Rod Dreher's Blog, page 639

Into What Should Muslims Integrate?

The Muslim reader who blogs under the name “Jones” had a good question at the end of the Decadence-and-Duck-Confit post discussion:

I do think the question some Westerners should ask–not because it will help us fight terrorism, but because it is a good question anyway–when you ask Muslim immigrants to integrate, what do you mean? Integrate into what?

That is not only a good question, it’s an excellent one. I’m not sure how I would answer it. I’ve never thought about it before, and am embarrassed to realize that.

I wrote several paragraphs here trying to explore how I would answer the question, and wasn’t happy with them, so I deleted them. I think when Europe asks them to integrate, it’s asking them pretty much to quit being Muslim. When America does, I think it’s more or less asking them, “Will you please not act in ways that make us feel afraid?” Big difference.

Still thinking about this, especially given that Jones and I probably look with equally jaundiced eyes at the broader society. What’s your answer?

World’s Best Cornbread Dressing

By popular demand, this great recipe from Christopher Kimball’s The Cook’s Bible. It is a staple on our Thanksgiving table:

Toasted Cornbread-Pecan Dressing (or, Stuffing, for Yankees)

Ingredients

6 cups coarsely crumbled cornbread

3/4 cup pecans

1/4 pound bacon, cut into 1/2-inch pieces

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 cups finely chopped onions

3/4 cup finely chopped celery

1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves or 1 teaspoon dried

1 tablespoon minced fresh sage, or 1 teaspoon dried 

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

4 tablespoons bourbon

1 cup chicken stock

1/2 cup minced flat leaf parsley

1. Heat over to 350F. Spread crumbled cornbread onto a baking sheet. Coarsely chop pecans and add to cornbread. Toast in oven for 25-30 minutes or until cornbread is golden, tossing the crumbs once or twice during toasting. Cool and place in a large mixing bowl.

2. Cook bacon over medium-high heat in a saute pan of skillet. Remove bacon with a slotted spoon to bowl with cornbread and pour off all but 1 tablespoon of drippings. Add butter and olive oil to skillet and when butter has melted add onion and saute for 5 minutes over medium heat. Add celery and saute another three minutes. Stir in thyme and sage and salt and pepper to taste. Add to cornbread.

3. Turn up heat under saute pan and add bourbon. Stir vigorously for 2 minutes with a wooden spoon, scraping the bottom of the pan. Add chicken stock, cook for 1 minute, and add mixture to bowl. Add parsley to bowl and adjust seasonings.

Makes about 10 cups, and it tastes even better if you make it the day before Thanksgiving and let it sit overnight.

UPDATE: I left out the sage from the list of ingredients by mistake; I’ve added it in, and boldfaced it. Sorry! Also, I have nodded to the fact that not everyone in America uses the proper name for this dish, “dressing”; some people sadly call it “stuffing.” In a spirit of diversity, I acknowledge their existence in this update. Also x 2, my wife says to increase the chicken stock, because it’s too dry as is.

The High School Roots of SJW

Jonathan Haidt has a remarkable post up on Heterodox Academy, talking about how the SJW insanity starts in high school. He recounts a talk and seminar he gave to the student body of an elite private high school in the Pacific Northwest; he calls it “Centerville High,” but that’s not its real name. The talk was about coddling students versus strengthening them. Then came the Q&A period. Excerpt:

But then the discussion began, and it was the most unremittingly hostile questioning I’ve ever had. I don’t mind when people ask hard or critical questions, but I was surprised that I had misread the audience so thoroughly. My talk had little to do with gender, but the second question was “So you think rape is OK?” Like most of the questions, it was backed up by a sea of finger snaps — the sort you can hear in the infamous Yale video, where a student screams at Prof. Christakis to “be quiet” and tells him that he is “disgusting.” I had never heard the snapping before. When it happens in a large auditorium it is disconcerting. It makes you feel that you are facing an angry and unified mob — a feeling I have never had in 25 years of teaching and public speaking.

After the first dozen questions I noticed that not a single questioner was male. I began to search the sea of hands asking to be called on and I did find one boy, who asked a question that indicated that he too was critical of my talk. But other than him, the 200 or so boys in the audience sat silently.

After the Q&A, I got a half-standing ovation: almost all of the boys in the room stood up to cheer. And after the crowd broke up, a line of boys came up to me to thank me and shake my hand. Not a single girl came up to me afterward.

Then Haidt went into a seminar with about 60 students, to talk about the same issues. He recalls the session went like this:

Me: What kind of intellectual climate do you want here at Centerville? Would you rather have option A: a school where people with views you find offensive keep their mouths shut, or B: a school where everyone feels that they can speak up in class discussions?

Audience: All hands go up for B.

Me: OK, let’s see if you have that. When there is a class discussion about gender issues, do you feel free to speak up and say what you are thinking? Or do you feel that you are walking on eggshells and you must heavily censor yourself? Just the girls in the class, raise your hand if you feel you can speak up? [about 70% said they feel free, vs about 10% who said eggshells ]. Now just the boys? [about 80% said eggshells, nobody said they feel free].

Me: Now let’s try it for race. When a topic related to race comes up in class, do you feel free to speak up and say what you are thinking, or do you feel that you are walking on eggshells and you must heavily censor yourself? Just the non-white students? [the group was around 30% non-white, mostly South and East Asians, and some African Americans. A majority said they felt free to speak, although a large minority said eggshells] Now just the white students? [A large majority said eggshells]

Me: Now lets try it for politics. How many of you would say you are on the right politically, or that you are conservative or Republican? [6 hands went up, out of 60 students]. Just you folks, when politically charged topics come up, can you speak freely? [Only one hand went up, but that student clarified that everyone gets mad at him when he speaks up, but he does it anyway. The other 5 said eggshells.] How many of you are on the left, liberal, or democrat? [Most hands go up] Can you speak freely, or is it eggshells? [Almost all said they can speak freely.]

Me: So let me get this straight. You were unanimous in saying that you want your school to be a place where people feel free to speak up, even if you strongly dislike their views. But you don’t have such a school. In fact, you have exactly the sort of “tolerance” that Herbert Marcuse advocated [which I had discussed in my lecture, and which you can read about here]. You have a school in which only people in the preferred groups get to speak, and everyone else is afraid. What are you going to do about this? Let’s talk.

You need to read the whole thing to see what the parents of male students at the school told him later. Incredible. Haidt goes on to talk about the feedback loop that campus victimology creates:

Once you allow victimhood culture to spread on your campus, you can expect ever more anger from students representing victim groups, coupled with demands for a deeper institutional commitment to victimhood culture, which leads inexorably to more anger, more demands, and more commitment. But the Yale problem didn’t start at Yale. It started in high school. As long as many of our elite prep schools are turning out students who have only known eggshells and anger, whose social cognition is limited to a single dimension of victims and victimizers, and who demand safe spaces and trigger warnings, it’s hard to imagine how any university can open their minds and prepare them to converse respectfully with people who don’t share their values. Especially when there are no adults around who don’t share their values.

Read the whole thing; it’s very important. And please pass it on.

About the feedback loop, a number of you readers are forwarding to me e-mails sent by your alma maters to the university communities, including alumni, in which administrators promise to go even further in “diversity” to appease campus militants. All of you say that it’s hard to imagine that these colleges could go any further into diversity ideology than they already do, but … well, here we are. Take this excerpt from the letter sent out by the interim president of Brandeis, which is already on the far end of social justice sensitivity:

However, successfully recruiting a more diverse community to Brandeis is not enough. If under-represented students, faculty, or staff feel isolated, excluded or unsafe on our campus and as a result leave, their missing voices in our classrooms, labs, in the production of our scholarship and creative works, and in our social interactions limits our excellence and our impact on the world.

Achieving a diverse and supportive campus requires a multi-faceted strategy that broadly engages every part of our university. I propose – and the Board supports — that we use town halls, teach-ins and our existing structures (e.g. the student union, the graduate student association, the Faculty Senate, the Provost’s steering committee on diversity, and the University Advisory Committee) to identify additional ways to accelerate our current efforts to increase diversity and inclusion on our campus.

The remaining part of this letter details measures that Brandeis is already undertaking to advance diversity and inclusion and how we can and will do even more to achieve our shared goals.

It will never be enough. Never, ever, ever.

Of Decadence, Catholicism, & Duck Confit

From Alexandra Schwartz’s report from Paris in the current issue of The New Yorker. Matthieu is a Parisian she interviewed for the piece; he was among those shot by the ISIS terrorists:

“There is a real, catastrophic self-hatred in France,” Matthieu told me. We had been talking in his apartment for more than an hour. A friend was due at any minute, to drive him to Normandy; he needed to get away for a few days. Soon, he planned to leave Paris for good. Even before the attacks, he had become fed up with the city. He wanted to quit his job and move back to Bordeaux, where he grew up. His desire to go home surprised me—his parents had hardly been in contact since the news. His father had sent him a text message earlier that day; his mother e-mailed him while he was in the hospital to tell him that he should get sick leave.

Matthieu had his reasons for returning to Bordeaux. He recalled a line from Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, “Submission,” in which the narrator decides to leave Paris for the southwest following the rise of a French Islamic party: “It was a region where they ate duck confit, and duck confit struck me as incompatible with civil war.” Matthieu smiled wryly. “It’s true that terrorism and the southwest are incompatible. Things move more slowly there. And the decadence of the provinces is less advanced than it is in Paris, where it’s always on the cutting edge.”

I asked him what he meant by “decadence.”

“To me, ‘decadence’ is objective,” he said. “It’s not a value judgment. It’s the fact that France, bit by bit, doesn’t believe in anything in common anymore. Anyone could tell you that.” [Emphasis mine — RD] Regional elections were coming up in a few weeks, and, like many people, Matthieu was worried that the attacks would mean a major victory for Marine Le Pen, the leader of the extreme-right Front National, which could make her a formidable candidate in the 2017 Presidential election. “What I’m really afraid of is that either everyone will rally around the values of the Front National or there won’t be any rallying around anything.”

I remembered that when Matthieu and I first met we’d discussed our upbringings, and religion had come up. His family was Catholic, but I couldn’t remember if he was religious.

“I’m more agnostic than Catholic, though I come from the Catholic culture,” he said. “In any case, this isn’t really a moment when I’m thinking about religion. When I think about religion, I always think about it in connection with what’s beautiful, what’s good. But never in connection with evil. I just don’t see the connection.”

Well, this is the problem: it’s all about religion, and Matthieu is thinking about religion whether he realizes it or not. Marc at the Bad Catholic blog lays it all out:

But Mr. Obama’s claims that ISIS is “not Islamic” is more than a generosity to the majority of Muslims, and the general decision to refer to the thing as an “ideology” rather than a “theology” has a definite motive beyond a banal political correctness. It’s embarrassing for liberals to admit that liberalism offers religious freedom only to those religions that adhere to its central tenants. It’s awkward to admit that liberalism limits in advance the form any given religion may take (pray, but not here, believe, but don’t preach, hold ethical principles, but pay for others to violate them, interpret your Scriptures, but not radically, etc.). The liberal society wants to maintain that it accepts all religious beliefs with equal validity, and is thus forced, when a particular religious belief radically rejects the central doctrines of liberalism, to conclude that it is not really a religion after all, only a “group of thugs.” Liberalism, in short, does not want to admit that it is an exclusive theology, and thus does not want admit that it is rejecting a definite “other theology” — a rival set of beliefs about God and man.

(That being said, the awareness that this is a theological war slips out of our theologically-repressed consciousnesses every now and then. It is somewhat routine to speak of our goal in Biblical terms, “to wipe ISIS off the face of the earth,” and politicians like Joe Biden can be rather uncharacteristically medieval in their theological claims: “We will follow them to the gates of hell until they are brought to justice. Because hell is where they will reside. Hell is where they will reside.”)

But ISIS have a theology, and liberal democracies have a theology, and never the twain shall meet. Between “absolute belief” and “optional belief” there is no dialogue. Between “divine command” and “the state-sanctioned hands-off space in which some may hear and respond to divine commands insofar as they do not conflict with the freedom and comfort of others” there is no wiggle room. Between the “apocalypse now” of ISIS and the West’s “apocalypse if you believe in it as a matter of private opinion” there is no accord — only violence.

More:

Now, on the one hand, this is hardly a problem. We don’t negotiate with terrorists, and we certainly don’t need to hold a reasonable debate with them. Who cares if the secular West is theologically neutered, without the capacity to speak with and argue against an idiotic belief system? Who would want to sink to the level of religious extremism? We, after all, have bombs, and bombs speak louder than words. That our baseline presuppositions don’t match hardly changes the fact that they will kill us, and that we will kill them.

But while this sort of bravado filled our hearts well enough after 9/11, it’s starting to ring stale. The problem was best stated by Mr. Obama, when he said that our enemy is anyone who believes this poisonous ideology. Beliefs cannot be bombed. Beliefs are not bound by geo-political situation, geographical location, ethnicity, or culture — even as they rise from them. Thus, and this much is admitted by the Obama administration, there is no political action and no military engagement that can guarantee the safety of the West, insofar as you and I, reading this now, are absolutely capable of believing the ideological theology of ISIS.

Marc says that the theology of liberalism cannot defeat ISIS; only real, committed theology can — first, he says, “the active promotion of a better theology in the form of the Quietist Salafis. Obama has an inkling of the importance of this theological counter-offensive when he calls for moderate imams to prevent radicalism in their communities.

I would take their suggestions one step further, and argue that Catholics have a role to play in this war, a role that no liberal government can achieve — to counter the theological claims of ISIS with the Gospel.

Trite? Cliched? Naive? I’ll take those insults from the secular-minded, but rather as one takes the boorish interruptions of someone who has no idea what they are talking about. We have already established that secular, liberal values have nothing to say to a theology that is their antithesis. When people blow themselves up for theological reasons, it’s time for the secular to sit down and let those with a stake in the questions of theology get to work.

Marc is not claiming that Catholic apologists can turn the hearts and minds of Muslims already committed to ISIS, and make Christians of them. He is claiming that Catholics who really believe in their faith — not MTD Catholics, but the real deal — have a lot to say to Muslims in the West who are alienated from secular liberalism. Marc makes the important and overlooked point that truly believing Catholics (and, I would say, Protestant and Orthodox Christians too) feel alienated from secular liberalism also. With Catholics, he says, “Of course, there is something less of an obsession with human purity, something more of mercy, but nevertheless, the committed Catholic can, like it or not, sympathize with the ISIS-member’s primary spiritual frustrations.”

True. Marc contends that Catholics who reach out to alienated Muslims before they are reached by the preachers of ISIS will give them an answer to the valid questions they ask — and it’s an answer very different from the one Salafist Islam gives:

The Catholic, before the process of radicalization has taken hold, can introduce a concept of God who is Love, and not simply Law; Father, and not simply Dictator; a God who desires communion with his creatures in freedom – not in force and fear.

Read the whole thing.  Even if you’re not a Catholic, it is challenging and hopeful. When I read the Salafist ideologue Sayyid Qutb some years back, I thought at once that this man was a bloodthirsty fanatic, but I also realized that he was by no means wrong about how secular liberalism works to destroy faith. If we in the West tell ourselves that radical Muslims are nothing more than inscrutable berserkers, we will miss why they appeal to people.

If Matthieu returns to Bordeaux, I hope he will make a pilgrimage to the Christian shrine of Rocamadour, as the protagonist of Submission does. And I hope he is open to the encounter with the God of his fathers there. Time was that in France, the thing most people had in common was their Christian faith. Nationalism and republicanism cannot fill the God-shaped hole.

And what about America? Could we not also say, “It’s the fact that America, bit by bit, doesn’t believe in anything in common anymore. Anyone could tell you that”? The answer — you knew this was coming — is a return to the faith via the Benedict Option.

UPDATE: I forgot to append this recent Catholic World Report piece that several of you have sent to me, talking about France’s revival of Catholicism. Excerpt:

While Mass-attendance rates have steeply declined over the last 30 years, today France is witnessing the rise of an increasingly self-confident—and dynamically orthodox—Catholicism.

When many think about France and religion today, the images that usually come to mind are those of a highly secular society with a growing Islamic presence: a combination of widespread indifferentism, epicurean Voltairans, persistent anti-Semitism, increasingly radicalized Muslims, and now jihadist-inspired and organized terrorism. But now even some secular French journalists have started writing about a phenomenon that’s become difficult to ignore: an increasingly self-confident Catholicism that combines what might be called a dynamic orthodoxy with a determination to shape French society in ways that contest the status quo—both inside and outside the Church.

On October 30, readers of France’s main center-right newspaper, Le Figaro, woke up to the headline “La révolution silencieuse des catholiques de France.” What followed was a description of how those whom Le Figaro calls France’s néocatholiques have come to the forefront of the nation’s political, cultural, and economic debates. Significantly, the new Catholics’ idea of dialogue isn’t about listening to secular intellectuals and responding by nodding sagely and not saying anything that might offend others. Instead, younger observant Catholics have moved beyond—way, way beyond—what was called the “Catholicism of openness” that dominated post-Vatican II French Catholic life. While the néocatholiques are happy to listen, they also want to debate and even critique reigning secular orthodoxies. For them, discussion isn’t a one-way street. This is a generation of French Catholics who are, as Le Figaro put it, “afraid of nothing.”

May their tribe increase.

This Is How It Begins

Oh God:

President Vladimir Putin accused Turkey of being an accomplice of terrorism for shooting down a Russian warplane in Syria and warned of “very serious consequences” for their relations.

“We understand that everyone has their own interests but we won’t allow such crimes to take place,” Putin said at talks Tuesday with Jordanian King Abdullah II in Sochi. “We received a stab in the back from accomplices of terrorism.”

Russia’s warplane was one kilometer (0.6 miles) from the border with Turkey when it was “shot down over Syrian territory” by Turkish F-16 jets firing air-to-air missiles, Putin said. It’s “obvious” that the Russian “pilots and our aircraft in no way threatened the Republic of Turkey” as they carried out an operation against Islamic State, he said.

Putin spoke after Turkey said its military shot down a Russian warplane that violated its airspace near the border with northwestern Syria, roiling global markets and marking the first direct clash between foreign powers embroiled in the civil war. Russia’s Defense Ministry denied the plane had crossed the border. Russia began its bombing campaign in Syria Sept. 30 against Islamic State and other groups battling President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Turkey’s action is the first time in decades that a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member has downed a Russian military aircraft. Ambassadors of the 28 NATO member states are meeting at 5 p.m. Tuesday in Brussels at Turkey’s request to discuss the incident, the military alliance said in a statement.

If we are not extremely careful, and extremely lucky, this is how World War III could begin. Open thread to discuss this.

What’s Coming After Liberalism?

A letter from a college professor:

I think your post about the need to fight back is exactly right. I also think it might be hopeless. It pains me to say that, but people like me will not speak our minds if it comes at the cost of our livelihoods.

That comment at the beginning of the post — about all of this stuff making us turn inward, away from public discourse — is exactly how I feel. Most of my friends are secular, urban, liberal academics, and I lost them all after Obergefell. I didn’t even argue against the verdict. I simply suggested that perhaps we should be cautious in defining liberty and happiness and social good simply as what gives us personal gratification, and pointed out that Kennedy’s famous reasoning from Casey, which you cite often, is a recipe for social and moral bankruptcy. In what was virtually a friendship intervention, I was told that my views were prejudiced and hateful, and thus I was not worth listening to. Having already lost all of them, I don’t plan to risk my professional life by writing or saying anything in public about the current SJW craziness; virtually the only writing I do now is about fiction, which still provides some safety. And so, like that commenter, I turn inward: to my family, to my home, to nature, to books, to my parish. When civitas terrena is in its current state, where else to turn but civitas dei?

There are two other things I’ll point out about campus life today. One is that we’re all still realizing just how thoroughly the ideas of Michel Foucault were institutionalized in humanities departments. Foucault was fairly brilliant — the Panopticon section of Discipline & Punish reads like a virtual prediction of the technological surveillance state — but he was also the leading voice in the so-called “discursive turn”: the idea that discourse is everything, that we cannot ever find any truly real/essential/ideal form beneath our terms for things. We create the world as we speak it, and there is nothing under that. That world we speak-create is all about forms of power, as you note in your post. So the scholar’s main concern becomes finding a locus of power — which, in case it’s not clear, is always and everywhere synonymous with discrimination and oppression — and disrupting it. Thus Hamlet goes from being a high point of Western literature to being a cesspool of misogyny, patriarchy, etc., and thus democratic deliberation goes from being a Habermasian process of “collective rationality” to being a tool of the elites. Power is the overarching concern of all things, and (crucially) the job of the academic is no longer to transmit wisdom or teach knowledge but simply to teach the next generation how to point out yet another locus of power. (Remember that litany of complaints at Amherst, where every type of perceived oppression under the sun was noted? Perfect example.) And the work in the classroom is work enough, because the work in the classroom becomes the template for social change. You don’t need to march in the streets to demand justice. You can just point out the misogyny in Elsinore and then lean back in your chair, with the knowledge that society will follow.

The second thing is how people still believe this is purely a campus phenomenon. Remember the JP Morgan Chase incident? (“Are you: An ally of the LGBT community, but not personally identifying as LGBT.”) This is coming to the business world, and corporations are moving to align themselves with the forces of Progress. This hit a kind of apotheosis during the Indiana thing. When you have Apple and Walmart — companies responsible for employee suicides, shuttered town squares, millions of un- and underemployed people, the exploitation of the natural world — being praised by liberals for their devotion the cause, then you know we’ve crossed an important barrier. Anyone — no matter what crimes a person or group or company has committed or continues to commit — who declares loyalty with this vaguely defined movement is on the side of the good. Anyone who opposes is not just an enemy but an undesirable, with no place in polite society. A person like me, in other words, and a person like you.

This is why, when people my parents’ age scoff at the whole trans thing and dismiss it as just the cause du jour (remember Darfur? neither do any of the SJWs), I shake my head and tell them they have no idea what’s coming. The project of the Willed Self is a natural outgrowth of Enlightenment thinking. (I share your opinion that Submission is not a great book, but a very important one in terms of exposing the internal contradictions of the Enlightenment.) The whole intellectual movement of the last three centuries has at its core the principle of freeing the willed self from all constraints. The trans movement represents this idea’s apex: if we can free ourselves from basic biology and anatomy, then truly we have become gods. “I am that I am” is no longer confined to Exodus 3; it is the mantra of the willed self freed from all external barriers. There is nothing beyond the subjective, the personal, the therapeutic, because all that matters is how I define my own self, my own existence, and my own gratification. There can be no society or community within this worldview. Patrick Deneen was right in that “After Liberalism” lecture he gave: Enlightenment liberalism has been scary for we traditional conservatives, but what’s coming next — what’s coming now — is terrifying.

I wrote about Dante and Patrick Deneen’s lecture here.

Ahmed the Clock Boy’s Payday

Gosh, nobody saw this coming:

Lawyers for the 14-year-old Muslim boy who was arrested after taking a homemade clock to his Dallas-area school say he was publicly mistreated and deserves $15 million. A law firm representing the boy, Ahmed Mohamed, sent letters Monday demanding $10 million from the City of Irving and $5 million from the Irving Independent School District. The letters also threaten lawsuits and seek apologies. Ahmed was arrested but not charged in September after an educator said the clock could be a bomb. He was also suspended from school. His family accepted a foundation’s offer to pay for Ahmed’s education in Qatar and moved to the Persian Gulf country.

I think he was mistreated, as I’ve said here before, and I believe some compensation for his humiliation is in order. But this is disgusting and greedy.

Puny Ivy Leaguers, Principled Ivy Leaguers

I’m pleased to learn that this blog has multiple readers at Harvard Law School. One just forwarded me the following e-mail that the HLS Student Government sent out on behalf of the school’s “Affinity Group Coalition”:

We write to you today as a community of identity affinity group leaders at the law school, committed together to challenging discrimination based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, socioeconomic status, disability, religion, and nationality. As most of you know, on Thursday, November 19th, students woke up to the news that someone had placed tape over the faces of our Black professors’ portraits.

To those hurting, we are with you, we are here for you, and we want you to know that none of us will stand for racial hate crimes. This disgusting act targeted one group on this campus: the Black community. As a whole, we cannot fully comprehend your pain, one born by a history of slavery, segregation, and continued oppression and discrimination. Still, as a Coalition we stand against hatred and in the hopes that we can create a society that includes and welcomes us all.

To white allies, we recognize that this can be a time of questioning and confusion as to your roles and voices. There are many ways to be a good ally, but there is one thing that they all have in common: continue acknowledging your privilege. Ask how you can help, and listen to the answers you receive, even if they are just to be at a certain space to show support or to do nothing at all.

To those who do not think there is a problem, or who are not uncomfortable, please take this opportunity to ask yourself why not. Ask yourself why you are saying what you are saying, whether your goal is to help or to hurt other people, and whether how you are conducting yourself is what is best for the HLS community. We think there is a problem, a poison in this community. Indifference, under these circumstances, not only prevents progress but also compounds the pain. It is important to recognize that many of our peers can never avoid the topic of race.

Racist acts cut at the values we aspire to uphold, as does nonchalance in response. We believe in this community. We believe in its capacity for support. And we stand hopeful to see that capacity realized in the coming weeks. We stand with you.

With passion and affection,

The Affinity Group Coalition

In other words: Abase yourselves before us and do as we tell you to do, and don’t think your silence is going to protect you. 

The person who passed that letter on is scheduled to leave Harvard Law this academic year, and writes, “I’m immensely grateful that I’ll be [leaving] so I won’t have to continue to deal with this madness in the years to come.”

My correspondent sent along this contrasting — and inspiring — Change.org petition put up by Princeton students in opposition to the SJW effort to dictate terms to the university. It already has over 1,200 signatures, and reads as follows:

We, the undersigned members of the Princeton University community, appreciate the concerns but oppose the demands of the Black Justice League. We call for increased dialogue and the creation of a process that properly considers the input of all students and faculty, not merely those who are the loudest.

WHEREAS the Black Justice League has condemned Woodrow Wilson’s undeniable racism and demanded that the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy and International Affairs and Wilson College be renamed,

WHEREAS the Black Justice League has demanded that undergraduates be required to take “classes on the history of marginalized people,”

WHEREAS some members of the Black Justice League have reportedly demanded “affinity housing for people interested in black housing,”

WHEREAS some members of the Black Justice League criticized the university for “focusing on free speech;”

We, the undersigned members of the Princeton University community, affirm the following:

THAT the first of these three demands represents an alarming call for historical revisionism and seeks to eliminate vindication of a significant historical figure who, despite his flaws, made great contributions to this University,

THAT the second of these three demands represents a thinly veiled attempt to impose the Black Justice League’s unilateral narrative upon all undergraduates through the conduit of the core curriculum,

THAT the third of these three demands represents a morally abhorrent and blatantly illegal call for what is essentially racially segregated housing.

*Update: in response to the clarification that affinity housing would be for those interested in black culture (rather than a call for black-only housing as some protesters advocated for), we no longer consider this demand illegal, but all our other objections still stand.*

THAT free speech is fundamental to Princeton’s role as an institution of higher learning and excessive political correctness stifles academic discourse.

We, the undersigned members of the Princeton University community, request that the President, Trustees, and Faculty affirm the following:

THAT any steps to purge this campus of its Wilsonian legacy creates a dangerous precedent and slippery slope that will be cited by future students who seek to purge the past of those who fail to live up to modern standards of morality,

THAT a properly enacted “diversity requirement” should allow students to study a non-American culture or American minority of their choice—not merely those who have been deemed marginalized by the Black Justice League—and will be accompanied by a required course in Western or American civilization in order to better enable cross-cultural understanding,

THAT racially based housing creates segregation and is thus anathematic not only to the University’s purported goal of promoting a diverse student body but also to the core values of American society.

THAT this University maintains its commitment to free speech and open dialogue and condemns political correctness to the extent that it infringes upon those fundamental academic values.

Here’s a link to the petition page. Very, very well done! Good for you, principled Princetonians. Now, march in defense of your university.

From Molenbeek To Merkelbeek

The Belgian capital celebrates diversity and multiculturalism for a third day:

BRUSSELS — On what normally would be a bustling Monday, empty streets and an eerie silence attested to the reality that this capital city, the heart of the European Union, had been paralyzed by a terrorist cell answering to the leaders of the Islamic State.

As universities, shopping malls, museums, food markets, the subway system and even a nursery school shut their doors, the city remained jittery after a number of false alarms involving hotels and even City Hall, which was closed on Monday.

The central square, known as the Grand Place or Grote Markt, was all but deserted, except for a few tourists ambling around a giant Christmas tree. Soldiers patrolled an area normally thronged with shoppers, and armored personnel carriers rolled over cobblestone streets usually choked with cars.

The level of anxiety was so high that the authorities felt compelled to remind people that they were free to leave their houses, even in Brussels, although they still were recommending that they “avoid unnecessary travel to busy places and comply with any potential security check.”

Isn’t that lovely? Via Steve Sailer, I discovered a Politico essay by photographer Teun Voeten, a Belgian who used to live in Molenbeek, the Brussels neighborhood that is jihadi central. Excerpts:

I called Molenbeek my home for nine years. In 2005, it was the city’s last affordable neighborhood — in large part because of its bad reputation. My apartment, just across the canal from the city center, is close to the home where two suspects in the Paris attacks were based, and around the corner from where the shooter from the foiled Thalys attack in August had been staying.

I was part of a new wave of young urban professionals, mostly white and college-educated — what the Belgians called bobo, (“bourgeois bohémiens”) — who settled in the area out of pragmatism. We had good intentions. Our contractor’s name was Hassan. He was Moroccan, and we thought that was very cool. We imagined that our kids would one day play happily with his on the street. We hoped for less garbage on the streets, less petty crime. We were confident our block would slowly improve, and that our lofts would increase in value. (We even dared to hope for a hip art gallery or a trendy bar.) We felt like pioneers of the Far West, like we were living in the trenches of the fight for a multicultural society.

More:

Slowly, we woke up to reality. Hassan turned out to be a crook and disappeared with €95,000, the entire budget the tenants had pooled together for our building’s renovation. The neighborhood was hardly multicultural. Rather, with roughly 80 percent of the population of Moroccan origin, it was tragically conformist and homogenous. There may be a vibrant alternative culture in Casablanca and Marrakech, but certainly not in Molenbeek.

Over nine years, I witnessed the neighborhood become increasingly intolerant. Alcohol became unavailable in most shops and supermarkets; I heard stories of fanatics at the Comte des Flandres metro station who pressured women to wear the veil; Islamic bookshops proliferated, and it became impossible to buy a decent newspaper. With an unemployment rate of 30 percent, the streets were eerily empty until late in the morning. Nowhere was there a bar or café where white, black and brown people would mingle. Instead, I witnessed petty crime, aggression, and frustrated youths who spat at our girlfriends and called them “filthy whores.” If you made a remark, you were inevitably scolded and called a racist. There used to be Jewish shops on Chaussée de Gand, but these were terrorized by gangs of young kids and most closed their doors around 2008. Openly gay people were routinely intimidated, and also packed up their bags.

I finally left Molenbeek in 2014. It was not out of fear. The tipping point, I remember, was an encounter with a Salafist, who tried to convert me on my street. It boiled down to this: I could no longer stand to live in this despondent, destitute, fatalistic neighborhood.

Voeten, a war photographer and cultural anthropologist, goes on to explain why Belgium is such a rich place for jihadism to thrive. The biggest reason?:

The country’s political debate has been dominated by a complacent progressive elite who firmly believes society can be designed and planned. Observers who point to unpleasant truths such as the high incidence of crime among Moroccan youth and violent tendencies in radical Islam are accused of being propagandists of the extreme-right, and are subsequently ignored and ostracized.

The debate is paralyzed by a paternalistic discourse in which radical Muslim youths are seen, above all, as victims of social and economic exclusion. They in turn internalize this frame of reference, of course, because it arouses sympathy and frees them from taking responsibility for their actions.

Read the whole thing. It’s important.

This is why the overwhelming deluge of Islamic refugees into Europe right now is so dangerous. Europe is governed by elites like Angela Merkel that don’t have any capacity to deal with this kind of thing. There can be no doubt that Europe (and America) have a moral responsibility to help the refugees. But they cannot be allowed to settle en masse in Europe — or they will create many more Molenbeeks. Then what?

Balkanized America

A reader comments on the thread about the SJWs trying to get their KU Professor fired for crimethink in class:

I find myself turning more and more inward — toward my home, family, church — and less and less on public discourse.

Of course. Me too. This is the America that the Social Justice Warriors and their allies in the Establishment (especially media and academia) have created: a Balkanized polity where nobody trusts anybody who is not like them.

You would have to be an absolute fool, or in a position not to care, to be a white person who voiced a non-left opinion about race, sex, gender, or homosexuality these days. Last month, I communicated with a nationally prominent liberal professor who teaches at a prestigious institution, who said that he is extremely careful what he dares to say in class and anywhere on campus, for fear that some student, somewhere, will consider it a microaggression, and file charges against him. Even groundless charges that are ultimately dismissed can consume a professor’s life, and severely damage his career. In a flash this fall, we have seen university after university taken over by fanatics who despise freedom of speech and thought — the core of a university education — and who have learned that the power elite within those communities are paper tigers who can be intimidated into giving them whatever they demand, or close to it.

It has not yet occurred to these weak and unprincipled leaders that the protesters possess the dead-end politics of Ta-Nehisi Coates: construing the problem in such a way as to deny the possibility of any kind of solution. As I pointed out in my blog post on the book, Coates holds that the only reasonable path for black people in America is to quit believing in Dr. King’s vision (“The changes have awarded me a rapture that comes only when you can no longer be lied to, when you have rejected the Dream”). Actually, I’m probably wrong about that: they almost certainly agree with Coates’s politics. Coates just won the National Book Award, a sure sign that his views have been embraced by the Establishment. What the events of this autumn are teaching the rest of us is that universities are ceasing to be places of open debate, and “safe spaces” for anybody who holds the “wrong” beliefs, especially if one is white, male, and/or heterosexual.

I want to draw your attention to this passage from the “open letter” the KU grad students wrote to demand the firing of their teacher:

The response that more dialogue is needed to resolve this problem is insufficient to redress our claim that the space of dialogue is coded through terror and hostility. The belief that democratic deliberation is neutral is wrong and dangerous. We appreciate the IOA’s commitment to “students’ ability to file complaints and have their voice heard without fear of retaliation.” What is needed now is action upon those complaints. Do not allow the guise of free speech to be invoked and crowd out our demand — legal precedent indicates that Dr. Quenette’s speech is not protected by the First Amendment.

Free speech, democratic deliberation — none of it matters, because it is a potential obstacle to the radicalized students getting what they demand. Understand what’s at stake here: nothing less than the destruction of university education.

When I went to college in the 1980s, I found it thrilling to have my beliefs challenged in class, and outside of class. I learned how to analyze and to argue. This is a core part of education! And yet, these left-wing militants want to destroy the ability of all students to have that kind of opportunity, by driving any faculty who disagree out of the university, or silencing them. The poison of cultural leftism is destroying universities. It’s bad enough that this happens at any university, but for it to happen at public universities, like Mizzou and KU — that’s even more disturbing, and telling.

What these students and their supporters on faculties and university administrations are doing is destroying the possibility of a public, of the common good. To them, there is no such thing as the common good; there is only power. And so far, they have met no resistance.  This movement and the mentality behind it is exacerbating the fractures that exist in America today, driving people apart and into private life as the only reliable “safe space” available to them. When a professor faces career ruin because of some mildly controversial things she said in class, it is reasonable to wonder if the public university is safe for free expression and free inquiry. If the faculty of KU had any sense, it would threaten a campus-wide strike in support of Prof. Quenette; their own academic freedom requires it. But they may end up doing what Quenette’s own department is doing: endorsing the radicals’ demands, either because they agree with them, or because they are too afraid of their own children to object.

And when the radicals come for them next year, there will be nobody left to speak out for them.

Here is a comment that someone left on the first KU thread on this blog:

I’m an alumnus of the graduate program in question. I’ve been in touch this past week with graduate students in the department and have tried to get some info from my professors, but the latter are maintaining a pretty strict radio silence (understandably). From what I can tell, no one expects Dr. Quenette to survive this. The campus radicals have been calling for the chancellor to resign (a black woman, by the way) because of some perceived failure to combat the usual litany of problems (real and otherwise).

I was in the department when Dr. Quenette was hired, and she is a wonderful and kind person. Her kids are adorable. She’s a good presence in the building. It’s incredible that she may be fired for using a racial slur in a discussion about racial slurs and racial incidents. I don’t know any of the students who wrote that shallow and vile letter, but if they cannot distinguish between hateful language and a discussion about hateful language, then I’m embarrassed to have been admitted to the same program as them.

The Coms program at KU is among the nation’s oldest and probably among the five most highly regarded in the country. And that is precisely why she will probably be fired. If she isn’t, it will decimate an already underfunded department (like many places, KU is shifting virtually every resource into engineering and medicine). What graduate students will come to the place that kept a “racist” professor? What prospective faculty members will want to join? What grant funding would come our way if this woman is not ejected from the “safe, inclusive environment”?

The most disgusting and deplorable part of this entire story is that the precious students demanded Dr. Quenette read aloud in class the letter calling for her own termination. Have these students never read about the Soviet show trials? The forced guillotine-platform confessions?

There is a new kind of intellectual tyranny spreading on campuses, and any of us who care about traditional conservatism need to care about it. The idea starts on campus but will spread through society. Things that we hold dear — tradition, faith, community — will be denounced as racist, bigoted, irrational, and so on, and will be deemed unworthy of expression and thus prohibited. When Rod says “they are coming for us,” he is not being hyperbolic. As an academic, I can vouch for this. They are not just coming; they are here. You can say, “Oh, I’m not a professor, this doesn’t affect me.” I promise you that if you are a believer, a traditionalist, or even just slightly skeptical of the Willed-Self project, then they are coming for you next. “Silence is Violence” is their mantra. If you do not declare fealty to them, they will destroy your career, your reputation, and, eventually, intellectual freedom.

We will see if conservatives and (more importantly) traditional liberals have the courage and foresight to fight back. The thing that most concerns me is that campus radicals are operating from premises that are already accepted within the liberal Establishment; they are just taking them one or two steps further.

Take the discipline situation at Los Angeles public schools, as reported by the L.A. Times. It’s a relatively small example, but a consequential one:

It’s another day of disruption on this campus in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which has been nationally hailed by the White House and others for its leadership in promoting more progressive school-discipline policies. The nation’s second-largest school system was the first in California to ban suspensions for defiance and announced plans to roll out an alternative known as restorative justice, which seeks to resolve conflicts through talking circles and other methods to build trust.

The shift has brought dramatic changes: Suspensions districtwide plummeted to 0.55% last school year compared with 8% in 2007-08, and days lost to suspension also plunged, to 5,024 from 75,000 during that same period, according to the most recent data.

The district moved to ban suspensions amid national concern that they imperil academic achievement and disproportionately affect minorities, particularly African Americans.

But many teachers say their classrooms are reeling from unruly students who are escaping consequences for their actions.

 

More:

“My teachers are at their breaking point,” Art Lopez, the school’s union representative, wrote to union official Colleen Schwab in a letter obtained by The Times. “Everyone working here is highly aware of how the lack of consequences has affected the site. Teachers with a high number of students with discipline issues are walking a fine line between extreme stress and a emotional meltdown.”

Lopez wrote that many teachers felt that administrators were pushing the burden of discipline onto instructors because they can no longer suspend unruly students and lack the staff to handle them outside the classroom. Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, which represents principals and others, declined to comment.

Michael Lam, an eighth-grade math teacher, said he has seen an increase in student belligerence under new discipline policies.

“Where is the justice for the students who want to learn?” he said, speaking at a recent forum held as part of the process to select the next superintendent of schools. “I’m afraid our standards are getting lower and lower.”

In Los Angeles, because a significant number of black students cannot control themselves in class, teachers are made to suffer, and so are all the students — black, white, Asian, whatever — who are there to get an education. Naturally, the liberal backers of this scheme tell the Times that there’s nothing wrong with it that more bureaucracy won’t fix. In the meantime, those parents that can afford to withdraw their kids from public schools in Los Angeles, either by putting them in private education or by moving to a different school district, will do so, because they can plainly see that the institution does not have the vision or the courage to defend itself against those who would tear it down.

So people withdraw into the private sphere for education, as they will withdraw ever more into the private sphere across the board. Again and again, MacIntyre saw it all coming. A society where people lack core shared convictions cannot hold together. In the last decade, the liberal Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam discovered an inconvenient truth: that diversity is not always our strength, but in some ways our weakness. From a Boston Globe essay about it:

It has become increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

“The extent of the effect is shocking,” says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.

The study comes at a time when the future of the American melting pot is the focus of intense political debate, from immigration to race-based admissions to schools, and it poses challenges to advocates on all sides of the issues. The study is already being cited by some conservatives as proof of the harm large-scale immigration causes to the nation’s social fabric. But with demographic trends already pushing the nation inexorably toward greater diversity, the real question may yet lie ahead: how to handle the unsettling social changes that Putnam’s research predicts.

“We can’t ignore the findings,” says Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. “The big question we have to ask ourselves is, what do we do about it; what are the next steps?”

Putnam says he tried to re-examine the data from all sides, because he didn’t want to accept the conclusion:

But even after statistically taking them all into account, the connection remained strong: Higher diversity meant lower social capital. In his findings, Putnam writes that those in more diverse communities tend to “distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

“People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle,” Putnam writes.

In documenting that hunkering down, Putnam challenged the two dominant schools of thought on ethnic and racial diversity, the “contact” theory and the “conflict” theory. Under the contact theory, more time spent with those of other backgrounds leads to greater understanding and harmony between groups. Under the conflict theory, that proximity produces tension and discord.

Putnam’s findings reject both theories. In more diverse communities, he says, there were neither great bonds formed across group lines nor heightened ethnic tensions, but a general civic malaise. And in perhaps the most surprising result of all, levels of trust were not only lower between groups in more diverse settings, but even among members of the same group.

“Diversity, at least in the short run,” he writes, “seems to bring out the turtle in all of us.”

Sure it does, because diversity forces us to confront difference constantly, and that makes all of us anxious, no matter what our tribe is. The way to ameliorate that natural anxiety is to move within a social framework that allows people to express differences of opinion without opening themselves up to strong attack. That requires grace on both sides: people who express a particular opinion have to allow for the fact that they might be wrong, and must be willing and able to have their mind changed; people who hear that opinion expressed must be willing and able to allow the Other to express that opinion without being denounced as a heretic, and having to fear for his own safety or security.

In my life, and in my travels, I have greatly benefited from being around people who are not like me — people who have challenged my way of thinking and seeing and moving in the world, and changed my mind. In every single case, my mind has been changed by people different from me who gave me the benefit of the doubt, assuming that I had a good heart, and was willing to listen. And I opened up to them because I assumed that they too had good hearts, and were willing to listen to me, with respect. “Diverse” friends like that have been a blessing to me.

But when “diversity” is seen as a threat, everything changes. On campuses, we see that holding opinions that diverge from SJW dogma is considered by SJWs to be a threat that must be extinguished by force. SJWs have shown that liberal authorities have no courage to stand up to their bullying. I have every expectation that the spinelessness shown by university administrators finds its analogue in corporate America.

It’s not likely to get better anytime soon. Look at the results of a new Pew survey measuring attitudes towards free speech, as reported in the WaPo. Says the Post:

Pew asked various groups of people whether or not it was appropriate for the government to intervene to censor offensive comments about minority groups. In the United States, no two groups were more sympathetic to letting the government do so than millennials (defined here as those aged 18 to 34) and non-whites.

Now do you see where the SJWs at KU are coming from with their claim that “democratic deliberation” is a sham, and that “free speech” should not be allowed to stand in the way of satisfying their demands?

Will the unwinding be arrested? Will conservatives and traditional liberals find it within themselves to stand up to this tyranny of the cultural left? I hope so, but I’m pessimistic. I could be wrong, but my sense now is that the best conservatives and traditionalists can hope for is for our political leaders and judges to protect under law the private realm. That is why it is important to vote for politicians who believe in the private realm — and why the most sensible thing for traditional conservatives to do in most cases may be to vote libertarian. But this does nothing to bolster the public realm or the sense of the common good.

To be fair to the SJWs, if what they believe constitutes a just political and moral order is true, then there is no place for people like me in it. I do not share — and in fact reject — some principles they see as non-negotiable. Similarly, if what I believe is true, then they have no place at the table, because they do not share the basic beliefs necessary to form a cohesive society, as I see it. Note well that this is not a dispute over the interpretation of shared beliefs, but a confrontation between fundamentally irreconcilable beliefs. At the most basic level, we are not part of the same society, but rather are people who happen to dwell in the same polity. They have and are gaining power now in most of the key institutions of this society. I hope there is an equal and opposite reaction that restores order to these institutions. I am pessimistic about that, but hope to be proven wrong. The authority of those institutions (versus their power) is dissolving. As Philip Rieff said, when institutions cease to be able to transmit their core values to the next generation, they decline. By caving in to the SJWs, universities are failing to defend, much less transmit, their core values to young people. Ideas have consequences.

In any case, this is one reason why we need the Benedict Option: we traditional Christians have to be able to remember who we are in a time of mass forgetting, and to be able to band together to support each other through what’s to come. People like us will, I fear, be cast out of universities. Where will they go? What will they do? Who will help you when they come for you, or deny you the right to work?