Untimely Observations

As if further evidence were needed that college education is a pyramid scheme; we hear today from the Associated Press:

A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.

Not much is asked of students, either. Half did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.

The findings are in a new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," by sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia. An accompanying report argues against federal mandates holding schools accountable, a prospect long feared in American higher education.

....

Overall, the picture doesn't brighten much over four years. After four years, 36 percent of students did not demonstrate significant improvement, compared to 45 percent after two.

Students who studied alone, read and wrote more, attended more selective schools and majored in traditional arts and sciences majors posted greater learning gains.

Imagine that: when working hard and studying traditional subjects, people actually tend to learn stuff! Just like those old dead white males said would happen! Who knew that bachelor's degrees in feminist queer art studies didn't equip their holders with a capacity for rational thought? I wonder what other hoary tenets of that antiquated bugbear, Western Civilization, might also be true?

Today the American media, politicians of all stripes, and public educators will invariably fall into rapturous tones describing the black leader whose birthday is being celebrated, namely, Martin Luther King (1929-1968). King’s birthday is the only national holiday devoted to an individual American whose public observance has been commanded by Congress, and in 1983, this honor was accorded, with more or less bipartisan support. The same tribute is no longer extended to the founder of our country George Washington, or to our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, who is still widely honored for ending black slavery. Washington and Lincoln both now share a generic President’s Day that is wedged in between their two birthdays in February. The gallant Southern leader Robert E. Lee, whose birthday coincides with King’s and who after 1983 was to be co-celebrated in Southern states along with the black civil rights leader, has now fallen upon exceedingly hard times. Lee has become a non-person or even worse, someone identified with Southern slavery, although there is nothing to suggest that this Christian gentleman favored that institution or that he led the Confederate forces in Virginia for any reason other than the one he gave upon turning down an invitation to command the Union army—to protect his ancestral state against invasion.

There is a very clear relation to be drawn between these two recent developments, as my longtime friend Sam Francis delighted in pointing out. The replacement of Lee and Washington, who were related through Washington’s wife Martha, by King as the center of a public cult signaled a true “iconic revolution” in our country. Nor was this revolution in consciousness likely to end with the congressional enshrinement of King or with the public acknowledgement of his birthday. Every January, there takes place an orgy of guilt-tripping and pseudo-Christian penance, one that seems to become shriller and more robotized with the passing of time. There is also in the U.S. a relation between the downplaying of Christmas, which is being reduced here no less than in Britain to a “holiday season,” and King’s birthday in mid-January, which is followed by Black History Month, formerly know as Febuary. What the new liturgical season highlights is King’s martyrdom in 1968, when he was assassinated while leading a garbage employees’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee, and the need for national atonement for our country’s long embedded white racism. This penance, which is a post-Christian form of Lent, goes on through Black History Month and is then resumed for another putative victim group during Women’s Month. Although the establishment Right (that is, GOP operatives and neoconservative journalists) and the Left disagree on how this sacral calendar is to be observed, they all see eye-to-eye on its contents.

The dispute here resembles nothing so much as the councils of the early Church that were devoted to clarifying the nature of Christ. Instead of the strife released over whether the concept of homoousia or that of homoiousia properly described the nexus between the first two members of the Trinity, we now have a more timely question: Did Martin Luther King, by his suffering and death, release our country from further atonement for racism or must this atonement become even more frenzied because of how his “unfinished mission for racial justice” ended?

Although the Heritage Foundation proclaimed King to be a “Christian theologian” as well as a “great conservative thinker,” the reality is exactly the opposite: this now beatified figure was a self-proclaimed social radical, who provided the god figure of a post-Christian religion, albeit one that is parasitic on Christian narratives. He is living proof of the continuity between Christian images and a now victorious leftist ideology.

Lest I be accused of being unfair to my subject, let me stress that he was not really responsible for this glorification. As far as I know, King could never have imagined how he would be used after his death, any more than Karl Marx could have imagined that his ideas would be cited to justify Soviet tyranny. He might even have had the decency to blush if he had heard our “conservative” presidential candidate John McCain apologizing last spring in Memphis for having not supported the King public holiday soon enough. McCain characterized this failure as “the single biggest mistake in my political life.”

The BBC reports today:

The Default Retirement Age (DRA) is to be phased out this year, the government has confirmed.

It means employers will no longer be allowed to dismiss staff just because they have reached the age of 65.

The Department for Business said that as well as benefiting individuals, "the freedom to work for longer will provide a boost to the UK economy".

Those who have read Mister will recall the recurrence of harried elderly White workers performing low-status jobs, of which 'Picasso', the irascible nonagenarian taxi driver of the year 2023 was a prime example. The novel was written between May 2007 and June 2008, so elderly workers, forced to keep working in order to keep their heads above water in a floundering and debt-ridden economy, is yet another sad prediction that has come true.

The phrase 'a boost to the UK economy' spins the fact that this end of the default retirement age results from the realisation, admitted, that there is not going to be enough money to pay all the welfare commitments successive governments have made in the efforts by politicians to get themselves elected. 

Meanwhile, the phrase 'ageing population', because it refers to a generalised phenomenon driven by several causes, conceals the unwilliness of the government to make the economy more family friendly: indigenous Europeans are delaying starting a family, having smaller ones, or not having them altogether, partly because of the cost relative to their incomes—resulting from, on the one hand, pressure from the consumer culture, and on the other, inflation, predatory taxation, and labyrinthine regulation—is seen as too high. (Another factor is Marxist feminism.)

One of the few edifying things about the tapoica-brained fruitcake in Arizona making the news: I smell fear. I don't think ordinary people in this country are afraid, but I'm pretty sure the ruling class are soiling their hormone-free recyclable underthingees.   Ramussen agrees with me as to the mental state of the political class:

The gap between the Political Class and Mainstream voters on this question is enormous. While 76% of Political Class voters are concerned that opponents of Obama’s policies will turn to violence, 60% of those in the Mainstream are not very or not at all concerned.

More than 75% of voters now believe the U.S. government lacks the “consent of the governed,” a foundational principle of the American political experiment.

 

How else can you explain IRA terrorist-lovin' "conservative" Peter King's preposterous Marie Antionette proposal? How else can you explain both the ADL and ... the SPLC of all groups coming to the defense of Jared Taylor and American Renaissance? Could it be these groups have realized that open debate with a man like Jared Taylor is a losing game? Their defence of Mr. Taylor is actually quite clever: had they done the predictable thing and gone after him and his organization, they would have generated considerable sympathy and almost entirely favorable publicity for Mr. Taylor's organization. One might even speculate that this story was planted by a sympathizer in Fox News to drum up sympathy and publicity for AR. Certainly that has been the ultimate effect; even though the neocons keep up their slurs ... they're forced to acknowledge and defend the "far right." Doubtless many curious people will have a look over there; I hope AR has their best foot forward.

Fear makes people do stupid things, like accuse innocent people. While the natural thing to do is to defend AmRen and Mr. Taylor from these slurs, really, now is the time to go on the offensive. If I were Jared Taylor, I'd take advantage of this bad publicity to get his message out. I'm no political strategist, but I've done some martial arts, and the right thing to do to a frightened and confused opponent is to overwhelm them. It's not a gentlemanly thing to do, but it is what you need to do to win. What does this mean, practically speaking? The left is presently busy hyperventilating over Sarah Palin; I wouldn't want to interrupt them when they're having one of those, um, personal moments. Go after the neocons: get the attention of their followers. The neocons are the ones who just dropped the microphone. The left is helping: let 'em help -their days are numbered anyway. Professor Gottfried has recently been doing a splendid job of pointing out the unbelievable vapidity of authorized "conservatives" like Jonah Goldberg and Rich Lowry -we need to do more of this, if we're going to peel away their supporters who don't realize there are actual alternatives to the media authorized nincompoops who claim to speak for them.

My young friend Richard Spencer has observed that whenever neocon employees take “conservative” positions on social issues, they find irreproachably leftwing reasons to do so. Thus when they object to abortion, it is because its advocates and practitioners refuse to extend the egalitarian principle far enough—to the unborn. Or when minicons grumble feebly about quotas for Black, Hispanics and women, it is typically because such programs have the putative effect of making their recipients feel “inferior,” because they were given benefits that they might not have earned. Although one could find legion examples of such attempts by “social conservatives” to seem more liberal than Obama, a case that has popped up recently and stands out in my mind is a commentary by Rich Lowry on why “Huck’s censors miss all the points.”

Rich’s column begins by going after the obnoxious censors who have removed all of the 219 uses of the word “nigger” from the new edition of Twain’s classic being put out by NewSouth Books. Along the way, Rich also makes fun of the immoderate PC, which extends even to purging “the use of the word ‘injun’ for good measure.” But he then pushes his commentary away from the obvious reasons for objecting to the censorship, which are not the most fashionable reasons, at least in Rich’s presumed social circles. One, once we start bowdlerizing classics to fit current political hysteria, there is no end to this process. Every time a new obsession comes along or some designated victim group starts griping, we’ll have to rewrite what authors wrote in the past.

Such a course will soon result in the kind of reconstruction of culture that we see previewed in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. The Western “heritage” will be refashioned, including the language used in the past, to fit current ideological needs. Even the Communists and Nazis didn’t go quite as far as our present PC gatekeepers. The old totalitarians allowed old classics to be reprinted as they had been rewritten, but then appended their updated introductions.

Two, it is sheer hypocrisy to bowdlerize past authors to fit ADL or NAACP requirements when we produce and distribute movies that should be infinitely more offensive to minorities and most everyone else. Are the bowdlerizers of Twain complaining about Tarantino flicks or “Gansta rap” albums that are packed with “niggas” and “motherfucking” language? Such products of our cultural industry are far more insensitive than any book published in the 19^th century? Why this bizarre double standard? Perhaps it is justified by the fact that filmmakers and producers of blasphemous “art” are part of the “intelligentsia,” along with the totalitarians who are now bowdlerizing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. One should apparently only censor dead White males who will be read by children of the booboisie in state-run institutions.

It is fairly obvious that this Loughner fellow has a mental illness. His attack has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the fact that our laws make involuntary treatment for the mentally ill nearly impossible.

It is important to emphasize that as a result of this attack, we have lost the very conservative Republican anti-immigration chief judge of the District of Arizona, John Roll, opening up the opportunity for Obama to replace him with a pro-immigration Hispanic. No politically motivated assassin in his (otherwise) right mind who is "connected" with AmRen would ever have done such a counter-productive thing.

From a political perspective, Loughner's targeting was, in a word, insane.

Much is made in the mainstream media of the alleged perfidy of certain revisionist historians on the Right, whom they accuse of falsifying documents, whitewashing, and distorting history to suit a political agenda. Yet, alert students of history know well enough that the Left is not above revisionism. Indeed, in Leftists we find yet another example of accusers who are guilty of doing similar things they accuse others of doing, and who, in fact, do it on a much wider scale. Leftist revisionism is not limited to history, but extends even to classic works of literature. The latest example of politically motivated revisionism was reported by the BBC earlier today:  

Furore over 'censored' edition of Huckleberry Finn

A new edition of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is causing controversy because of the removal of a racially offensive word.

Twain scholar Alan Gribben says the use of the word "nigger" had prompted many US schools to stop teaching the classic.

In his edition, Professor Gribben replaces the word with "slave" [219 times] and also changes "injun" to "Indian".

. . .

Two days ago, the publisher, New South Books, posted this on their website:

In a bold move compassionately advocated by Twain scholar Dr. Alan Gribben and embraced by NewSouth, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn also replaces two hurtful epithets that appear hundreds of times in the texts with less offensive words, this intended to counter the “preemptive censorship” that Dr. Gribben observes has caused these important works of literature to fall off curriculum lists nationwide.

Reading James Kalb’s thoughts on Alternative Modernities and Paul Gottfried’s pessimistic assessment of proposed solutions put me in the uncomfortable position of disagreeing with men I respect immensely. Mr. Kalb dismissed racial preservation as an intellectually weak guiding principle of social order; Dr. Gottfried warned that creating a biologically homogenous community may be wishful thinking. I agree with Dr. Gottfried that there presently seems to be no hope to be found in working through the system in order to save society from late modernity’s decay—which is why I think we should physically separate ourselves from it.

A separatist movement today would be no less practical than the Massachusetts Bay Colony was in the seventeenth century. Indeed, given the advancements in transportation, communication, medicine and material resources, the main obstacle to sparking such a movement might be that its goal would be too easily attained. The call to create a separate society summons men who seek to live dangerously; imitating the Amish in that respect does not strike most as a particularly risky endeavor. Still, if it is the best chance we have at making our ideas matter I think it should be seriously considered.

In his analysis of modernity’s various forms of political organization I’m not sure that Mr. Kalb himself has stepped outside of modernity’s perspective. He says that the preservation of a race cannot serve as a guiding principle of social order because that is not what men find worthwhile in life. Well, it is a commonplace in these quarters to say that man is a tribal animal. There are certainly limits to our sympathies but the proposition that tribal loyalty is not a healthy or effective basis for binding an individual to a community is one of the more egregious lies of liberalism. Racial exclusion has been the rule, not the exception, throughout human history. Living with people who look and act like you is not a convention that needs to be imposed on society by tyrants; it is a preference rooted in our blood. Try telling the Japanese that racial exclusion is not a healthy or effective principle; they would probably pay even less mind to that argument than the Israelis.

What Mr. Kalb apparently misses is the extent to which culture is shaped by human biology. Culture is an “extended phenotype”: different races will produce different cultures even given the same environmental conditions. This is why a degree of racial purity is vital for cultural homogeneity and its preservation. As Sam Francis famously said,

The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people.

That statement has powerful implications which should not be dismissed as intellectually weak. Most whites may not rank preserving their race as a personal priority but most will admit that they do not wish to see America look more like Mexico.

Furthermore, is holding that the guiding principles of social order need to be based on what men find worthwhile in life not the liberal perspective in essence? What men find worthwhile has shallower roots than I think Mr. Kalb supposes. Religion is a natural phenomenon but it is not a universal need. We should not underestimate how much of what we value in life is shaped by those we consider moral authorities. Indeed, a basic problem is that we lack the kind of noble and charismatic leader whose moral authority commands the attention of a significant number of men; we have not heard a convincing political leader tell us that the preservation of the tribe is a worthwhile duty in a long time. (Jared Taylor would be a worthy candidate.) Pericles did not ask men what they thought was worthwhile in life: He told them their duties and they found honor in fulfilling them.

Now, it may be worth making a distinction between tribalism as a guiding principle and tribalism as a founding principle. Tribalism makes no sense as a guiding principle for a society that seeks to be more than one dimensional and in a world where men depend on people whom they will never meet for nearly all of their material needs; but we should not discount it as a founding principle. From there it follows that to preserve what has been founded is to be assumed.

In his comments on my discussion of alternate modernities, Paul Gottfried observes that in our present situation there's no educational program, system of alliances, or political and cultural strategy that seems likely to get us out of the hole we're in.

I agree. If we start with what I called the modern "attempt to base social order simply on this-worldly empirical man," we can't get anywhere, because we can't escape the problem of conflicting wills fighting over who gets what. The only way to deal with that problem is by some combination of force and fraud, and any new combination of programs, alliances, and strategies is just going to be one more configuration of force and fraud. Why should our force and fraud work out better than everyone else's? Haven't the possibilities been tried and found wanting?

The problem, it seems, is the basic modern understandings that make our present situation what it is and so condition all the programs, alliances, strategies, and so on that now seem reasonable and practical. Things won't get a whole lot better until those understandings change, and that won't happen because some group of activists and theoreticians puts together a system of understandings that's more to their liking and tries to get them adopted by the dominant forces in society.

In particular, as Paul notes, right-wingers aren't going to create a better world by getting together and aligning themselves with selected religious institutions, "command[ing] the political class and its allies in the media, the entertainment industry, and public education to change their worldview," and educating the masses into an outlook more to their liking. Among other problems, religious institutions themselves are affected by the dominant understandings.

But what then? If we don't like the way things are there must be some response--alcohol, skydiving, suicide, whatever--that makes sense even if political maneuvering is not likely to do much for us.

My proposal was to "go back to first things." What defines the political situation is what seems best and most real to the people involved, and if the situation is impossible those things must change. Current understandings have basic problems that (among other things) lead to a view of man as essentially asocial and eventually mean various forms of tyranny as well as "mindlessness and incompetence on the part of rulers and ruled."

It follows that the dissatisfied need first of all to understand the world better, and in a way that enables them to live in a manner more worthy of human nature. That, of course, is a prepolitical issue. It's worth dealing with in itself, since doing so will help ourselves and our families and friends. It's more than just a personal matter, though, since such initiatives can spread and transform social life. At some point some initiative will--it's happened before and will happen again--so why not ours if it's superior?

The present setup has basic contradictions, and won't last forever any more than other social arrangements have. With that in mind, those with an outlook and way of life that is more true and more worth living by should make their pitch and see what catches on and endures. As I commented, "revolutions begin in thought, and the way of thought that makes people most functional and enables them to deal most intelligently with the world has a good shot at winning eventually."

The proposal sounds impossibly conjectural and long-range, but when there is no obvious quick fix you drop day-to-day events as your reference point and do what you can for what could work in principle. If what's needed is a change in basic understandings then that's what you should pursue. Modernity makes effectiveness the measure of thought, but to deal with the world effectively you have to deal on their own terms with issues that precede effectiveness, like what is real and good.

Such an approach might get results soon: things might be better than they seem, late modernity might be a bubble about to burst, the Church (which like everything else has its own characteristic way of functioning) might be about to revert to type, or something nobody has thought of might happen. Or it might take effect slowly or not at all. The same is true of every approach, though, and the basic point is that this approach--unlike others--could work in concept, and is worth pursuing on its own terms even if it does not.

The big question is what a superior way of thought would be. On that point opinions differ and discussion is necessary. In order to deal with man as he actually is and the problems politics actually present we need an outlook that's adequate to the world as we experience it. It seems clear, to me at any rate, that such an outlook requires an understanding of practical rationality not limited to technology and of knowledge not limited to modern natural science.

Otherwise we cannot, among other things, understand people. To understand and deal with life and human beings as we find them, I suggested that "something like the Christian soul, or at least a human essence that by nature is oriented toward the good" is necessary. Whether I'm right on that is a matter for discussion. Still, each of us in his manner of life displays what he thinks is most real and most worth living by. We're more likely to make progress on basic issues to the extent we articulate and examine such commitments. Our problems today really are that basic, which is the reason there seems to be no exit from them.

1. I predict that the dispossesed majority in America will NOT revolt in 2011.

2. I predict that the dominant paradigm will NOT be subverted in 2011.

3. I predict that a formerly virginal young female star will attempt to shock the world by unveiling a sexy new image in 2011.

4. I predict that Glen Beck will predict the imminent collapse of America in 2011, but will use vague enough language to be able to backtrack when America remains just as repugnantly existent as ever come December 31, 2011.

5. I predict that Republican hacks will make jokes about Obama's teleprompter and Biden's hair plugs in 2011, and will crack themselves up in the process.

6. I predict that Democrat hacks will make jokes about Sarah Palin's alleged lack of intelligence in 2011, and will crack themselves up in the process.

7. I predict that someone famous will get in trouble for making allegedy racist or homophobic statements in some public or private venue in 2011, and will be forced to offer a humiliated apology for his supposed verbal malefactions. I further predict that said malefactions will NOT be forgiven by representatives of the dominant paradigm (which, by the way, will NOT be subverted) until he does further work to begin the "healing process," which he will immediately do forthwith, and that after he does them forthwith, the representatives of the dominant paragigm will CONTINUE to withhold forgiveness indefinitely.

8. I predict that powerful evangelical churches will pimp for Israel in 2011.

9. I predict that NPR will pimp for gay acceptance in 2011. 

10. I predict that a lot of drearily predictable things will happen in 2011.

Happy New Year!