Many of us now feel old, detached even, before our time. The beliefs, attitudes, mores that our parents, clergy, coaches, teachers, and other authority figures, almost unconsciously imparted to us, seem increasingly like museum pieces. Should we consign individualism, competitive striving, personal accountability, to say nothing of a belief that we live and act under God and the moral law, to an antiquated, bigoted past? In is the new victim slick and its reduction of the person to gender and race—its symbology sits on your Nike apparel, emblazoned on sporting venues, touted by leading corporations. Out is the fabric of liberty and order, honesty and sobriety, diligence and thrift. The symbology of these virtues may become synonymous with white supremacy, the ontological core of American identity, we are increasingly told. The Smithsonian Museum for African American History and Culture has pedagogical plans on this front.
We confront the following question: “what if the “self” that is “realized” under the conditions of liberal capitalism is a self that despises liberal capitalism, and uses its liberty to subvert and abolish a free society?” This question was asked forty eight years ago by Irving Kristol in his magnificent 1972 lecture “Capitalism, Socialism, and Nihilism,” delivered to the twenty fifth anniversary meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. Kristol understood well the problems of liberal democratic society when it is detached from metaphysical and spiritual goods. He underscores what he thinks are the tendencies for such an order: a vacuous liberty increasingly perceived as unworthy of defending and the turn to a pathological, if not socialist tinged, notion of the good. The outcome, Kristol feared, would be a sickness leading to death. His insights in this essay clear a path forward during our own sickness in 2020.
Immanuel, a pediatrician and a religious minister, has a history of making bizarre claims about medical topics and other issues. She has often claimed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are in fact caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.
She alleges alien DNA is currently used in medical treatments, and that scientists are cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious. And, despite appearing in Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress on Monday, she has said that the government is run in part not by humans but by “reptilians” and other aliens.
Immanuel gave her viral speech on the steps of the Supreme Court at the “White Coat Summit,” a gathering of a handful of doctors who call themselves America’s Frontline Doctors and dispute the medical consensus on the novel coronavirus. The event was organized by the right-wing group Tea Party Patriots, which is backed by wealthy Republican donors.
In her speech, Immanuel alleges that she has successfully treated hundreds of patients with hydroxychloroquine, a controversial treatment Trump has promoted and says he has taken himself. Studies have failed to find proofthat the drug has any benefit in treating COVID-19, and the Food and Drug Administration in June revoked its emergency authorization to use it to treat the deadly virus, saying it hadn’t demonstrated any effect on patients’ mortality prospects.
“Nobody needs to get sick,” Immanuel said. “This virus has a cure.”
In our time, the New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has been celebrated as the genius behind the Times‘s 1619 Project, which is an attempt to — in the Times‘s word — “reframe” American history around slavery. No longer should 1776 be considered the year of America’s birth, but rather 1619, the year the first African slaves were brought to the New World. Jones won the Pulitzer Prize this year for her work on the project. It is based on a fundamental historical falsehood — a malicious and destructive one too: that the purpose of America was to preserve slavery.
A number of historians — none of them conservatives — called Jones and her team at the Timesout on this lie (see here for a list of some of the names, and their criticism). This is a lie that could have tremendous consequences. As Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, himself a man of the left, has said:
“To teach children that the American Revolution was fought in part to secure slavery would be giving a fundamental misunderstanding not only of what the American Revolution was all about but what America stood for and has stood for since the Founding.”
But Jones’s lie is politically useful in advancing the identity-politics goals of progressives. Oprah Winfrey and Lionsgate are going to make a series of films and feature television shows based on the 1619 Project. They are changing the cultural memory of Americans, in a way that deceives people about what America was, and is. Nobody can possibly deny that slavery was a terrible stain on this nation, but it is an evil whose existence stood as a rebuke to the Founders’ ideals. It took a Civil War to finally end the malignant institution — but it did end, at the cost of between 600,000 and 750,000 American lives.
The reason we’re talking about it now is that Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, is sponsoring legislation that would prohibit the use of federal tax dollars to teach the 1619 Project in American classrooms. Whether or not such legislation is wise is certainly debatable. What’s caused the ruckus is this section from a story in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette:
In the interview, Cotton said the role of slavery can’t be overlooked.
“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,” he said.
Instead of portraying America as “an irredeemably corrupt, rotten and racist country,” the nation should be viewed “as an imperfect and flawed land, but the greatest and noblest country in the history of mankind,” Cotton said.
This is being wildly misconstrued as some sort of justification for slavery. What Cotton is saying simply is that the United States could not have existed if the non-slave states had not agreed to accept the slave states. It was a doomed compromise, a one we eventually had to go to war over, but it launched the country. Cotton is pointing out the tragic nature of the compromise that made America possible as a nation united under the Constitution. He is not defending slavery, which would be as insane morally as it would be politically. He is repeating a similar point that Abraham Lincoln made in an 1855 letter to Joshua Speed, a friend of his who owned slaves:
You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union.
Do you see?
No comments:
Post a Comment