Mona Charen at The Bulwark looks at the dismaying descent of Utah Senator Mike Lee from Constitutional scholar and principled conservative into Trumpism, as evidenced by his CPAC speech last week.
Two essays about how identity politics militancy has found a way to poison the most objective science of all - mathematics - merit your attention.
John McWhorter's focus is on a document currently garnering buzz called "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction."
It's a doozy:
the thrust of this pamphlet is that:
1. a focus on getting the “right” answer is “perfectionism” or “either/or thinking;”
2. the idea that teachers are teachers and students are learners is wrong;
3. to think of it as a problem that the expectations you have of students are not met is racist;
4. to teach math in a linear fashion with skills taught in sequence is racist;
5. to value “procedural fluency” – i.e. knowing how to do the fractions, long division … -- over “conceptual knowledge” is racist. That is, black kids are brilliant to know what math is trying to do, to know “what it’s all about,” rather than to actually do the math, just as many of us read about what physics or astrophysics accomplishes without ever intending to master the math that led to the conclusions;
6. to require students to “show their work” is racist;
7. requiring students to raise their hand before speaking “can reinforce paternalism and powerhoarding, in addition to breaking the process of thinking, learning, and communicating.”
He cuts off arguments that it's really not of much significants at the pass:
I am not cherry-picking especially ripe-seeming quotes from an otherwise perfectly normal document. I am referring to its principal tenets, often restated several times within it.
Another response will be that I am exaggerating the proposal’s impact – that almost nobody is using it for real and that really it’s “just a proposal.” To which the proper response is “Thank God,” – but we also recall that the people saying this would be dancing jigs if every state in the Union adopted the whole pamphlet wholesale.
Bari Weiss turns over the current edition of her Substack newsletter, after an introduction, to a Princeton math professor named Sergiu Klainerman. He likewise takes that document (which was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) on and provides the perspective of a refugee from Ceausescu-era Romania.
The UMC moves a little closer to its inevitable split:
Conservative leaders within the United Methodist Church unveiled plans Monday to form a new denomination, the Global Methodist Church, with a doctrine that does not recognize same-sex marriage.
The move could hasten the long-expected breakup of the UMC, America’s largest mainline Protestant denomination, over differing approaches to LGBTQ inclusion.
The operative term is "a little closer." It's not like next week is in the cards or anything:
The Rev. Keith Boyette, a Methodist elder from Virginia who chairs the Global Methodist initiative, said he and his allies do not want to wait that long to formally leave the UMC. They have asked that the topic of schism be added to the tightly limited agenda of a special one-day General Conference to be conducted online May 8.
“The church is basically stalemated right now,” Boyette said. “We don’t believe an additional year is going to be helpful for anybody.”
However, Louisiana-based Bishop Cynthia Fierro Harvey, who heads the UMC’s Council of Bishops, said debate over a schism would involve “delicate deliberations” and attempting to conduct them online in May “does not seem wise or ethical.”
If the issue is not addressed on May 8, Boyette said he and his allies would be willing to delay until the 2022 General Conference, but only if UMC centrists and progressives remain committed to previous agreements about a breakup. Any lessening of those commitments might prompt the conservatives to bring the new church into existence, Boyette said.
Departure from sound doctrine on the matter of human sexuality is not just happening in the UMC. This development is pretty significant:
One of the country’s largest adoption and foster care agencies, Bethany Christian Services, announced on Monday that it would begin providing services to L.G.B.T.Q. parents nationwide effective immediately, a major inflection point in the fraught battle over many faith-based agencies’ longstanding opposition to working with same-sex couples.
Bethany, a Michigan-based evangelical organization, announced the change in an email to about 1,500 staff members that was signed by Chris Palusky, the organization’s president and chief executive. “We will now offer services with the love and compassion of Jesus to the many types of families who exist in our world today,” Mr. Palusky wrote. “We’re taking an ‘all hands on deck’ approach where all are welcome.”
The announcement is a significant departure for the 77-year-old organization, which is the largest Protestant adoption and foster agency in the United States. Bethany facilitated 3,406 foster placements and 1,123 adoptions in 2019, and has offices in 32 states. (The organization also works in refugee placement, and offers other services related to child and family welfare.) Previously, openly gay prospective foster and adoptive parents in most states were referred to other agencies.
The decision comes amid a high-stakes cultural and legal battle that features questions about sexuality, religious freedom, parenthood, family structure and theology.
Along these lines, I highly recommend this piece at The Gospel Coalition that addresses several frequently asked questions about the Equality Act.
At The American Conservative, Rod Dreher recounts a sequence of events beginning with his writing a letter to the editor of the Baton Rouge Advocate. The letter explains why he endorses Senator Bill Cassidy's vote to convict Donald Trump in the second impeachment trial. Dreher makes clear that he did not come to his position out of some longstanding strident Never-Trump sentiment:
As a conservative voter, I have never been a Never-Trumper and though I have also never been a Donald Trump fan, I recognize he brought a much-needed shake-up to the GOP.
But Trump’s grotesque post-election behavior made me realize that the Never-Trumpers were more correct than I previously thought. Trump’s words and actions regarding the Jan. 6 atrocity merited impeachment and conviction. It gives me no pleasure to conclude this, but had a Democratic president done the same things, I would feel the same way.
I am also proud of Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, for his vote to convict Trump. It was a brave call.
He lost a friend of 40 years over having penned the letter:
I didn’t realize the letter was going to run at all, much less today. Until I woke up this morning and received the following e-mail from a friend of 40 years:
I’d like to just let this pass, but I can’t. Support for Trump and his policies is the last straw. I can’t see a way for us to stay friends. You have broken my heart.
Well, that letter makes me sad, but mostly it makes me angry and depressed about the country. Notice that my liberal friend ended our friendship — of four decades! — because in a letter to the editor supporting Trump’s impeachment, I did not express perfect hatred of the man, and everything he did.I’m still stunned by the fanaticism here. I wrote a letter to the editor supporting the Republican US senator who voted to impeach Trump, and my old liberal friend’s response to that is to end our friendship. Sen. Cassidy told Walter Isaacson the other day that he has lost some friends over his vote, but he was talking about Republican friends. I, however, lost a liberal friend because I didn’t support Cassidy’s impeachment vote in exactly the right way.
Quin Hillyer at the Washington Examiner responds to Bill Kristol's recent floating of the idea that, for the time being, anti-Trumpist conservatives ought to consider finding a temporary home among the Democrats:
William Kristol has done more for conservatism and country than most of his carping critics combined, but his latest column is so off base that it requires a friendly rebuke.
Sorry, Bill, but conservatives and Republicans have no business allying themselves with President Biden.
Kristol addressed his column to longtime Republicans now disaffected by the party’s slavish obeisance to former President Donald Trump’s every whim, no matter how mendacious or malicious. Seeing them, us, lost in a new political wilderness, he says the “pretty obvious alternative” is to join forces with the (supposedly) “moderate” group who (supposedly) make up “the Biden wing of the Democratic party.”
The whole scenario is based on a fantasy that Kristol is far too intelligent actually to believe. The fantasy is that Biden is a political “moderate” by any reasonable standard, much less that his “wing” of the party rules the roost. Everywhere one looks, one sees Biden pushing not just liberal but very liberal nominees to high positions. Everywhere one looks, one sees Biden pushing very liberal policies and signing very liberal executive orders.
And at no time, not once so far in his brief presidency, has Biden reached out to the center-Right to find or build on common ground. Killing the Keystone XL pipeline isn’t "moderate." Pushing an anti-nun bully such as Xavier Becerra to run Health and Human Services or a race-obsessed radical such as Kristen Clarke to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division isn’t "moderate." Letting Communist China get its hands on the U.S. electric grid isn’t "moderate." Trying to stop all deportations of illegal immigrants certainly isn’t "moderate."
I've written many times about the rot within the humanities. Efforts to pinpoint how and why it happened abound, and how reversal might be commenced, and some are quite worthwhile.
The crisis is compounded by the fact that higher education is inextricably linked in most people's minds with preparing a student for the world of work.
At Breaking Ground, Joseph M. Keegin revisits these developments and asserts that we have not yet forthrightly identified the real, core reason for them and the first order of business in finding a way to address the situation.
First, his summary of what has happened:
Higher education is in bad shape. This has been the case for decades, of course: by the time Allan Bloom published his bestselling polemic against the state of the academy in 1987, a handful of other, arguably more prescient critiques had preceded it: Illich, Barzun, Carne-Ross. The critiques point to a common hollowing: the American academy churns out degreed technicians who have had the love of humane learning drummed out of them, or who had never been given a taste for it at all. Even William James had recognized the drift of education toward credentialism all the way back in 1903: “The Doctor-Monopoly in teaching, which is becoming so rooted an American custom, can show no serious grounds whatsoever for itself in reason. As it actually prevails and grows in vogue among us, it is due to childish motives exclusively. In reality it is but a sham, a bauble, a dodge, whereby to decorate the catalogues of schools and colleges.”
And (surprise) things are worse now. Colleges and universities have ignored these Cassandras and charged headlong into all of the trends that contribute to its degradation: obsessive credentialization, tuition inflation, a fondness for gratuitous abstraction, “publish or perish” prioritizing of dubious research over teaching, elitism. As I wrote last October in The Point, the academy that once served as a “serious house” (in Larkin’s phrasing) for the cultivation of intellectual and moral excellence has become a training center for bureaucrats—contemplatives and the curious need not apply.
A bit later, he zeroes in on the missing element in even the most well-meaning attempts to seek alternatives to the university as it's currently structured:
notably absent is any reference to one of the few institutions of the old American civil society that still enjoys some popularity: the church. Though those universities originally founded as Christian institutions have left their commitment to that Light behind, many Christian traditions have long understood the educative potential of the local house of worship. Along with the operation of parochial schools and programs for children, parishes have long been home to Bible studies, book groups, panel discussions, guest lectures, and other opportunities for moral, spiritual, and intellectual development. My parish in Louisville had an adult forum that had offered lectures by guests and parishioners for years; my new parish in Chicago invited me and several other younger adults to give talks as part of a Lenten program series last spring. And there is a thriving Christian classical education movement, inspired by Dorothy L. Sayers’s 1947 essay “The Lost Tools of Learning,” which has revitalized traditions of humanistic learning based on the classical trivium. Schools and homeschool groups, some linked to specific churches, some nondenominational, are preparing at least some students for serious humanistic study in universities that may or may not themselves be prepared to give these students the food for which they’ve been given a taste.
Keegin goes on to demonstrate that he's well aware that an order of business that must precede the reliance on the church in this undertaking is, as is my point in including pertinent links above, healing the church itself of its own demons.
Finally, there's my latest at Precipice. I discuss how this year's CPAC makes it more likely than ever that actual conservatives will have to abandon the Republican Party to the Trumpists and begin the daunting task of building something new from scratch.
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