Rod Dreher's Blog, page 127

The Quiet Fury Of Americans

R.R. Reno has been on a roadtrip across the country. What stands out in his mind is the anger of the people. Excerpts:

I don’t believe anecdotes predict elections. In any event, an election forecast was not the object of my travels. I wanted to get a sense of our national mood. I anticipated encountering heightened emotions. Most commentators have observed that our country is increasingly polarized. But I was taken aback by the intensity.

He says that he only spoke to people on the right, but that it is clear that the left too is angry. More:

When I asked about the election mood in their communities, they reported that political realities are increasingly hidden from view. One said, “Right now journalists seem ignorant of what most people are thinking, perhaps willfully so.” When I pressed him about why that’s the case, he replied, “In all fairness, most people won’t say what they’re thinking. It’s too dangerous.”

Of course it’s too dangerous. Say anything that gets you on the wrong side of a leftist with access to social media, and that might well be the end of your career, or your good name.

This week the Cato Institute came out with a new survey, conducted for it by YouGov, showing that cancel culture is no phantom. Excerpts:

A new Cato national survey finds that self‐​censorship is on the rise in the United States. Nearly two-thirds—62%—of Americans say the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive. The share of Americans who self‐​censor has risen several points since 2017 when 58% of Americans agreed with this statement.

These fears cross partisan lines. Majorities of Democrats (52%), independents (59%) and Republicans (77%) all agree they have political opinions they are afraid to share.

Look at this: the only group in which a majority believe they can speak their minds in public is “strong liberals”:

I completely understand this result. The left is so censorious, and in such a position of cultural power (especially in the media), that you’d have to be a fool not to fear for your livelihood and reputation by voicing an unwoke opinion. This is unsustainable. You cannot have a stable country in which so many people are afraid to speak their minds, unless it is a police state.

Here is where it gets even crazier (emphases mind):

The survey found that many Americans think a person’s private political donations should impact their employment. Nearly a quarter (22%) of Americans would support firing a business executive who personally donates to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign. Even more, 31% support firing a business executive who donates to Donald Trump’s re‐​election campaign.

Support rises among political subgroups. Support increases to 50% of strong liberals who support firing executives who personally donate to Trump. And more than a third (36%) of strong conservatives support firing an executive for donating to Biden’s presidential campaign.

Young Americans are also more likely than older Americans to support punishing people at work for personal donations to Trump. Forty‐​four percent (44%) of Americans under 30 support firing executives if they donate to Trump. This share declines to 22% among those over 55 years old—a 20‐​point difference. An age gap also exists for Biden donors, but is less pronounced. Twenty‐​seven percent (27%) of Americans under 30 support firing executives who donate to Biden compared to 20% of those over 55—a 7‐​point difference.

Firing people for donating to either a Republican or a Democratic presidential candidate! Making it impossible for them to earn bread for their families. What kind of sick country are these people — especially young people — creating for us all?

The only number I would feel comfortable with on either side is zero percent. But do note that far more strong liberals are willing to see someone fired for their political contributions than strong conservatives:

If you are like me, and work in a profession or industry dominated by strong liberals, this is terrible news.

More:

Nearly a third (32%) of employed Americans say they personally are worried about missing out on career opportunities or losing their job if their political opinions became known. These results are particularly notable given that most personal campaign contributions to political candidates are public knowledge and can easily be found online.

And it’s not just one side of the political spectrum: 31% of liberals, 30% of moderates and 34% of conservatives are worried their political views could get them fired or harm their career trajectory. This suggests that it’s not necessarily just one particular set of views that has moved outside of acceptable public discourse. Instead these results are more consistent with a “walking on eggshells” thesis that people increasingly fear a wide range of political views could offend others or could negatively impact themselves.

And check this out — boy, do I relate:

One more quote:

These data suggest that a significant minority of Americans from all political persuasions and backgrounds—particularly younger people who have spent more time in America’s universities—are most likely to hide their views for fear of financial penalty.

A particularly surprising finding was that Americans who have these concerns are somewhat more likely to support the firing of Biden or Trump donors. A third (33%) among those who worry that their political views could harm their employment supported firing either Biden or Trump donors, compared to 24% of those who were not worried about their views impacting their jobs. This suggests that those who fear reprisal or economic penalty for their political views are not entirely distinct from those who seek the same for others.

Read the whole survey. 

What is wrong with us? This is awful. I do not want to live in a country in which anybody, left or right, has to live in fear of losing his or her job because of their political contributions or opinions. Yes, the greater threat demonstrably comes from the “strong liberal” left, but there is nothing in this survey to make conservatives proud. What to make of the fact that so many people most afraid of being fired over their politics believe that the Other Guy should be fired over his politics?

Again: this is not sustainable. We cannot stay together as a democratic country if people are so damn afraid of each other, and of speaking their minds. The Cato survey shows that these fears are by no means baseless. It ought to appall each and every one of us that so many Americans are so afraid of either exercising free speech, or tolerating free speech.

I wish I could say that I see a way out of this in the near term. In fact, I believe it’s going to get worse. Live Not By Lies is based in part on the belief that the left within corporations and institutions (not limited to the state) is going to double down on surveillance of and punishment for wrongthink. We are going to have to learn how to defy it when we can, and work constantly to undermine the new order at every turn.

But yeah, anger? No wonder people are angry. They have a right to be — on the speech issues, especially those on the conservative side of the spectrum. But this passion is going to destroy us. It already is.

The post The Quiet Fury Of Americans appeared first on The American Conservative.

Woking Up At Baylor

A lot of people, I find, still can’t process how deep and how far wokeness has spread. This morning a student at Baylor University, the Baptist school deep in the heart of Texas, e-mailed some information that the university’s president, Linda Livingstone, had sent out to the Baylor community, on the subject of how they should all confront the white supremacist within. The reader writes:

Since Baylor is considered one of the leading conservative-leaning, Christian-leaning higher ed institutions in the U.S., I thought this would be of interest to some of your readers. It is of great interest to me, as I’ve hoped for years to have a career in higher education. Watching the erosion of Christian institutions in real time is incredibly disheartening.

The President’s weekly letter to all students included several sections, one of which stated, “As Baylor walks through the process of acknowledging our historical connections to slavery and planning for our future, it’s an opportunity for all of us to engage in self-reflection and education regarding issues of race.”

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This has been the tenor of many of Baylor’s statements on the issue of race, and it didn’t surprise me. But she also linked to an article posted on Baylor’s website and later posted on Baylor’s twitter account. In that article (linked here), the author [Kerri Fisher] (who is a lecturer at Baylor) recommends that students evaluate their own racism using, among other things, “Tema Okun’s characteristics of white supremacy culture.”

The student goes on:

The author doesn’t link to these “characteristics” (even though she links to everything else in her article), but they’re easy to find online. You can read them here, but they include things like “individualism,” “objectivity,” logical thinking, memos, and “requiring people to think in a linear fashion.”

I was surprised to see that the highest levels of Baylor’s administration are recommending this kind of nonsense. I wrote President Livingston to voice my concerns but never heard back.

If you decide to mention this anywhere online, I’d rather not have my name publicly posted. I’m about to finish my degree, and I don’t want to jeopardize that. But I thought parents of prospective students, along with prospective donors, should know about this.

That Tema Okun list really is something. It’s the same thing as that controversial Smithsonian poster about “whiteness” that caused such a ruckus a week or two ago. Reading the list, there are some things on it that I would agree can be problematic about a culture, but it’s nonsense to claim that as “white supremacy culture.” It’s the kind of culture that, for better and for worse, both produced and emerged from the Enlightenment. Is that “white supremacy”? Well, are science and technology white supremacy?

At their worst, these characteristics (the ones on the Tema Okun list) lead to the stereotypical “Organization Man.” But at best, this is why organizations and societies that hold these values  get things done.

Look at this one:

Perfectionism

– little appreciation expressed among people for the work that others are doing; appreciation that is expressed usually directed to those who get most of the credit anyway

– more common is to point out either how the person or work is inadequate

– or even more common, to talk to others about the inadequacies of a person or their work without ever talking directly to them

– mistakes are seen as personal, i.e. they reflect badly on the person making them as opposed to being seen for what they are — mistakes

– making a mistake is confused with being a mistake, doing wrong with being wrong

– little time, energy, or money put into reflection or identifying lessons learned that can improve practice, in other words little or no learning from mistakes

– tendency to identify what ís wrong; little ability to identify, name, and appreciate what ís right

Antidotes: develop a culture of appreciation, where the organization takes time to make sure that people’s work and efforts are appreciated; develop a learning organization, where it is expected that everyone will make mistakes and those mistakes offer opportunities for learning; create an environment where people can recognize that mistakes sometimes lead to positive results; separate the person from the mistake; when offering feedback, always speak to the things that went well before offering criticism; ask people to offer specific suggestions for how to do things differently when offering criticism

OK, let’s assume for the sake of argument that “Perfectionism,” as defined here, is actually a problem within an organization. How on earth is it “white supremacist”? Why racialize it at all? If this is a question of management philosophy, the “perfectionism” strategy, as defined here, could bring about a culture of discouragement within a culture ruled by it. But going too far in the “antidotes” could create a professional culture of mediocrity, in which making everybody feel good about themselves is more important than doing the work that the office is supposed to do.

Again, though, I fail to see what any of this has to do with racism and anti-racism. And if it does, is it not embarrassing to black people that mediocrity is construed by these academics as somehow a value of black culture? Can you imagine black jazz musicians adopting that approach to their art? Of course you can’t, because they’re serious about what they do. Where is this crap coming from?

Baylor President Linda Livingstone and social work Prof. Kerri Fisher recommend Suzanne Pharr’s Mechanisms of Oppression. Go ahead, take a look. This is the opening paragraph of Pharr’s essay:

It is virtually impossible to view one oppression, such as sexism or homophobia, in isolation because they are all connected: sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, ableism, anti-Semitism, ageism. They are linked by a common origin-economic power and control-and by common methods of limiting, controlling and destroying lives. There is no hierarchy of oppressions. Each is terrible and destructive. To eliminate one oppression successfully, a movement has to include work to eliminate them all or else success will always be limited and incomplete.

How do you justify running a Baptist university according to this Marxist framework (that is, the idea that all social phenomena must be understood as economic at base)? Something has to give. Read the entire essay, and understand that this is what the president of Baylor is urging students to read in order to understand themselves and their institution better. If Pharr’s analysis is correct, then the only thing to do is to dismantle Baylor as it historically has existed. In order to eliminate racism, then every other -ism must also be eliminated in order to create utopia.

This is not Oberlin or UC Berkeley. This is Baylor, in Waco. Are there no Christian resources that Baylor’s students might read to gain a better understanding of the sin of racism? Isn’t it interesting that Baylor’s president turned to these particular sources — truly poisonous ones, in my view — to inspire student reflection about racism?

It’s important for traditional Christians and conservatives to know what’s going on in our institutions, and not to make any assumptions based on past experience or wishful thinking.

UPDATE: The more I think about it, the crazier this all seems. Did the president of Baylor not think to check with theology professors about Christian contributions to the racism discussion from which students might benefit? Professors on other faculties? After all, Baylor is a Christian university with a seminary on campus. The Civil Rights Movement was led by the black church! And yet, the president of Baylor defers to a social work professor who recommends the same trite progressive cant you can get at any other college. It’s almost as if Baylor’s distinctly Christian identity is only incidental, and maybe even something embarrassing to be overcome.

UPDATE.2: Strong comment e-mailed to me from Prof. Perry Glanzer, Resident Scholar at Baylor’s  Institute for Studies of Religion. He gives me permission to publish this under his name:

Your criticisms of Baylor University and President Livingstone regarding the lack of Christian theological thinking are not surprising as someone on the faculty.  Baylor leadership has given plenty of rhetoric but little concrete action to support to this particular element of the Christian mission (a point I have continually made privately to the administration and now feel free to make publicly due to the lack of action). Unlike many Catholic universities, they do not have a Vice-President for Mission. They did have someone in a similar position, but President Livingstone demoted him on the grounds that all faculty are in charge of the mission.  Thus, the administration lacks someone at the highest levels of leadership who would interrogate this kind of message through a sophisticated Christian lens.

There have also been no recent or significant upper level administrative initiatives to help faculty think through their scholarship, teaching and service from a Christian perspective.  As a result, it is no surprise that we hire faculty who identify as Christians but think like Marxists when it comes to the noble cause of racial justice.  There is a great faculty development program but little of it relates to how faculty might learn to interrogate their discipline through the lens of Christian theology.  The incentives structure at the university does not reward distinctly Christian scholarship, teaching or service (only progress toward R1 status metrics).  When the leadership does not support efforts for faculty to think through how Christ might animate learning, this is the result you get–sloppy thinking and intellectual discipleship about one of the most important topics and causes of the day. The vitally important cause of racial justice deserves our best Christian thinking and not sloppy borrowing from or links to warmed-over Marxism (for a good counter-example of a distinctly Christian approach to the subject, I invite you to see the chapter one of my graduate students wrote in Christ-Enlivened Student Affairs: A Guide to Christian Thinking and Practice in the Field ).

We must and can do better.

UPDATE.3: If you were waiting on Baylor professor Alan Jacobs to speak his mind on this issue, wait no more. Excerpt:

In my judgment, it is the opportunity to receive and extend forgiveness that is the greatest possible inducement to repentance and amendment of life, and a shared repentance and amendment of life make genuine community possible. I have many colleagues who believe the same, and students at Baylor can find us. If you’re white, we won’t tell you that you haven’t been the beneficiary of a social order in which it has always been harder to be black. You have. We won’t tell you that you needn’t think about racism, that race doesn’t matter, that good people are colorblind, because those are easy evasions. We won’t despise or mock those who demand “social justice,” because we know that the prophets of Israel call for justice to roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. We will encourage you to reflect seriously on all such matters.

But we will also tell you that you have something more and better to look forward to than a lifetime of being policed for microaggressions. We will echo St. Paul and tell you that we Christians forgive others because God in Christ has forgiven us. We will tell you that your shortcomings and failures can never outpace the mercy of God, who loves his wayward children, all of them, and will someday wipe from their eyes every tear. And this is the great hope of those who wound as well as those who are wounded.

But does Baylor University, as an institution, believe in any of this? If so, why is none of it ever mentioned in our administration’s public statements about race and racism? Why do we strive to build an entire system of dealing with racism that doesn’t touch on the Christian Gospel at any point?

Read it all. That last question really is key. Why would the president of a Christian university ignore, you know, the Christian faith when counseling students at this Christian university on how to think about race in a Christian way? Read Jacobs’s entire post for his depressing list of what students at Baylor are taught by the Baylor administration about race.

UPDATE.4: George Yancey, an African-American sociologist (and sometime commenter here) who has recently joined the faculty at Baylor, wrote this yesterday for the Gospel Coalition. It’s very good. Excerpts:

DiAngelo’s basic thesis is that whites have been socialized to have “a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement.” All whites, then, are racist, but not overtly so; they are racist in that whites are complicit in society’s institutionalized racism. And their defensiveness about this—their “fragility”—needs to be broken down, DiAngelo argues, if we’re to move beyond a white-dominated society. This isn’t the totality of her argument, but it’s a key point I’d like to discuss.

Though I support some of DiAngelo’s points, our disagreement is pronounced. As an African American who has not only done academic work on these issues but had to navigate the issues of racism personally, I recognize the irony of reviewing a book by a white woman. But as a professor in the social sciences, I believe she provides little empirical work to support her assertions. The work on implicit bias is questionable at best. Implicit bias may be real, but it doesn’t seem a major factor in why people discriminate against others. Another empirical problem is her lack of research for the unique defensiveness of white people. Where’s the cross-racial research indicating fragility is unique to them?

How can we test for white fragility? As far as I can tell, the only way a white person can’t be “fragile” is if they agree with the accusations brought against them. Any reaction other than compliance is taken as evidence of white fragility. This is not useful as a conceptual tool for hypothesis-testing.

What about empirical results of anti-racism techniques? The type of diversity training that emerges from such efforts has been shown to have little long-term effect on prejudice. Further, focusing on privilege can actually decrease sympathy for poor white people while not raising the overall sympathy for black people. Research seems to indicate that taking the route of DiAngelo is not lessening our racial hostility—but it may be making that hostility worse.

The concept of white fragility is an academic way to tell white people to be quiet and listen. Bottling up the expressions of white people, though, is not the path to addressing our society’s racial alienation. Indeed, it’s a path that will continue to frustrate attempts at correcting racism’s genuine effects.

More:

It’s well established that we have a racial history in which white people have abused people of color—and that this history has yielded a contemporary system in which people of color are often disadvantaged. We need to move from racialized institutions that only benefit the majority to institutions that are fair for everyone.

But proven sociological theories of group interest get in the way of this aim. Why? Because we’ll favor institutional systems that help our own group, even at the expense of other groups.

For white people, given that the status quo works to their advantage, it makes sense that their typical solution is to ignore racial problems. The anti-racism crowd is spot on when they point this out. But what they miss is that group interest affects people of color, too. People of color can also go too far and set up unfair conditions for whites. Group-interest theory indicates that allowing either group total control means that one group will create rules that benefit themselves, while disadvantaging others.

Given group-interest theory, as an African American I shouldn’t feel comfortable living in a society where white people have the final say in race relations. And given the implications of group-interest theory, it’s reasonable for a white person to not feel comfortable with African Americans having complete power either. Indeed, one of the problems of the theory of white fragility and anti-racism is that white people are expected to rely on people of color to not abuse their newfound authority. But such an assumption, empirically speaking, is naive.

Read the whole thing to learn about Prof. Yancey’s suggestions for how to talk through and deal with racism and racial conflict in a Christian way, not in a woke way. George Yancey is a black man and sociologist on the Baylor faculty, and, if you’ve read his commentaries over the years, as I have, you’ll know that he’s a deeply committed orthodox Evangelical Christian. He’s a treasure. Why was he not consulted by the president of Baylor, a Christian university, in seeking out advice for Baylor students on how to think about race and racism? Why was the go-to person a social work professor who doesn’t say a thing about reasoning about race as Christians?

 

The post Woking Up At Baylor appeared first on The American Conservative.

What Is The 1619 Omelet?

If you haven’t yet seen the film Mr. Jones, please do. It’s based on the true story of Gareth Jones, a young Welsh journalist who risked his life to expose the 1930s Ukraine famine engineered by Stalin, and that took the lives of up to 12 million Ukrainians. Stalin aside, the villain of the story is Walter Duranty, the New York Times‘s Pulitzer-winning Moscow correspondent, who deliberately lied about the famine to shield Stalin from Western accountability. In the Times article in which he consciously lied to discredit Gareth Jones’s reporting, Duranty acknowledged that things were not perfect in the Soviet Union, but the great things that Communists were trying to achieve there were worth it. He used the memorable phrase (repeated in the film): “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

In a 2003 piece about Duranty, Arnold Beichman wrote:

In his masterwork about Stalin’s imposed famine on Ukraine, “Harvest of Sorrow,” Robert Conquest has written:

As one of the best known correspondents in the world for one of the best known newspapers in the world, Mr. Duranty’s denial that there was a famine was accepted as gospel. Thus Mr. Duranty gulled not only the readers of the New York Times but because of the newspaper’s prestige, he influenced the thinking of countless thousands of other readers about the character of Josef Stalin and the Soviet regime. And he certainly influenced the newly-elected President Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet Union.

What is so awful about Duranty is that Times top brass suspected that Duranty was writing Stalinist propaganda, but did nothing. In her exposé “Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s man in Moscow,” S.J. Taylor makes it clear that Carr Van Anda, the managing editor, Frederick T. Birchall, an assistant managing editor, and Edwin L. James, the later managing editor, were troubled with Duranty’s Moscow reporting but did nothing about it. Birchall recommended that Duranty be replaced but, says Taylor, “the recommendation fell by the wayside.”

When Duranty of his own volition decided to become a special correspondent on a retainer basis for the New York Times, the newspaper published an editorial reassuring its readers that his reputation as “the most outstanding correspondent of an American newspaper during all the years of his faithful and brilliant work at Moscow will remain unimpaired in the slightest degree by the change now made.” This about a man whom Malcolm Muggeridge, the Manchester Guardian correspondent and Duranty’s contemporary, described as “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism.”

The Times has in recent years forthrightly acknowledged that Duranty was a fraud. As the movie makes clear — and in this it is true to the historical record — is that Duranty’s apologies for Stalin were quite influential in convincing the US to help the Soviet Union, including officially recognizing the Bolshevik government. Duranty did not mind breaking eggs, in terms of using journalism to tell lies, to make an omelet that served his political ends.

In our time, the New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has been celebrated as the genius behind the Times‘s 1619 Project, which is an attempt to — in the Times‘s word — “reframe” American history around slavery. No longer should 1776 be considered the year of America’s birth, but rather 1619, the year the first African slaves were brought to the New World. Jones won the Pulitzer Prize this year for her work on the project. It is based on a fundamental historical falsehood — a malicious and destructive one too: that the purpose of America was to preserve slavery.

A number of historians — none of them conservatives — called Jones and her team at the Times out on this lie (see here for a list of some of the names, and their criticism). This is a lie that could have tremendous consequences. As Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, himself a man of the left, has said:

“To teach children that the American Revolution was fought in part to secure slavery would be giving a fundamental misunderstanding not only of what the American Revolution was all about but what America stood for and has stood for since the Founding.”

But Jones’s lie is politically useful in advancing the identity-politics goals of progressives. Oprah Winfrey and Lionsgate are going to make a series of films and feature television shows based on the 1619 Project. They are changing the cultural memory of Americans, in a way that deceives people about what America was, and is. Nobody can possibly deny that slavery was a terrible stain on this nation, but it is an evil whose existence stood as a rebuke to the Founders’ ideals. It took a Civil War to finally end the malignant institution — but it did end, at the cost of between 600,000 and 750,000 American lives. 

Anyway, Nikole Hannah-Jones is now crawfishing:

This is key:

The fight here is about who gets to control the national narrative, and therefore, the nation’s shared memory of itself. One group has monopolized this for too long in order to create this myth of exceptionalism. If their version is true, what do they have to fear of 1619?

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) July 27, 2020

Wait … what? There is only one national narrative about American history? All white people have a single story to tell about this country? What kind of college-freshman bull is that?

Conor Friedersdorf objected:

I fear anyone, regardless of viewpoint, getting to *control* “the national narrative” or “the nation’s shared memory of itself,” as there is no one correct narrative or shared memory–in a diverse, pluralistic country, unanimity requires coercion + preference falsification https://t.co/tSxrEwaItb

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) July 27, 2020

This is correct. It brings to mind a 1989 essay the black critic Stanley Crouch wrote about Do The Right Thing-era Spike Lee. Excerpts:

But Lee, whose truest gift appears to be comedy, either lacks the intelligence, maturity, and the sensitiv­ity necessary for drama, or hasn’t the courage and the will to give racial confrontation true dramatic complexity. At heart, he is for now a propagandist, one who reduces the world to a shorthand projected with such force that the very power of the projection itself will make those with tall grass for brains bend to the will of the wind. Though there is much cleverness, the film has no feeling for the intricacies of the human spirit on any level other than that of fast-food irony, no sense of the trickiness of both good and evil, none of the emotional scope that brings artistic resonance. Do the Right Thing, for all its wit, is the sort of rancid fairy tale one expects of the racist, whether or not Lee actually is one.

More:

That naïveté, like an intellectual jack-in-the-box bumpkin, periodically popped up through the Black Filmmaker Foundation’s ceremonies. There was much talk of “controlling our images,” a term suggestive of the worst political aspects of black nationalism, one far more dangerous if taken in certain directions than, say, expanding our images. Such “control” without attendant intelligence and moral courage of the sort we saw so little of during the Brawley farce or rarely hear when Louis Farrakhan is discussed, will make little difference, since the problems Afro-Americans presently face ex­tend far beyond the unarguable persistence of a declin­ing racism. Intellectual cowardice, opportunism, and the itch for riches by almost any means necessary define the demons within the black community. The demons are presently symbolized by those black college teachers so intimidated by career threats that they don’t protest students bringing Louis Farrakhan on campus, by men like Vernon Mason who sold out a good reputation in a cynical bid for political power by pimping real victims of racism in order to smoke-screen Tawana Brawley’s lies, by the crack dealers who have wrought unprecedented horrors, and by Afro-fascist race-baiters like Public Ene­my who perform on the soundtrack to Do the Right Thing.

Read the whole thing. It’s interesting to think of Crouch’s lacerating criticism of Lee — which was a brave thing for any critic, especially a black one, to have done back then — in light of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Anyway, the goal of the 1619 Project — as stated by NYT Magazine editor Jake Silverstein — is to “reframe” American history around 1619 as the founding year of the nation, not 1776. No serious person denies the horror of slavery, or its importance to American history. If that’s all the 1619 Project was about — drawing attention to the importance of slavery, and the black experience to American history — who could complain? What makes the 1619 Project stand out is its radical claim that the point of America’s founding was to enslave Africans.

It is simply not true. The reason we’re talking about it now is that Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, is sponsoring legislation that would prohibit the use of federal tax dollars to teach the 1619 Project in American classrooms. Whether or not such legislation is wise is certainly debatable. What’s caused the ruckus is this section from a story in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette:

In the interview, Cotton said the role of slavery can’t be overlooked.

“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,” he said.

Instead of portraying America as “an irredeemably corrupt, rotten and racist country,” the nation should be viewed “as an imperfect and flawed land, but the greatest and noblest country in the history of mankind,” Cotton said.

This is being wildly misconstrued as some sort of justification for slavery. What Cotton is saying simply is that the United States could not have existed if the non-slave states had not agreed to accept the slave states. It was a doomed compromise, a one we eventually had to go to war over, but it launched the country. Cotton is pointing out the tragic nature of the compromise that made America possible as a nation united under the Constitution. He is not defending slavery, which would be as insane morally as it would be politically. He is repeating a similar point that Abraham Lincoln made in an 1855 letter to Joshua Speed, a friend of his who owned slaves:

You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union.

Do you see?

Damon Linker is not buying Nikole Hannah-Jones’s revisionist claim that she sees the 1619 Project as simply adding one more perspective to the mix:

The 1st page of the 1619 Project declares “it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.” How? By “refram[ing] American history,” treating 1619 as “our nation’s birth year,” & by placing slavery “at the very center of our national narrative.” That is not a call to pluralism. https://t.co/BfKg3QKyRb

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) July 27, 2020

It’s not hard to see why Duranty knowingly lied to protect Stalin: he believed that what the Soviet Union stood for — worldwide communism — was so important that the lives of Ukrainians, and the truth about their deaths, were not worth as it. As Fidel Castro would later say of his own communist revolution, history will “absolve” the victors of the eggs they broke on the way to making the omelet. I don’t think that Hannah-Jones is consciously lying. I think she really does believe this fairy tale. What’s hard to figure out is what Hannah-Jones and her supporters want to see come from it. What is their omelet? It will be the undoing of this nation if people come to believe that it is true. Is that what she’s after? If not that, then what?

UPDATE: Reader Sancho comments:

As a historian, and as I’ve said before on this blog, Ida Bae Wells’ [Nikole Hannah-Jones]  complaint about the myth of American exceptionalism is misplaced. One of the many, many problems with her 1619 Project is that ironically, it is simply another version of American exceptionalism. In the standard version of American exceptionalism, America has allegedly been a “city on a hill” from the very beginning. And today, America is a unique country, a force for good in the world like no other. America’s values and institutions are seen as a model for the rest of the world. It is no accident that the standard version of American exceptionalism dovetailed with neoconservativism. On the other hand, the 1619 Project simply inverts this and posits America as founded on the evils of slavery and racism, evils that in one form of the other have supposedly been central to America’s character from the beginning and make America a uniquely negative country. It is also worth pointing out that the 1619 Project is not entirely new. Howard Zinn’s awful book “A People’s History of the United States” paved the way for her years ago. American exceptionalism in all of its forms, either the neoconservative “city on a hill” version or the left-wing version of America as the devil nation that Bell and Zinn peddle, is simplistic, highly selective, ideologically driven, teleological nonsense. It is the very opposite of how best to engage with the past and make sense of it. History is complicated because human beings are complicated. Anyone who tries to make it a “just so” story should be viewed with skepticism.

I appreciate this comment. I hadn’t thought of the issue that way: America as either uniquely good among the nations, or uniquely evil among the nations. It’s just cartoonish, either way.

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

These omelettes have been made before. One is called Haiti. Zimbabwe is another. Since the end of Apartheid, South Africa has been a hopeful counterexample, but its not looking good there either. They now have rolling blackouts, and white farmers have been attacked. Last year Annette Kennealy was beaten to death in her home in the Limpopo province of RSA for calling attention to injustices against white farmers there.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Southern Africa – some months, all told, through the years. I love it. But the same ideology gaining momentum in our country (anti-white racism underwritten by Marxism) is what enmiserated millions of blacks and whites all over southern Africa. ZANU, the ANC,  FRELIMO (in Mozambique)… all were Marxist racists. In shouldn’t need saying, but of course the evil that those chaps perpetrated doesn’t justify whatever evils white rule may have perpetrated before, but that’s not what’s at issue. Two wrongs don’t make a right etc. etc.

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Totalitarianism By ‘Hundreds Of Little Steps’

From a German who lived through Nazism:

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

— Milton Mayer, “They thought they were free: the Germans, 1933-1945” (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017 [1955])

I got this via a reader who sent me this link from Steve Perisho.

An advance reader of Live Not By Lies (

I am a deacon in [deleted] Church, and I received an advanced digital copy of your book. I just wanted to let you know how much of an inspiring and challenging read it was. It reminded me that I have a lot of work to do spiritually (by the Grace of God!) to prepare for the long fight ahead.

Thank you for all the work that you do, your blog has been indispensable in keeping me sane the past couple of months. I can’t tell you how many conservative Christian friends that I grew up with have gone off the deep end on this wokeness stuff. I don’t mean that they’re just anti-Trump or are just to the left of me politically. I mean intensely “anti-racist” to the point where, by reading their Facebook posts, I don’t even recognize them anymore. They almost sound possessed. It’s terrifying and heartbreaking at the same time.

Keep up the good fight! Please pray for me.

Is this happening to you too? I mean, are you noticing your friends behaving in extreme, hard-to-explain ways? A few of you regular commenters here have indicated in your comments on various threads that this is happening in your lives.

One of my sources for Live Not By Lies , an immigrant to America from a Soviet bloc nation, wrote me recently to lament what has happened to one of his American-born children, now in college. He said that a lifetime of growing up in his household, listening to his stories about his communist childhood, had done no good. She is now as militantly woke as any other kid raised in prosperous suburban Blue America; he said that he would not be surprised if she one day denounced him to the authorities, as young people in his native country were encouraged to do to their parents under communism.

Do not forget what the political scientist Zach Goldberg found when he did a Lexis/Nexis database dive on the media’s use of certain key words and concepts. Read the whole thing here. Excerpts:

For the last seven years, the media have been marinating the public mind in these concepts. How did this all of a sudden start happening around 2013? Why did it take off like a rocketship across the media? In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next…

 

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What’s Really Happening In America?

We continue to lose our minds. This weekend, there was a protest by an armed black militant group, the self-titled Not F*cking Around Coalition, in Louisville, KY. One of these very stable geniuses shot a colleague by accident there as they were marching. The NFAC issued a list of demands yesterday:

When backed up by men with loaded guns, this is mafia stuff. I hope no business owner in Louisville complies. But the fact that Louisville business owners now have to decide whether or not to defy a large group of men with loaded guns is insane.

Did you hear about the black militant group shooting one of their own in a public protest in Louisville this weekend? If it hadn’t been from a friend of mine in Louisville, I wouldn’t have heard about it at all.

At least they can count on police protection, unlike the merchants of Seattle, who received this letter from the city’s police chief:

I’m not sure you’ll be able to read that type. The Chief of Police told business owners that the City Council has banned the cops from using pepper spray and less lethal means of protecting property from violent mobs. She adds that starting this weekend, the police will be on “adjusted deployment,” meaning that they will not intervene to protect property now that the City Council has taken away from them the tools to do so without risking life. On Friday night, though, a federal judge issued an emergency injunction prohibiting the City Council’s rule from going into effect. Good thing, too. From Sunday morning’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Seattle police declared a riot Saturday following large demonstrations in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood and deployed flash bangs and pepper spray to try to clear an area near where weeks earlier people had set up an “occupied protest zone” that stretched for several blocks.

Via Twitter, police said they had made more than two dozen arrests for assault on officers, obstruction and failure to disperse. They also said they were “investigating a possible explosive damage” to the walls of the city’s East Precinct police station.

Authorities said rocks, bottles, fireworks and mortars were thrown at officers as they attempted to clear the area over the course of several hours stretching into Saturday night. One officer was hospitalized with a leg injury caused by an explosive.

Earlier, protesters in Seattle broke through a fence where a youth detention facility was being built, with some people setting a fire and damaging a portable trailer, authorities said.

 

The insanity runs deep in Seattle. Independent journalist Christopher Rufo reports:

Seattle is quickly moving forward with its plan to “abolish prisons.”

I’ve received a trove of leaked documents from within the King County Executive’s Office claiming that the justice system is a “white supremacist institution” that must be dismantled.

It’s explosive.

The Amazing Church Forests Of Ethiopia

Reader Ryan Fehrmann sent me a link to a story and a short film about the most incredible and hopeful thing I’ve heard of in a while: the church forests of Ethiopia. 

He said:

The Ethiopian Forest Churches are exactly what the Benedict Option should look like on a conceptual scale: it is not a fleeing from the world but a conserving of the good, true, and beautiful — the faith —  from all that would consume it. As one person in the video says: we build walls not to keep people out, but to prevent the destruction of what is within.

He’s right. The short film is only about nine minutes long, but stop whatever you’re doing and watch it. If you click on the link above, you can watch it in HD. Or here:

You have to click here, though, to read Fred Bahnson’s essay to accompany the film. Excerpts:

When he decided to become a forest ecologist, [Dr.] Alemayehu [Wassie] realized that in order to study Ethiopia’s native forests, he would have to study the forests surrounding churches. Until roughly a hundred years ago, Ethiopia’s northern highlands were one continuous forest, but over time that forest has been continually bisected, eaten up by agriculture and the pressures of a growing population. Now the entire region has become a dry hinterland taken over almost entirely by farm fields. From the air it looks similar to Haiti. Less than three percent of primary forest remains. And nearly all of that three percent, Alemayehu discovered, was only found in forests protected by the church.

“I was amazed to discover that,” he said.

More:

When Alemayehu met Meg at an ecological conference, she introduced him to Google Earth. They estimated that there were nearly twenty thousand tiny church forests in the Ethiopian highlands, scattered like emerald pearls across the brown sea of farm fields, and most of these were no more than eight or ten hectares. While viewing the Google Earth images, Alemayehu and Meg hatched a plan: they would use these images to educate priests, showing them how much forest had been lost, and also how much was still worth saving.

The picked out the dying church forest of Zhara to see if it could be saved, as their pilot project. And:

Zhara was rich in biodiversity. During his initial research Alemayehu counted over forty-six tree species in this one forest alone. Yet it was becoming degraded. “When I first came to Zhara in 2002,” he said, “the forest floor was trampled. Like the dirt floor of a house.” He found no regeneration, no young seedlings emerging. Cattle had trampled or eaten everything within browsing height. A harsh microclimate dominated. Trees on the outer perimeter bordering farm fields were stressed; when Alemayehu returned a year later, some of those border trees had died.

“I said to myself, ‘this forest is not going to last.’”

Look how small the church forest is against the desolation

As part of the pilot project, Alemayehu and Meg offered their first workshop to the priests on how better to conserve their forests, and it was at this workshop that the idea for the wall first arose. It came from the priests themselves. They would enlist local villagers to take stones out of the surrounding farm fields and build a dry-stack stone wall around the forest. Meg raised money for a gate and for trucking the stones. They built the first wall at Zhara in 2010, expanding the forest boundary from eight to ten hectares. Very quickly the process of regeneration began. The inner forest became more secure, the air more conditioned. Birds returned. Wild animals increased. The number of pollinators grew.

The stone wall protected the church forest from the things that were causing it to erode and die off. More:

As we stood beside the wall, a stream of local parishioners came and went through the gate. This is what Alemayehu meant when he described the wall as “porous.” A group of children hopped on the wall and ran down its length to the west until they rounded the corner and were lost to sight. An elderly woman approached. She stopped beside the wall, crossed herself three times, then bowed low at the waist and began to fan her face with both hands, cupping the air and pulling it toward her, as if partaking of some invisible goodness that lay inside the wall. Then she rose and walked solemnly up the forest path. Clearly this was no mere border fence; it was an entrance into the sanctuary.

One more passage:

Churches in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition inherited many of their ideas of sacred space from Judaism. The center of their church, like the metaphorical center of the Jewish temple, is called the qidduse qiddusan, the Holy of Holies. In that center rests the tabot, a replica of the biblical Ark of the Covenant, another borrowed symbol. Only priests can enter the Holy of Holies. Enclosing this sacred center is a larger circle—the meqdes, where people receive communion—and outside that lies a still larger circle called the qine mehelet, the chanting place. All three spheres are contained under the round church roof, but those circles ripple outside the church itself.

Beyond the church building lies the inner wall, which forms a circular courtyard around every church. According to tradition, the proper distance this wall should stand from the church is the armspan of forty angels. During my visits to different churches, I watched many people enter these inner courtyards. Before crossing the threshold, they performed various gestures of piety—crossing themselves three times, dipping a knee, perhaps kissing the wooden doorframe. It was clear to everyone that when you crossed the inner wall, you were entering holy ground.

The brilliant move the priests made was to take the idea of the inner wall and replicate it. Using the same design, they built a second wall of dry-stacked stone just outside the forest boundary, thereby extending the invisible web of sanctity to include the entire forest. Suddenly the holy ground surrounding the church expanded from the size of a backyard to a vast tract of ten, fifty, or even several hundred hectares. Once Zajor’s outer wall was complete, people could no longer cut trees along the perimeter, nor could cattle trample or browse young seedlings. Every tree, animal, and hermit was now sheltered under the church’s protection.

By extending the boundaries of what they consider sacred, the Orthodox Christians of northern Ethiopia are not only protecting their own forests; they are offering a pattern for how we might tap into our deep cultural memory reaching back hundreds if not thousands of years, and put that memory to work on behalf of the web of life.

When it can be channeled, there is no force on earth more powerful than the religious imagination.

Again, read it all, and watch Jeremy Seifert’s beautiful film.

Sure enough, the essay’s author wonders if the church forests are “signs of retreat.” But Dr. Wassie tells him they are like arks. We learn later in the essay that the trees can jump the walls, and grow the church forest outward. But first, you have to build the wall to allow the church forest to recover its strength.

Boy oh boy, did I ever love that short film and essay! Ryan Fehrmann is right: this is exactly what we want to do with the Benedict Option. If I had known these things existed, I would have traveled to Ethiopia to write a chapter for the book about them. The spiritual desertification we’re living through in the West has been caused by the forces of modernity. The only way we are going to preserve what remains is by building (porous) walls, to keep what is holy holy. Dr. Wassie hopes that by saving the remaining church forests, in time they will expand, and regenerate the great forests that used to cover Ethiopia. So too with our spiritual forests in the West, right? And not just in the West, but everywhere the withering hand of modernity has touched.

And look, the forest churches aren’t even close to the most wondrous houses of worship in Ethiopia. Watch this, and marvel.

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‘Every Knee Shall Bow’

Here’s a dopey controversy. Sports Illustrated writer Dan Gartland is put out with San Francisco Giants relief pitcher Sam Coonrod. Why? Well, why do you think? Read:

Coonrod was the only player on the Yankees, Nationals, Dodgers or Giants to stay on his feet while everyone else knelt. He stood out like a sore thumb.

Asked to explain himself after the game, Coonrod cited his religion.

“I meant no ill will by it,” Coonrod told reporters. “I don’t think I’m better than anybody. I’m just a Christian. I believe I can’t kneel before anything but God, Jesus Christ. I chose not to kneel. I feel if I did kneel I’d be a hypocrite. I don’t want to be a hypocrite.”

If a central tenet of Christianity is treating others with love and respect, it’s not clear how not joining a call for just that would be hypocritical. But Coonrod also said he took issue with the substance of the statement.

Coonrod explained that he dissents from some of the things the Black Lives Matter organization stands for. None of that is good enough for Dan Gartland, though. Note well that Gartland’s original text (now changed) read: “I don’t go to church much anymore, but I’m pretty sure the central tenets of Christianity are …”.

This is so stupid, especially in a national magazine. Gartland’s level of understanding of, and curiosity about, Christianity is about at the freshman dorm level. “I thought Christianity was about loving people, so I don’t understand why Christians believe,” etc. If Coonrod were a Muslim, and he politely declined to eat something with pork in it that was offered to him, would Gartland say, “I thought Islam was about being kind to others, so it’s not clear how turning down a hot dog on opening day is sacrilegious”? Of course he wouldn’t. He might have even troubled himself to spend two minutes Googling to find out why a practicing Muslim would not be able in good conscience to join in an act that others participated in.

This is a small thing, maybe, but it’s an example of media ignorance about religion, bordering on bigotry. Bigotry, in the sense that a journalist for a national publication is holding a Christian player up as a bad example, while making no effort to understand why a believing Christian might be uncomfortable kneeling for anything that is not God. Personally, I don’t see it as being obviously sacrilegious for Christians to take a knee in these protests, but I do believe Christians should not be doing it. Still, if a Christian believes that it is permissible to take the knee, I would not judge him for it. Actually, I think one could have a really good conversation about why or why not a believer can take the knee.

But an ignorant journalist who presumes to tell other people how to practice a religion that he (the journalist) no longer practices makes those conversations a lot more difficult.

The Coonrod-Gartland thing is another example of why it’s so difficult to talk about racial conflict and religion today. Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio Journal, in the  Journal ‘s summer fundraising letter, goes deep on the topic:

Y’all know that I’m a longtime subscriber to the Journal, and that I can’t possibly recommend it strongly enough for thoughtful Christians. You can learn more about what the Journal is, and what kinds of questions it seeks to explore, here. 

I wonder how many people who profess to be Christian share the same understanding about taking the knee that Dan Gartland does. Let me be clear: I am not talking about Christians who disagree with Coonrod about whether or not it is permissible for Christians to take a knee for something other than Christ. I am talking about Christians who haven’t considered the issue beyond Christianity is about treating others with love and respect, so what’s Coonrod’s problem? This is what Ken Myers is getting at, if I’m reading him correctly: the very framing of these issues relies on a modernist conception of religion that is irreconcilable with what the phenomenon of religion is in much of the world, and what Christianity was until the modern era in the West.

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Green Shoots Among The Dry Grass

David Brooks says today:

What we erroneously call “cancel culture” is an attempt to shift the boundaries of the sayable so it excludes not only conservatives but liberals and the heterodox as well. Hence the attacks on, say, Steven Pinker and Andrew Sullivan.

This is not just an elite or rare phenomenon. Sixty-two percent of Americans say they are afraid to share things they believe, according to a poll for the Cato Institute. A majority of staunch progressives say they feel free to share their political views, but majorities of liberals, moderates and conservatives are afraid to.

Happily, there’s a growing rebellion against groupthink and exclusion. A Politico poll found that 49 percent of Americans say the cancel culture has a negative impact on society and only 27 say it has a positive impact. This month Yascha Mounk started Persuasion, an online community to celebrate viewpoint diversity and it already has more than 25,000 subscribers.

After being pushed out from New York magazine, Sullivan established his own newsletter, The Weekly Dish, on Substack, a platform that makes it easy for readers to pay writers for their work. He now has 60,000 subscribers, instantly making his venture financially viable.

I just subscribed for a year to The Weekly Dish — fifty dollars, or you can go month to month for five dollars — and I encourage you to do the same — and to support other writers, via Substack or otherwise, whose opinions and analysis you value. If you’re a fan of this blog — even if I sometimes make you mad (as Sullivan does me from time to time) — please consider making a tax-exempt donation to TAC. We are a shoestring operation, and every cent helps.

I am happy to pay to read Andrew Sullivan’s writing, because even when I disagree with him, he almost always makes me think — and when I agree with him, he usually articulates what I believe to be true with uncommon force and beauty. Personally, investing in the success of the Substack model is an investment in my own future. TAC has been a great place to write, a place that has given me total editorial freedom. But if, God forbid, TAC should ever cease publication, I know well that many of the things that I have written under the authority of my wonderful TAC editors would make me unemployable in the woke mainstream media of today. If iconoclastic writers like Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, and others can make it on their own, maybe I can too if it ever comes to that. I strongly urge you to contribute to the small magazines, websites, or substacks of your favorite writers.

I am wondering too if it will be possible to start some Benedict Option for the traditional humanities: a college that sees itself as like an early medieval monastery, a place behind the walls of which the tradition can be kept alive for as long as this new Dark Age lasts. What if very rich people who were sick of what their alma maters had become redirected their giving towards a new institutions we’ll call Erasmus College. They could hire people like Princeton’s popular classics professor Joshua Katz, who is now despised by his woke department, to head up the Classics Department. Think about the other traditional scholars in literature, philosophy, languages, arts, music, and so forth, who can see the catastrophe into which their universities are sailing, and who want out — they could populate the other departments. I suppose the St. John’s College campuses are already this sort of thing in a secular way, and schools like the Catholic Thomas Aquinas Colleges, University of Dallas, and the Orthodox St. Constantine School in Houston provide  but can we not have more of them?

The universities are falling apart financially (Covid has accelerated longstanding trends), and even those that are strong — like the Ivies — are bound for self-destruction via ideologization. Now is the time for patrons with resources to pull them from trying to uphold colleges and universities that teach what amounts to the destruction of our civilization and its gifts, and redirect that support to new institutions and communities within which these traditions can endure what is present, and is to come. Some of this effort can go into expanding and building up the burgeoning classical school movement.

Who can do this? Who are the leaders? Who are the scholars, and the students, willing to follow?

This is a gloomy time, but out of this destruction, new growth can come, if we look to the innovators and reward them.

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At Princeton, Masters And Slaves

Here’s startling news: a major institution in American life does not cave to the left-wing cancel culture. The Wall Street Journal is not going to give the internal mob what it wants. In an editorial today (behind paywall), the Journal‘s editorial page editors write:

We’ve been gratified this week by the outpouring of support from readers after some 280 of our Wall Street Journal colleagues signed (and someone leaked) a letter to our publisher criticizing the opinion pages. But the support has often been mixed with concern that perhaps the letter will cause us to change our principles and content. On that point, reassurance is in order.

In the spirit of collegiality, we won’t respond in kind to the letter signers. Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility, in any case.

The editorial goes on to re-assert the traditional firewall between the editorial pages and the news pages.

Unfortunately, it appears that Princeton University is headed in a bad direction. A couple of weeks ago, in “Katz Showdown at Princeton,” I wrote about how Joshua Katz, a popular Classics professor at the university, had become a target for the woke mob for publicly objecting to a quite outrageous faculty letter calling for huge changes in the university’s life — including a de facto retraction of academic freedom — for the cause of making Princeton an “antiracist university.” Katz quite reasonably defended free speech and free thought at the university. For this he became a pariah, and even the university’s president threatened to investigate him.

Happily, there will be no investigation. I am told by multiple sources that because Princeton signed on to the Chicago Principles (to protect free speech and expression on campus) a few years ago, the university can’t touch Katz. Let this be a five-alarm wake-up call to all academics: get your universities to adopt the Chicago Principles now, while you still can. If you still can; if your university will not adopt them, that’s important information to know, because you will then be clear that your institution will not protect you when the woke mob comes for you.

I learned this morning that the American Council of Trustees and Alumni have named Prof. Katz a “Hero of Intellectual Freedom.” ACTA writes:

Although he was met with a fierce response in the campus newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, and from Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber, Professor Katz continues to speak the truth with reason, thoughtfulness, and dignity. His commitment to candor, fairness, and the free exchange of ideas makes him a Hero of Intellectual Freedom at a time when higher education needs to recommit to the intellectual freedom that is the lifeblood of the liberal arts and sciences.

But this appears in the Daily Princetonian — a letter from Brooke Holmes, a professor in the Department of Classics, and indeed its director of graduate studies. It’s worth reproducing in full:

One month ago, President Eisgruber ’83 circulated a message to the University community calling on all of us “reflect on our place in the world and challenge ourselves to identify additional steps we can take to fight racism.” Recognizing the massive, ongoing protests for racial justice in the US, the message firmly committed Princeton to our nation’s urgent, overdue reckoning with its racist history and “the ongoing reality of oppression and violence against Black Americans.”

Less than two weeks later, an open letter detailing almost fifty ways that the University can “take immediate concrete and material steps to openly and publicly acknowledge the way that anti-Black racism, and racism of any stripe, continue to thrive on its campus” was delivered with over 350 signatures from faculty and staff to the Princeton administration.

I’m a signatory to the open letter. I signed because I don’t think we can wait a minute more to start taking these steps. I signed because it’s critical at this moment, and going forward, to listen to Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous colleagues, students, and alums. I signed it as a member of Princeton’s faculty appointed in the Department of Classics, a field that, as a statement issued last month by the Society for Classical Studies acknowledged, has long been complicit in “constructing and participating in racist and anti-Black educational structures and attitudes.” I signed because it’s past time to stop pretending things are okay around here.

And where are we at two weeks later? Most of the attention has been focused on Professor Joshua Katz’s intervention in the conversation in Quillette for its racialized vilification of the Black Justice League. Last week Princeton alum Nicholas Bellinson ’13 moved to reclassify any criticism of Professor Katz’s incendiary language as a “bad faith” response to the op-ed’s arguments. This line of defense led Bellinson to a point where, when faced with Professor Eddie S. Glaude GS ’97’s observation in an interview that reading the op-ed gave him the sense that “Professor Katz … seems not to regard people like me as essential features, or persons, of Princeton,” Bellinson accused him of “utter slander.”

Let’s get this straight. Bellinson was agitating not only for the right to use dehumanizing language against Black students in the name of academic freedom, he was insisting on our moral obligation to give its user the benefit of the doubt. And when a Black professor said that this language made him feel less than human, Bellinson invoked defamation, the small corner of unprotected speech under Princeton’s Rights, Rules, and Responsibilities that is subject to disciplinary regulation. So much for free speech.

In the meantime, what has happened to the fight against racism? If the op-ed is, as its defenders have claimed, a constructive contribution to this fight, it’s because of its arguments. These arguments cannot be criticized as unconstructive because Professor Katz has indemnified them with his claim that “racist slurs and clear and documentable bias against someone because of skin color are reprehensible and should lead to disciplinary action, for which there is already a process.”

Never mind that the premise of the open letter, which is centered on the voices of faculty of color, is that the processes to combat racism on campus aren’t working. What’s worth paying attention to here, at the very moment of inoculation against the (minimal) charge of being indifferent to racism, is a little adverb: “already.”

Yes, there are a handful of changes that Professor Katz thinks are unobjectionable. He’s okay with giving all new assistant professors summer move-in allowances. But the recurring theme is: Things are fine just the way they are. Don’t require classes on the history and legacy of racism because classes in American history already have enough in them about slavery and race. No one can pass a purity test, so why try to think critically about the past? The op-ed reads above all as a plea. Please don’t ask me to think about racism, or change anything in the way I conduct my professional life at Princeton, or listen to people of color when they talk about racism.

What’s gotten lost in the talk about the right to free speech over the past couple weeks, as President Eisgruber recently emphasized, is the responsibility to maintain “a climate of mutual respect,” as laid out in 1.1.3 (“Statement of Freedom of Expression”) of the University’s Rights, Rules, Responsibilities 2020. We all also have a responsibility to foster “an environment that recognizes both the distinctiveness of each person’s experience and the common humanity that unites us all,” as laid out at 1.1.4 (“Statement on Diversity and Community”).

White members of the Princeton community, however, have a particular responsibility right now. We must do some searching self-examination about what this moment in the history of the fight against racism asks of us. We must try harder to hear what our colleagues of color are telling us before we demand the right to speak.

In the past couple weeks, I’ve been stunned by the repeated refusal to recognize the threats of violence that Black faculty, students, and alums routinely face when they exercise their rights to speak out, peacefully protest, and move freely. I believe Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor when she writes that after criticizing President Trump as a “racist, sexist megalomaniac” in a speech in 2017, she received a flood of emails threatening rape and lynching, and Princeton’s Department of African American Studies “was so flooded with hate that the locks on the doors had to be changed.” I believe Professor Tracy K. Smith when she reports that members of the Black Justice League saw “an uptick in death threats” after Professor Katz’s op-ed. I believe students of color who have reported being physically menaced on Princeton’s campus in recent weeks. If you defend the language of the op-ed against the charge of reckless endangerment, my question to you is this: “Why don’t you believe them?”

Anyone committed to the conversation around race on campus, and in classics and historical linguistics in particular, should read the recent statement signed by ninety students and alums of the Princeton Department of Classics and Program in Linguistics, a number of them Black, Latinx, and Asian.

Especially unproductive is the attempt to keep the labor of faculty of color invisible by reframing it as privilege. We need to recognize and compensate this labor. We need to hire many more faculty of color. We need many more faculty of color in positions of leadership where their voices will be amplified and where they can implement their visions for this institution. And all of us on campus need to stop spending our energy fighting for the status quo and help take the spirit and the praxis of the open letter forward.

Here’s a bit from that “recent statement” by ninety students and alumni of the Classics department and Linguistics program:

We applaud faculty members who have taken proactive rather than reactive stances, and we challenge the classics department and the University more broadly to bolster their commitments in reforming curricula, pedagogy, and hiring practices. The spirit of Katz’s writing is not new for him, the University, or the field of classics. Yet when the institutional memory of an undergraduate concentrator is so narrow, many students only realize the unique complicity of classics in white supremacy and Eurocentrism toward the end of their undergraduate education. This is beginning to change, and it must change. A list of anti-racist policy changes is currently being drafted to submit to the department, and the implementation of these policies should take center stage.

This is barking mad. The Classics studies Greek and Roman cultures. How on earth could it not be “Eurocentric” and still be the classics? In what conceivable sense are the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans “white”? It’s ideological insanity — and it is being taken up in the Princeton Classics Department.

In January 2019, I wrote a longish post about wokeness coming to the field of Classics. It included a statement by Prof. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a black colleague of Katz’s at Princeton, who claimed that the field of Classics is unsalvageably racist, and that it must be destroyed. What kind of insane institution employs a scholar who wants to destroy his field?! You can read Peralta’s entire rant here. And if you don’t think he wants to destroy the field, read his last line to the Chronicle of Higher Education here. 

It would appear that this radicalization is well underway at Princeton. Who knows what is going to happen to Joshua Katz? It’s hard to see how he could keep working in that department, or why he would want to, as it appears the department is going to empower radicals like Prof. Padilla Peralta and ideologized white allies like Brooke Holmes to wreck the discipline and remake it according to ideological criteria. This is a warning to aspiring Classics scholars: stay away from Princeton, for the rot has set in.

I keep going back to this passage from Live Not By Lies, so very relevant to what’s happening at Princeton today, and in so many institutions:

Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause.

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.”For example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on history— that it is a manifestation of class struggle— were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised.

Princeton — at least its Classics department — is relinquishing its freedom for the sake of the “understood necessity” of “antiracism.” Its life is now going to bleed out. And you watch: it’s going to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of “antiracism.” It’s corruption, straight up. These people don’t want to be free; they want to be masters and slaves.

The post At Princeton, Masters And Slaves appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Left Became The Creeps It Hated

When Matt Taibbi is on fire, nobody blazes hotter. This column is thermite. It’s about how everybody used to laugh at right-wing knotheads and busybodies — but now, the left is the same thing, only a million times worse, because they run the country and the culture. Excerpts:

The old Republican right’s idea of “humor” was its usual diatribes against Bad People, only with puns thrown in (are you ready for “OxyClinton”?). As a result the Fox effort at countering the Daily Show, the 1/2 Hour News Hour — a string of agonizing “burns” on Bush-haters and Hillary — remains the worst-rated show in the history of television, according to Metacritic. The irony gap eventually spelled doom for that group of Republicans, as Trump drove a truck through it in 2016. However, it’s possible they just weren’t as committed to the concept as current counterparts.

He has just described The New Yorker in the Trump era: it’s the liberal 1/2 Hour News Hour, in print. I didn’t think anything could make New Yorker cartoons unfunny. Trump did. He broke them. More Taibbi, talking about the stupid Smithsonian “whiteness” chart I wrote about last week:

The astute observer will notice this graphic could equally have been written by white supremacist Richard Spencer or History of White Peopleparodist Martin Mull. It seems impossible that no one at one of the country’s leading educational institutions noticed this messaging is ludicrously racist, not just to white people but to everyone (what is any person of color supposed to think when he or she reads that self-reliance, politeness, and “linear thinking” are white values?).

The exhibit was inspired by white corporate consultants with Education degrees like Judith Katz and White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, who themselves echo the work of more consultants with Ed degrees like Glenn Singleton of Courageous Conversations. Per the New York Times, Courageous Conversations even teaches that “written communication over other forms” and “mechanical time” (i.e. clock time) are tools by which “whiteness undercuts Black kids.”

The notion that such bugbears as as time, data, and the written word are racist has caught fire across the United States in the last few weeks, igniting calls for an end to virtually every form of quantitative evaluation in hiring and admissions, including many that were designed specifically to combat racism.

More:

What to make of the campaign to end blind auditions for musical positions, which the New York Philharmonic began holding in the early seventies in response to complaints of discrimination?

Before blind auditions, women made up less than 6 percent of orchestras; today they’re half of the New York Philharmonic. But because the change did not achieve similar results with Black and Hispanic musicians, the blind audition must now be “altered to take into fuller account artists’ backgrounds and experiences.” This completes a decades-long circle where the left/liberal project went from working feverishly to expunge racial stereotypes in an effort to level the playing field, to denouncing itself for ever having done so.

He’s just getting wound up. Taibbi writes, “The Smithsonian story is essentially the same tale of bubble-thinking run amok as the infamous “Museum of Creation” exhibit showing Adam and Eve partying with dinosaurs, only featuring opposite politics.” And he points out — importantly! — that the liberal press didn’t care about any of this until right-wingers started making fun of it. Here’s the dagger in the ribs:

Once, the right couldn’t see or comment upon its own absurdities, and instead spent most of its time whining about being frozen out of the media at the exact moment its messaging was becoming hegemonic, e.g. when we weren’t even able to watch a football game without someone trying to shove Rush Limbaugh or Dennis Miller onscreen. Now the left has adopted the same traits (the NBA restart played on a “Black Lives Matter”-emblazoned court is going to make those old Monday Night Football broadcasts seem chill), with a major difference: it has the bureaucratic juice to shut down mass media efforts to ridicule its thinking. These are the same pontificating, stereotyping busybodies Republicans used to be, only this time, they’re winning the culture war.

Read the whole thing — and subscribe to Taibbi’s Substack (five dollars per month) to get access to all his work. In this piece, he wonders why no institutional leaders have the guts to stand up to this illiberal, racist garbage. As well he should wonder.

Taibbi also points out (let me repeat) that these leftists are every bit as shrill and as bullying as that jerky Rush Limbaugh obsessive relative who would never miss an opportunity to hector you about politics at family gatherings, and couldn’t let anything go. Except the left today is not just the rude cousin you could walk away from. It’s running everything — and it can get you fired.

Why are so many people so eager to give up their liberty? Are they that desperate for meaning and purpose? Here, from Live Not By Lies, is a partial answer:

Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause.

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre- totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake

of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.”

For example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on history—that it is a manifestation of class struggle— were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised.

So it is with these woke mobsters today, and the gutless institutional leaders who won’t stand up to them. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “antiracism,” or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth.

Why is it that it takes a wise-ass journalist writing not for a magazine, but on his own Substack, to point this out so vividly and convincingly, while none of the presidents of our great universities, and few if any writers or broadcasters for our mainstream news sources, will say so?

The post The Left Became The Creeps It Hated appeared first on The American Conservative.