Category: Transvaluation of Values
Where fun goes to die
It’s Saturday noon. Tens Hundreds of thousands of University students are highly inebriated and on their way to watching kickoffs.
But my thoughts turned earlier to the educational enterprise.
Several years ago Robert Zimmer was asked by an audience in China why the University of Chicago was associated with so many winners of the Nobel Prize — 90 in all, counting this month’s win by the behavioral economist Richard Thaler. Zimmer, the university’s president since 2006, answered that the key was a campus culture committed to “discourse, argument and lack of deference.”
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[F]ree speech is what makes educational excellence possible. “It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears,” Louis Brandeis wrote 90 years ago in his famous concurrence in Whitney v. California.
It is also the function of free speech to allow people to say foolish things so that, through a process of questioning, challenge and revision, they may in time come to say smarter things.
If you can’t speak freely, you’ll quickly lose the ability to think clearly. Your ideas will be built on a pile of assumptions you’ve never examined for yourself and may thus be unable to defend from radical challenges. You will be unable to test an original thought for fear that it might be labeled an offensive one …
That is the real crux of Zimmer’s case for free speech: Not that it’s necessary for democracy (strictly speaking, it isn’t), but because it’s our salvation from intellectual mediocrity and social ossification. In a speech in July, he addressed the notion that unfettered free speech could set back the cause of “inclusion” because it risked upsetting members of a community.
“Inclusion into what?” Zimmer wondered. “An inferior and less challenging education? One that fails to prepare students for the challenge of different ideas and the evaluation of their own assumptions? A world in which their feelings take precedence over other matters that need to be confronted?”
These are not earth-shattering questions. But they are the right ones, and they lay bare the extent to which the softer nostrums of higher ed today shortchange the intended beneficiaries.
(Bret Stephens, profiling University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer, emphasis added)
But I’m not sure that Zimmer’s answer to the Chinese is complete. He’s standing on the shoulders of Robert Hutchins:
After the 1939 season, Hutchins abolished football at Chicago University. And he did it during Christmas break, while the students were off campus. This decision (along with Hutchins eliminating fraternities and religious organizations from campus) caused a decrease in enrollment and financial backing.
Now to his credit, Chicago became one of the premier schools in the country ….
Well, yes, there’s that, I suppose. Where fun goes to die and future Nobel laureates go to do whatever magic it is that makes Nobel laureates.
But I was surprised to learn that the University pioneered women’s sports and is still involved in intercollegiate athletics, having been a charter member of a unique Division III conference (as once it helped found the Big Ten):
In 1987-88, Chicago became a charter member of a new and unique NCAA Division III conference, the University Athletic Association. Comprised of some of the nation’s leading research institutions, UAA members include Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon University, Case Western Reserve University, Emory University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, the University of Rochester, and Washington University in St. Louis.
The UAA provides its member institutions and student-athletes with some of the best athletic competition in the country, as evidenced by the fact that the UAA has sent 129 teams to NCAA postseason play and has produced 11 national champions in its 11-year history. Many student-athletes at UAA institutions are capable of competing at the NCAA Division I level, but choose the UAA experience because of the unique combination of academic, athletic, and travel opportunities the Association afford its members.
Mitch Daniels has deservedly gotten much attention for innovations to prepare Purdue for a changing environment, but I see no sign that his vision is as bold as dropping out of Division I to focus more on education.
Is it okay that I had fun poking around a bit, reminding myself that Division III isn’t incompatible with first-rate education, and writing this?
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“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)
There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)
Saturday, 10/14/17
Wednesday, 8/30/17
Saturday, 8/5/17
Trump in Warsaw
It sounds as if the President’s speechwriters gave him some very lofty things to say in Poland. I almost laughed out loud, derisively, at the thought of Donald Trump as the defender of what’s noble in the western tradition.
I wish I could credit him with believing — even understanding while uttering hypocritically — any of the better things he said. But I can’t.
If he follows through, he will enhance my faith in miracles.
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I had every intention of leaving Trump’s Warsaw comment there, with nothing more said. But something bizarre has happened:
The shocking thing here is that this is controversial at all. It shows how decadent we’ve become.
Let’s sample some of the left-liberal freakout, shall we?
Here’s Peter Beinart in The Atlantic:
In his speech in Poland on Thursday, Donald Trump referred 10 times to “the West” and five times to “our civilization.” His white nationalist supporters will understand exactly what he means. It’s important that other Americans do, too.
… The West is a racial and religious term. To be considered Western, a country must be largely Christian (preferably Protestant or Catholic) and largely white.
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More Beinart:
The most shocking sentence in Trump’s speech—perhaps the most shocking sentence in any presidential speech delivered on foreign soil in my lifetime—was his claim that “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” On its face, that’s absurd. Jihadist terrorists can kill people in the West, but unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, they cannot topple even the weakest European government. Jihadists control no great armies. Their ideologies have limited appeal even among the Muslims they target with their propaganda. ISIS has all but lost Mosul and could lose Raqqa later this year.
Trump’s sentence only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia. The “south” and “east” only threaten the West’s “survival” if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders. They only threaten the West’s “survival” if by “West” you mean white, Christian hegemony. A direct line connects Trump’s assault on Barack Obama’s citizenship to his speech in Poland. In Trump and Bannon’s view, America is at its core Western: meaning white and Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian). The implication is that anyone in the United States who is not white and Christian may not truly be American but rather than an imposter and a threat.
Poland is largely ethnically homogeneous. So when a Polish president says that being Western is the essence of the nation’s identity, he’s mostly defining Poland in opposition to the nations to its east and south. America is racially, ethnically, and religious diverse. So when Trump says being Western is the essence of America’s identity, he’s in part defining America in opposition to some of its own people. He’s not speaking as the president of the entire United States. He’s speaking as the head of a tribe.
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Let’s move on. Here’s a tweet by Slate’s Jamelle Bouie:
Imagine being a political writer in this moment and being utterly unable to identify clear white nationalist dogwhistles.
— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) July 7, 2017
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Here’s James Fallows on the Warsaw speech:
Has Donald Trump ever heard of Leni Riefenstahl?
These are collected by Rod Dreher, who detests Trump about as much as I do. I don’t recall much about Peter Beinart and nothing at all about Jamelle Bouie, but this kind of crap from James Fallows is bitterly disappointing. No, it’s worse than that: it’s unhinged. The real paranoiacs in this story are the deranged eisegetes.
I can’t give Trump credit for playing the media like a violin this time because I don’t think he intended anything provocative. He neither intended nor uttered anything racist or white nationalist, and the grievance-mongers aren’t likely to persuade me otherwise.
Dreher explains pretty well why Trump’s themes are legitimate and timely while David Frum and Ross Douthat explain what really was jarring about the speech (articulating what I had only intuited).
Douthat:
One key to understanding Trump, always, is that he appeals to people by attacking the decadence that he himself also embodies.
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) July 7, 2017
Frum:
As presidential speeches go, Trump’s address in Warsaw was fair. Ish. If you forget who is speaking and what that person has been saying and doing since Inauguration Day—since the opening of his campaign in 2015—and really through his career.
But if you remember those things, the speech jolted you to attention again and again.
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[T]he most troubling thing about the speech was the falsehood at its core; the problem is not with the speech, but with the speaker. The values Trump spoke for in Warsaw are values that he has put at risk every day of his presidency—and that he will continue to put to risk every day thereafter. Trump’s not wrong to perceive a threat to the Euro-Atlantic from the south and east. But the most recent and most dramatic manifestation of that threat was the Russian intervention in the U.S. election to install Donald Trump as president. The threat from outside is magnified by this threat from within—and it is that truth that makes a mockery of every word President Trump spoke in Warsaw.
Maybe this is analogous to the trick bag the Left thought Trump was in on immigration (the one President, in all of American history, forbidden to limit immigration is Donald J. Trump because he promised to do so in terms connected to the religion of Islam): the one person forbidden to defend Western Civilization is Donald J. Trump because we know it’s racist dog-whistles when he does it.
Back to Dreher, who says what I was starting to feel:
If you tell people that to love and to want to defend the culture of the West is a racist act, then they will cease to care about your judgment on the matter, because you are requiring them to hate themselves as an act of virtue. In that regard, Jamelle Bouie’s sentiment here is a much greater gift to the racist alt-right than anything Donald Trump said in Warsaw.
I mean, really, how ignorant and provincial do you have to be, Messrs. Beinart and Bouie, to hear Trump’s speech and think of it as a #MAGA version of a Nuremberg Rally Address? Is the degree of self-hatred of the West required to be a virtuous, woke person such that you cannot tell the difference between Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus and the Horst Wessel Song? Do they really think Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (all of which is available on YouTube, starting here) is a plummy version of Triumph of the Will? If standing against this kind of liberal insanity means I have to stand with Donald Trump, well, okay, I’ll stand with Donald Trump. I won’t like it, but at least Donald Trump doesn’t hate his own civilization.
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It is necessary to criticize ourselves constructively, for the sake of growing in virtue.But that is not what these people are doing. By anathematizing any and all who cherish the culture and history of the West, they will ultimately force conservatives to embrace Reaction as the only bastion of resistance to their nihilistic crusade. But they don’t see it anymore than the Social Justice Warriors grasp that their militant illiberalism is calling up and equal and opposite reaction from the people they have demonized.
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“Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?” Trump asked. Maybe he was thinking about Islamic terrorists. I’m thinking about the educated barbarians who cannot create a living culture, only live off the last vestiges of one they inherited, even as they scatter salt in its fallow fields. Donald Trump may be the enemy of culture in many respects, but he is in no way as potent an enemy as these mad evangelists for the Anti-Culture.
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But then here comes respectable commenters on the left, like Bouie, Beinart, and Fallows, yammering about fascism, Leni Riefenstahl, and racist dog whistles, and you realize that whether he meant to or not, Trump’s speech was clarifying. I don’t think Donald Trump could write ten meaningful sentences explaining why the West matters, but that’s beside the point. The point is, when talking about the worth and the defense of Western civilization makes you into Hitler McGoebbelsface in the eyes of liberal commentators, then you suddenly see the situation in starker relief.
(Emphasis added)
Finally, I really want to share Dreher’s beautiful response to the “‘Western civ’ is white nationalist and racist” crap:
Broadly speaking, what we call the West are the countries and peoples formed by the meeting of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Hebrew religion. There’s a great deal of diversity within the West, but religion, ideas, art, literature, and geography set it apart from other civilizations …
Go to Istanbul. Turks are heirs to a great civilization; you have to look no further than the religious architecture of the city to know that. But you also would never mistake Istanbul for a city of the West. So what?
Every descendant of Africa and Asia who lives in the West and broadly affirms the values that shaped Western civilization is a Westerner. Louis Armstrong and Muddy Waters are as much sons of the West as J.S. Bach and Ludwig von Beethoven. I wrote a book about how reading a poem written by a 14th century Tuscan, Dante Alighieri, utterly changed my life. I have no Italian blood in me at all, but I am part of Dante’s civilization in a way that I simply am not part of the civilization that produced, say, the Analects of Confucius. If not for my mind having been shaped by the Christian narrative, and by Greco-Roman narratives, the poem would not have meant at much to me. Again: so what? This is normal human experience the world over. The civilization shaped by Islam have broad diversity too, but they all share a core belief and experience that binds them.
Thank God that the deracinated, de-Christianized EU elite plan to integrate Turkey into the European Union did not work. And if I were a Turk, I would thank Allah for preserving my Islamic country from that fate too. Elites in both countries wish to deny the religious basis of their respective cultures, and pretend that we’re all a bunch of universalists. We’re not, and never will be.
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“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)
All Trump
If you’re tired of criticism of Trump, this is not your afternoon at the Tipsy Teetotaler. That’s a trigger warning, not a taunt. I can fully understand just wanting normalcy.
Albert Mohler and his guests
Interesting times
The reins of our brains
If you’re used to thinking of sin in terms of “culpability,” as specific and deliberate deeds, then focusing on thoughts can seem impossibly small. But if you think in terms of soul-sickness, of sin as a systemic corruption that marches on to death, then it makes sense to go to the root. That’s what a surgeon would do. We might wish that our faith would instead keep us happy and comfortable, but it’s when the surgeon says, “All we can do is keep her comfortable” that you’re really in trouble.
(Frederica Matthewes-Green, Welcome to the Orthodox Church, page 202)
One of the reasons I think Calvinism is a “good place to be from” is that Calvinist Tipsy realized that sin ran deeper than specific and deliberate deeds. It also ran into thoughtlessness, cluelessness, clouded intellects and even sin’s epiphenomenon of “social friction,” as when Paul and Barnabas had a falling out over John Mark.
But when I read “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” I mis-translated it into “in any sustained battle between the imagination and the will, the imagination will eventually win.” I got that from C.S. Lewis, I believe. And I do believe it’s true. But the underlying attitude was “as a man thinketh in his heart, so does he deeds sooner or later.” That was the only way thoughts really mattered, thought Calvinist Tipsy. (Maybe I was just a lousy Calvinist.)
One of the reasons I think Orthodoxy is the place to abide is that it knows sin is “soul-sickness … a systemic corruption that marches on to death,” and that thoughts per se matter tremendously.
Some days, though, I wonder if I have reflexively taken guarding my thoughts a little too far.
I have been under the impression that cable and satellite Television had destroyed Television as one of our commonalities — one of the things you can safely broach at the “water cooler” (these days, the office Keurig machine) with a colleague you don’t know well enough to really open up to. The method of destruction: today’s twenty-person office dispersing at 5 pm and going home to watch 20 different, personally-interesting narrowcasts, as opposed to yesterday’s office going home to watch Cronkite and then Dallas — the drama or the Cowboys football team.
And I worried that, neither network TV nor the shopping mall (destroyed by Amazon) being a suitable agora any more, we were left bereft of even crappy commercial glue to hold us together.
But having “done lunch” with colleagues recently, it now seems as if there may have emerged certain “cable shows” that “everyone is watching,” contrary to my impression. I use the term “cable show” loosely; for all I know, they are Netflix or Amazon original content, viewed over an internet stream rather than cable TV. I can’t tell you the name of any of these current shows. I don’t watch them. The cultural allusions are lost on me.
It’s tempting to feel smug about that instead of thinking de gustibus non est disputandum, but what if
[p]urity . . . is not the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted[?]
(William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience) Should I risk being slimed by violence, sex, cynicism or whatever else might assault my imagination, all for solidarity’s sake?
Could I even pull it off, or would I sound like some Aspie trying to make small-talk? Am I an Aspie?
I spend orders of magnitude more time online than on television. I try to avoid both the repulsive and the seductive. Good luck with avoiding seductive on the internet, which is free because “you are the product,” and seduction is the whole point of “free.” But there’s Regular-Seductive (Hammacher-Schlemmer, The Grommet, Amazon, Apple) and then there’s Succubus-Seductive (sorry, I know they’re there, but wouldn’t name them if I could).
Heck, I generally stay away from even the more violent professional sports. It doesn’t seem right to enjoy men trying to knock each other unconscious, for instance.
Is that a virtue, or at least a para-virtue, or am I just being a prig?
One thing I can assure you: I’m not doing it so that I can virtue-signal “Oh, I wouldn’t know about that” when some pop culture topic comes up. Been there, done that, and felt pretty bad about it.
I really kind of wish I could understand what my compadres are watching. It seems benign enough. They are nice people, after all.
But then I see stuff like this (warning: page loads very slowly, but the link was valid Thursday) and this, and I wonder “where did that come from?!” The moral majority apparently is dead. Very dead.
One example of “moral issues” in a Gallup poll is birth control:
One of the six issues showing virtually no change is birth control. Opinions on this issue have been highly permissive since Gallup first asked about it in 2012, ranging between 89% and 91% finding it acceptable.
One of my liberalish Facebook friends wondered not only why the heavy focus on sex, but why birth control was even surveyed. But while I grok her question (I’m surprised it might be as low as 89%) I know enough history to know that 90 years ago, there was virtual Christian unanimity against birth control. It may say more about us, and about our susceptibility to Succubus-Seductive cultural shifts, that such a high proportion of us find the question itself jarring.
I’m open to argument on many things. But I don’t like bad notions insinuating their way into my head through back channels. So I’m careful about to whom I hand the reins of my brain. (As an Orthodox Christian, I should say “nous” instead of “brain,” but darned if I could rhyme that.)
Given my level of trust in the purveyors of popular media, I’d rather eat at the Ptomaine Café or get tattooed by troglodytes with dull needles than watch TV dramas, sitcoms and such with less than full, critical attention at all moments. And that (“Look! A squirrel!”) …
Where was I? Oh, yeah: that just isn’t likely to happen.
So I don’t think my parsimonious viewing habits are likely to change unless, by sheer force of will (and perhaps some technological reminders), I resume watching Major League Baseball as retirement (not quite here yet) frees up my afternoons.
They don’t have Hootchi-Cootchie Cheerleaders in MLB, do they?
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Men are men before they are lawyers or physicians or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers and physicians. (John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address at St. Andrew’s, 1867)
“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 