Plisetskaya the great, in the late 1950s:
The decline of the classics departments
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
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
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.
Open thread 6/1/21
Leonard Cohen the standup comic:
COVID scientists: fools or knaves?
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.
Disillusioned…
…with Black Lives Matter:
A song for Memorial Day
From the incomparable Mark Knopfler:
Open thread 5/31/21
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
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
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.
Philip Roth and the woke police
Recently there’s been a big brouhaha about whether Philip Roth was a misogynist and/or a sexual predator, and whether his latest biographer is a sexual predator as well. As part of this kerfuffle, a new lengthy Roth biography (over 800 pages – I’m not sure even Philip Roth would care to read that much about himself) is being taken off the shelves.
Hey, why not burn it? Can’t be too careful, you know.
You may or may not like Roth’s novels, but of course this sort of present-day censorship goes way beyond Roth. Personally, I liked Roth’s early work and read most of it way back when, but later on he lost me. I don’t know when the turning point began for me or exactly why, but I think it had something to do with the fact that his later work bored me.
But perhaps I’ve missed some good books along the way. For example, I’d heard that The Human Stain might be one of them, but I never mustered up enough interest to wade through it. Now, looking at the book’s Amazon listing, I am surprised to see that the theme of the 2000 work is described this way:
It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.
Sounds prescient, doesn’t it? Things like that were happening back then, but they seemed to be isolated incidents. Now they’re standard and common. Here’s an excerpt from the book:
It was about midway into his second semester back as a full-time professor that Coleman spoke the self-incriminating word that would cause him voluntarily to sever all ties to the college-the single self-incriminating word of the many millions spoken aloud in his years of teaching and administering at Athena, and the word that, as Coleman understood things, directly led to his wife’s death.
The class consisted of fourteen students. Coleman had taken attendance at the beginning of the first several lectures so as to learn their names. As there were still two names that failed to elicit a response by the fifth week into the semester, Coleman, in the sixth week, opened the session by asking, “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?”
Later that day he was astonished to be called in by his successor, the new dean of faculty, to address the charge of racism brought against him by the two missing students, who turned out to be black, and who, though absent, had quickly learned of the locution in which he’d publicly raised the question of their absence. Coleman told the dean, “I was referring to their possibly ectoplasmic character. Isn’t that obvious? These two students had not attended a single class. That’s all I knew about them. I was using the word in its customary and primary meaning: ‘spook’ as a specter or a ghost. I had no idea what color these two students might be. I had known perhaps fifty years ago but had wholly forgotten that ‘spooks’ is an invidious term sometimes applied to blacks. Otherwise, since I am totally meticulous regarding student sensibilities, I would never have used that word. Consider the context: Do they exist or are they spooks? The charge of racism is spurious. It is preposterous. My colleagues know it is preposterous and my students know it is preposterous. The issue, the only issue, is the nonattendance of these two students and their flagrant and inexcusable neglect of work. What’s galling is that the charge is not just false–it is spectacularly false.” Having said altogether enough in his defense, considering the matter closed, he left for home.
More at the link, in case you’re interested.
So here’s my two cents on the whole misogyny question. Not only had I originally read some of Roth’s early fiction, but I had read some of it as excerpts (short stories, actually) published in magazines before the books in which they later appeared were published. I no longer remember what periodicals I saw them in; this was probably close to fifty years ago.
One of these stories ended up as a chapter in Roth’s atypical 1967 novel When She Was Good. I used to own it, but somewhere along the line it got jettisoned, so I can’t read the chapter now to check and see what I think after the passage of so many years. The chapter was about the book’s main character Lucy, a good student from a poor and quite messed-up family who had gotten pregnant as a college freshman and was trying to decide what to do about it. When I first read the chapter as a short story, it was one of the most poignant and also hard-hitting examples of that dilemma I’ve ever seen, and it showed remarkable empathy with the girl.
I also recall being impressed by a chapter in Roth’s 1962 novel Letting Go. The chapter described an unhappy young woman’s first visit to a therapist, with dialogue. It was an example of empathy and insight into the pros and cons of what can happen in therapy to a vulnerable person, who happened in this case to be a woman.
I don’t see how an actual misogynist could have written either of those chapters. But even if he is a misogynist, so what? I don’t care. And I also don’t care if Roth wrote things that were offensive. Maybe his life was offensive, too. People are pretty complicated beings, and I have little doubt that Roth was very complicated, as well. My suggestion is quite simple: if you don’t like his work, don’t read him, and don’t read biographies about him.
But – as Roth himself seemed to be saying in The Human Stain – the woke simply can’t let us be.