It hurts to admit some of these things.

Below are some important ideas that deserve more attention and explicit discussion. They are organized under three general topics: discourse, culture, and policy. We hope you will find them thought provoking and consider contacting us to share your views. As this website grows, we will add more topic categories, ugly truths, and links to essays about these issues.

On discourse:

⇒  Irony and cynicism have their place, but they’ve gotten us into trouble.

Irony can be fun and clever; it can help us laugh at ourselves and shine a smiling light on problems that might otherwise make us frown. But, like cynicism, irony can erode the will to take important things seriously and the idealism necessary to strive for the seemingly impossible. Right now, we need more earnest diligence.

⇒  Although some privileged people have failed to treat working class Americans with the dignity they deserve, many of the recent attacks on “the establishment” are specious acts of hypocrisy.

Elected officials who rail against the “establishment” are part of the elite, as are millionaire corporate leaders. Virtually all authority figures try to spread ideas they believe to be important, and the best ones typically come from elite thinkers — even if they resist using that label themselves.

⇒  What’s called “political correctness” is complicated, and much of it is good.

If political correctness means calling out racism, it’s good. And if it means demanding more than lip service to equal treatment, then that’s good, too. It it means smug condescension, it’s bad. And if it entails a tin ear to the painful disorientation that has accompanied rapid social change, it’s also bad. The phrase, which started as a wry joke among liberals, has become a shifting Rorscharch test of little reliable meaning.

On culture:

⇒  Our culture has eroded its expectation that adults should aspire to sober maturity and shared sacrifice.

There’s plenty of blame to go around — childrearing practices, widespread affluence, dysfunctional politics, economic dislocation, enhanced safety net, etc. — and the precise causes are hard to pin down. But perhaps we need to revive what it means to grow up: work hard, take the high road, plan for the long term, face life’s inevitable adversities, and sacrifice for one’s family and broader community. Can patriotism once again demand that we take our medicine and do the right thing for future generations?

⇒  Because human happiness depends so heavily on subjective expectations and a person’s relative status to others, raising everyone’s standard of living cannot by itself remedy social tensions.

Before the discovery of electricity, for example, no one felt deprived for lacking a refrigerator or air conditioner, let alone a smart phone. Children who grew up poor in self-contained neighborhoods 75 years ago rarely “felt” poor because everyone around them lived the same way. For better or worse, modern communication technology has made it simple to compare our circumstances with others’ and made our desire and ability to be happy with our status quo much more challenging. Identify politics can exacerbate this problem.

⇒  Those of us with average skills can’t truly know what it’s like to possess outstanding talents at a given task.

Can you imagine being able to paint like Rembrandt? Design a rocket? Play the guitar like Jimi Hendrix? Dive with three twists from a ten-meter platform? Perform brain surgery? This gap in understanding holds true for intelligence, too, and creates an enormous communications challenge between ordinary thinkers and people lucky enough to have gifted and informed minds. Great educators can help bridge this gap.

On policy:

⇒  As a society, we spend too much money on end-of-life medical care.

In 2008, Medicare paid $50 billion just for doctor and hospital bills during the last two months of patients’ lives — more than the budget of the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Education. Roughly one-quarter of traditional Medicare spending for health care is for services provided to Medicare beneficiaries in their last year of life — a proportion that has remained steady for decades. Can we have a serious debate about this problem without being accused of proposing “death panels”?

⇒  Compared with earlier times, our present culture has largely given up on using shame to encourage responsible behavior.

Teen-age mothers, for example, used to be sent away to special “homes” to give birth to their children, who would be given up for adoption. Now unwed mothers are much more common and rarely criticized. Many responsible, affluent liberals value two-parent families and succeed in keeping their own families intact, but are hesitant to say anything publicly against unwed mothers. Why? Can liberals and conservatives find a way to speak out against unwed motherhood while still providing an adequate safety net to the children born to such parents? (According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of 2004 “[t]wenty-nine percent of female-headed families with no spouse present were in poverty, compared with 5 percent of married-couple families.”)

Can you add to this list? Can you write a short essay about any of these topics? Contact us to share your thoughts.