The Little Red Blog

Wednesday with Pascal: From Woodstock Nation to MAGA

{In which Pascal the existential Russian blue cat reminds us what a long, strange trip it’s been.}

“Johnny’s in the basement / Mixing up the medicine / I’m on the pavement / Thinking about the government.” (Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” 1965)

All the new thinking is about the government. In this, it resembles all the old thinking, only worse, because now it requires thinking about Elon Musk.

Perhaps because I am old—I literally wear my trousers rolled—the current chaos being generated by our MAGA overlords has me diving deeper than usual into my bottomless well of nostalgia. As a certified Boomer, I grew up with chaos, the difference being that the chaos in the Sixties was in the streets whereas today’s chaos is mainly in the White House and in government offices and agencies.

On the one hand, chaos is chaos; but not all chaos is created equal, and not all chaos serves the same purpose(s). Sometimes, when all that is solid melts into air, and when all fixed, fast-frozen relations are swept away, we have to pick our chaos (like picking our poison); that is, we have to decide which chaotic side we’re on.

For example, here is Jacques Ellul’s analysis (from his 1973 book Hope in Time of Abandonment) of the Sixties’ chaotic counterculture, which attracted a large portion of the postwar generation:

The young are in revolt against organized and ordered society itself, against the proliferation of things and of well-being, of skills and machines. They rebel in glorification of flower power, of the hypnotic dream and the musical trance. Absent is any program or project; in fact, that absence is the essence of the revolt. One lives for today. One seizes the present moment and tries to make it as beautiful, as seductive, as charming as possible. The ‘consequences’ are rejected. New modes of expression and new kinds of life experiences are tried out; security and provision for the future are renounced. Action toward a fixed goal is scorned.

Rage against the machine! In Ellul’s estimate, Sixties’ rebels were not trying to do anything so pedestrian as reforming society. Rather, they were bent on immanentizing the eschaton:

The young are trying to get at the root of evil. ¹ Convinced that all will be recaptured in the end, they promote only the Nothing; that, at least, or so they think, can never be captured by our cumulative and englobing type of society. Protests against war, against racism, and against repression are mere pretexts and secondary rallying points. The essence of the movement is nothing. It aspires not to see beyond the present moment. It recommends the Great Rejection of everything, which must be reduced to nothing because whatever exists is alienation and repression.

What Ellul called the Sixties’ “Great Rejection” bore more than a passing resemblance to Herbert Marcuse’s proposed “Great Refusal”:  

In this movement, there is no more value. There are no longer any criteria for action. There is no intelligent deliberation. There are flowers and love, hunger one minute and surfeit the next. There is desire finally set free, an ownership of the world which exudes from every pore, a calm exaltation, musical ecstasy, a resurgence of Orphism, a stripping bare of the self. This growth of the irrational is the true protest against the technological society. These desperate attempts, these behaviors which seem to us so strange and outlandish, these rings and beads, these Hindu symbols and long hair, these refusals and insults, these hatreds and hallucinations, this loveless free love and this confusion of crowds with communion, all this novelty which the young are throwing in our faces, is nothing but the reflection of the situation which is marked by the absence of a future. ² Of course, there will be a tomorrow. But there is no future, no building, no job, no logic, no ultimate unfolding of life, no harmony either present or to be sought after. There is no possible continuity, no steadfastness or loyalty, no lesson to be drawn for tomorrow’s conduct, tomorrow’s tactics, or tomorrow’s living, because tomorrow is nothing. ³

Of course, one could (and many did) characterize the absence of ambition as a refusal to grow up, thereby dismissing the whole counterculture movement as a reprise of the Lost Boys’ anthem: “I won’t grow up / I don’t want to go to school / just to learn to be a puppet / and recite a silly rule.” Still, for someone my age, it’s hard to accept that our generation’s Children’s Crusade was simply the growing pains of an affluent, coddled generation. Maybe Neil Sedaka should have changed his tune to "Growing Up Is Hard to Do"? ⁴

As a constructive alternative to the foolishness of the Sixties, consider the following much more adult guidance from Linda McMahon, recently installed as Secretary of the Department of Education. Ms. McMahon—tasked with shuttering the DOE so that American children can be protected from exposure to DEI, SEL, and other harmful acronyms—has exhorted her employees and colleagues to join her “in this historic final mission on behalf of all students.” Ignoring the ominous implications of “final mission,” she explained the raison d’etre of America's education system: “Postsecondary education should be a path to a well-paying career aligned with workforce needs.” 

As inspiring as that sounds, another way of stating Secretary McMahon’s point might be this: “Twenty years of schoolin’ and they put you on the day shift.” Why bother filling kids’ heads with “useless, pointless knowledge,” even a little of which is known to be a dangerous thing? The formula for getting ahead is simple: “Get dressed, get blessed, try to be a success.” Who needs a Department of Education for that? "Teacher, leave them kids alone!"

The question is, which kind of chaos do you prefer? The childish antics of a g-g-generation of spoiled brats, or a mature approach to Making America Great Again by throwing government agencies into a bureaucratic woodchipper, bringing chainsaws to HR meetings, and training students to align themselves with workforce needs? Do you want to grow up or don’t you?

God, I miss the Sixties. I was so much older then, but I’m younger than that now.

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¹ “And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” (Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock,” 1969)

² “There’s no future, no future, no future for you.” (The Sex Pistols, “God Save the Queen,” 1977)

³ “There’s nothing at the end of the rainbow / There’s nothing to grow up for anymore.” (Richard Thompson, “End of the Rainbow,” 1974)

⁴ My first ever reference, and likely my last, to Neil Sedaka ("Breaking Up Is Hard to Do," 1959).

We Are Doomed (Part Whatever)

“More people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.” (Viktor Frankl)

It was St. Paul, I believe, who famously lamented, “I’ve got nothing, Ma, to live up to.” Centuries later, St. Augustine would echo, “There’s nothing at the end of the rainbow. There’s nothing to grow up for anymore.” The present times are always the worst of times, even when they are the best of times. We are always doomed, it seems; the sword of Damocles hangs over our head, though it never drops. Man is the creature described by Jesus as “always ill but never dies.”

If you are not worried about the human condition, and particularly about the American condition, you have not been paying attention. Decades ago, John Lennon implored us, “Come, let us worry together.” Legions of worriers have responded. To my embarrassment, however, I have misplaced my list of sources for the following dire observations. I therefore cannot identify which was written by Henry David Thoreau or by William James, by Oswald Spengler or by Reinhold Niebuhr, by Herbert Marcuse or by Christopher Lasch, by Genrich L. Krasko or by Gertrude Himmelfarb.

In any case, and whatever their origin, these quotations together form a powerful American jeremiad. I will withhold comment (for now) and let the authors speak for themselves:

This is the situation in America today: catastrophically, in a significant segment of American society, people have lost the meaning in their lives.

The most acute problems of today—crime, drugs, greed, gender polarization, disintegration of family, decay in morals, racism, and so on—are, to a great extent, the direct consequences of this crisis of meaning.

People do not want to acknowledge that the origin of these problems is deep within our everyday lives, that it has to do with the deepest core of our existence as human beings.

Today, we find ourselves sick. Society is unprepared to meet the dawn of a new era. People are lost, wandering in darkness. The American Dream, which has been the pillar of life for generations, seems not to lead anywhere.

Robert Kaplan gives a vivid picture of the existential vacuum that has engulfed America: ‘When voter turnout decreases to around 50 percent at the same time the middle class is spending astounding sums in gambling casinos and state lotteries, joining private health clubs and using large amounts of stimulants and anti-depressants, one can legitimately be concerned about the state of American society. We have become a nation of voyeurs and escapists. Our willingness to give up self and responsibility is the sine qua non for tyranny.’

An important factor that has allowed our lives to become devoid of meaning has been the degradation in education. The majority of Americans are getting more and more estranged from the nourishing spring of our inherited culture. Instead, an ugly mass pseudo-culture is striving to subvert that culture, like a cancer, metastasizing racism, drugs, violence, and sexual promiscuity throughout the whole society.

A new kind of ignorance has emerged: the ignorance of the educated professional. Though these professionals have mastered the skills of their fields, their lives are devoid of almost any connections with the humanitarian culture of Western civilization. Education today has given way to training, which focuses on providing a person with specific skills useful in getting a good or better job, rather than enhancing one’s sense of connection to (and identity within) our civilization. Unwittingly, rather than helping to develop strong personalities, our education system prevents people from acquiring maturity. Hence, the loss of direction in people’s lives.

We have abandoned our children. Nobody cares any more about their intellectual and spiritual health. Our culture is fundamentally anti-intellectual and entertainment-oriented, for children as for adults. Our children’s existential misery is unbearable; their lives are empty, they are lost, they are desperate.

If tomorrow the government succeeds in completely sealing our borders from imported and smuggled drugs, domestically manufactured drugs will fill that vacuum. We are spending billions of dollars to stop the supply of drugs, but it is the demand for drugs that is the problem.

Americans do not respect their government. People believe in all kinds of theories of the government’s involvement in wrongdoings, cover-ups, and secret covert operations at home and abroad.

The general irresponsibility of our politicians (on both sides of the aisle) is an obvious sign of what Walter Lippman called ‘political Jacobinism,’ a gradual shift from representative government to populist democracy. This is extremely dangerous given the lowering of the education level of our populace and its consequent inability to understand how a developed society, and its institutions, functions.

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Postscript #1: I have located my list of resources. It turns out that the above quotes are all taken from Genrich Krasko’s The Unbearable Boredom of Being: The Crisis of Meaning in America. The book, published in 2004, is a compilation of essays written by Dr. Krasko between 1994 and 2003. Dr. Krasko, who emigrated to America in 1980 from the Soviet Union, died in 2020.

Postscript #2: We should note that Dr. Krasko's complaints about America are from twenty to thirty years ago, before the advent of Wokeism, Cancel Culture, DEI, CRT, SEL, BLM, Antifa, or the weaponized Biden DOJ. Any fair-minded observer can only conclude that we are doomed yet again, the silver lining being that we are too far gone at this point to notice or even to care.

I mean, what does 'meaning' even mean, anyway?

My Fair Share

{I confess I have increasingly burdened Pascal the existential Russian blue cat with writing the lion’s share of The Little Red Blog’s posts. That is a lot to ask of a cat, even one as gifted as Pascal. I promise to do better; to begin with, here is my fair share for today.}

Oh, no: Victor Davis Hanson is upset about a thing—I mean, about another thing—I mean—oh, let’s face it, Victor Davis Hanson is, as always, upset about everything.

Why won’t the Baby Boomers, “the generation that is now passing after a half-century of preeminence and whose Jacobin agendas have nearly wrecked the nation they inherited,” get off the nation’s lawn?

The Sixties generation’s new normal is to impeach a president twice, to try him as a private citizen, and to seek to remove him from state ballots.

All that was now characteristic of a generation that learned in the 1960s that if it did not get its way, it would wreck what it could not control. So, it was logical that it sought to pack the court, to end the filibuster, to destroy the Electoral College—and to corrupt the law to achieve political ends. Or as the Sixties generation taught us, “by any means necessary”—an arrogant affirmation of Machiavelli’s dictum that “the ends justify the means.”

Now we are left with a final toxic gift from this generation: the destruction of jurisprudence, a system designed not to easily protect the popular and admired but those often pilloried in the public square, the unorthodox, eccentric, and unliked.

Also, much to their discredit, the Baby Boomers, as Hanson notes, failed to liberate Europe from Nazi Germany. Where were all the hippies at Normandy, Boomer?

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The Destructive Generation—Proving America’s Weakest Link › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

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I am guessing that Pavlos Papadopoulos, who teaches at Wyoming Catholic College, has no idea that parts, at least, of his tirade against American higher education are reminiscent of the 1962 “Port Huron Statement” that helped jump-start the Sixties’ counterculture mentality:

The last century has seen our constitutional republic largely replaced by a new administrative state. This replacement mirrored, and was midwifed by, a transformation in our dominant institutions of education. The sprawling modern research universities that, since the turn of the 20th century, have created an administrative state at home, sustained an American Empire abroad, and continue to dominate higher education today, were built on radically different foundations than the humble classical liberal arts colleges that taught the citizens and statesmen of the early centuries of American history, through our colonial, founding, and early-republican periods.

The regime-level function of the contemporary university is to catechize and credential managers whose expertise will legitimate their rule of the American people, and the wider world, via the federal bureaucracy and a suite of mega-corporations and non-governmental organizations. The regime-level function of our old classical colleges had been to train elites whose wisdom would prepare them to serve the material and spiritual needs of their communities. Today’s university presupposes, and reinforces, the bureaucracy of an empire and the careful management of subject peoples. Our older colleges presupposed, and reinforced, the civil society and structures of a republic and the moral and political self-government of its citizens.

I commend to Mr. Papadopoulos’ attention this link: The Port Huron Statement (1962) | The American Yawp Reader He might learn that the bureaucratic, research-driven academic “regime” he opposes today is the same “regime” we opposed in the Sixties, before we started camping out on Victor Davis Hanson’s lawn.

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As the Schools Go, So Goes the Nation - TomKlingenstein.com

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Christoph Blumhardt:

Our work must follow two laws. We may not bear grudges against anyone, for the kingdom of God is God’s love for all people. And we must not annoy, scorn, or despise any of the poor as of less value than ourselves. You are yourself a miserable wretch if you treat them as though they were of no value. We must always have God’s values before our eyes. God’s treasure lies within each person, not with the great and powerful of this earth. The divine worth in any despised person must be recognized, and we must protect and cherish it. Whenever we get together with people, we need to consider their value for the kingdom of God.

When history, which confuses us and creates enemies, comes to an end and deception has been driven out of the world, we might see this kingdom, this treasure, shining clearly. In the meantime, I must see it in my enemy as a mustard seed and forgive again and again. If someone should insult me a hundred times, I must still see in him value for God.

This is what people have not yet learned, and I believe that this is why the kingdom of God has not yet come. People bite and scratch, warring against each other, despising and scorning one another. Even the finest people are ready, for the sake of their beliefs and convictions, to judge and condemn others – they have thoroughly learned that! But to discern what is of God in the enemy, to grasp God’s worth in those who insult us, in foreigners, in those far from us who think differently, in the poor just as much as in the noble – this they have not learned.

The above is from a sermon preached by Christoph Blumhardt in 1899. The congregation listened attentively, then went out into the world and, following Blumhardt’s advice, loved their enemies, turned the other cheek, and went out of their way to see the value in everyone. Their efforts were contagious, and, within a miraculously short time, the mustard seed of love had become an entire kingdom. Nations did not make war no more, swords were turned into ploughshares, and everyone got a pony. Honest—that’s what happened; I mean, proleptically.

Fun fact: Blumhardt, a respected Lutheran theologian, declared his support for socialism in 1899, and announced that he had joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany. He was promptly fired from his position as a Lutheran minister.

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How God Sees Us by Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (plough.com)

Saturday Lecture: Thirsting for Ignorance

{Writing over a century ago, Gerald Stanley Lee, a self-proclaimed ‘disagreeable character,’ denounced modern education for forcing books upon children who didn’t want them, for turning reading into drudgery rather than pleasure, and for using the printed word to intimidate rather than to inspire the imagination. Shades of 11^th-grade English class, circa 1965!}

“I never read if I can help it.” (Gerald Stanley Lee)

Gerald Stanley Lee, from The Lost Art of Reading (1907):

Do you not know what it means when you, a civilized, cultivated human being, can stand face to face with a list headed  “books of the week,” and when, unblinking and shameless, and without a cry of protest, you actually read it through, without seeing, or seeming to see, for a single moment that right there in that list, in the fact that there is such a list, your civilization is on trial for its life? That any society or nation or century that is shallow enough to publish as many books as that has yet to face the most awful, the most unprecedented, the most headlong-coming crisis in the history of the human race?

I was born to read. I spent all my early years, as I remember them, with books, peering softly about in them. My whole being was hushed and trustful and expectant at the sight of a printed page. I lived in the presence of books, with all my thoughts lying open about me; a kind of still, radiant mood of welcome seemed to lie upon them. When I looked at a shelf of books, I felt the whole world flocking to me.

I have been civilized now, I should say, twenty, or possibly twenty-five, years, and my whole being has changed. I cannot so much as look upon a great many books in a library or any other heaped-up place, without feeling bleak and heartless. I never read if I can help it. My whole attitude toward current literature is grouchy and snappish, a kind of perpetual interrupted “What are you ringing my doorbell now for?" attitude. I am a disagreeable character.

It is a serious question whether the average American youth is ever given a chance to thirst for knowledge. He thirsts for ignorance instead. From the very first he is hemmed in by knowledge. The kindergarten with its suave relentlessness, its perfunctory cheerfulness, closes in upon the life of every child with himself. The dear old-fashioned breathing spell he used to have after getting here — whither has it gone? The rough, strong, ruthless, unseemly, grown-up world crowds to the very edge of every beginning life. It has no patience with trailing clouds of glory. Flocks of infants every year — newcomers to this planet — who can but watch them sadly, huddled closer and closer to the little strip of wonder that is left near the land from which they came? No lingering away from us. No infinite holiday. Childhood walks a precipice crowded to the brink of birth. We tabulate its moods. We register its learning inch by inch. We draw its poor little premature soul out of its body breath by breath. Infants are well informed now. The suckling has nerves. A few days more he will be like all the rest of us.

There was a time when, if a man revealed in conversation that he was familiar with poetic structure in John Keats, it meant something about the man — his temperament, his imaginative or delighting power. Now, it means that he has taken a course in poetics in college, or teaches English in a high school, and is carrying deadly information about with him wherever he goes. It does not mean that he has a spark of the Keats spirit in him, or that he could have endured being in the same room with Keats, or Keats could have endured being in the same room with him, for fifteen minutes.

The greatest inconvenience of being born in the latter half of the nineteenth century is the almost constant compulsion one is under of finding people out, of making a distinction between the worthwhile people who know a beautiful thing and the boors of culture who know all about it. One sees on every hand today persons occupying positions of importance who have been taken through all the motions of education, from the bottom to the top, but who, whatever their positions might be, are clumsy and futile with knowledge. Their culture has not been made over into themselves. They have acquired it largely under mob-influence (the Dead Level of intelligence), and all that they can do with it, not wanting it, is to be teachery with it — to force it on other people who do not want it.

Whether in the origin, processes, or results of their learning, these people have all the attributes of a mob. Their influence and force in civilization is a mob influence, and it operates in the old and classic fashion of mobs upon all who oppose it. It constitutes at present the most important and securely intrenched intimidating force that modem society presents against the actual culture of the world, whether in the schools or out of them. Its voice is in every street, and its shout of derision may be heard in almost every walk of life against all who refuse to conform to it. There are but very few who refuse. Millions of human beings, young and old, in meek and willing rows are seen on every side, standing before It, the Dead Level, anxious to do anything to be graded up to It, or to be graded down to It, offering their heads to be taken off, their necks to be stretched, or their waists, willing to live footless all their days, anything, anything  whatever, bless their hearts! to know that they are on the Level, the Dead Level, the precise and exact Dead Level of Intelligence. The fact that this mob-power keeps its hold by using books instead of bricks is merely a matter of form.

If John Milton had had any idea when he wrote ‘Paradise Lost’ that it was going to be used mostly to batter children's minds with, it is doubtful if he would ever have had the heart to write it. It does not damage a book very much to let it lie on a wooden shelf little longer than it ought to. But to come crashing down into the exquisite filaments of a human brain with it, to use it to keep a brain from continuing to be a brain — that is, an organ with all its reading senses acting and reacting warm and living in it—is a very serious matter. It always ends in the same way, this modem brutality with books. Even Bibles cannot stand it. Human nature stands it least of all. That books of all things in this world, made to open men's instincts with, should be so generally used to shut them up with, is one of the saddest signs we have of the caricature of culture that is having its way in our modem world. It is getting so that the only way the average dinned-at, educated modem boy, shut in with masterpieces, can really get to read is in some still overlooked moment when people are too tired of him to do him good. Then softly, perhaps guiltily, left all by himself with a book he stumbles upon, his soul suddenly steals out and loves something.

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Gerald Stanley Lee - Wikipedia

Friday Fragments

{Here and there on the WorldWideWeb...for once in my life, I will refrain, for the most part, from snarky comments.}

At Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson makes a sensible point: laws should apply equally to everyone, with no loopholes for anyone whose personal Lord and Savior says otherwise.  Or, as Robinson phrases it, “If a law should apply, it should apply regardless of how people feel about following it. If the law infringes on liberty, it should be repealed. All a religious exemption is at the end of the day is a rule that some people are allowed to violate laws because they believe they ought to be allowed to. Or rather, because they believe God told them they shouldn’t have to follow the law and should get to discriminate against people.” 

There Should Not Be “Religious Exemptions” To Laws ❧ Current Affairs

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Kerry McDonald, on the other hand, leader of the Foundation for Economic Education, would like to get rid of laws forcing kids to go to school. Yay, Kerry McDonald! Where were you when I needed you in 1965? Ms. McDonald argues as follows:

Compulsory school attendance laws terrorize parents and weaken families. Last week, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld a state law that allows parents of children who regularly miss school to be jailed. The case focused on two single mothers in Missouri who were given jail sentences when their children, who were in kindergarten and first grade, were each absent from school for roughly 15 days during the 2021/2022 academic year. 

We may see this criminalization of parents accelerate in the coming months as states and school districts try to find the allegedly “missing” children who have left district schools since the pandemic response began in 2020. It is likely to be low-income parents and those from historically marginalized groups who will be targeted for truancy.

Compulsory schooling is incompatible with freedom, as Thomas Jefferson himself recognized. While promoting broad educational offerings, free to the poor, and noting that a society could not be both free and ignorant, Jefferson opposed forced education. “It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father,” Jefferson wrote in 1817.

Instead of criminalizing parents whose children miss school, sometimes for heartbreaking reasons such as bullying, we should seek instead to eliminate compulsory schooling statutes and free families from the government’s coercive clutches. In the absence of these laws, a robust, diverse, and decentralized education ecosystem would emerge that would be grounded in consent over coercion and defined by variety over monopoly.

Compulsory Schooling Laws Have Got To Go - Foundation for Economic Education (fee.org)

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Lastly, educator Daniel Buck is very excited about a new college admissions test that, he says, will challenge the SAT and the ACT for prominence: it’s the CLT (Classical Learning Test), and it requires students to read Plato and Teresa of Avila!

Created in 2015, the CLT hopes to revive what we consider an education of old — logic, grammar, Shakespeare, Tolstoy. In format, it resembles its competitors, featuring passages with multiple choice questions. Yet students instead read the likes of Plato on tyrannical man or St. Teresa of Avila on the virtues of a humble life.

Hundreds of private colleges and universities now accept its scores. Last spring, Florida began funding its administration at the K-12 level, and high scores can even earn students Bright Futures Scholarships.

Especially as the classical education movement more broadly gains national momentum, there is both room and need for a challenger to incentivize the kind of education that cultivates wisdom, fosters virtue, inspires wonder, and crafts the soul.

A test to challenge the SAT | The Hill

Wednesday with Pascal: Hillsdale Explains It All!

{An exciting development: Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has enrolled in a free online course offered by Hillsdale College! The course, titled “The American Left: From Liberalism to Despotism,” is based on Professor Kevin Slack’s upcoming book, War on the American Republic; it consists of ten recorded lectures by Professor Slack, along with a brief introductory address by Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College. Although no college credits are awarded for completing the course, nonetheless, there will be quizzes! And grades! Pascal’s classwork will preclude him from posting on other subjects for a while, but he promises to keep us informed of his progress, should he make any.}

We are awash today in woke madness. A few examples will suffice:

• Did you know that, in California, gerbils are allowed to vote?
• Did you know that there is a university in Oregon where courses in “History,” having been previously retitled “Herstory,” are now listed as courses in “theirstories”?
• Did you know that in Germany, (and I have this on good authority) women are now allowed to swim topless in public pools—and so are men!
• Did you know that adolescents in River City are allowed to play pool in the local billiards parlor?

Such things are but the tip of the iceberg toward which the Titanic that is the United States of America is inexorably headed, which is the point made by President Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College in his video introductory to Professor Kevin Slack’s online course, “The American Left: From Liberalism to Despotism”. What we will learn in the course, promises President Arnn, is the history, nature, and purpose of “Post-Sixties Liberalism,” and (of course) the reasons to be afraid of it. We will learn too that the contemporary madness stems from our abandonment of Nature and Nature’s God, our insatiable lust for Power, and our ridiculous (if not Diabolical) belief in Progress.

Moreover, we will learn that postmodern Liberals have redefined Progress even as they worship it. “Progress” no longer means advancing toward a chosen destination; instead, it now means “a journey that changes us as it happens,” as if we are Huck Finn lazily drifting down the Mississippi on a raft! Or something. The point is, says President Arnn, Progress now happens to us, and we—that is, ordinary Americans—no longer have much to say about it.¹  

Is there a text in this class? Technically, no; but non-technically, students are encouraged to consult Kevin Slack’s soon-to-be-published The American Left: From Liberalism to Despotism. According to the publisher’s blurb, Slack’s book will explain how “Teddy Roosevelt’s Anglo-Protestant progressive social gospelers battled trusts and curbed immigration; Franklin Roosevelt’s and Lyndon Johnson’s secular liberals forged a government-business partnership and promoted a civil rights agenda; and the 1960s radicals protested corporate influence in the Great Society, liberal hypocrisy on race and gender, and the war in Vietnam.”

Each iteration of the Left went further, seeking “to overturn what came before.” Bad people filled with bad ideas did bad things. After the Sixties, “Radicals ensconced themselves in bureaucracy and academia to advance their vision of social justice for women and minorities, while neoliberal elites promoted monopoly finance, open borders, and the outsourcing of jobs to benefit consumers.” Eventually, “The neoliberals’ economic and military failures precipitated a crisis of legitimacy.”

Professor Slack’s book—and, I assume, his course—wends its way to a tragic finale.

“In the ‘great awokening’ that began under Barack Obama, neoliberal elites, including establishment conservatives, openly broke with the populist base of the Republican Party, embraced identity politics, and used COVID-19 and a myth of insurrection to strip away the rights of American citizens. Today, an incompetent kleptocracy is draining the wealthiest and most powerful people in history, thus eroding the foundations of its own empire.”

If today’s America exemplifies what it means to be “woke,” well, this existential Russian blue cat would prefer to go back to sleep. I will, however, wake up in time for Lecture #1, by Kevin Slack himself: “Liberalism’s Rejection of Progressivism”. That should be an eye-opener!

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Professor Kevin Slack’s CV: Kevin Slack - Hillsdale College

I should note that, on the popular website “Rate My Professors,” Professor Slack is unanimously praised; of his twelve reviews, eleven rate him as “Awesome” and one rates him as “Great”. The reviews are so fulsome, one might suspect Professor Slack of having written them himself (but he didn’t).

¹ One cannot help but think of Richard Weaver’s remark, which (because I cannot locate the quotation) I will paraphrase as: just because the river is at full flood and the current is carrying us downstream, we are not thereby obliged to sing hymns of praise to the river gods as we are swept away. Or something.

Education for the Eschaton

{Apropos of nothing, our quote for today is from Senator Rick Scott (R-FL): “Democrats want to destroy America.” Curses! How did he manage to decode our platform?}

I’ll make this quick: the time is short, the end is near, and we are doomed.

According to Molly Olmstead (at Slate), Christian publishers are currently churning out “survival guides, books about current events, and prayer manuals all oriented around a rapture, a second coming of Christ, or an otherwise cataclysmic event at the hands of God.” How does one account for “this spate of end-times books”? One consults an expert—in this case, “Tommy Ice, a retired theology professor and the executive director of the Pre-Trib Research Center.”

Professor Ice explains “the rising interest in end times”:

“The reason it’s happening is the totalitarianism in the United States. It’s because of the seemingly overnight decline of America, from our perspective. It’s a huge shift, the stealing of an election. When has that ever happened in the United States?”

For him, the “stolen presidential election”—along with, he believes, stolen elections in the two 2020 Senate races in Georgia—clarified the depths of the nation’s degeneracy. (All of the election fraud claims that Ice cited as signs of totalitarianism have been thoroughly debunked.) That, he said, was “lining up with what it is going to be like after the rapture of the church, where you have the Antichrist coming from Europe, who’s going to be the world ruler.”

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

The rapture, apocalypse, and end times are sweeping Christian books, with a Trump connection. (slate.com)

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At the Acton Institute Powerblog, Auguste Meyrat reflects on a new book, Don’t Go to College, in which co-authors “Michael J. Robillard and Timothy J. Gordon not only cover the familiar problems plaguing colleges but also perceive something deeper corrupting an institution that was so fundamental to Western civilization. The real problem is more than the financial cost, the coddling, or even the abuse the writers themselves suffered—it’s the philosophy stupid.”

It seems that a specter is haunting American universities: the specter of “neo-Marxism,” which, alas, Meyrat doesn’t bother defining or explaining. Instead, he simply quotes Robillard and Gordon: ‘[Traditional education] is meant to advance actual knowledge, neo-Marxism is meant to advance propaganda, which is true to Marx’s goal of putting change (revolution) above understanding (wisdom).’ Whereas one philosophical system espouses the intellect and reason, the other system emphasizes feeling and action. It’s no mystery which one is the easier sell to young adults.”

Meyrat goes on to explain that “ideas have consequences, and the damage done by the capture of neo-Marxism cannot be underestimated.” [He means “overestimated,” of course, unless he means “should not be underestimated”.] “Neo-Marxism has fundamentally warped the whole goal of college. According to Robillard and Gordon, students who are now charged with ‘changing the world’ have taken this to mean ‘changing mankind,’ which explains the current rush to embrace transhumanism. Citing more than a few authorities on this topic, the writers explain:

‘Transhumanists believe that human beings are reducible to data points; technology can deliver secular utopia; tech gurus should lead society (and globalist technocrats manage it); and depopulation, anti-natalism, extreme life extension, vegetarianism/veganism, alternative sexual lifestyles, New Age spiritualism (but not Christianity), wokeism, and new urbanist, “smart-city” living are all unquestionably good things.’ 

To paraphrase Richard Nixon, we are all transhumanists now, data points existing in virtual reality—at least, that’s how Robillard, Gordon, and Meyrat see things. I, on the other hand, have never met a transhumanist, an anti-natalist, or anyone who believed in a technological utopia; perhaps I have led a sheltered existence.

Auguste Meyrat’s only complaint about Don’t Go to College is that the authors offer no useful solutions; all they advise is either to become an autodidact (easier said than done) or to go to college and troll the woke professors and the sheeple who follow them. As Meyrat sees it, we should not throw out the baby of higher learning with the bathwater of neo-Marxist transhumanism. He agrees that the present situation is untenable; “bad education and bad philosophy,” after all, “ultimately lead to an unfulfilling, impotent kind of life. It’s no surprise that our society has decayed politically and culturally; this is the inevitable result of its having rejected the West’s, and Western education’s, founding principles.” Still, Meyrat does not want to bury the universities, only the woke faculty and the postmodern curricula. “It’s critical,” he concludes, “that we either restore the university from the ground up or design a plausible alternative, one that’s unafraid to recover the great books of the past and that can assist and inspire us in our lifelong pursuit of wisdom.”

As someone who dropped out of college as soon as the bursar's office cashed the tuition check from my parents, I am sympathetic to the "don't go to college" movement. However, there ought to be better reasons to quit school than woke faculty and transhumanist indoctrination. How about this: don't go to college because the eschaton is about to arrive, and you will either be Raptured into the clouds with Jesus or caught up in the battle against Antichrist here on earth?  

Does College Get in the Way of Education? – Acton Institute PowerBlog

       Either the end times have arrived, or Spring Break has gotten out of hand...

The Unbearable Sadness of Today's Conservatives

What are we unhappy about today? We are unhappy about many things--if, by "we," you mean American conservatives. Let us air a few of their grievances.

For one thing, conservatives are unhappy about DEI: that is, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. According to Nicholas Waddy, who teaches history at SUNY Alfred:

Higher education’s abject submission to the gods of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is now assured. Many colleges and universities are building into their hiring, promotion, and tenure schemes a requirement that candidates show “DEI competencies” in order to advance. What’s more, the rubrics assessing whether a candidate has hit the mark are saturated with the terminology of leftist identity politics. More importantly, they take for granted the central assumptions of modern cultural Marxism and critical race theory.

Professor Waddy’s concern isn’t limited to the halls of academe; it extends to the epidemic of “woke” corporations, corporations which were once the backbone of America but are now spineless, craven servants of Moloch (DEI):

Conservatives and Republicans should ask themselves: if every institution in modern society submits to cultural Marxism and identity politics—from education and entertainment to big business and even mainline Christianity—then what are the long-term prospects of a political movement that dares to dissent from such a pervasive orthodoxy?

If we once thought we could afford to scoff at the woke antics of professors, the looming conquest of the corporate world by the Left should be seen for the grave threat to America that it is. In the battle for corporate America’s soul, failure simply cannot be an option.

That is enough to make anyone, and not just Nicholas Waddy, unhappy.

DEI Will Be the Death of Us › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

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Also at American Greatness, where dissatisfaction with the status quo seems to run rampant, Robert Curry, a conservative, is unhappy with the Seventeenth Amendment (election of U.S. senators by popular vote), which, along with the rest of the Progressive agenda, pulled the rug out from under America's carefully constructed, perfectly balanced, and finely tuned system of federalism. “Today,” writes Curry, “the central government rides roughshod over the states and regulates the lives of every American citizen to an extent that would have horrified the founders.” Speed limits! Gun regulation! Voting by mail! Dire consequences for removing mattress tags! Pronoun indoctrination! Black people being paid for working! The Communist Manifesto being recited at gunpoint by schoolchildren!

Curry goes on to explain how this came about:

When exactly did America abandon federalism, and how were the states neutered? We can date the turn with startling precision. The United States abandoned federalism on April 8, 1913, the day the 17th Amendment was ratified. It provided for the popular election of senators by the people of the individual states, the system we have now. Up until that day, the two senators from each state were chosen by the state legislatures. Consequently, before April 8, 1913, because the legislatures of “the several States” controlled the Senate, they had some control over the federal government. 

Curry sets forth a commonsense agenda for American reform:

The states must be restored to their proper place in the federal system if we are to live again in the liberty at home and the peace abroad that the founders intended for us. Much will be required of us to accomplish that noble purpose. Not the least of our tasks will be the repeal of the 17th Amendment. Repealing that amendment, of course, will not be enough. What is required of us as a nation is re-dedicating ourselves to the American idea. Then all can be accomplished. We can restore the states to their rightful place in the American system of liberty and reclaim American liberty for ourselves.   

If that doesn’t bring you to your feet with tears in your eyes, well, you just might be a Progressive.

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Federalism in Name Only Undermines Liberty at Home and Peace Abroad › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

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Lastly, Adam Ellwanger, who teaches at the University of Houston, is unhappy that conservatives refuse to fully embrace their countercultural identity. Writing at The American Conservative, Ellwanger insists that “People on the right need to learn to relish being part of the counterculture, and to jettison the bad connotations that this term implies. Counterculture can be bad, but that depends on the virtue of the culture that it opposes. Our cause is just. In 2022, being vanilla is about the most transgressive identity you can inhabit. In a culture that openly opposes the very notion of virtue, counterculture becomes a moral obligation.”

The counterculture of the Sixties left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, Ellwanger concedes, but the truth is that, like it or not, “the countercultural left won. Their offensive against America’s traditional culture overwhelmed our defense, and now they sit in the seat of institutional power; meaning, traditionalists and conservatives are now the counterculture. It’s our job—if we care—to play offense and undermine the new culture wherever we can. We must understand that voting alone is insufficient as members of the counterculture. We need to be willing to openly live and express the norms that oppose the left’s cultural paradigm.”

Alas, too many on the Right have already surrendered:

Some conservatives are still trying to play defense. They don’t yet grasp that their enemies won the culture war on traditional American values. They rant and rave about violations of norms that are obsolete. Their values are not obsolete, but those values no longer operate as norms because the state and other institutions openly support the new norms (which only a few decades ago were the values of the left counterculture). Others on the right grasp that the old counterculture has become the new culture—that it now dictates the norms of our society. But many of them have not yet come to grips with the fact that this makes us the new counterculture. Some try to quietly maintain traditional values in their personal lives but pay lip service to the new culture when required at school, work, or elsewhere. These people are intellectually conquered. 

The challenge of openly living according to countercultural norms is daunting. It will require conservatives, for instance, to maintain their cisgender identities in public, regardless of the shaming they will endure; to use traditional pronouns for themselves, regardless of the confusion for which they will be blamed; to emerge from the heterosexual closet and admit their transgressive attraction to the opposite sex; to not have (or perform) abortions, even when infanticide has become a secular sacrament; to bring children up in accordance with their religious beliefs, even though atheists control the Deep State; to attend the church of their choice and to pray on their own time (and without state subsidy) to the god in whom they believe, despite godless secularists' constant attempts to prevent them from doing so.

Traditionalists are now the people their parents warned them against, or the people our parents wanted us to be, or something like that. Next thing you know, they'll be insisting on powdered wigs for our judges, government business to be transacted exclusively in Latin, and the return of bastinado for nonviolent offenders.

Worse, they might vote (again) for Donald Trump.

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Counterculture Warriors - The American Conservative

Bastinado for Dummies

 

Friday Frivolities

There is no easy way to say this: America has lost its mind (which is a terrible thing to waste). For a century now, our children has not been learning.

That, at least, is the considered opinion of John Peterson (not to be confused with Jordan Peterson), who, reviewing Pete Hegseth’s and David Goodwin’s Battle for the American Mind, observes that “Insofar as there ever was a battle for the American mind, it was lost a long time ago.” Peterson does not indict the usual suspects—"our suicidal obsessions with race and gender, or, in the 60’s and 70’s, with cultural Marxism or critical theory”; instead, like the authors of the book under review, Peterson blames the Progressivism of the early 20^th century, along with the docile “mainstream of America”  which inexplicably supported and furthered the progressive education agenda, “even though it was designed, from the beginning, to root Christianity and the Western tradition out of their schools.” Alas, Americans, including conservatives, traded their birthright for a mess of pottage, that is, “We traded a rich, life-giving inheritance, the education of a free people, for trinkets like skills- and jobs-training and the Pledge of Allegiance.” ^{1 & 2}

Clearly, Peterson agrees with the main thesis of Battle for the American Mind, which is, in Peterson’s summary, “Our schools are garbage.”  He does not, however, exactly shower the book with praise; instead, he writes that “It is clumsily executed, wildly inaccurate in many details, and lacking a consistent or coherent argument.” Moreover, he notes that one of the co-authors, Pete Hegseth, is “a television host” at Fox News (what a surprise!) “who, by his own admission, ‘write[s] like [he] speak[s],’ and has ‘read next to nothing’ of the canonical texts of the Western tradition, despite holding degrees from Princeton and Harvard.” In other words, Hegseth is an ignoramus with Ivy League degrees to prove it; given such exemplary credentials, it is no wonder that he required a co-author.

Among the book’s demerits, according to Peterson, is that it “regularly conflates Marxism and Progressivism,” an observation that should be shouted daily from the rooftops. Peterson also criticizes the authors’ insistence that “Charter schools cannot truly do classical education because they can teach nothing of transcendent truth, biblical revelation, or God, not to mention the truth system of Christianity.” Without Christianity, they say, “we cannot truly understand anything.” To which Peterson replies, “There can be no more anti-classical sentiment than this, and until conservative Christians are cured of this intellectual affliction, they can never have a workable battle plan for winning back education.”

Our schools may be “garbage,” but John Peterson seems to have emerged with his intellect intact from the various cesspools of mediocrity into which he was hurled. His review is almost certainly more worthwhile than the book which is its subject. Let us hope we never need to speak of Pete Hegseth again.     

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Battle for the American Mind - by Paul Weinhold (substack.com)

“John M. Peterson is Assistant Dean, Graduate Director of American Studies, and Sub-Director of Classical Education in the Braniff School of Liberal Arts at the University of Dallas.”

If you happen to be a glutton for punishment, by all means learn more about Pete Hegseth: Pete Hegseth - Wikipedia

¹ The wreck that is American public education inspired, among much else, the dirge-like folk ballad, “Hang Down Your Head, John Dewey”.

² Don’t blame me; as far back as 1965, I called the American educational system “a cesspool of mediocrity”.

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At Law & Liberty, Daniel Mahoney—self-described as “a conservative who appreciates that today the best of conservatism and classical liberalism stand or fall together”—teams up with Dan Klein—"a classical liberal open to conservative wisdom”—to take a stand on behalf of appreciating the best of both conservatism and classical liberalism. Their collaborative essay, “The Baby and the Bathwater,” amounts to an ideological “Can’t we all just get along?” It seems that, according to the Dans’ analysis, both sides of our ideological divide are “beset by overgeneralizations and simplistic representations of that which they reject. In each case, a baby is thrown out with the bathwater. But if the anti-religionists stopped throwing out the baby, the other group would be friendlier to the best currents of classical liberalism. And if the anti-liberals stopped throwing out the baby, the other group would be friendlier to religion. If one erred less, the impulse toward erring by the other would be less. They could better coalesce to common purpose and something truer.”

It is a variation of the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”; both sides would win if they could only trust each other to cooperate. What stands in the way of developing such trust? Well, for one thing, “classical liberals can be dogmatic and rationalistic, with a self-defeating subjectivism, an aversion to the supremacy of the good of the whole, a lack of appreciation for custom, tradition, and authority, a defective anthropology, and a thin understanding of virtue.” As for religious [read “Christian”] conservatives, they are imperfect as well: “Organized religions, religious practice, and religious fervor have sometimes led to what Machiavelli in The Prince called ‘pious cruelty.’ Religious groups can be fanatical or superstitious.”

Since “The Baby and the Bathwater” is a lengthy essay, allow me to jump ahead to its conclusion, which was telegraphed from the outset: in draining the swamp, be it liberal or conservative, make sure you preserve whatever in it is valuable. Do not, that is, in your haste, make the mistake which T-Bone Burnett accused the Sixties’ Baby Boomers of making: “Keep all the bad and destroy all the good.” ¹ The Dans put it this way:

Humans are imperfect, and each of us is bound to produce some dirty bathwater. Dirt is to be thrown out, but it must be separated from the health and wholeness that we love. Tocqueville proposed that the “spirit of liberty” and “the spirit of religion” stand or fall together. In throwing out the dirt in a baby’s bathtub, take care not to throw out the baby itself. Tocqueville was right: When either baby is thrown out, the other perishes as well. Bereft of the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion, the organic core of society is hollowed out. The void is filled with what Tocqueville tried to warn us against: tutelary despotism followed by massive degradation of the human spirit and slavery to lawless government. ² Mordor prevails if its adversaries do not coalesce.

In summary and in conclusion: do not throw out ideological babies, but do give them a thorough scrubbing from time to time.

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The Baby and the Bathwater – Daniel Klein & Daniel J. Mahoney (lawliberty.org)

¹ If Messrs. Klein and Mahoney can toss in references to Tocqueville and to Mordor, then I believe I am allowed to toss in T-Bone Burnett.

² Tutelary Despots would be a good name for a band.

Hang down your head, John Dewey; hang down your head and cry.

A Troika of Deplorables

(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