“She was the ‘wrong’ kind of victim, and therefore didn’t exist”

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “AesopFan”]

Harry V. Jaffa, a professor of political philosophy at Claremont College, gave a farewell address to the school in 1989 that appears here in its entirety. The speech has some commonalities with the work of Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind) written at around the same time. It describes destructive leftist forces in academia that were already strongly entrenched and which have only gained power in the ensuing years.

The title of this post refers to the victim of a bombing that occurred at Claremont in 1969 in a situation that very much resembled that which occurred at Cornell in the same year, described by Bloom in detail in his book, and about which I’ve written previously.

Here’s Jaffa:

I recall one AP wire service story [about the Claremont bombing and resultant grave injuries to a 19-year-old woman] that crossed the nation the day the bomb went off, and then, after a short flurry in the local media, silence. In the twenty years that have intervened I have told this story hundreds of times. I have never met anyone outside of Claremont who knew about it. I have never met anyone in Claremont who was not here at the time — and that includes students who came in the fall of 1969, and in all the years that have followed — who knew about it.

To the best of my knowledge, the bombs that exploded in Claremont in February of 1969 were the first bombs to explode on any American campus in that time of turbulence across the nation. This dubious distinction is one that has been as thoroughly suppressed as any of the innumerable non-events that have occurred within the Soviet Union, at any time in the last 70 years, or until the arrival of Glasnost
.
The shabby treatment of this innocent victim reflects less the miserliness or parsimony of this extremely wealthy college, than a collective desire of all the colleges to suppress the memory of what happened. She was the “wrong” kind of victim, and therefore didn’t count.

But the shame does not stop here. No arrest in the case was ever made, although shortly after the Claremon episode a young Black Panther in San Francisco engaged in putting together a pipe bomb blew himself up. It was common knowledge at the time that there was a Panther unit in the nearby City of Pomona, supplying “technical assistance ”to the radical students on campus. Had Pomona or Scripps or any of the other colleges had any real interest in finding the criminals who planted the bombs, they would have offered a substantial reward for information leading to arrests and convictions. They never did. They were perfectly terrified at the prospect of what might happen if there were arrests.

The entire episode was very much in the vein of the events at Cornell in 1969, although there was no bombing at Cornell and what happened there was covered quite heavily in the press.

Jaffa also wrote of Claremont:

There was no wish to eliminate racial bias from the courses of study in the Claremont Colleges. Rather did it wish to encounter white bias with black bias. The assumption was that an unbiased education was a delusion. Education was understood to be, not a function of the freedom of the human mind, but of its determination by race and ethnicity. What stands out finally in my memory of this meeting, was the declaration of a Brown leader, that he had been in Vietnam, and had seen there what bullets could do, and that he knew therefore what they could do in Claremont. This was followed by a rhetorical question asked by a Black leader — a young woman who the next year was an assistant dean at Pomona College. The question was, “Do you want this campus burned down this summer or next summer?”

There’s much much more in the speech, but it’s long. So I’ll close with this quote, in which Jaffa describes a now-familiar leftist approach to “debate”:

Debate, like religion, had become in their minds only an opiate. You defeated your opponent’s arguments by trampling on your opponents, and by treating them with contempt.

In recent years this approach has been markedly successful in achieving a type of persuasion – not through the mechanism of logic but through emotion. The feelings to which it appeals in its practitioners are the desire for power and revenge, and the feelings it attempts to engender in its targets are fear, shame, remorse, and the desire to surrender.

The decline of the classics departments

The New Neo Posted on by

Howard University is instituting a new policy described in this WaPo op-ed by Cornel West and Jeremy Tate:

Upon learning to read while enslaved, Frederick Douglass began his great journey of emancipation, as such journeys always begin, in the mind. Defying unjust laws, he read in secret, empowered by the wisdom of contemporaries and classics alike to think as a free man. Douglass risked mockery, abuse, beating and even death to study the likes of Socrates, Cato and Cicero.

Long after Douglass’s encounters with these ancient thinkers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be similarly galvanized by his reading in the classics as a young seminarian — he mentions Socrates three times in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”

Yet today, one of America’s greatest Black institutions, Howard University, is diminishing the light of wisdom and truth that inspired Douglass, King and countless other freedom fighters. Amid a move for educational “prioritization,” Howard University is dissolving its classics department. Tenured faculty will be dispersed to other departments, where their courses can still be taught. But the university has sent a disturbing message by abolishing the department.

Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.

Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this op-ed is that it was written (at least in part) by Cornel West, a Harvard professor you’d hardly call a conservative. For example, from his Wiki entry:

Cornel Ronald West…is an American philosopher, political activist, social critic, and public intellectual. The grandson of a Baptist minister, West focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their “radical conditionedness”. A radical democrat and socialist, West draws intellectual contributions from multiple traditions, including Christianity, the black church, Marxism, neopragmatism, and transcendentalism.

West is an outspoken voice in left-wing politics in the United States.

The op-ed begins with examples of how the classics inspired black civil rights leaders, and it talks about typical left-wing topics such as “crimes of the West” (the society, not the man). But it’s certainly not limited to that, because West also makes it clear that he sees intrinsic value in studying the classics.

Something about what’s going on in academia these days seems to be disturbing even to an old activist leftist such as West, who is practically a traditionalist compared to the young firebrand whippersnappers of today. The op-ed continues:

The Western canon is an extended dialogue among the crème de la crème of our civilization about the most fundamental questions. It is about asking “What kind of creatures are we?” no matter what context we find ourselves in. It is about living more intensely, more critically, more compassionately. It is about learning to attend to the things that matter and turning our attention away from what is superficial.

Howard University is not removing its classics department in isolation. This is the result of a massive failure across the nation in “schooling,” which is now nothing more than the acquisition of skills, the acquisition of labels and the acquisition of jargon. Schooling is not education. Education draws out the uniqueness of people to be all that they can be in the light of their irreducible singularity. It is the maturation and cultivation of spiritually intact and morally equipped human beings.

The removal of the classics is a sign that we, as a culture, have embraced from the youngest age utilitarian schooling at the expense of soul-forming education.

West is a Christian, and that may be part of his objection to some of what’s happening in education these days.

Howard is indicating that its classics courses may still be taught in other departments at the school. But that’s not the same as having a dedicated classics department, and my guess is that the school is on the road to a greater phase-out of such study.

In addition, we have this announcement from Princeton:

Classics majors at Princeton University will no longer be required to learn Greek or Latin. The change is part of the school’s attempt to give more students the opportunity to major in the discipline.

The school has also removed the “classics track,” which required intermediate proficiency in Greek or Latin to enter the concentration.

Director of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Classics Josh Billings clarified that the department would offer the same variety of subjects. Students will still be encouraged to take these languages if relevant to their academic pursuits. However, these changes will provide students with greater freedom in their education.

Princeton has also approved changes in its politics and religion department. Politics has added a new track for race and identity, while religion majors can choose between a “traditions” stream and a “themes” stream.

So in the name of promoting the study of the classics, a supposedly august institution such as Princeton is watering down the requirements tremendously. Remember, we’re not talking about classes in the classics for non-majors, which have probably long been available in English and not requiring knowledge of Latin or Greek. We are talking here about the requirements for classics majors.

Absurd.

China continues to try to centrally control its birthrate

The New Neo Posted on by

In 1979, China instituted its one-child policy for population control, and enforced it with draconian measures. It’s an example of the impulse to centralized control by leftist states, and also the cruelty, unforeseen consequences, and ultimate failure of such control.

There were many effects of the policy, some of them still debated today because it was in place during a time when birthrates were falling anyway in many Western countries. But one of the fairly clear results of the policy has been a large male-to-female ratio. Another is this:

As the first generation of law-enforced only-children came of age for becoming parents themselves, one adult child was left with having to provide support for his or her two parents and four grandparents. Called the “4-2-1 Problem”, this leaves the older generations with increased chances of dependency on retirement funds or charity in order to receive support. If not for personal savings, pensions, or state welfare, most senior citizens would be left entirely dependent upon their very small family or neighbors for assistance. If for any reason, the single child is unable to care for their older adult relatives, the oldest generations would face a lack of resources and necessities

In 2016, China changed the policy and allowed two children. But the change failed to increase the birthrate sufficiently, and now the country’s leaders have announced that they will be allowing three.

But if two didn’t do the trick, why would three?:

The cost of raising children in cities has deterred many Chinese couples.

The latest move was approved by President Xi Jinping at a meeting of top Communist Party officials.

But human rights organisation Amnesty International said the policy, like its predecessors, was still a violation of sexual and reproductive rights…

“If relaxing the birth policy was effective, the current two-child policy should have proven to be effective too,” Hao Zhou, a senior economist at Commerzbank, told Reuters news agency.

“But who wants to have three kids? Young people could have two kids at most. The fundamental issue is living costs are too high and life pressures are too huge.”

If there are economic disincentives to having more children, it’s not going to work. There are also social changes in the perception of what the ideal family might be:

Generations of Chinese people have lived without siblings and are used to small families – affluence has meant less need for multiple children to become family-supporting workers, and young professionals say they’d rather give one child more advantages than spread their income among several kids…

More than 180,000 users have commented on Xinhua’s upbeat post, and the ones with the most likes do not look upon the policy kindly.

“There are too many big pressures in life at the moment,” one user says, “Young people are not willing to have kids.”

Many talk about modern day “workplace dilemmas” for people leaving on maternity/paternity leave and there not being even “the most basic reproductive benefits”.

And with a shrinking labour market, young Chinese people today accept that they have to work longer hours. Overtime and overwork are endemic.

More women meanwhile are choosing to pursue further education and employment, rather than settle down early to start a family.

All of these things are rather obvious, and all work against having large families. They are not particular to China, either; Western countries are experiencing a decline, too. However, the falling birthrates are happening just about everywhere.

That’s a huge and important topic, but it’s one I’m not going to explore further in this post. I’ll probably give it more of an in-depth look in a future one.

The intelligence trap

The New Neo Posted on by

From commenter “Barry Meislin”:

One might wish to believe otherwise, but intelligence is no guarantee against believing—and holding fast to—the most absurd and pathetic falsehoods. In fact, it seems as though the opposite is the case; i.e., the more intelligent a person, the greater that person’s ability to uber-rationalize all kinds of garbage—while believing that precisely because of his/her intelligence, there’s no way he/she can be wrong.

I believe that Thomas Sowell’s book Intellectuals and Society treats this subject in some depth.

It’s also something on which George Orwell reflected: “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”

But now we have a lot more going on than that. Now, education is devoted to inculcating students with such ideas, and in blocking or demonizing other information. I don’t think there’s ever been a society in which the young are being taught that their basic culture is evil, fraudulent, exploitative, and cruel, and that its obvious and evident achievements are somehow evil as well or at least to be discounted. It’s quite the experiment.

COVID scientists: fools or knaves?

The New Neo Posted on by

For over a year the left promoted the idea that COVID emerged accidentally in the wild, and called every challenge to that notion a debunked and ridiculous conspiracy theory. But recently – for reasons that remain someone obscure but about which we can speculate – the Democrats and the media have acknowledged that COVID’s genesis just might have been in a lab, as has long been considered a possibility by Donald Trump and most of the right.

Now several scientists have described seemingly powerful evidence of COVID’s lab creation, and they also claim that there was an elaborate coverup attempt:

An explosive new study claims that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a Wuhan lab, then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats.

The paper’s authors, British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen, wrote that they have had ‘prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China’ for a year – but were ignored by academics and major journals.

The shocking allegations in the study include accusations of ‘deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data’ at Chinese labs, and it notes the silencing and disappearance of scientists in the communist country who spoke out.

I suppose the allegations are “shocking” – or they would have been a couple of years ago. But I’m not shocked, and I bet most of the readers of this blog aren’t shocked either. After what we’ve seen in the last few years, it’s not difficult to believe that this information was suppressed. What’s far more puzzling is why it’s finally being allowed to come out now.

In the 22-page paper which is set to be published in the scientific journal Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, the scientists describe their months-long ‘forensic analysis’, looking back at experiments done at the Wuhan lab between 2002 and 2019.

Digging through archives of journals and databases, Dalgleish and Sørensen pieced together how Chinese scientists, some working in concert with American universities, allegedly built the tools to create the coronavirus…

Dalgleish and Sørensen claim that scientists working on Gain of Function projects took a natural coronavirus ‘backbone’ found in Chinese cave bats and spliced onto it a new ‘spike’, turning it into the deadly and highly transmissible SARS-Cov-2.

One tell-tale sign of alleged manipulation the two men highlighted was a row of four amino acids they found on the SARS-Cov-2 spike.

In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Sørensen said the amino acids all have a positive charge, which cause the virus to tightly cling to the negatively charged parts of human cells like a magnet, and so become more infectious.

But because, like magnets, the positively charged amino acids repel each other, it is rare to find even three in a row in naturally occurring organisms, while four in a row is ‘extremely unlikely,’ the scientist said.

Apparently they figured this out a year ago.

The authors add:

The implication of our historical reconstruction, we posit now beyond reasonable doubt, of the purposively manipulated chimeric virus SARS-CoV-2 makes it imperative to reconsider what types of Gain of Function experiments it is morally acceptable to undertake.

The idea of “gain of function” experiments – essentially, taking viruses and purposely changing them in ways that make them more likely to infect humans – is so reminiscent of scarey science fiction that one would have thought no such experiments would ever be “morally acceptable to undertake” – although of course not all nations are interested in conforming to what’s morally acceptable.

Question: does this mean we can call it the “China virus” again?

The Daily Mail article is long, and I suggest you read the whole thing.

Open thread 5/31/21

The New Neo Posted on by

This literal video version of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” came up in the comments yesterday, and I figured why not have another go-round with it? If you don’t know what a literal video is, this will show you:

Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad

The New Neo Posted on by

In this video, composer Jim Steinman talks about the genesis of his song “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.” It was suggested by the wife of a friend, and he originally conceived it as a country song:

So here’s Elvis singing “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” in 1956:

And here’s Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”:

Here’s Meat Loaf singing Steinman’s song in 1977, which was a big hit for him:

Jim Steinman, who was a very private person about his personal life that didn’t involve music, died a little over a month ago (April 19). His songs about love – and there are many – are dramatic, and most exhibit an unusual blend of ironic cynicism and humor as well as intensity and pathos. The only quote I’ve ever read from him referring to his private life – and it’s both revealing and concealing – is this:

Responding to an interviewer’s assertion that his songs are tragic, Steinman said he has “never been stomped on literally. Figuratively, I am stomped on every day … anyway, that is the way I feel sometimes. I’ve never had my heart broken the way you are talking about. I’ve never been dumped… but probably because I don’t allow myself to be dumped.”

A bit like the song, although in the song the singer has been dumped once, and then vowed to become the dumper and not the dumpee.

Biden is getting even creepier

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s always been something “off” about Biden. But the Democrats and the press have continually treated his offness as an endearing eccentricity.

As he gets older and becomes more addled, his creepiness gets worse. For example, this happened yesterday:

President Joe Biden raised eyebrows — and a few alarms — Friday when he lavishly complimented a little girl on her appearance during remarks at a Virginia military base.

“I love those barrettes in your hair, man,” Biden said. “I tell you what, look at her, she looks like she’s 19 years old, sitting there like a little lady with her legs crossed.”

The girl in question, who appeared to be elementary school age, had joined her parents and two older brothers on the podium while her mother introduced the president at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Hampton, Virginia.

Bizarre and inappropriate, at the very least.