This may go down in history as the era when buzzwords replaced thinking. Like other organs that shrink from lack of use, the human brain may get smaller and smaller with the passing generations.
One of the most widely used set of buzzwords is "role models." Grown men and women, many of them with Ph.D.s, go around speaking glowingly and mystically of "role models" - just as if they actually knew what they were talking about.The very thought of evidence never crosses their minds. Somehow "everybody knows" that students need teachers of the same race, sex, culture and who knows what else. Even to ask for evidence is enough to get you branded as "insensitive" - if not worse.
Some of the most spectacular rises of groups from poverty to prosperity have occurred among people who grew up without seeing a "role model" in a month of Sundays. The first generation of Jewish immigrant children in New York were taught by Irish Catholic teachers. The first generation of Japanese American children to go to school in the United States found no Japanese American teachers there - and saw no Japanese American engineers, mathematicians or scientists in the world around them.
In Harlem back in the 1930s and early 1940s, virtually all the schoolteachers were white. Yet the black kids of that era performed as well as the white immigrant kids of New York's lower east side - and some years the kids in Harlem did better. They were by no means as badly educated as ghetto kids in today's era, when "role models" and other mindless words and policies have taken over.
One of the other buzzwords replacing thought today is "diversity." A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision - Metro Broadcasting vs. FCC - used the word "diversity" 21 times, not counting several uses of "diverse" and "diversification." None of these uses was defined, much less backed up with evidence.
Even the Supreme Court doesn't have to think anymore, when it can use buzzwords instead.
On our leading college campuses, "diversity" is used more widely than ketchup. At Stanford, a memo from on high tells us to take "diversity" into account when hiring employees. Hey, we don't have quotas. We have "diversity."
None of the buzzwords so captures the spirit of our times as "non-judgemental." No one even notices that it is a complete contradiction in terms to say that we should be non-judgmental. If we are really non-judgmental, then there is nothing that we "should" do - or shouldn't do.
Leaving logic aside, however, there is the question of what we are to do with our brain cells if we are not to exercise judgment. It seems a shame that all that space between our ears should be going to waste. Without all those useless brain cells, you could use that space to store things. It would be like a portable glove compartment.
Maybe that is what posterity will do, after brains become smaller.
Like most buzzwords, "non-judgmental" doesn't honestly mean what it says. "Non-judgmental" means that you should excuse all sort of inexcusable behavior and blame "society" instead of the person who did rotten things.
"Society" is itself one of the great buzzwords serving as a substitute for thought. Variations like "our society" or "American society" give you a clue as to where this buzzword is heading. Evils common to the human race all over the planet are to be blamed on the special features of the United States.
We need to stop using pretty words like "diversity" to describe separate provincialisms. We need to stop using dogmas about "role models" to reinforce those separate provincialisms. We need to hold people personally responsibel for what they do, not let them cop out by talking about "society."
If we start using our brains again, posterity may lose an opportunity to have glove compartments in their heads. But that's a chance worth taking.