Sunday roundup

 Michael Tolhurst of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, writing at Discourse, says there are three values that, were we to embrace them, could lift our discussions about how to teach civics and history out of their present dismal state. They are optimism, inclusion and honesty.

Of optimism, he says

When the greatest generation—the generation that went on to lead America through World War II and the Cold War—was in school, the curriculum was very big on American potential and American freedoms. We do want people to feel good about the country and their community. We do not want people to feel alienated from their society. We also want Americans to feel hopeful about the future. A teaching of civics and history that paints our country as irredeemably bad is going to be rejected by citizens who like their country.

History’s Missing Players

Not surprisingly, these books don’t feature many Black people, and it is hard to feel good about your country and hopeful about the future when you’re left out of the picture. The photos in a civics textbook from the 1930s, for example, feature only white children exhibiting the virtues of daily exercise. Immigration is looked upon with suspicion. Native and Black Americans are treated at best with a stiff politeness or with demeaning compliments. A history of Virginia textbook from the 1890s clearly limns out the tropes of the Lost Cause, which rejected Reconstruction and obscured the causes of the Civil War. So, optimism alone can lead to an unthinking jingoism, and is not a sure guide for a better approach to education.

Inclusion - -real inclusion, not perfunctory demographic quota-filling - has to be part of the picture as well: 

Granted, what constitutes “people like me” is murky—it should not be restricted to the arbitrary categories of race, class or gender popular with some theorists, though these characteristics can’t be ignored either. 

And, lastly, we have to keep it real:

If what we are looking for is an inclusive and optimistic rendition of history, we also need one that is as close to true as possible, and we arrive at that truth by checking our interpretations with others. We arrive at that truth by comparing our perspective with the perspectives of others. This is not to say all perspectives are of equal weight—empirical facts put hard constraints on what is plausible to believe.

The recent passing of Joan Didion brought her husband, John Gregory Dunne, some momentary renewed attention. Kevin Mims, writing at Quillette, takes a fresh look at his brother, Dominique Dunne. The arc of his career and life are pretty remarkable in their own right.

David Rose, writing at UnHerd, sheds light on the degree of excuse-making Western climate activists indulge in for the Chinese Communist Party:

A few blocks away from Tiananmen Square, amid the cavernous splendour of the Beijing Hotel Convention Centre, an array of senior Communist Party officials gathered in September to proclaim a clear message: by “focusing on cutting carbon emissions… China will promote green development, and continuously improve its ecology”. The annual general meeting of the China Council for International Co-operation on Environment and Development (the CCICED) was in full swing.

Rapturous applause filled the room, though that was hardly unexpected. Conferences run by the CCP are not usually marked by dissent, especially when they’re attended by the likes of Xie Zhenhua, who led China’s delegation to Cop26, and vice premier Han Zheng, one of the seven standing committee members of the Politburo, the Party’s supreme elite. Indeed, as the room fizzled with optimistic eco-rhetoric, you could almost forget that China is the world’s biggest source of greenhouse gases — and that the new coal-fired power stations in its construction pipeline alone have a greater capacity than Britain’s entire generation fleet.

What was remarkable about this meeting, though, was the surprising presence of an external delegation: joining the CCP apparatchiks on a collection of screens dotted around the room were a number of enthusiastic Britons and other Westerners. According to the official conference report, the “foreign committee members and partners lauded China’s ecological civilisation building and its new and greater contributions to promoting the construction of a clean and beautiful world”.

Who were these people? Strange to tell, they consisted of a veritable Who’s Who of British, European and American climate activists.

Here, for example, was Professor Lord Nicholas Stern, Chairman of the Grantham Centre on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, and a longstanding government adviser who wrote a reportfor Blair’s Labour government on the need to go green. He told the meeting the world is beginning a “new growth story” that “fits well with China’s vision of an ecological society”.

Here too was Kate Hampton, chief executive of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), which is mainly bankrolled by the billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn, a key financial backer of Extinction Rebellion and one of the world’s biggest sources of green largesse. During the meeting, Hampton said she “supported Chinese leadership on setting the global path for fulfilling Paris goals” — the attempt to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — and praised China for “supporting green Covid-19 recovery”.

Others were equally fulsome, including Laurence Tubiana, France’s former climate ambassador and now chief executive of the European Climate Foundation, which also gives millions to British green campaigns, such as UK100, an alliance of local authorities pledged to turn Net Zero by 2030; and the Conservative Environment Network.

Also present were representatives from ClientEarth, a law firm that tries to block development in Britain and other countries on environmental grounds in the courts; the Worldwide Fund for Nature, whose president is Prince Charles; and representatives from rich and influential organisations based in America including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Resources Institute and the Energy Foundation.

And yet in the weeks since the CCICED meeting, Cop26 has come and gone; and largely thanks to China, any hope of a meaningful deal has evaporated. On the last day, British minister Alok Sharma was reduced to tears when India and China refused to promise to phase out coal. Back in the real world, President Xi Jinping has said China will increase annual coal production by 220 million tonnes.

But they got the Western tree-huggers to sell them enough rope:

. . . Qiushi, the CCP’s theoretical journal, published an article in Chinese this year which explores how foreign environmentalists can be utilised. The idea of ecological civilisation, it says, is “Marxist and scientific by nature”, and will have a big role in spreading the China Model’s appeal.

None of this is hidden. This article uses Chinese documents, but all are available on the Mandarin web. Yet climate change activists continue to blindly give China a free pass on its emissions and continued use of coal.

Recently, LITD has posted fairly frequently about the mounting threats to the US from China and Russia. Lest anyone forget that Iran is part of the mounting-threats club as well, its Quds Force head provides a bracing reminder:

Delivering a speech to a ceremony in Mashhad marking the second anniversary of martyrdom of General Soleimani and remembering Martyrs of the "Resistance Front"Defending the Holy Shrines, The IRGC Quds Force Commander Brigadier General Esmaeil Qaani underlined that the Islamic Republic will take revenge for General Soleimani’s assassination in its own way.

“We will prepare ground for the hard revenge against the US from within their homes, as we do not need to be present as supervisors everywhere, wherever is necessary we take revenge against Americans by the help of people on their side and within their own homes without our presence,” Commander Qaani said.

The senior Iranian commander highlighted that Iran will deal with the enemies and the people who committed the crime of assassinating General Soleimani with its own tactics, behavior, style and manner.

Qaani went on to say that it would be much wiser for the US to deal with the criminals who assassinated General Soleimani on their own, as it would be much costlier for the them if “the children of the Resistance Front” are to take the matter in their own hands and take revenge from the Americans by themselves.

“This revenge has begun. Americans will be uprooted from the region,” IRGC Quds Force Commander concluded.

 

Which is why, as Quin Hilyer explains at the Washington Examiner, the US had better take an unflinching look at its preparedness - or, rather, lack thereof - to deal with the mounting-threats club:

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, no combination of foreign threats to the United States and the West has been as dangerous as that which we face in 2022 and immediately beyond. The Chinese designs on Latin America, part of which have been described as “buying an empire,” are just a small portion of leader Xi Jinping’s not-so-secret scheme for world domination. Russia’s Vladimir Putin not only continues to ramp up his anti-Western aggressiveness but also now works militarily with its onetime rival China. Iran moves ever and ever closer to nuclear-weapons capacity. 

Indeed, it is sobering to know that nonstate terrorism of the ISIS and al Qaeda variety, which the State Department still labels “a persistent and pervasive threat worldwide,” arguably is now just the fourth most pressing danger facing the West. This is only in small part because of the decline of terrorists’ capabilities, but in larger part a result of the growth in practical menace from China, Russia, and Iran. 

At times of such peril, domestic political crusading and hyper-partisanship ought to be shunned. Of course philosophical differences will always exist, but patriotic leaders should be stressing areas of unity rather than discord. A polity as bitterly divided as the United States is now will be hard to rally. And a nation as financially indebted as today’s U.S. will be hard-pressed to ramp up greater spending for security. 

Consider that in 1941, on the eve of U.S. entry into World War II, this nation was coming off three straight landslide presidential elections. There was no hint of democratic illegitimacy in the air. And despite nine years of New Deal spending, the ratio of U.S. debt to gross domestic product stood at an eminently manageable 44%, rather than today’s economically frightening, unsustainable 122% (not to mention a mind-boggling $123 trillion in unfunded liabilities). 

All of which is to say that political leaders for now should abjure grand, expensive visions and utopian dreams. Stop trying for “transformational,” systemic change and instead seek collaborative and bipartisan reform. Re-adopt “regular order” procedurally, embrace incrementalism (on all sides), seek consensus even amid philosophical tensions, and put country ahead of party.

A tall order given the shift in attitudes among a chillingly large swath of our populace. Tom Hogan at The Bulwark:

year after supporters of Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn his election defeat, a new survey has found that a small but significant portion of his devotees believes he should be reinstated by any means, including armed revolt.

More generally, the survey, which I sponsored, finds that, although Americans remain strong believers in liberty, there is a powerful undercurrent of potential support for authoritarianism.

The survey of 1,000 American voters was conducted online and by phone between Christmas and New Year’s by political scientist David B. Hill of Hill Research Consultants. Respondents were asked a battery of 21 agree-or-disagree questions—indicators of possible support for or opposition to authoritarianism. The results were then weighted to match national demographics. (The poll results and an explanation of the methodology can be found here.)

The responses showed solid majorities of support for liberty, democracy, and the rights of protesters.

However, nearly half the respondents (49 percent) agreed with the assertion that “Once our leaders give us the go-ahead, it will be the duty of every patriotic citizen to help stomp out the decay that is poisoning our country from within.”

More than half (56 percent) agreed with the sentiment that the “only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put a tough leader in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading radical ideas.”

Yeah, that's where we are. For real.

I highly recommend "In Defense of Elite Film Criticism" by Hannah Long at The Dispatch. It speaks to one of my preoccupations: standards:

Uncritical enthusiasm—and absolute insistence that lowbrow entertainment is high art—is the order of the day. We don’t just need to enjoy superhero movies, we need them to be up for Best Picture. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—flailing for relevance—floated a “popular film” category for the Oscars before outcry forced a reversal. Meanwhile, Black Panther and Joker both received Best Picture nominations. A ripoff of Taxi Driver about a comic book character’s antagonist isn’t exactly Citizen Kane, is it?

Look around you: We don’t need more subjectivism. We need more standards. Better standards. Good critics are necessary to help us achieve that. And yes, that means some elitism, because they’ll need to push back on the current populist cinema craze. It means standards.

But aren’t movies about making us feel good? Martin Scorsese may be a great director, but who really wants to rent a Fellini film when the new Spider-Man is playing at the multiplex? As someone with tastes that include plenty of populist pulp content, I’m sympathetic to that argument. And the viewing of art is inescapably an emotional experience, for beauty is not the same as an empirical formula. But it’s too easy to let our emotions run away with us here.

The late British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton wrote that beauty is something which engages both our heart and our mind—our passions and our intellect. Beauty, far from merely being “in the eye of the beholder,” is something which can bear objective analysis. Animals can only chase their appetites. We have the ability to remove our self-interest from the equation and appreciate a thing for itself—not for its “survival value” but because it gives survival value, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis.

I can't remember where I came across this piece at Plough by Wheaton College English professor Richard Hughes Gibson.  It's a little over a year old. Maybe someone on social media referred to it. Anyway, it's entitled "In Search of Charitable Writing: Christian Authors Should Not Discard Christian Virtues In Their Political Writings" and it speaks to the harsh landscape of our political discourse and how it's reflective of our broader societal brittleness, and how there's no avoiding the fact that changing it starts with individual cultivation of traits that add to the light, not the darkness.