, as I’ve heard tell, when you can figure out everything with Wikipedia and a few books (if you can read them)?

Dunning-Kruger is kind of fun when it’s just a few knuckleheads on the Interwebs, but it’s incredibly dangerous when it spreads like a contagion through an entire civilization. The antidote to faux expertise is supposed to be actual expertise. Unfortunately, most of what used to constitute expertise passed away during the COVID pandemic—mostly by suicide.

Things just aren’t what they used to be when it comes to experts. Those who were useful, ethical and reliable are fading away. Their replacements matriculated through a lousy system of education and ply their trade in flawed institutions. It’s slim pickings. I’d like to see a show of hands right now for everyone who thinks that we should replace tributes to Neil Armstrong with tributes to Anthony Fauci.

So yeah, we’re in a bind. When it comes to using education to better the human condition, we have no clue and no idea of even where to look for a clue. Thank you, Department of Education, teachers unions, and higher education. Someone, somewhere, is surely singing your praises, but it’s likely in Russian or Chinese.

As much as the failure of education has led us down the road to perdition, we got here with much more than professional hubris and incompetence; there’s a fair amount of moral failure as well. Perhaps the worst is see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. No one cares about trouble anymore until it arrives at their front door and won’t go away on its own.

There’s plenty of that. Meth and fentanyl are in every US community. Every burg with more than 50 people has a vape shop, a CBD dispensary and a payday lender before they get a post office. Children are inundated with unhelpful messages from the media. The homeless and those with untreated mental illness are everywhere, and as far as I can tell, no one is doing much about it.

Untreated mental illness may be our greatest challenge. It’s even more ubiquitous than drugs (though the two are not unrelated). Yet many will acknowledge that untreated mental illness even exists only after a crazy person attacks a spouse in their living room with a hammer.

It wasn’t always this way. Decades ago, we had a system of institutions for the treatment of the mentally ill. Because these folks are easy targets for abuse, it occurred. Instead of addressing the abuse issues, we decided that mental institutions violated human rights. We turned the mentally ill loose to fend for themselves on the streets with the same rights as everyone else but with only a fraction of the necessary skills to survive independently. This was never a great solution.

So that’s how we find ourselves in a world of suck. The moment one walks out the front door these days, they encounter an indifferent world that grinds everyone with mendacity, stupidity and cruelty into soullessness. The same species that sent people to the moon and back six times decades ago and can now share reams of information around the world instantly drives past mentally ill people sleeping on sidewalks every day without noticing it or caring if they do. It’s just too difficult of a problem for most people to confront or even contemplate. This should be unacceptable. Instead, it’s just the way things are.

There’s a woman in my community, Nicky, who was, at one time, a well-educated middle-class housewife with a good family and many friends. Medication effectively controlled her mental issues and allowed her to lead a normal life. But, as happens often, she didn’t like the way her meds made her feel, so over time she quit taking them. She was soon divorced and disowned, famous for showing up at city council meetings raging about something weird that the voices in her head insisted be addressed by a row of Napoleon Dynamite-style apparatchiks. The only good thing about this was that even handicapped with full-blown schizophrenia, she was still the smartest person in the room.

Nicky logs about twenty miles a day walking around our town yelling at traffic and protesting things that no one else understands. Over the years, many have tried to get her the help she needs. She’s a good worker, and she’ll do an impressive job of general chores if you can tolerate the lectures that go along with hiring her. One of these folks, a police officer friend of mine, lives along her daily route. He gets to deal with her more than most. As much as he’d like to help her, which is a lot, he lacks the one thing that would make this possible—the ability to take her before a judge and have her confined to a mental institution until she got her mind right.

Until something like that happens, all of the small acts of compassion directed towards the Nickys of the world amount to little more than tears in rain. That’s the bigger point here. None of us, alone, can deal with mental illness, homelessness, incompetence and much of what is dragging us all down like a lead balloon on Jupiter. Political correctness, misplaced priorities and blatant dumbassery robbed us of the tools that used to enable individuals to make a difference. Until we fix that, our problems are bigger than any of us as individuals.

All of this bugs me a lot. I have not lived almost seven decades just to watch everything go to hell in my final years. I tried to make the world a better place; I really did. I thought that teaching the wonders of the universe to university students would make them curious and inquisitive and trusting of science. COVID burned that to the ground. I thought that creating unforgettable experiences for people would foster fellowship. Instead, it fostered arrogance and ego. I thought that setting good examples would be good, but no one was paying any attention. These days, I’m not sure that I ever accomplished anything.

This is why I decided, after years of thinking about it, to spend my retirement fostering children in my home. Fostering is the one thing that I’ve hit upon that enables me as an individual to make the world a better place. It’s how I can look in the mirror each day and live with what I see. Bitter years of experience have taught me that I can't save the world, but I can sure save little parts of it. Fostering is my act of defiance against a world that wants everything to suck, or at least just doesn’t care if it does. If that’s all there is for me, it’s going to have to be enough.

That’s my path off the road to perdition. Yours is up to you. All I know is this: unless enough of us pull our heads out of our fannies and get after things that need getting after, it just might be all over for us except for the slow walk and sad singing.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com