(To be clear: the authors referenced below—William Lind, Michael Anton, Timothy Gordon, and Michael Robillard—may be fine, decent human beings. It is only their political/ideological views which I deplore.}
According to William Lind (at The American Conservative), modernity is, among many other flaws, terminally ugly:
A curious aspect of today’s America is its combination of wealth and ugliness. In the past, money usually led to beauty: to classical, baroque, and art deco buildings, to the music of Biber, C.P.E. Bach, and Boccherini, to the art of Michelangelo, Titian, and Gainsborough. Now, money buys decadent art, painful music, and alienating architecture. Most prominent architects belong to the “turd in the punchbowl” school; they delight in forcing something disharmonious into a previously charming neighborhood. America’s commercial districts, with their endless strip malls and parking lots, have to be among the ugliest ever built. A southern mayor, speaking at a Congress on the New Urbanism, showed a slide of one of his city’s main streets and said, “I call this our corridor of crap.”
One need not share Mr. Lind’s ideology to agree with his premise that a good deal of the American landscape has been uglified. The disagreement revolves around who, or what, is responsible for the uglification:
Three reasons why we are awash in ugliness stand out. The first is the abolition of the concept of beauty by relativism. There are no objective standards. Everyone’s opinion is of equal value, and there are nothing but opinions.
A second reason is a change in the means of cultural transmission. Today, electronic screens are the means of cultural transmission, and they drive morals, aesthetics, and culture ever lower. Why? Because money is to be made by appealing to the widest audience, which means the least educated, crassest, and most vulgar. Relativism having abolished all standards, there are no limits on how low taste dare go.
A third force promoting ugliness: ideology, specifically the ideology of cultural Marxism, currently parading itself in the Emperor’s clothes of “wokeism.”
Good Christ, does anyone on the Right know anything about “cultural Marxism”?
Anyone who can discuss the uglification of America without mentioning the word “capitalism” is either disingenuous or obtuse.
The Ugliness of Everything - The American Conservative
Michael Anton is one of the Right’s intellectual lights, which gives you some idea of the darkness on that edge of town. Nevertheless, Anton is not wrong when he explains:
The “socialism” with which we are most familiar today—high and progressive taxation, a generous welfare state, nationalization of key services such as health care, an expansive list of state-guaranteed “rights,” combined with the retention of private property and private ownership of most means of production—Marx and Engels deride as “bourgeois socialism,” i.e., not only not the real thing but fundamentally closer to bourgeois capitalism than to true socialism, much less communism.
In short: bourgeois socialism is not true socialism, much less communism.
Now, if only Anton had the sense to realize, or the honesty to admit, that it is therefore preposterous to equate American liberals’ efforts to bolster the welfare state (social safety net) with Marxism or Bolshevism. Alas, despite his having spelled it out, neither Anton nor his conservative colleagues seem able to understand, or willing to recognize, the difference between Communism and what is called in much of the world “democratic Socialism”; and so, on they go, Anton and his ilk, prattling about gulags and tyranny, pretending to be persecuted, marginalized, and silenced while commanding impressive speaking fees, book contracts, and prestigious think-tank fellowships.
Socialism and the Great Reset - The American Mind
Finally, at The American Mind, Timothy Gordon and Michael Robillard do their utmost to convince young readers not to go to college. Their rationale is as simple as it is specious:
The modern university has succumbed, in the name of the triple-headed god of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), to the hegemonic ideology of woke intersectionality. All decisions about staffing, curriculum, and student life must be minutely inspected for their adherence to dismantling white supremacy and patriarchy. Despite an ever-growing list of instances of campus hysteria, cancellation of conservative voices, and violent harassment of heterodox university speakers, the unquestioned cultural narrative persists: One must go to college in order to flourish as a full person in society.
Nor is this calamitous situation limited to the humanities; “Even traditionally rigorous courses of study have been blighted. Woke university professors have declared mathematics “a field dominated by whiteness and racism.” At the University of Toronto, one can now take a “Liberating Mathematics” course which seeks to “re-imagine” mathematics, offering the mathematically incompetent a handy excuse in the form of a “daring critique” of math, allegedly delegitimizing it as having drawn predominantly from “the experiences and narratives of men.” In formal logic, scholars have declared “there is much more to be done–especially on decolonizing our curriculum.”
The authors wax predictably grim over the prospect of academic decolonization:
This woke takeover of the hard sciences is reinforced by an entrenched set of professorial and administrative hiring quotas, overbearing and overbroad institutional incentives and disincentives, and an oppressive campus culture submerged in the now-unquestionable presuppositions of woke orthodoxy. All this has engendered a reinvigorated cult of scientism.
Gordon and Robillard then briefly discuss Stalinism and Lysenkoism, thus linking American universities to Stalinist atrocities. They conclude by urging, “We need to encourage STEM-inclined Zoomers to circumvent the college-industrial complex altogether, to marry young and learn a trade, and to get on with their lives in a world hopefully soon delivered from woke-mathematics and nature-hating scientism.”
The authors have a book due for release soon from Regnery Press, titled Don’t Go to College: A Case for Revolution. The spirit of the Sixties lives on, albeit in unexpected quarters: “tune in” to Fox News and Infowars, “turn on” the woke liberal elite and the nefarious Deep State, and “drop out” of modernity to find your own, doubtless very different, Benedict Option.
Welcome to the New Dark Ages. The cost of one admission is your mind.
The Triumph of Scientism - The American Mind
The Three Horses of the Woke Apocalypse
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