Friday roundup

 A good book review, in my estimation, is one that holds up on its own as a great essay and also makes me want to read the book in question. Juliana Geran Pilon has succeeded on both counts with "Athens and Jerusalem Revisited" at Law & Liberty.  It's a review of Strauss, Spinoza & Sinai by Jeffrey Bloom, Alec Goldstein and Gil Student. They re-examine the ground plowed by Leo Strauss regarding how philosophy (symbolized by Athens) and faith (symbolized by Jerusalem are the two indispensable pillars of the Western outlook:

Modernity is supposed to have elevated reason at the expense of faith; if so, the results are dismal. University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss explained that Jerusalem and Athens—the former rooted in faith, the latter in reason—constitute the twin legacies of our moral civilization. But fully grasping their inseparability takes “going beyond the self-understanding of either,” and asking: “is there a notion, a word that points to the highest that both the Bible and the greatest works of the Greeks claim to convey?” Strauss was convinced that “[t]here is such a word: wisdom. Not only the Greek philosophers but the Greek poets as well were considered to be wise men, and the Torah [first five books of the Bible] is said, in the Torah, to be ‘your wisdom in the eyes of the nations.’”

Conceding that faith could not be scientifically proved, as Baruch Spinoza had contended (1632-1677), Strauss nonetheless rejected the rationalist Jewish thinker’s bold claim to have repudiated the Orthodox belief in God as Creator. In the preface to his celebrated 1930 book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, he argued that Spinoza would have had to provide rational “proof that the world and human life are perfectly intelligible without the assumption of a mysterious God.” Without such proof, one “cannot legitimately deny the possibility of revelation.” If knowledge requires reason, revelation can at least justify belief.

It wasn’t much. But it proved sufficient for one University of Chicago philosophy student, Jeffrey Bloom, for whom Strauss “’broke the spell’ of secularism, giving my inner skeptic permission to take the claims of Orthodox Judaism seriously.” He thus decided to reach out to Orthodox Jews to learn how they explained faith to themselves, with help from Jewish scholars Gil Student and Alec Goldstein. The three became co-editors of a remarkable collection of intellectually stimulating, often quite personal, attempts to convey the basis of their own spiritual beliefs. Titled Strauss, Spinoza & Sinai, it is bound to help others, both Jews and non-Jews, in their search for higher meaning in a cynical world.

I like this point of Bloom's and the artful way he makes it:

Dismissing ubiquitous calls for “moral revival” as little more than “paper airplanes launched at the advance of secularism,” Bloom charges that “there is little thinking in the public square about how one could actually move from a secular outlook to a religious one.”

Anesthesiologist Ronald W. Dworkin has a piece at Hedgehog Review entitled "Medical Humanities and the Specialist," in which he argues for doctors' need to immerse themselves in art:

All novelists try to get closer to truth, and they do somehow, but perspective matters, and no one perspective accomplishes everything. It is the same for doctors. Relying solely on the machine perspective would have caused me to miss my patient’s diagnosis of early sepsis. At other times, however, the machine perspective is the correct one. Reading literature has helped to keep my mind nimble and my eyes always to be shifting their angle of view.

Reading literature also reminds doctors to keep their scientific systems of thought at bay. Many medical specialists are tempted to dwell in the world of pure thought, accompanied by their formulas and abstract classification systems. I myself have daydreamed of giving anesthesia remotely from a Caribbean island, applying my algorithms and equations, turning my precise dials and squeezing my syringes, while my patients lie somewhere in the universe, reacting ideally, as science and engineering predict they will, every time. But I know I would injure my patients if I gave anesthesia in this way, and for the same reason that a politician who consults only magazines, statistics, and committees makes lots of mistakes. The medical specialist, like the politician, must remain in constant contact with the living world to achieve anything.

Oliver Traldi, writing at American Compass, gives us three criteria for determining whether to listen to an expert:

The public will never be able to assess the validity of expertise on a case-by-case basis. Trying yields widely varied conclusions and thus eliminates any common starting point from which to conduct public debates—roughly the situation today. Assessing apparent expertise requires knowledge of a field’s inner workings, something almost no one has the time or inclination to learn. From the outside, it is difficult to infer what dogmas might contaminate a discipline’s standard training or what pressures might distort processes of hiring, promotion, and socialization. However, some general heuristics and defaults might provide a basis for at least some agreement.

First, a simple conflict-of-interest standard would make sense. Look at what people gain from giving their views, and from whom they gain it. Someone who stands to gain more personally from one view than from another should not be entitled to deference when offering the former. That does not mean the view is wrong, only that it must be defended on its merits rather than based on the identity of the speaker. A supporter of Joe Biden who declares that an embarrassing trove of Hunter Biden emails is fake may very well be correct and is entitled to make the case, but his listeners are similarly entitled to doubt his cogency or his sincerity. A supporter of Joe Biden who studies poisonous spiders for a living should be deferred to when he warns that the spider on your arm is poisonous.

Second, political stances should be inherently suspect. Experts can offer knowledge useful in evaluating the values-laden tradeoffs of politics and public policy, but that expertise does not make their judgment superior to that of any other citizen, and certainly not the democratic determination of a large group of citizens. This is not to say that no one can be a moral expert, only that technical expertise is not moral expertise. Plenty of people defer to religious leaders, community leaders, and even political leaders when it comes to questions of what to value and how to act. But in doing so, we should be aware that our moral experts will not be our neighbor’s. Identification of moral experts often depends on prior moral and political convictions, and disagreement on who the experts are will tend to mirror disagreement about the underlying issues.

Third, we should be far more skeptical of claims of knowledge-that expertise than of knowledge-how. In the latter case, people’s claims of expertise can be substantiated by their ability to deliver objective results. The surgeon with a track record of successful surgeries is easily distinguishable from the charlatan with none. Knowledge-that experts, by contrast, are laying claim to the truth. Sometimes they have it, and are guiding us as reliably as a pilot. Other times they are simply taking us for a ride.

As a historian, one of my favorite times and places  to learn more about is 1660s London. At Ordinary Times, L.D Burnett makes that the subject of an essay, focusing particularly on John Dryden:

. . . Dryden almost singlehandedly invented criticism—both literary criticism and cultural criticism—as both a genre and a paying job. 

Dryden’s works—his poetry, his plays, and his reflections on them—made the case and argued the case for the writer as cultural critic, responsibly and deftly wielding his pen to tell his age the truth about itself. “Using the epic past and his own poetic imagination to illuminate present realities was Dryden’s special gift,” Winn writes. “It sets him apart not only from the smoothly empty Waler and the pungently specific Marvell of the ‘Painter’ poems, but from the greatest poet of his century as well”—that is, unquestionably, Milton (177). 

While Milton made “glancing references” to recent inventions and current events here and there in Paradise Lost, “Milton’s choice of an epic mode deliberately limits such direct commentary on his own times.” Dryden, by contrast, preferred a “heroic” to an “epic” mode of poetry, “In Annus Mirabilis,” Dryden’s stirring poem about the disastrous year of plague, war, and fire, “he teaches us how to see the events of 1666 as both ‘Epick’ and ‘Historical’; his poem is both effective propaganda for the court and a moving vision of human suffering and triumph.” (177-178)

Throughout his career, Dryden straddled the shifting line between poet and pamphleteer, between aesthete and activist. Writing in conversation with his moment, rather than in an attempt to escape it, invigorated Dryden’s work, as did writing in conflict with other playwrights and poets whose different political commitments showed up in and showed through their own aesthetic choices.

Burnett discusses the fact that Restoration England was a time and place of lots of sexual mischief and interpersonal intrigue, not only in the theater and literature realms, but most of public life. During the pandemic, I reread The Diary of Samuel Pepys, which is basically a chronicle of 1660s London. His depictions of the plague and fire are cinematic in style. He also writes of going out on the town - dinner and a play - and seeing women he happened to know to be mistresses of Charles II. As I say, quite a juicy period.

At the American Enterprise Institute website, Sarah Lawrence professor Samuel J. Abrams warns that intolerance - ironically among those hustling "diversity" - continues to metastasize. 

Kat Rosenfield makes a similar point in her essay "The Paranoia Driving Office Politics" at UnHerd: 

A slip of the tongue? Ha! The only thing that slipped was the mask you’re wearing. That sound could only come out of your mouth if that word, in all its hateful and hideous glory, was already in your head.

Perhaps this is the natural outgrowth of a culture in which art and politics and opinions are increasingly seen as indistinguishable from one’s essential self. Matters of taste, or personality, now get swept up under the banner of capital-I-identity; you don’t just laugh at the sexist joke, you are the sexist joke. Even the silliest iterations of this phenomenon, like the obsession of certain young people with niche sexual and gender identities demarcated by bespoke pronouns and colourful flags, speak to a broader cultural impulse to make sense of things — and of other people — by slapping labels on them. Meanwhile, the idea that a person might contain self-contradictory multitudes, or that his taste in comedy, art, cuisine or decor says very little (if anything) about his character, cannot be borne in our present environment. The inscrutable nature of other people’s hearts is not an enticing mystery, but a source of horror: they could be hiding anything in there. The problem with this, of course, is not just that too many good people are saddled with permanent reputations for badness as a result of something as silly as a tweet, but that the cheapening of “badness” as a concept makes the perpetrators of actual evil much harder to identify.

There’s a paradox here: that in a moment where social media gives us unprecedented access to other people’s thoughts, we have become consumed by fear of all the things they might be thinking but not expressing. There’s a pervasive sense, perhaps owing to the inherent performativity of the medium, that signs of virtue cannot be trusted, but hints of vice should be treated with deadly seriousness, investigated, and prosecuted where possible. In the age of oversharing, it is the things we supposedly do not mean to reveal that are the most revealing.

And then there is my recent piece at Precipice entitled "Is Our Headlong Plunge Into Uncharted Territory Really Something To Celebrate?" The subtitle is "There Is Indeed A Basic Architecture To The Universe, And We're Flouting It."

 

 

With the "equity" push, the overlords may have found their most effective means yet of imposing tyranny on us

 A while back, at my Substack, Precipice, I wrote a piece titled "The Sliver of Terrain I Inhabit Grows Narrower Still." It further developed a them I've visited there occasionally - namely, the struggle to adhere to a truly conservative vision in an age in which Trumpism has assumed the role of progressivism's chief combatant. As I've exhaustively explained, at Precipice, here at LITD and elsewhere, Trumpism and actual conservatism are markedly different critters, and the peril in the conflation of the two weakens the case against the progressive agenda.

In the latest essay on the subject, I make note of a further complication: that of the non-Trumpist conservative who minimizes, or at least cares not to discuss more than glancingly, the machinations of the Left:

There are two types of people who frustrate me to no end with their perpetuation of the message that concern about this is overblown. For shorthand, I’ll use individuals who embody the two types of argument for saying so.

It gives me no pleasure to call either of them out. I greatly admire both of them, and feel the work they do generally speaking is invaluable.

Let me start with Heath Mayo, the founder of Principles First. It was supremely important that that movement appeared when it did, and its importance continues to this day. But Mayo, whose presence on Twitter is considerable, is so focused on the ill-advised nature of the Florida legislature’s tactics that he risks coming across as oblivious to the very real damage late-stage progressivism is doing to Western civilization’s spiritual health. He’s a solid conservative. I know that. But there is more to conservatism than the limited-government pillar.

Then there’s David French. I hesitate to take issue with him, given the risk thereby incurred that one gets associated with Sohrab Amari-ism. Let me state with no ambiguity that I am not in Amari’s camp.

In fact, my frustration with French is rooted in his main virtue. He is first and foremost a Christian, a real, deep and sincere one. He has the heart of one who is constantly looking to see if he has a plank in his own eye, as we all should. But it leads him to say some things that, frankly, I don’t think serve the moment well, such as that “how you love your friends might be more important to our nation than what you think of CRT.” 

Mr. French, with all due respect, the racialization of everything, along with the sexualization of everything, is a real and urgent problem.

Furthermore, the way he frames such things leaves him open to mocking from some truly scurrilous figures who, despite their vileness, have followings and influence. Since we’re naming names, I’ll say that Kurt Schlichter comes to mind in this regard.

I start this post the way I do because the Left's intention to bring every last individual in our society to heel grows more menacing by the day. 

If one loves freedom, particularly freedom to come to one's own conclusions about human interaction, one cannot fail to see the darkness our federal government wishes to subject us to:

Under the Biden administration, more than 90 federal agencies have pledged their commitment to equity by adopting action plans that put gender, race and other such factors at the center of their governmental missions.

The Equity Action Plans, which have received little notice since they were posted online last month following a document request from RealClearInvestigations, represent a “whole of government” fight against “entrenched disparities” and the “unbearable human costs of systemic racism.”

The equity blueprints show that:

• The U.S. State Department is keen on exporting American-style gender and race consciousness into foreign diplomacy and across the globe. Citing “identity” and “intersections of marginalization” as focal points, State Department officials acknowledge that promoting these Western concepts in foreign lands may clash with “societal norms” and elicit an “unwillingness to cede power by dominant groups.”
• The Environmental Protection Agency plans to tap into “community science” from tribal nations and other interest groups, in addition to relying on academic peer-reviewed research. As the agency shifts its enforcement focus from responding to complaints to proactively initiating its own investigations, the EPA plans to fund “community scientists” to supply evidence of what it calls environmental racism and other corporate practices to be targeted for federal investigation.
• The Smithsonian Institution is embedding diversity and equity in “everything we do” across the labs and collections that make up the world’s largest museum complex. The Smithsonian has, like other agencies, enthroned a Head Diversity Officer position to coordinate these efforts, and will refocus its energies to explore “how race has informed all our lives” and affirm “the centrality of race in America.”

The Equity Action Plans are a response to an executive order President Biden signed on his first day of office in January 2021, committing his administration to pursuing “a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.”

And these Equity Plans are not an end but a means:

The Equity Action Plans are only the first step in what the Biden administration calls a “generational commitment” to redressing historical disparities between political identity groups. But the full implications of the Biden strategy are obscured by the fact that the documents are short on specifics and larded with standard governmentese and boilerplate language about promoting best practices, collecting data, reducing barriers to government procurement, and contracting with disadvantaged and underrepresented groups.

In a typical bureaucratic passage, the Justice Department's plan includes a commitment to “ask each of its major procuring bureaus to identify at least two contracting opportunities for HUBZone small businesses each fiscal year for 4 years, or until the statutory goal of 3% is met, and to compete those contracts exclusively among HUBZone firms.”

But the documents are also open-ended and can serve as a platform for significant change. In a sweeping, general statement, the Department of Agriculture vows to “continue to integrate civil rights and equity in the design of its policies and programs that span the entirety of its mandate, including areas such as food security, nutrition, natural resources and conservation, rural development, and more.”

Representatives of several groups that filed public comments described the comments as generic but promising an important first step toward empowering historically marginalized communities.

“For the most part they say the right things,” said James Goodwin, senior policy analyst with the Center for Progressive Reform, one of the nearly 500 groups that filed public comments to guide the creation of the Equity Action Plans.

“But you know words on paper are very different from action. What’s most important is that an agency’s culture changes to incorporate a lot of these things,” Goodwin said. “A lot of these things can be relegated to a check-the-box exercise which doesn’t make a major impact in the day-to-day actions of an agency, or it can be fully integrated into an agency’s DNA.”

As I noted in a piece here at LITD a while back, this is also happening the local level:

The codification of DEI into an imposition of rules and even laws is not confined to coastal areas or the federal level of government. 

There is a city, with a manufacturing-based economy (that is, it's not some insular bubble of egghead-ism), in the heart of an ostensibly rock-ribbed red state in which local government, the local community college, the local K-12 school district, hospital, newspaper, major employers and religious coalition have banded together to coordinate efforts to impose DEI on all aspects of daily life. 

The message is clear: You will be made to put your fellow human being's demographic classification front and center in your dealings with him or her. 

And the emergence of this term "equity" merits some discussion. Until recently, I'd never heard it used in any context other than as the portion of a piece of property one is buying on loan that one has already paid for. Why has it supplanted the term "equality"? 

“Equity” is the relative newcomer to the [DEI] trinity. It is a substitute for “equality,” because equality before the law, equality of opportunity, and moral equality fail to deliver the wished-for result, which is redistribution of all social goods in strict proportion to the relative size of a minority group to the general population. Equity is a wish-fulfillment word masquerading as a justice claim.

 There is only one way this upending of what we've always been about as a nation is going to have any kind of chance at being rolled back: unflinching courage on the part of everybody who can see what's happening.

 

 

 

 

Friday roundup

 Rays of light are still possible, even as late in the day as it is. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals says a university professor has the right to refer to a he as a he:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled Friday in favor of Dr. Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University, reversing a district court’s dismissal of his lawsuit against university officials. The university punished Meriwether because he declined a male student’s demand to be referred to as a woman, with feminine titles and pronouns. The court ruled that, based on the allegations in the complaint, the university violated Meriwether’s First Amendment rights.

“This case forced us to defend what used to be a common belief—that nobody should be forced to contradict their core beliefs just to keep their job,” said ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President of Appellate Advocacy John Bursch. “We are very pleased that the 6th Circuit affirmed the constitutional right of public university professors to speak and lead discussions, even on hotly contested issues. The freedoms of speech and religion must be vigorously protected if universities are to remain places where ideas can be debated and learning can take place.”

“Traditionally, American universities have been beacons of intellectual diversity and academic freedom,” the 6th Circuit wrote in its opinion in Meriwether v. The Trustees of Shawnee State University. “They have prided themselves on being forums where controversial ideas are discussed and debated. And they have tried not to stifle debate by picking sides. But Shawnee State chose a different route: It punished a professor for his speech on a hotly contested issue. And it did so despite the constitutional protections afforded by the First Amendment. The district court dismissed the professor’s free-speech and free-exercise claims. We see things differently and reverse.”

In January 2018, during a political philosophy class, Meriwether responded to a male student’s question by saying, “Yes, sir.” After the class, the student approached Meriwether, stated that he was transgender, and demanded that the professor refer to him as a woman, with feminine titles and pronouns. When Meriwether did not instantly agree, the student became belligerent and promised to get Meriwether fired.

The student then filed a complaint with the university, which launched a formal investigation. Meriwether offered to call the student by first or last name, but the student insisted that Meriwether use pronouns and titles consistent with the student’s gender identity. University officials ultimately rejected any compromise that would allow Meriwether to speak according to his conscience and sincerely held religious beliefs. Instead, they formally charged him, saying “he effectively created a hostile environment” for the student simply by declining to use the feminine pronouns demanded by the student. Later, they placed a written warning in his personnel file and threatened “further corrective actions” unless he articulates the university’s ideological message.

The 6th Circuit explained that if “professors lacked free-speech protections when teaching, a university would wield alarming power to compel ideological conformity. A university president could require a pacifist to declare that war is just, a civil rights icon to condemn the Freedom Riders, a believer to deny the existence of God, or a Soviet émigré to address his students as ‘comrades.’ That cannot be.”

On the other hand, according to Bruce Bawer at City Journal, things are not working out so well for Rob Hoogland:

At this moment, a Vancouver postman named Rob Hoogland is sitting in a jail cell in British Columbia. He will be there until at least April 12, when he’s scheduled for a court date. At that time, he may be ordered to remain behind bars for a period yet to be determined.

Has Hoogland killed or robbed somebody? Is he an arsonist? A rapist? No. What did he do, then? Short answer: he tried to save his emotionally unstable daughter from self-destruction.

The long answer begins in the 2015–16 school year, when, as Hoogland recounted in a talk last October, his then fifth-grade daughter (he also has an older son) was getting into trouble at school and Hoogland and his estranged wife (whom he divorced in the spring of 2015) decided it might be good for her to see her school counselor. Since it’s forbidden by the British Columbia Supreme Court to make her name public, she’s referred to in legal documents as “A.B.” (Hoogland is “C.D.,” and the girl’s mother is “E.F.”)

Unknown to Hoogland, A.B. continued to see school counselors well into seventh grade, when one day she suddenly cut her hair very short. At the end of that school year, Hoogland saw that she was listed in her yearbook under a male name. It turned out that the school had been feeding her transgender ideology, and that she’d already begun “socially transitioning” to a male identity under the direction of a psychologist, Wallace Wong, who was encouraging her “to take testosterone.” To this end, Wong referred her to an endocrinologist at the Gender Clinic and Children’s Hospital in Vancouver.

It used to be understood that gender dysphoria is vanishingly rare, typically afflicts boys, and almost always begins to manifest when a child is extremely young. In recent years, however, there’s been an epidemic in many Western countries of older girls who suddenly claim to be in the wrong body. This “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” as Abigail Shrier argues in her important 2020 bookIrreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (which I reviewed), is a fad rooted in a number of contemporary social factors.

Hoogland was drawn ever deeper into a negation of his parental rights:

By eighth grade, her school was making special bathroom arrangements for her and requiring that she be addressed by her new name. Early in that school year, she was taken to see the province’s “top transgender psychologist expert,” known in court documents as “I.J.” When Hoogland first met I.J. a month or two later, he asked him to treat A.B. for depression. Instead, I.J. pronounced that A.B. was a “prime candidate for cross-sex hormones,” which, he promised, would “solve all her problems.” Accordingly, he referred her to the gender clinic at British Columbia Children’s Hospital, where, after a single hour’s examination, an endocrinologist decided to put her on puberty blockers and testosterone.

At the beginning of ninth grade, A.B. had her first appointment with G.H., an endocrinologist at British Columbia Children’s Hospital, to receive testosterone injections. But when E.F., the mother, contacted Hoogland during the appointment to ask for his consent, he withheld it. Four months later, in December 2018—by which time A.B. had turned 14—G.H. told Hoogland that her treatment would go forward, that Hoogland had no say in the matter, and that he’d no longer have access to her medical records. In defense of this decision, G.H. cited a 1993 amendment to the British Columbia Infants Act—which permits doctors to prescribe birth control for, and perform abortions on, young people whom those doctors judge to be “mature minors,” and to do so without parental knowledge or consent. Now, this amendment was being used to allow the medical treatment of gender dysphoria in “mature minors,” also without parental consent.

Shortly after hearing from G.H., Hoogland took the matter to provincial court, where A.B.’s treatment was suspended twice. In February 2019, the case went to the supreme court of British Columbia. Among the respondents to Hoogland’s petition were E.F., I.J., and G.H., plus the British Columbia Children’s Hospital, the provincial ministry of education, the local school district, and a half-dozen counselors and officials at both the elementary and high-school levels.

The case filing stated that A.B. had “gender identified as a male” since age 11 and had “informed his school counsellor of that when he was 12 years old and in Grade 7”—information withheld from Hoogland at the time. The same document cited A.B.’s suicide attempt, linking it not to a romantic rebuff but to gender dysphoria and stating that, in G.H.’s view, a “continued delay in treatment” would risk another suicide attempt. Affidavits by international experts brave enough to oppose the administration of testosterone to teenage girls were summarily dismissed.

Instead of recognizing that very few, if any, 14-year-olds are in a position to understand the grave implications of sex-change therapy, the judge, Gregory Bowden, ruled that A.B. was a “mature minor” and that her consent, by itself, was thus “sufficient for the treatment to proceed.” And instead of being guided by caution—which would have been wise, one should think, in a case involving such radical measures—Bowden bought fully into the trans-activist line that a further delay in A.B.’s treatment would be injurious to her. It’s also significant that Bowden denied Hoogland’s lawyer a relatively routine 40-day adjournment to prepare.

That wasn’t all. Bowden placed remarkable restrictions on Hoogland. He was forbidden to try to persuade A.B. to stop treatment. He was forbidden to address her by her birth name. He was forbidden, in any conversation with anyone, to refer to her as a girl or to use female pronouns to describe her. If he were to do any of these things, ordered Bowden, it would be “considered to be family violence”—yes, violence—under the Family Law Act. That’s par for the course today, when certain words are viewed as acts of violence, while objective acts of violence—such as the use of chemicals to permanently alter developing bodies, and the use of scalpels to remove healthy organs—are regarded as purely benign.

Soon after Bowden’s ruling, A.B. began gender-transition treatment, but Hoogland persevered with his legal fight. In violation of Bowden’s order, he also spoke in public and gave interviews about the case. In April 2019, in response to an application by A.B., Judge Francesca Marzari tried to quell these public appearances. Noting that there had been “substantial online commentary [i.e., reader comments on articles about the case] analogizing A.B.’s medical treatment to child abuse, perversion and even pedophilia,” and that A.B.’s doctors had allegedly received threatening emails, Marzari ordered Hoogland to stop trying to talk A.B. out of receiving treatment for gender dysphoria and to stop communicating with others—including media outlets, and A.B. herself, but excluding his lawyers, the court, doctors, and other authorized persons—about A.B.’s decision to receive hormone therapy.

Instead of recognizing that Hoogland was acting out of concern for his child, Marzari painted him as a selfish bigot. His conduct, she wrote, was causing A.B. “a significant risk of harm.” He was “publicly rejecting his [A.B.’s] identity, perpetuating stories that reject his identity, and exposing him to degrading and violent commentary in social media.” Marzari adduced no evidence to support any of these assertions. That said, Hoogland, added Marzari, “has been irresponsible in the manner of expressing his disagreement [with A.B.’s decision] and the degree of publicity which he has fostered with respect to this disagreement with his child.” Marzari also seconded Bowden’s description of Hoogland’s “rejection of A.B.’s gender identity” as “family violence.” 

 

 

Mike Gonzales of the Heritage Foundation, writing at Law & Liberty, reviews the book The Dictatorship of Woke Capital by Stephen R. Soukup.  A lot of corporate acquiescence to lefty do-gooderism can be traced to the introduction of the "stakeholder capitalism" model:

American business was about to change, as the new love for the scientific method turned into the pursuit of “scientific” planning for businesses, including a new player, the “stakeholder”—the employees, the consumers, and the residents who may live near a plant—whose interests supposedly diverge from those of the “shareholder.” The eager supporters of stakeholder activism gave the idea a superior moral force—the narrative that what mattered was making profits was supplanted with the theory that stakeholders were ends in themselves. The stakeholder became superior to the shareholder and subject to the “planners” actions. And the superiority was not simply moral, but also in terms of the bottom line. Soukup quotes professors Thomas Donaldson and Lee Preston as writing in 1995 on the evolution of the stakeholder model that “whatever their methodologies, these studies have tended to generate ‘implications’ suggesting that adherence to stakeholder principles and practices achieves conventional corporate performance objectives as well or better than rival approaches.”  Stakeholder analysis became, Soukup tells us, “a key concept in corporate strategic analysis and planning.”

The problem here, writes Soukup, is an old one: these planning theorists “applied purely systemic, scientific methods to phenomena that were not easily shoehorned into a scientific method,” i.e., human affairs. In one of the book’s best lines, Soukup writes that “the little human animal has a mind of his own and defies behaving in ways that fit the statistical model.”

The supporters of stakeholder theory—and also of the obviously false idea that the interests of the stakeholder and the shareholder always diverge—needed a foil, and Soukup makes a good case that they set up a strawman opponent in the ideas of Milton Friedman, especially a 1970 essay he wrote for The New York Times Magazine.

In the essay, the monetarist economist, who would win a Nobel Prize six years later, explained that the corporate “manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation” and that his responsibility was to “conduct the business in accordance to their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible.” This somehow was traduced later as a “cult of shareholder value” which, to critics, meant short-termism and ignoring the interests of “stakeholders,” things Friedman didn’t say and wouldn’t have said because they’re nonsensical. “None of this matters,” writes Soukup. “The only thing that matters is the myth of Friedman, the myth of the greedy shareholder and the rapacious capitalists, the myth that shareholders and stakeholders must, always and everywhere, be opposed to one another.”

At First Things, Scott Walter takes a deep-dive look at Alicia Garza, Patrice Cullors, and Opal Tometi, the founders of Black Lives Matter. 

Tevi Troy's essay at National Affairs, "How To Defend Free Speech," is a worthwhile contribution on that subject, but he may be a little too optimistic about the success of the endeavor. Says it depends on a "unified conservative movement." Good luck with that. 

Ed West, writing at UnHerd, in an essay entitled "The Tyranny of Diversity Training," says that that toxic trend is now permeating Britain. 

This Harvard Business Review article entitled "Why Diversity Programs Fail" is from 2016, but is a timely accompaniment to the essay above. 

Yet another sign of how late in the day it is in post-America: A Gallup poll shows US church membership falling below a majority for the first time ever. 

LITD has looked at the trend within the Republican Party to cultivate some kind of working-class orientation, building on the populism that Trumpism was based on. Marco Rubio's recent pronouncements. The Jim Banks memo. But Andrew Trunsky at The Daily Caller says that Illinois Republican Rep. Peter Meijer has a different approach that might appeal to the populists:

He even introduced his Direct Dollars Over Government Expenses ($DOGE) plan, which would have given $2,400 checks to qualifying Americans instead of the $1,400 outlined in the American Rescue Plan. His bill, however, was nearly $1 trillion smaller than the ARP, which President Joe Biden signed into law on Mar. 11.

After all, it has simplicity going for it, and pro-freedom types greatly admire the elegant simplicity of freedom-oriented policy:

“Direct cash payments have long been part of the conservative playbook,” Scott Lincicome, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told the DCNF. “There has always been an attraction among free-marketers for the most basic type of assistance, which is a direct cash payment … Basically, you just give people money.” 

In an essay entitled "American Culture Is Broken; Is Theonomy the Answer?" at The Gospel Coalition, Andrew T. Walker come to the conclusion that it's not:

There are serious criticisms of the movement—criticisms so severe that Theonomy should be repudiated as an evangelical framework for understanding the mission of the church and the relationship between civil and sacred, eternal authority and spiritual authority.

In sum, the error of Theonomy is that its hermeneutic stretches beyond the Bible’s understanding of its own authority. From this mistaken hermeneutic comes serious distortions, with drastic consequences for the church’s role in fallen political orders.

Theonomy is a facile hermeneutic that channels an eschatology of triumph. Historically undesirable, it instrumentalizes religion, blurs church-state relationships, and jeopardizes religious dissent. And it proves unnecessary because of how other covenants showcase the benefits of common grace and natural law.

Rather than become mired in interpretive problems amply demonstrated by many conservative scholars elsewhere, the simplest observation to make about Theonomy as a hermeneutic is that it misunderstands the relationship between the old covenant and the new covenant—which leads to misapplications today. 

It correctly stresses a continuity in the original moral force behind Israel’s civil law. It overlooks, however, the covenantal discontinuity in applying and enforcing the particulars of Israel’s civil law, especially since theocratic Israel’s expiration. God’s purposes with Israel were unique in design compared to his relationship with other nations.

The laws God laid down with Israel were meant to enforce and protect the exclusivity of that relationship. Israel thus played a singular role that other nations aren’t called to replicate down to the level of their judicial laws.

Believing that Israel’s civil law serves as a model for contemporary civil government, Theonomy tends to downplay the moral law’s existence predating Israel and Ten Commandments. But murder, for instance, wasn’t permissible until the sixth commandment prohibited it. It was wrong from the beginning (Gen. 1; 4; 9) because it destroys an image-bearer of God. It is rooted in who God is and his purposes for creation, as revealed from the very beginning.

American Enterprise Institute scholar James Pethokoukis asks "Does America Really Have An Infrastructure Crisis?" and concludes that it doesn't:

America doesn’t have an infrastructure crisis. Nor does it have a job crisis, even though Biden chose to put that in the name of his plan. If current economic forecasts are anywhere close to being correct, the story of 2021 will be one of rapid economic growth and plunging unemployment. Don’t forget that before the pandemic, the unemployment rate was at a 50-year low, and wages were rising fastest for lower-income workers. The economy didn’t look in need of reimagining just over a year ago. It just needed a tight labor market. That might well be where we are headed again thanks to both the reopening economy and a tsunami of already approved federal spending. By the way: It’s kind of a red flag when politicians talk about infrastructure in terms of jobs created. The goal of an infrastructure program should be to create better infrastructure. Government at all levels should focus on building and maintaining the most compelling projects.

Brings to mind Bastiat's broken window theory.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The serious grownup: a vanishing species

But God-haters and identity-obsessives we have aplenty.

Faculty and staff, mind you, not the snot-nosed tabula rasas seated in the classrooms taking in their indoctrination, are the ones making the fuss at this particular outpost of civilizational rot:

Faculty and staff at the University of Kansas sent a letter to the school's chancellor, calling for a boycott of Chick-fil-A on campus over the company's stance on LGBTQ issues, according to The Hill.

Over the summer, the university allowed Chick-fil-A to open a location inside the student union, and entered a contract agreement with the company to sponsor the "Chick-fil-A coin toss" at home football games in coming years. Faculty and staff have protested Chick-fil-A's support of organizations "hostile to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer LGBTQ people, families, and communities."

"KU granted Chick-fil-A, a bastion of bigotry, a prime retail location in the heart of our campus," the letter reads.
More from the letter:

Moving Chick-fil-A to the Union and granting it a role at the start of all home football games violates the feelings of safety and inclusion that so many of us have striven to create, foster, and protect on campus, and sends a message that the Union, KU Athletics, and the administration at large are more concerned about money and corporate sponsorship than the physical, emotional, and mental well being of marginalized and LGBTQ people.

The faculty and staff are demanding that the University of Kansas not renew its contracts with Chick-fil-A once they expire, and that future decisions about companies to bring on campus be more "transparent, principled, and inclusive." The letter also calls on the campus community to boycott Chick-fil-A in the meantime.

Just stop it, right now. No one at Chick-fil-A, not the CEO, no board member, no spokesperson, even weighs in on "LGBT issues." Some years ago, the founder stated, in the course of an interview, the plain and, until our society went nuts, universally recognized fact that marriage consisted of one man and one woman. It's true that the company is overtly Christian, but hires and serves plenty of homosexuals every day of the week - well, except Sunday, when its restaurants are closed.

And now we have to endure a dustup over chocolate:

Cadbury, that confectionist purveyor or such delights as the Fruit & Nut Bar and the Creme Egg, has apparently come under fire for its newest chocolatey offering—which, ironically enough, the company created to demonstrate its commitment to diversity.

Read on, but be warned that my IQ dropped a full ten points just from reading the headline:

The British confectionery giant Cadbury has been facing some backlash on social media for a new candy bar that it introduced in India, which features four types of chocolate — dark, blended, milk and white — to promote diversity.

“This is as absurd as Kendall Jenner fighting police brutality with a Pepsi,” tweeted legal analyst Imani Gandy.

“Congratulations to cadbury for solving racism,” wrote restaurant critic Tejal Rao.

Cardbury rolled out the multi-flavored chocolate bars on Aug. 15 — teaming up with the global advertising agency Ogilvy — to celebrate India’s Independence Day.

I used to think that chocolate was a lot like bacon. Is there nothing it can’t do? But now, at least according to the woke scolds of social media, even my candy bar has to check its privilege, lest I commit some racial faux pas by eating it.

So what does ethnically insensitive chocolate look like? See for yourself—but be prepared, because once you gaze upon the face of such hateful bigotry, you will never be the same:

“Limited edition,” eh? Something tells me this edition is gonna be a lot more limited than Cadbury ever intended.

This is everything wrong with diversity,” tweeted one person. “You force in a set amount of predefined difference and it’s going to taste awful. I would rather see a range where you don’t know what you’re going to get, but it’s going to taste amazing whatever it is.”

Well, that’s one opinion. But we all remember what Dirty Harry said about opinions, don’t we?

Another person said, “You would THINK, if they were going for unity, that all of the types would be interspersed instead of segregated (from light to dark, no less). This is the problem with playing to the woke crowd; you BETTER get it right.”

Yes, it’s 2019 and we’re talking about segregated chocolate. 

I'm so embarrassed for my species.

Thursday roundup

The Left is big on using poster children for its causes. Erick Erickson at The Resurgent takes on the one it's currently gushing over for her stunt in service of the lie that the global climate is in a state of crisis:

All you need to know about Greta Thunberg, the 16 year old autistic child from Sweden, is that the left expects you to listen to her, comply with her, and never question her. She is the newly appointed high priestess of climate change.

It is eye opening that the left has decided an obnoxious and spectacularly unaccomplished child must be the voice to which we must listen. It is a cult. Her arrival has been met with top of the fold status in various publications as if she is some conquering hero.

She is no hero. She is a child. She is known for being brash and rude, which the left says is the super power autism gives her. Yes, they actually believe this. She is known for wanting civic protest to advance her cause. She is the child leader of the global warming cult who got the privilege to sail on a yacht owned by a prince.

Secularism has become a religion unto itself. Thunberg is just the latest in a growing hierarchy of religious leaders for secularism. Her arrival is heralded like a visit from a pope. There is a messianic zeal that she will bring some level of repentance and revival. The media will cover her every move and thought.

The thoughts, though, are what exactly? She thinks the world is warming and everyone must do something, including protest. She is fueled by progressive mythology currently fixated on an Amazonia fire that is being exaggerated in the press as celebrities circulate decades old photographs of previous Amazonia fires.

Go home, Greta. The people who worship you do so because they are using you as a shield against themselves. They demand we not question you and give your ramblings a level of authority most reserve for scripture. It is by faith they believe you will lead them to some promised land. You won’t. Why? Because you are an unaccomplished sixteen year old whose only power is making older progressives swoon and TV reporters smile.

Elijah Cummings's staffers are disinvited for return trips to an ICE facility after acting like complete jerks on the one last week.

Universities understandably liked to brag about their alums and faculty who have achieved great things in fields such as medicine and science by putting their portraits together on a wall.  Now some of them are becoming "uneasy" with those walls because of lack of "diversity."

Hugely important essay by John Hood at National Review on how Trumpism will likely flame out after its namesake moves offstage. There's just no core set of principles or philosophical basis for it:

Contrary to the calumnies offered by both progressives and populists, Trump isn’t just a blunter version of previous Republican presidents and conservative leaders. He isn’t Ronald Reagan with a shorter IMDb page. He isn’t an Internet-age Barry Goldwater. To the extent Trump has had consistent political convictions over the decades, they have little to do with American constitutionalism, individual liberty, resistance to totalitarianism, or defense of traditional values. Trump has long advocated a strident protectionism — Japan was the main villain of his narratives during the 1980s, as China is today — and expressed contempt for politicians with significant political experience. Both exemplify garden-variety American populism. Both are also rhetorical devices designed to cloak the schemes of special interests in the apparel of popular sovereignty.

When conservative leaders and voters embraced the Trump candidacy in 2016, many did so as a political transaction. If he agreed to nominate constitutional conservatives to the federal bench, pledged to advance traditionally conservative approaches to tax and regulatory policy, and focused relentlessly on beating Hillary Clinton, they’d sign up. He did. They did. This arrangement did not in theory require reshaping American conservatism in any fundamental or lasting way. In practice, however, some who supported Trump grudgingly in 2016 have found themselves thrust by our polarized politics into a role of Trump-explainer, if not Trump-whisperer. Others, for various reasons, have freely and enthusiastically become reflexive defenders of the president. Among the latter are leading voices of the new nationalists. They are playing with fire. They may well get burned. I’d rather not see the wider conservative movement scorched with them.

To be fair, the new nationalists have done their best, explicitly and repeatedly, to distance their emerging movement from white nationalists, alt-right fakirs, strident isolationists, and other assorted cranks. That’s much appreciated. Alas, their precautions will likely prove inadequate, in part because their cause has so many prominent champions, including but not limited to the president, who are prone to rhetorical excess and theatrical provocation. Trump can’t help himself, truly. He’s going to wake up tomorrow, or the next day, with some stray thought that a prudent leader would set aside. Trump will tweet it. When tragedy strikes, as we saw in the aftermath of mass shootings in California, Texas, and Ohio, the president will recite some well-written remarks and likely mean them. Before too long, though, he’ll be back on Twitter. He’s not winning new converts to the conservative cause there.

I don’t know if Donald Trump will be reelected in 2020. Neither, respectfully, do you. We should have learned from 2016 not to predict election outcomes with great confidence. I do feel comfortable predicting, however, that Trumpism as a political phenomenon will not long outlast him. He is wearing on America’s nerves. He is wearing us out. To the extent that the new nationalism looks and feels like an attempt to flesh out the political and economic dimensions of Trumpism into a durable political coalition and governing philosophy, its fate is bound up with his own. I would not bet on a favorable long-run outcome. I hope American conservatives don’t, either. 

While LITD is recommending hugely important essays, this one by Mary Eberstadt of the Faith and Reason Institute at Quillette entitled  "'The Great Scattering: How Identity Panic Took Root in the Void Once Occupied By Family Life" is a bracing read. In the course of articulating her main point, she also talks about the role of family dissolution in the ruination of popular music:

Pop culture weighs in, too. In a 2004 Policy Review essay called Eminem Is Right, I documented how family rupture, family anarchy and family breakup had become the signature themes of Generation-X and Generation-Y pop. If yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandonment. The odd truth about contemporary teenage music—the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before—is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers. Papa Roach, Everclear, Blink-182, Good Charlotte, Snoop Doggy Dogg—these and others have their own generational answer to what ails the modern teenager. That answer is: dysfunctional childhood. During the same years in which progressive-minded and politically correct adults have been excoriating Ozzie and Harriet as artifacts of 1950s-style oppression, millions of American teenagers have enshrined a new generation of music idols whose shared signature in song after song is to rage about what not having had a nuclear family had done to them.

In 2004, identity politics was not the omnipresent headline subject it is today. Even so, the effect of family decline on the sense of self already was appearing writ large across popular music. Tupac Shakur rapped about life with a single mother and no male parent, including in his 1993 Papa’z Song, about a boy who has to play catch by himself. Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, both towering figures in 1990s rock, were children of divorce, and both referred back to that event repeatedly in their songs and interviews.

Jacki Deason at the Washington Examiner says that the G7 nations, rather than try to impose "green" energy policy on their developing brethren, should level the playing field so that the developing world can have access to normal-people forms of energy and thereby grow economically and enjoy societal advancement.