Allan Bloom redux: education for tolerance

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I thought this post from 2013 could bear repeating, with some edits and additions to bring it up to date.]

I’ve written before about Allan Bloom’s masterful The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987, here and here.

And I probably will again. It is so richly loaded with thought that almost every sentence might cause the reader to pause and reflect. Plus, it’s extremely readable. Bloom has done something extraordinarily difficult, which is to write a serious work about education, politics, history, and philosophy in a very lively style.

Apparently, that’s the kind of guy he was.

I was blown away at the outset by the first few paragraphs of his introduction, entitled “Our Virtue.” And so I’m going to reproduce some of it verbatim, just for you, to whet your appetite for the book itself. Remember as you read this that it was written no later than 1987, and probably a bit earlier:

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative…Some are religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right; some intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen; some are poor, some rich. They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society…The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness, and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness—and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times…

The students, of course, cannot defend their opinion. It is something with which they have been indoctrinated…

Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being…In some nations the goal was the pious person, in others the warlike, in others the industrious…Aristocracies want gentlemen, oligarchies men who respect and pursue money, and democracies lovers of equality. Democratic education, whether it admits it or not, wants and needs to produce men and women who have the tastes, knowledge, and character supportive of a democratic regime. Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime. We began with the model of the rational and industrious man, who was honest, respected the laws, and was dedicated to the family (his own family—what has in its decay been dubbed the nuclear family). Above all he was to know the rights doctrine; the Constitution, which embodied it; and American history, which presented and celebrated the founding of a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”…

But openness…eventually won out over natural rights, partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion against nature’s last constraints. Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new…

Liberalism without natural rights, the kind that we knew from John Stuart Mill and John Dewey, taught us that the only danger confronting us is being closed to the emergent, the new, the manifestations of progress. No attention had to be paid to the fundamental principles or the moral virtues that inclined men to live according to them…

Note how long ago all of this had already hit its stride. As the book goes on, some of the best passages involve Bloom’s description of the faculty’s craven abdication during the student uprisings of the 1960s, when he was one of those who tried (in vain, as it turned out) to hold his finger in the dike of the best traditions of Western Civilization.

In 2017 I would add that little has changed except these ideas have become even more widespread, if anything, and many of the students have become more strident, angry, confrontational, and accusative. Yesterday at Legal Insurrection, Professor Jacobson quoted a tweet by Eric Weinstein (the brother of -much-in-the-news Evergreen professor Bret Weinstein), that succinctly summarizes where we have arrived at this point:

Intersectional Shakedown, n.: Protection racket where underrepresented groups sell protection from bigotry charges for apologies/concessions.

The Intersectional Shakedown racket is rampant not just in the university but in public life as a whole. If all the “ists” are defined as nearly the worst accusations ever—“racist,” “sexist,” “rape apologist” and the like—people will do almost anything to avoid being called any version of intolerant. And to avoid this, they will bend over backwards to give the potential accusers want they want. Special considerations of many sorts, including campus police standing down while they harrass others and/or block traffic, failure to be disciplined or charged even when violence occurs, being given pride of place at a graduation—all of this is in the form of a concession in order to avoid being painted with the vile brush of intolerance. And if all these concessions fail, and a person ends up being the target of such an accusation, then there’s always the apology.

Professor Jacobson adds:

The Intersectionality Shakedown method is particularly effective because it targets the people who are not what they are accused of being: Eric Weinstein is not a racist, and David Collum is not a rape apologist or any of the other things he was accused of being. So they actually are damaged by and afraid of the accusations, whereas people who actually were those things likely would not care.

In these circumstances, the silence of peers helps the aggressors.

“The silence of peers” is unsurprising. If one studies history—or lives for a while in the real world of various workplaces especially including academia—one becomes impressed by how relatively rare moral courage is. It has been my personal experience in academia, on issues much smaller and much less risky that the present ones, in situations where I stood up to speak against what I considered some sort of wrong action, that I was usually completely alone. Afterwards, people would often come up to me privately and say they agreed with me, and when I asked why they hadn’t stood and spoken publicly to support me, they would answer that they were afraid for their jobs or their grades. That’s how I learned that most people don’t want to draw even a minor amount of attention to themselves when any possibility of retaliation exists. How much worse it must be when the dangers and the exposure are greater.

The radicalization of Professor Weinstein: the Evergreen backstory

The New Neo Posted on by

You probably saw the video about the ruckus at Evergreen. You read the articles and the posts, including mine. You may have watched the interview between Tucker Carlson and Bret Weinstein, the professor whose letter protesting the idea that whites should leave the campus for a day started the whole thing.

I don’t know about you, but it made me wonder. Not about the protestors—their motives are pretty clear—but about what prompted Professor Weinstein to take the stand he did. After all, he seems to be a man of the left, and it was a brave act for which he must have known there would be powerful repercussions. What’s more, although he’s a biology professor, his letter and interview were both extremely articulate and showed that he’d thought a great deal about the issues involved. I wondered what his story was—that is, what prompted him to take this stand at this time, in a situation in which most professors who might have agreed with him probably decided it was best to keep a low profile.

I don’t have a complete answer. But Professor Weinstein has written an op-ed for the WSJ that sheds some light on the backstory. It’s an insightful account of a conflict between two groups of faculty at the college that has been ongoing for years—and even for decades—at universities and colleges all over the country:

…[T]he protests resulted from a tension that has existed throughout the entire American academy for decades: The button-down empirical and deductive fields, including all the hard sciences, have lived side by side with “critical theory,” postmodernism and its perception-based relatives…For decades, the uneasy separation held, with the factions enduring an unhappy marriage for the good of the (college) kids.

Things began to change at Evergreen in 2015, when the school hired a new president, George Bridges. His vision as an administrator involved reducing professorial autonomy, increasing the size of his administration, and breaking apart Evergreen’s full-time programs. But the faculty, which plays a central role in the college’s governance, would never have agreed to these changes. So Mr. Bridges tampered with the delicate balance between the sciences and humanities by, in effect, arming the postmoderns.

The particular mechanism was arcane, but it involved an Equity Council established in 2016. The council advanced a plan that few seem to have read, even now””but that faculty were nonetheless told we must accept without discussion. It would shift the college “from a diversity agenda” to an “equity agenda” by, among other things, requiring an “equity justification” for every faculty hire.

The plan and the way it is being forced on the college are both deeply authoritarian, and the attempt to mandate equality of outcome is unwise in the extreme. Equality of outcome is a discredited concept, failing on both logical and historical grounds, as anyone knows who has studied the misery of the 20th century. It wouldn’t have withstood 20 minutes of reasoned discussion.

This presented traditional independent academic minds with a choice: Accept the plan and let the intellectual descendants of Critical Race Theory dictate the bounds of permissible thought to the sciences and the rest of the college, or insist on discussing the plan’s shortcomings and be branded as racists. Most of my colleagues chose the former, and the protesters are in the process of articulating the terms. I dissented and ended up teaching in the park.

Aha! I knew there was a story there, and this one appears to have been brewing for Bret Weinstein for several years. I’m a bit puzzled as to why he still identifies as a self-described “progressive” (as he stated in the Tucker Carlson interview), because to think that “equality of outcome is a discredited concept” is to be at least edging towards being a conservative, if not already there.

Professor Weinstein appears to have decided to take his stand at Evergreen knowing full well what the stakes were, and knowing that “most of his colleagues” would indeed chose to remain silent and accept whatever was shoved down their throats rather than risk exactly what Weinstein risked and be branded as racists. Weinstein seems fully ready for the consequences of his actions. And he’s very correct about the conflict between the sciences and the “postmoderns,” and where universities are headed if this trend is not reversed.

A brave man, and I applaud him.

Melania and Sophia

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve compared Melania Trump to Sophia Loren before. They both are tall, statuesque, brown-haired, and somewhat cat-eyed. They both have extraordinarily good posture (you may not notice that sort of thing, but it certainly catches my eye).

And I’m evidently not the only one who sees a resemblance, because someone has made a video dedicated to the idea. But i have to say, on viewing it, that although I stand by my statement that there are major similarities between the two, the video makes it clear that Sophia Loren is by far the more extraordinary.

That’s not to put Melania down; she’s a gorgeous woman. But Loren is sui generis: lush, feline, exaggerated both in her facial features and in her body. In Sophia’s case, more is more.

Full lips? Hers are fuller. Cat eyes? Hers are more catlike. Small waist, large chest? Hers is smaller and hers is larger. Impossible that such a human existed. And yet she did, and still does. These photos (starting around 1:29) show the youthful Loren to be a marvel of human architecture. The older Loren is pretty darn wonderful, too, but it’s her youthful manifestation that will have you gasping:

Kathy Griffin and the severed head of Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Not gonna link to it; I’m going to assume you’ve seen it and know what I’m talking about.

My only commentary is this: Kathy Griffin has long been a humorless and unpleasant person whose specialty is supposed humor of the offensive sort. This latest—the photo of her holding the severed bleeding head of Trump—is just an extension of what she’s always been. She may have thought that the left and her fans would support and even praise her, because the atmosphere of Trump-hatred has gotten just that bad.

That’s why her “apology” features the idea that she “went too far.” The sentiment of wishing Trump dead is, I suppose, something that’s not uncommon on the left, but the going-too-far part must have been the exceptionally graphic nature of the image and the nakedness of the bloodthirsty desire.

Things have come to a pretty pass.

Tiger Woods and back surgery

The New Neo Posted on by

Tiger Woods is facing a new scandal: a DUI charge based on the fact that he was found passed out on the side of the road with his lights on, and was somewhat disoriented. He has claimed that the problem was not a result of drinking, but was instead “an unexpected reaction to prescribed medications.”

But that’s not really what I want to talk about. What caught my eye was this:

[Woods] underwent fusion surgery on his back more than a month ago — his fourth operation since 2014. Woods said in a blog post published last week that “it was instant nerve relief.”

From personal experience as a person very familiar with long-term back problems and nerve pain, I can say that four surgeries in three years is an awful lot of surgeries, and that nerve pain is a dreadful thing from which to suffer. Virtually all pain is mediated by the nerves, but the sort of nerve pain Woods is referring to is pain that originates in damage to the nerves themselves, and it is quite a different animal from the usual pain, as well as much more recalcitrant to medication or to treatment of any sort.

I wrote about my personal experience with the phenomenon here, and I wouldn’t wish such a thing on a dog.

Woods has written that he is now free of his nerve pain, so why was he taking medication? Well, he’s still pretty recently post-surgical, and my guess is that he’s taking it for the surgical pain (although of course it could be something more pernicious). A fusion is a big big deal, and a month or so isn’t long at all in the healing process, even for an athlete.

I wish him well. Four surgeries in rapid succession indicates to me that Woods might have been suffering from what’s called “failed back syndrome,” and it’s a difficult thing to treat. He reports that this latest surgery was successful; time will tell.

I never had back surgery, although many doctors were more than willing to perform it on me. One of the main reasons I didn’t have surgery was that they tended to disagree on which surgery I should have, and that fact didn’t inspire confidence even though I went to some of the most famous back surgeons in the country. Another problem was that I knew a lot about failed back surgeries from other people who’d experienced them. So I suffered nerve pain for over a decade, and then slowly my back started to improve. Nowadays (knock wood, knock wood, knock wood) I still have the problem, but if I’m careful it’s usually quite manageable and I don’t even need medication. But I have enormous compassion for those with histories such was Woods’.

Can leftists change?

The New Neo Posted on by

A couple of commenters on the Evergreen thread challenged the idea that it’s possible to change minds on the left by offering them new information and knowledge, even questioning whether it’s possible to change them at all.

I know a great many people on the left, of all ages. They are not even remotely a unitary bunch in what they advocate, why they advocate it, the basis of their belief system, what they are willing to do to promote and defend that belief system (particularly regarding violence and/or coercion of other kinds), and how firm and resistant to change their beliefs are.

Some of this difference is also a function of age. The younger the more malleable, as a general rule, although older people can change too—as evidenced by my own story.

In fact, ideological change is not all that unusual and certainly not unheard of on the left. Students are generally quite young and in a state of ideological and personal flux. These students (at Evergreen and elsewhere) have been indoctinated by their previous education, and many of them are profoundly ignorant of history as well as the arguments of the right. Exposure to those things would almost certainly change some minds, and students are a particularly fertile field for this because of their young age and relatively malleable minds.

I have thought long and hard about the process of changing a person’s mind in the political sense. The phenomenon is probably not common in terms of percentages of the whole, but nevertheless it happens every day. It can indeed happen, and if you read my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series I go into the process in great detail: change can occur as a result of life experience, emotion, and/or also a a result of changes in thinking such as the learning of more history. I myself experienced some political change back in college, long before my more major change experience, as a result of a single course I took (I wrote about the experience here). I am firmly convinced that this is possible today, and I read stories of such things happening on a daily basis. This is not based on any sort of naivete on my part. It is based on careful observation.

Are the principles of people on the left “fundamentally different than ours,” as commenter Frog has stated? Having spoken to many of them, it is clear to me that some actually have principles very like mine, but come to different political conclusions based on them, and yet some are operating under very different premises than I am. The left is not a unitary bunch in terms of principles; just as an example, some of my friends and relatives on the left are very devout and come to their leftism from that point of view, and some are atheists.

This is hardly a new topic on this blog. It’s one of the main subjects here and has been for 12 years. And I have plenty of data to illustrate the fact that such change can occur, and that it is not vanishingly rare. No, I haven’t done a scientific study on the subject, but I have observed a large number of people who have written of their left-to-right conversion experience. Some are famous. Some are people who have written a single op-ed in the newspaper and are heard from no more in the public sense. Some are bloggers like me; there are plenty of them with that experience. Some are commenters here. Some are relatives and friends of commenters here. Some are people who don’t comment here but who email me, both from this country and other places around the world. I have also personally seen some minds changed after lengthy discussions of politics, over time.

It is not an uncommon phenomenon, and it happens often enough that the remark commonly attributed to Churchill about being liberal when young and conservative when old is a famous one in all its guises. Whether Churchill actually said it or not (or was the first to say it) is not especially relevant; what is relevant is that the quote is ubiquitous (see that link I just gave for evidence of its widespread nature), and seems to reflect a commonplace observation in many parts of the world.

Those who deny its possibility, and who lump all liberals and leftists together as completely past “saving” and as impervious to change or argument or reason, are denying the evidence. Yes, it is usually very frustrating to deal with the left. Yes, it is difficult to persuade people; people don’t change all that often, and they certainly don’t do so as a result of a single conversation or being caught in a single error. But to deny the possibility of reaching some people on the left is to deny what appears to be reality, to give up the fight. and to consider the entire bunch an enemy against which any tactic no matter how harsh is acceptable.

[ADDENDUM: Coincidentally, Sarah Hoyt has a good post today on political change, her experience and others. (Hat tip: vanderleun.)]

The Evergreen mob versus Weinstein: the closed American university mind

The New Neo Posted on by

You may already be familiar with a recent incident at Evergreen State College in Washington state that resembles so many other incidents at colleges lately. At Evergreen, an angry mob of students confronted a professor for standing against racism, and the students did it in the name of fighting racism.

This is the Orwellian point we’ve reached:

Evergreen State College, a small liberal-arts school in Washington State, has long had an interesting tradition. Each year, there is a “Day of Absence” on which students and faculty members of color meet off campus to hold solidarity-building activities, leaving the remaining community members to recognize the absence ”” and thus the value ”” of their peers. Later there is a “Day of Presence,” with similar activities but for the entire campus community.

But this year, the event changed. On the April 12 Day of Absence, minority students and faculty remained on campus, while whites were asked to leave. According to the local student newspaper, the decision reflected concerns following the 2016 election that students of color no longer felt comfortable on campus. This was to be their chance to reassert their right to belong on campus . . . by asking everyone else of a particular skin color to leave.

Biology professor Bret Weinstein wrote a note of protest, correctly pointing out the different between a voluntary act of absence and what was being asked at Evergreen:

The first is a forceful call to consciousness which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.

Oh, boy. You might not be the least bit surprised by what happened in response to Professor Weinstein’s reasonable points, but he was. Here’s a fascinating interview with Weinstein, who is “troubled by what this implies about the current state of the left”:

I am on Weinstein’s side, and I am always happy to see anyone on the left get an inkling—however late in time—of what the left is all about. But I would strongly recommend to Weinstein that he read Allan Bloom’s 1989 book, The Closing of the American Mind, and he will see that not only is this not just the current state of the left (or the American university, for that matter), but it’s been the state of both for at least fifty years, since much of Bloom’s book is devoted to similar incidents at Cornell University during the late 60s.

Furthermore, this has been the left’s impulse virtually ever since it began. During much of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st, universities have almost utterly capitulated, and much of that capitulation has been in the name of fighting racism (as it was at Cornell).

You can see a longer video of the confrontation between some of the Evergreen students and Weinstein here:

I’ve written many posts about Allan Bloom and The Closing of the American Mind. The part of that book that describes what happened at Cornell in the late 60s is absolutely required reading for anyone who wants to understand what’s going on at universities today. It’s not pretty, and it’s not trivial. It’s dangerous fascistic stuff, and Weinstein (a “progressive,” i.e. man of the left, in his politics) has found out that the movement of which he’s a part isn’t what he thought it to be.

Weinstein is what the late Norm Geras—a leftist and early blogger who helped me get an audience when I was a newbie—called a “principled leftist” (see this). It’s a type that seems to be an endangered species these days on college campuses, and has been for quite some time. Is it any wonder that anyone with that inclination, and many on the right as well, would lay low and keep mum when faced with the mob? Weinstein, too, would be gone from the Evergreen campus if the student mob there who confronted him had anything to say about it.

Don’t sit on a hot stove till the administrators at Evergreen take a strong stand against what happened there, either (as you can see from that video of what Weinstein says in that interview with Tucker Carlson). Universities these days appear to be a safe place for the mob but not for the likes of Weinstein.

As Allan Bloom wrote in his description of events that occurred in 1969 at Cornell, and the behavior of the Cornell administration:

The [Cornell] provost was a former natural scientist, and he greeted me with a mournful countenance…there was nothing he could do to stop such behavior in the black student association”¦He added that no university in the country could expel radical black students, or dismiss the faculty members who incited them, presumably because the students at large would not permit it.

”¦The provost had a mixture of cowardice and moralism not uncommon at the time. He did not want trouble. His president had frequently cited Clark Kerr’s dismissal at the University of California as the great danger”¦At the same time the provost thought he was engaged in a great moral work, righting the historic injustice done to blacks. He could justify to himself the humiliation he was undergoing as a necessary sacrifice. The case of this particular black student clearly bothered him. But he was both more frightened of the violence-threatening extremists and also more admiring of them. Obvious questions were no longer obvious. Why could not a black student be expelled as a white student would be if he failed his courses or disobeyed the rules that make university community possible? Why could the president not call the police if order was threatened? Any man of weight would have fired the professor who threatened the life of the student. The issue was not complicated. Only the casuistry of weakness and ideology made it so”¦No one who knew or cared about what a university is would have acquiesced in this travesty. It was no surprise that a few weeks later””immediately after the faculty had voted overwhelmingly under the gun to capitulate to outrageous demands that it had a few days earlier rejected””the leading members of the administration and many well-known faculty members rushed over to congratulate the gathered students and tried to win their approval. I saw exposed before all the world what had long been known, and it was at last possible without impropriety to tell these pseudo-universitarians precisely what one thought of them.

It was also no surprise that many of those professors who had been most eloquent in their sermons about the sanctity of the university, and who had presented themselves as its consciences, were among those who reacted, if not favorably, at least weakly to what was happening. They had made careers out of saying how badly the German professors [during the Nazi era] had reacted to violations of academic freedom. This was all light talk and mock heroics, because they had not measured the potential threats to the university nor assessed the doubtful grounds of academic freedom. Above all, they did not think that it could be assaulted from the Left or from within the university”¦These American professors were utterly disarmed, as were many German professors, when the constituency they took for granted, of which they honestly believed they were independent, deserted or turned against them”¦To fulminate against Bible Belt preachers was one thing. In the world that counted for these professors, this could only bring approval. But to be isolated in the university, to be called foul names by their students or their colleagues, all for the sake of an abstract idea, was too much for them. They were not in general strong men, although their easy rhetoric had persuaded them that they were””that they alone manned the walls protecting civilization. Their collapse was merely pitiful, although their feeble attempts at self-justification frequently turned vicious. In Germany the professors who kept quiet had the very good excuse that they could not do otherwise. Speaking up would have meant imprisonment or death. The law not only did not protect them but was their deadly enemy. At Cornell there was no such danger”¦There was essentially no risk in defending the integrity of the university, because the danger was entirely within it. All that was lacking was a professorial corps aware of the university’s purpose, and dedicated to it. That is what made the surrender so contemptible.

At least Evergreen president Bridges has so far refused to fire Weinstein. That’s about it for taking a stand, though, unless you call this sort of statement “taking a stand”:

“Let me reiterate my gratitude for the passion and courage you have shown me and others,” Mr. Bridges said in his remarks, as reported by student newspaper the Cooper Point Journal. “I want every one of you to feel safe on this campus and be able to learn in a supportive environment free from discrimination or intimidation.”

You can read Bridges’ entire statement here. It’s lengthy and deals with many other issues besides the Weinstein brouhaha. It reads almost like a parody at some points, except it’s not (it begins with what I assume is not a joke, but a sold of mild apology for the conventions of English speech re gendered pronouns: “I’m George Bridges, I use he/him pronouns.”)

Evergreen isn’t Cornell in the 60s, so none of this should be surprising. Evergreen has long been a markedly “progressive” school (it even describes itself as “progressive”), similar to Oberlin or Antioch or Hampshire College. Therefore it isn’t within the realm of possibility that the president of Evergreen would be anything other than someone such as Bridges in the political sense. But it is symptomatic of the depth of the rot in the university that such behavior is hardly limited to a school like Evergreen. Note that one of the assertions by the students is that the place is somehow riddled with rampant racism; its leftist bona fides don’t protect it from attack as a racist institution any more than Weinstein’s protected him.

If I were president of Evergreen—which I’m not and never ever could be—I know what I’d suggest, rather than the increase in mandatory anti-racism training the already well-trained Evergreen faculty will be subjected to, as announced in Bridges speech. I’d take every one of those students—perhaps every student in the entire school, actually—and have them attend a required course (remember those?) in the history of tyranny. It would necessarily involve a great deal of instruction on the history—not the Chomsky/Zinn history, but the objective history—of the left in the USSR, China, Cambodia, and wherever else it gripped a country in its hideous maws.

Because, what would actually satisfy these students? A full-scale Cultural Revolution? The purging of those kulaks known as white people, or the right, or whoever the target du jour may be? And by the way, there were plenty of white students who were participants in that screaming crowd. No doubt they think that their politics would protect them, or perhaps their overwhelming feeling of guilt is such that they think they deserve whatever opprobrium they might get.

Memorial Day: if you’re reading this…

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve posted this song before, but I think it bears repeating, especially on Memorial Day.

It’s Tim McGraw’s extraordinarily moving song “If You’re Reading This:”

If you’re readin’ this
My momma’s sittin’ there
Looks like I only got a one way ticket over here.
I sure wish I could give you one more kiss
War was just a game we played when we were kids
Well I’m layin’ down my gun
I’m hanging up my boots
I’m up here with God and we’re both watchin’ over you

So lay me down
In that open field out on the edge of town
And know my soul
Is where my momma always prayed that it would go.
If you’re readin’ this I’m already home.

If you’re readin’ this
Half way around the world
I won’t be there to see the birth of our little girl
I hope she looks like you
I hope she fights like me
And stands up for the innocent and the weak
I’m layin’ down my gun,
I’m hanging up my boots
Tell dad I don’t regret that I followed in his shoes…

The first time I ever heard the song I got the chills as the lyrics unfolded and I realized what it was about, and then again and again as the heartstrings were jerked harder and harder as the song went on.

I say “the heartstrings were jerked,” which sounds as though I’m being critical and the song is manipulative. Well, it’s manipulative in the sense that it means to affect the listener emotionally, and it means to sell songs. But I see nothing wrong with that, if the emotion is sincere and deep. Most of us do, or should, feel a very strong gratitude to the young men and women who sacrificed their lives to defend liberty here and abroad, and a very strong sorrow that it was necessary. On Memorial Day, we thank them.

Memorial Day: patriotism

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly edited version of an older post.]

The story “The Man Without a Country” used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book—as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers—that I was assigned to read in school.

The plot was exciting compared to Dick and Jane and the rest, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad—and unfair, too—that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that I would guess is rarely or never assigned nowadays to students.

Patriotism has gotten a bad name during the last few decades.

I think part of this feeling began (at least in this country) with the Vietnam era and the influence of the left. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were seen to have wrought on that continent during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, but it seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.

Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:

If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…

A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which unbridled and amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response at the time, one that many decades later helped lead to the formation of the EU. The waning but still relatively strong nationalism of the US is seen by those who agree with him as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.

But the US is not Nazi Germany or anything like it, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. There’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores or tramples on human rights (like that of the Nazis), but one that embraces and strives for and tries to preserve them here and abroad, keeping in mind that—human nature being what it is—no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but it is a very good country nevertheless, always working to be better, with a nationalism that recognizes that sometimes liberty must be fought for, and that the struggle involves some sacrifice.

So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): …this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: …the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

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The hottest grandpa

The New Neo Posted on by

Or certainly the hottest 80-year-old. Freaky.

This is a holiday weekend, and you might want to leave politics for a while (I know I often do) and turn to the tale of Deshun Wang (or Wang Deshun), an 80-year-old Chinese man whose story I somehow missed when it went viral starting about two years ago.

Wang seems to be made of different stuff (physically and mentally) than just about anyone else, because I maintain that most humans—even if they had the will to work out at his intensity as long as he does each day—would not have a torso like his at the age of 80. Gravity eventually takes over on the skin of everyone—everyone except Deshun Wang, that is, although his face isn’t immune to its saggy effects.

It’s not just the way his body looks that’s notable. He also has an high energy level, with an immense focus and intensity.

But perhaps you’d like to see for yourself what on earth I’m talking about:

His torso doesn’t just look younger than 80. It looks about 18. The contrast between the elderly (but attractive) face and the extremely youthful body is why I used the word “freaky” earlier in this post.

And here’s an example of Wang’s art, his “living sculpture” performance, where Wang interacts with a statue of a woman and simultaneously becomes like a statue himself as the statue becomes more like a living person. I don’t know how long ago this was filmed, but probably not so very long ago at all:

Two longer articles about Wang can be found here and here.

[NOTE: I didn’t coin the phrase “the hottest grandpa.” That’s what he’s been called since the story went viral.]

Judicial reasoning: the 4th Circuit and the Trump travel ban

The New Neo Posted on by

Paul Mirengoff’s Powerline post on the recent decision of the 4th Circuit to uphold the lower court’s injunction on Trump’s immigration EO is entitled “Trump resisters in robes.”

I think that’s pretty much correct. But I don’t think the judges necessarily think of themselves as naked political operatives although—as a dissenting judge in the case has indicated—the lower court and the affirming majority of the 4th Circuit have stretched the law in an extreme way:

Judge Niemeyer concludes that the district court, whose decision the appeals court upheld, “seriously erred (1) by refusing to apply the Supreme Court’s decision in Mandel [Kleindienst v. Mandel, 408 U.S. 753 (1972); (2) by fabricating a new proposition of law ”” indeed, a new rule ”” that provides for the consideration of campaign statements to recast a later-issued executive order; and by radically extending Supreme Court Establishment Clause precedents.”

When I entered law school many moons ago, I didn’t have much (or actually, any) prior experience reading appellate decisions, an activity that formed the bulk of my assignments in law school. But the activity of reading them taught me that judges are very smart, and very good at finding plausible reasons for reaching the conclusions they wish to reach. The mystery, then and now, is which comes first, the reasoning or the conclusion?

You might say that of course the liberal judges in these EO cases go so far afield from precedent that they are torturing the law to come to exactly the anti-Trump conclusion they desire, and that therefore it’s clear that the conclusion comes first (whether they know it or not). I happen to think that’s true, because these decisions are so egregiously awful and the break with precedent so obvious. However, I doubt the judges sit around consciously thinking that they’re reasoning backwards from their desired conclusions when they are writing their decisions.

No, the human mind can justify and rationalize an awful lot, and I am virtually certain that the majority judges in these cases don’t think they’re doing anything except applying the law properly—applying it to stop a would-be tyrant (in their minds), to be sure, but applying it in an objective and correct manner. Human beings have a remarkable ability to fool themselves in order to come to the conclusions they seek.

Why is this of any importance at all? In other words, who cares what the liberal judges think in terms of how they come to the decisions they make? Well, I find the topic both psychologically and philosophically interesting, although you may not.

One of the reasons it’s easier for liberal judges to stretch the law in this way and justify it to themselves is that they believe in stretching the law, the believe that the law is an expansive and elastic instrument that must move with the times. A conservative judge, on the other hand, who believes (for example) in any of the conservative judicial philosophies such as originalism, strict constructionism, or textualism, has much less leeway and much less ability to justify twisting the law to come to the conclusions he/she desires.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t sometimes occur, even with conservative judges. But it’s less common and certainly more difficult for them to rationalize.