DEI jackboots would have had Richard Slayman die

 I just had to click when I saw the title of Heather MacDonald's latest piece for City Journal: ""Kidneys Don't See Color."

I've seen a fair amount of coverage of DEI encroachment on hard sciences, and I know the diversity racket is MacDonalds's beat, so I had an inkling that this would be about medicine - probably surgery. 

That was indeed the case. MacDonald, after introducing Slayman, the recent recipient of a genetically modified pig kidney that allowed him to get off dialysis, gives an impressively thorough account of the history of surgical transplants. I recommend it. It's a very interesting tale of various developments over the last century-plus.

So what's not to like about Mr. Slayman's story?

According to STEM diversity dogma, however, none of this should have happened. Slayman is black; his transplant surgeons were not. The scientists who pioneered the biological and surgical advances that made the transplant possible were also nonblack. Worse, before the mid-twentieth century, those pathbreaking scientists were overwhelmingly white.

These demographic facts mean, according to today’s medical establishment, that Slayman was at significant risk of receiving substandard care from a medical and scientific enterprise that is racist to its core.

According to the National Academies of Science, America’s most prestigious science honor society, “systemic racism in the United States both historically and in modern-day society” produces “systematically inequitable opportunities and outcomes” in medicine. Such medical racism privileges white patients and white doctors, explains the National Academies of Science, and is “perpetuated by gatekeepers through stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination.” The Journal of the National Cancer Instituteand its sister publication, Journal of the National Cancer Institute Spectrum, blasts the “systemic and institutional racism within health care” responsible for “inequities” in medical outcomes.

The best way to guard against such inequities, according to the STEM establishment, is to color-match patients and doctors. Similarly, the best way to advance science is to select scientists on identity grounds. The National Institutes of Health, which funds biological research, argues that a “diverse” scientific workforce will be better at “fostering scientific innovation, enhancing global competitiveness, [and] improving the quality of research” than one chosen without regard to racial characteristics. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, another federal funder, seeks scientists of the right color to “develop a highly competent and diverse scientific workforce capable of conducting state-of-the-art research in NIAID mission areas.” It is a given, per the National Academies of Science, that “increasing the number of Black men and Black women who enter the fields of science, engineering, and medicine will benefit the social and economic health of the nation.”

Slayman’s transplant surgeons—Leonardo Riella, Tatsuo Kawai, and Nahel Elias—came from non-European, non-white countries: Brazil, Japan, and Syria. Don’t think that those surgeons count as “diverse,” however. In the scientific establishment, as in all of academia, diversity at its core refers to blacks, with the other “underrepresented” minorities—American Hispanics and Native Americans—occasionally thrown in for good measure. When medical associations, medical schools, and federal agencies conduct diversity tallies (which they do obsessively), their primary concern is the proportion of blacks in medical education and practice. The American Medical Association’s chief academic officer, Sanjay Desai, is scandalized that “only” 5.7 percent of doctors identify as black, though blacks make up over 13 percent of the population. The American Society of Clinical Oncology’s March 23 bulletin complains that only 3 percent of practicing oncologists identify as black. By contrast, nearly 90 percent of hospital leadership “self-identify as White,” according to doctor Manali Patel. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases sees a crisis for medical science in the fact that “only” 7.3 percent of full-time medical faculty come from “underrepresented backgrounds,” though those “underrepresented backgrounds” constitute 33 percent of the national population.

The team leader in the Slayman transplant, Riella, directs a kidney transplantation research lab at Mass General. Its members look like a United Nations gathering, with researchers from Turkey, Lebanon, China, Spain, Japan, and other non-U.S. countries. Though white Americans are a small minority in the Riella Laboratory, it would not count as “diverse” for purposes of science funding or political legitimacy, because it has no blacks in it. We are to believe that this absence of blacks comes from white supremacist machinations, though those backstage white supremacists didn’t do a very good job of maintaining numerical advantage in the lab. And without blacks, the Riella Laboratory has never functioned at the highest levels of scientific achievement, according to diversity thinking.

Slayman may have had a positive outcome this time, despite being treated by nonblack transplant surgeons, but other black kidney patients have no guarantee that they will be as lucky in the future. In early April, the New York Times wrote about new techniques for keeping donated organs functioning outside of a body before transplant, a process known as perfusion. The transplant doctors whom the paper quoted—Daniel Borja-Cacho (originally from Colombia), Shimul Shah, Shafique Keshavjee, and Ashish Vinaychandra Shah—also don’t resemble the members roster of a Greenwich, Connecticut, country club, circa 1955. The Times undoubtedly tried to find a black source. Its inability to do so reflects a medical ecosystem that, according to the establishment, lacks diversity and, as such, puts black lives at risk.

This is the kind of jettisoning of not just compassion and medical ethics but basic common sense that has led to puberty blockers and teenage mastectomies.

Kudos to MacDonald for bringing this to our attention, but I think you know what LITD thinks the diversity jackboots who had a problem with this remarkable step forward deserve.. 

Thoughts on Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent in the SCOTUS affirmative action decision

 First, although I'm assuming LITD readers are up to speed on the story that will be driving the news cycle this evening, here's the gist of what went down:

The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down affirmative action programs at the University of North Carolina and Harvard in a major victory for conservative activists, ending the systematic consideration of race in the admissions process.

The court ruled that both programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and are therefore unlawful. The vote was 6-3 in the UNC case and 6-2 in the Harvard case, in which liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was recused.

Now, the short version of my reaction to Jackson's dissent: disappointment. I'd extended grace when she was confirmed to the court. I'd genuinely hoped she would have more depth as a jurist than to be the you-bet-race-is-an-undeniable-factor-in-American-legal-considerations voice.

Alas, that seems to be exactly the role she's assumed:

“Given the lengthy history of state-sponsored, race-based preferences in America, to say that anyone is now victimized if a college considers whether that legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its applicants fails to acknowledge the well-documented ‘intergenerational transmission of inequality’ that still plagues our citizenry.”

And

“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” she wrote. “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems.”

Look, it's obvious that black Americans, taken collectively, bear sociocultural distinctions within the overall national fabric. I'd be the last person to deny that. The recognizable marks of black contribution to that fabric, in terms of music, food, colloquial customs and speech are as strong as those for the various ethnicities and nationalities that came here voluntarily. And that - the fact that most black Americans' ancestors did not come here voluntarily - means that those marks must be regarded in ways the others are not. 

But the assumption behind the American experiment is that the sovereign individual is much more than the trappings of the circumstances that help define who she or he is. 

Furthermore, the whole notion of law is based on fairness. A person ought to be able to assume that he or she will have his or her case heard by the entity in our society with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force  - that is, government  - in an impartial manner. 

That means that the law must disregard questions of who had what kind of leg up at birth or during one's upbringing. The law must assume each one of us is a creature of agency, capable of exercising the faculties that differentiate human beings from lower animals when making choices. 

This is what Jackson's colleague Clarence Thomas gets at in his opinion which concurs with the majority's:

In his concurring opinion, Thomas called out Jackson for her focus on "the historical subjugation of black Americans, invoking statistical racial gaps to argue in favor of defining and categorizing individuals by their race."

"As she sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of black Americans still determining our lives today," Thomas wrote.

"I strongly disagree," Thomas said.

Jackson thinks, in a subsequent footnote, she's setting Thomas straight:

"The takeaway is that those who demand that no one think about race [a classic pink-elephant paradox] refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room—the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great Nation's full potential," Jackson's footnote reads.

In her own dissent of the UNC case, Jackson pointed to a number of statistics that show the wealth and health disparities between white and Black Americans, arguing, "Today's gaps exist because that freedom was denied far longer than it was ever afforded." Jackson warned that the majority opinion "will delay the day that every American has an equal opportunity to thrive, regardless of race."

See what she does there? She winds up using collectivist, demographics-based phenomena to try to justify the law performing tweaks on the bedrock notion of individuals standing before the law as such. 

And then there's the feigned pity which is at the core of what affirmative action, certainly in 2023 America, is all about, as articulated by Glenn Loury:

Racial preferences persist because they represent the path of least resistance. If an administrator of a selective institution saw that blacks were a minuscule percent of his student body, he would want to change that. If he found that admitting African-American students at a lower percentile of performance would ease his public-relations problem, then he would do it. But when thousands of people in that same situation make the same decision and place it beyond criticism, the goal of equality suffers. Failing to address ourselves to the developmental disparities manifest in test scores, as well as failing to change the dynamics of human development at the root of black underrepresentation in elite and selective venues, means failing to solve the inequality problem.

Head counts are no substitute for performance, and everyone knows it. No policy can paper over the racial dimension of academic disparities. True equality would seek to remedy the foundational circumstances reflected in the underrepresentation of African-Americans at the Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Tech, Holy Cross, or Harvard. I’m for racial equality, not patronization. Don’t patronize my people, inflict on us the consequences of a soft bigotry of low expectations, or presume that we’re not capable of manifesting excellence in the same way as any other people. Don’t judge blacks by a different standard.

Two competing narratives exist to explain racial inequality: a bias narrative and a development narrative. The bias narrative holds that, even today, white supremacy and institutional racism keep black people from gaining entry into elite and selective venues and that the remedy for this is affirmative action. This was correct half a century ago. But does any serious person today really believe that Brown University, where I teach, is a racist institution? Does any serious person believe that the bias narrative accounts for what, in the absence of racial preferences, would be the relatively low number of African-Americans at Harvard, while Asian-American students there are excelling at some of the most difficult intellectual tasks that humans can be asked to perform? I don’t think so.

The development narrative holds instead that realities of racial inequality are a consequence of underdevelopment. That underdevelopment certainly has a genealogy rooted in bias. Historically, blacks were not afforded equal opportunity in the housing market, were not given a fair chance to accumulate wealth, and didn’t inherit from their ancestors that to which they were due, because their ancestors were enslaved and not compensated properly for their labor. Some of the social and cultural factors that might impair the development of black intellectual performance have their roots in this history. But the problem of inequality for African-Americans today is not mainly the expression of a racist society. And jiggering the test-score standards for people to get into elite institutions is not a remedy for it.

So, in the first highly charged SCOTUS case having to do with race since she came on board, Jackson has let me down. I wanted to think maybe she had the fealty-to-what-the-Consituition-says chops to not be some kind of Ibram X. Kendi-type race hustler. 

I guess not. 

 

 

 

 

The thorniness of extricating the nugget of truth from the tangle of other considerations

 This post is about two people I simultaneously find gravely problematic and admirable. They are Rod Dreher and Ron DeSantis.

Dreher is editor of The American Conservative and has a record of penning ringing defenses of that which is inarguably defensible. He distilled his concern about what the marginalization of Christianity was going to mean for practicing believers into an important 2017 book, The Benedict Option.  He wrote the introduction to Carl Trueman's The Rise of the Modern. Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution, an exhaustive analysis of how we got to a point at which transgendered bathrooms were considered as something to which there was a right. 

But he has become enamored of this flimsy notion of a "national conservatism," to the extent of not only expressing admiration for Victor Orban, but moving to Hungary. This move really mars his standing as an articulator of he good, right and true.

Good Rod shows up today in a piece for his magazine in which he properly lauds Florida governor Ron DeSantis for serving notice that that state's educational system will not brook DEI or an African American Studies curriculum driven by the thought of Robin G. Kelly and Keeyanga Yamahtta Taylor. 

Dreher effectively conveys the significance of DeSantis's stance:

I can hardly believe that a leading Republican politician actually has backbone in the fight against wokeness. But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is the real deal. Fresh news out of the Sunshine State:

Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a series of proposals for Florida’s public universities at the State College of Florida on Tuesday.

One aspect of the proposal would eliminate all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) “bureaucracies” at public universities.

DeSantis said his administration will propose core course requirements that are “focused on giving them the foundation so they can think for themselves” and will be grounded in “actual philosophy that has shaped western civilization.”

“We don’t want students to go through, at taxpayer expense, and graduate with a degree in zombie studies,” he said. “And so this is gonna make a difference.”

Watch the video of his announcement here.

It's happening. It's actually happening. The Bad Guys are going to scream bloody murder, but finally -- finally -- we have a political leader who is taking a hard stand against these woke commissars. DEI bureaucracies at American universities have exploded in recent years, in part because the woke cartel has intimidated state legislators and others by calling them bigots who don't care about "marginalized" students if they resist. Are these bureaucracies actually making campuses better, or are they making schools more conformist by instituting programs and policies that reinforce a sense of grievance, and intimidate dissenters into silence? Would the ton of money spent on these apparatchiks' salaries be better spent hiring more teachers, or raising the salaries of professors? Finally, DeSantis's move is going to force these militants to justify their existence. 

He offers a taste of the screaming of bloody murder to which he alludes:

Expect more garbage like this New York Times op-ed slandering DeSantis's ban on the AP African American History course. The author fumes:

An unrelenting assault on truth and freedom of expression in the form of laws that censor and suppress the viewpoints, histories and experiences of historically marginalized groups, especially Black and L.G.B.T.Q. communities, is underway throughout the country, most clearly in Florida. The state’s Department of Education recently rejected a pilot Advanced Placement African American studies course from being offered in Florida’s public high schools.

Under Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE” law — which would limit students and teachers from learning and talking about issues related to race and gender — Florida is at the forefront of a nationwide campaign to silence Black voices and erase the full and accurate history and contemporary experiences of Black people.

Bullsh*t. I'll tell you why in a second. One more quote from the essay:

It’s no coincidence that these attacks are targeting not just historically marginalized people but also our very experiences of intersectionality. Mr. DeSantis recently rubbished the inclusion of “queer theory” in the A.P. African American studies course that was rejected, seeming to deny the need for future generations to learn about the contributions of queer Black American icons like Pauli Murray, Bayard Rustin, Audre Lorde and James Baldwin. Florida’s H.B. 1557, more widely known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, also limits conversations about sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida classrooms and, like “Stop WOKE,” makes clear that the State of Florida seeks to suppress and target people’s identities.

Why is it BS? Because DeSantis clearly said the other day, when he announced his ban on the course, that he is not going to allow the AP course to propagandize Florida students for tendentious, highly ideological reads on black history, under the guise of teaching about black history (which he fully supports). The lie here is that if you don't give these ideological culture warriors everything they want, then you must be a BIGOT. In fact, DeSantis is doing his job: making sure that the public school students of Florida aren't forced to read neo-Marxist propaganda as history. 

He ends by sharing this encouraging development:

UPDATE: Well now!:

One of Governor Ron DeSantis’ most vocal critics supports the state’s decision to reject the College Board’s AP African American Studies course for high schoolers. When asked his thoughts on the recent controversy, Leon County Commissioner Bill Proctor [who is black -- RD] blasted the course as “trash,” according to Tallahassee Reports.

“There is grave concern about the tone and the tenor of leadership’s voice from the highest spaces in our state being hostile to teaching of African American history. Well frankly I’m against the College Board’s curriculum,” Proctor said.

“I think it’s trash. It’s not African American history. It is ideology,” he continued. “I’ve taught African American history, I’ve structured syllabuses for African American history. I am African American history. And talking about ‘queer’ and ‘feminism’ and all of that for the struggle for freedom and equality and justice has not been no tension with queerness and feminist thought at all.”

We're seeing a display of Good Ron as well as Good Rod.

But there's the governor's other side as well. He intends to eke out his political future within the framework of what the Republican Party has become. This was most evident last fall when he campaigned for Doug Mastriano and Kari Lake and Blake Masters. 

This kind of drag-our-brand-over-the-finish-line politicking muddies the waters to a disturbing degree. Increasingly, the general public conflates MAGA yay-hoo-ism with actual conservative principles because that's just about the only arena in which one sees those principles being defended.

Many of those who have undertaken the self-appointed task of upholding an alternative - that is to say, rooted in an embrace of heritage - vision of conservatism are apparently uninterested in this whole area of our national life. You won't find an essay like this in The Bulwark. It doesn't appear to be on the Principles First radar. Adam Kinzinger is now a private citizen, It would be nice to see him weigh in. 

I'm afraid that the reason for reticence on the part of these people and outlets is that they don't want to endanger the big-tent premise on which they're inviting people to gravitate toward their project. Culture-war issues strike them as too icky to address.

And then there's the fact that DeSantis, should he jump into the presidential race, is going to be increasingly drawn into a nasty standoff with the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump. I'm not sure I can see DeSantis having the chops to remain elevated above Trump's style of political combat. 

Truth won't cease being truth, no matter what happens. But its ability to get an airing continues to diminish  as we move further into the age in which nihilism reigns. 

 

Wednesday roundup

 This is the kind of piece one can mine for new insights with multiple readings. History professor and former Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff looks exhaustively at what it means to think for oneself. There are a lot of aspects to the subject, as it turns out, such as what the quest for originality can do to one's prioritization of the truth, or the vastly different styles demonstrated by highly organized intellects and those of a more chaotic nature.

I'll just share enough such insights to tease.

How about this one?

For a start, we are confused about what thinking is. To think is not to process information. We have impoverished our understanding of thinking by analogizing it to what our machines do. What we do is not processing. It is not computation. It is not data analysis. It is a distinctively, incorrigibly human activity that is a complex combination of conscious and unconscious, rational and intuitive, logical and emotional reflection. It is so complex that neither neurologists nor philosophers have found a way to model it, and the engineers of artificial intelligence are still struggling to replicate some of the simplest forms of pattern recognition that human cognition does so effortlessly. We must beware that in our attempt to make computers think like us we do not end up thinking like them.

Nor is thinking a matter of expressing yourself or having opinions. It is not about turning on the fountain of our personality. It is an exercise in finding reasons to persuade yourself and others that something is true, or at least plausibly true. Thinking has truth as its goal and its organizing discipline. Bullshitters, as Harry Frankfurt told us, are precisely those who do not think: they simply express what comes into their minds, without concerning themselves with whether what they are saying has any relation to reality. Every university is, or should be, properly worried that their classrooms are training generation after generation of accredited bullshitters.

Nor is thinking about expressing your identity. It is not an intellectual achievement to parrot the truisms of our tribes. Indeed, thinking is about emancipating yourself from identity, insofar as it throws into question prior and unexamined ideas. Identity is a warm bath, but thinking is a discipline. Many important lines of thought are austerely impersonal, purged of the origins of those who thought them up. Think of mathematics, physics, and logic. These are great systems of thought made possible by thinkers who in the laboratory and the library discarded their identities altogether and lived, for years at a time, in the impersonal realm of signs and symbols. It doesn’t matter that perfect objectivity is impossible; imperfect objectivity, the progressive correction of biases, is certainly possible. Even in the social sciences, it is basic to our methods that we try to leave our personal biases, experiences, and histories behind, or in some way to bracket them, so as to see what the data tells us. In this work, thinking means leaving ourselves behind.

Or this?

If thinking for yourself is the goal of your life, then it pays to maintain a certain distance from the institutions in which you work and live. Distance implies wariness about received opinion, about fashions, about the recurring tides of certainty and urgency that course through the places where we work and soon have us all facing the same way, thinking the same thing. The larger point is about liberal society: if thinking for yourself is your goal, do not go looking for the warm bath of belonging or the certitude of faith. Do not expect a free society to provide these for you. Belonging is not the fondest dream of a serious intellectual. She dreams of other satisfactions first.

Lionel Shriver, writing at UnHerd, gives us a bracing upside-the-head entitled "How We Created a Self-Hating Generation." How we did it, she posits, is that we replaced character with identity as the focus of bringing up new citizens of our society:

I submit: the traditional concept of “building character” is out the window.

Once upon a time, a fully realised person was something one became. Entailing education, observation, experimentation, and sometimes humiliation, “coming of age” was hard work. When the project succeeded, we developed a gradually richer understanding of what it means to be human and what constitutes a fruitful life. This ongoing project was halted only by death. Maturity was the result of accumulated experience (some of it dire) and much trial and error (both comical and tragic), helping explain why wisdom, as opposed to intelligence, was mostly the preserve of the old. We admired the “self-made man”, because character was a creation — one constructed often at great cost. Many a “character-building” adventure, such as joining the Army, was a trial by fire.

These days, discussion of “character” is largely relegated to fiction workshops and film reviews. Instead, we relentlessly address “identity”, a hollowed-out concept now reduced to membership of the groups into which we were involuntarily born — thereby removing all choice about who we are. Rejecting the passé “character building” paradigm, we now inform children that their selves emerge from the womb fully formed. Their sole mission is to tell us what those selves already are. Self is a prefabricated house to which only its owner has a key.

Here's what we should say to a kid who says he or she doesn't know who he or she is:

There’s nothing shameful about being an empty vessel when you haven’t done anything and nothing much has happened to you yet. Telling children, “Of course you don’t know who you are! Growing up is hard, full of false starts, and all about making something of yourself. Don’t worry, we’ll give you lots of help” is a great deal more consoling than the model of the ready-meal self. We demand toddlers determine whether they’re “girls or boys or something in-between” before they have fully registered what a girl or boy is, much less “something in-between”. Placing the total onus for figuring out how to negotiate being alive on people who haven’t been given the user’s manual is a form of abandonment.

Adults have an obligation to advise, comfort, and inform — to provide the social context that children have none of the resources to infer and to help form expectations of what comes next.  Instead, we’re throwing kids helplessly on their primitive imaginations. The first time I remember being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I clearly remember answering, “a bear”. I wasn’t trying to be a wiseass. I just wasn’t up to speed on the ambitions to which I was expected to aspire. Little wonder that kids are now “identifying” as cats. Next, they will be identifying as electric lawnmowers, and we will have asked for it.

Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Brad Littlejohn contemplates what true authority might be. 

The year 2020 did not kill authority in American public life; it had been on life support for some time. This was merely the year authority tried to rise from its sickbed, in defiance of its terminal condition, and then expired from the strain. Needless to say, the Biden administration has not succeeded in resurrecting it.

Our contemporary crisis of authority runs much deeper than most realize. It is not just the product of institutional rot in Congress; of a swamp in Washington, D.C., that needs to be drained; or of inept leadership by grandstanding celebrity politicians. Nor is it simply the result of the radically democratizing effect of digital media, of a world in which likes and retweets matter more than credentials or even elections — although this is, as we shall see, a key part of the problem.

More fundamentally, our problem is that we no longer know how to recognize an authentic claim to authority, even if one dares show its face — which it almost never does. Without recognition of authority, there can be no legitimacy. Without legitimacy in our authoritative institutions, we cannot know how or why to act — a paralysis we experience as a loss of freedom even as we rage against the authorities we fear pose the greatest threats to our freedom.

He says it's crucial to distinguish between authority and power:

What is political authority? Before we answer, we must distinguish between two key concepts: authority and power. If we fail to do so, we will misunderstand the relationship between authority and freedom, perceiving them as antagonistic to one another when in fact they go hand in hand.

We may define power as a capacity for action in the broadest sense. The idea of power is thus quite close to that of freedom, for freedom clearly involves a capacity to act; indeed, we can use the phrases “power to act” and “freedom to act” interchangeably in certain contexts.

Some have disputed this characterization of freedom, arguing for a purely negative understanding of the term as the absence of compulsion. Yet under this definition, the quadriplegic is considered perfectly free to walk around so long as no one prevents him from doing so. This, of course, is absurd, and does violence to our well-grounded intuitions about what freedom must entail.

Because power and freedom are so similar to one another, they can readily stand in an oppositional relationship. One person’s power is perceived as (and quite often is in fact) a threat to another person’s freedom. There is, at least in some measure, a zero-sum game at work here.

That is not the case, however, when it comes to authority.

The concept of freedom adds to that of power the idea of rationality — freedom is the capacity for meaningful, rational action. We do not ordinarily think of the insane as “free”; indeed, it is precisely their radical un-freedom that can justify restraining or confining them. But from whence arises this meaning? Where do we find our reasons for acting? Not, as modernity is so fond of telling us, from within the freedom of our own will, for that is simply circular. No, it is authority (in the very broadest sense of the term) that provides us with reasons for action, and which thereby makes free action possible.

Authority is thus, in the pithy formulation of theologian Oliver O’Donovan, “the objective correlate of freedom.” Whereas one person’s power can limit another’s freedom by compelling him to act against his will, authority elicits free action by giving him reasons to act. Although it may be the authority that summons me to action, I can then recognize that action as my own. Power is thus far weaker than authority.

Authority gives us reasons for free action in two main guises: as epistemic authority and as political authority. Due to their systematic conflation over the past century, both types of authority are in a state of crisis.

In "From Environmentalism to Climate Catastrophism," Ruy Tiexiera says that as a society we did a good job of cleaning up actual pollution, but that alarmist swooning has diminished our capacity to address actual, specific problems and solve them.

A piece by Isaac Ariaril Reed and Michael Weinman at Hedgehog Review posits that as we as a society lose our grasp of any kind of common significance, we as individuals stake out positions we find comfortable, but that are untethered to evidence or reason. 

Coleman Hughes, writing at The Free Press, asserts that "Actually, Color-Blindness Isn't Racist." Such a statement ought to have a strong well-duh quality to it, but, in our age, it needs to be fleshed out in an essay.

At Precipice, I republished a Christmas-Eve piece I'd originally posted at Medium back in 2017. It's entitled "How I Made My Peace With God Being An Absolutist."

 

 

 

 

Thursday roundup

 It's been a while since LITD has served up a smorgasbord of recent attention-worthy essays I've come across.

Herewith is rectification of that paucity.

At U Discover Music, there's a great look at what made Rudy Van Gelder such a legendary recording engineer:

Blue Note’s founders, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, signed some of the most brilliant musical minds in modern jazz. From Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis to John Coltraneand Ornette Coleman, they recorded the music’s best and biggest names. But arguably, the most significant person they got to work for the company wasn’t a musician at all. He was, when they first encountered him, a part-time, self-taught sound engineer named Rudy Van Gelder. A professional optometrist by day, at night Van Gelder, also a jazz fan, recorded musicians in a studio he had set up in the living room of his parent’s home in New Jersey. It was in that house, located at 25 Prospect Avenue, Hackensack, that what we now know as the Blue Note sound was born.

Blue Note had been operating for 13 years when Alfred Lion met Van Gelder in 1952. Lion had been impressed by the audio quality of a session by saxophonist/composer Gil Mellé, recorded by the engineer at his Hackensack studio. Lion wanted to replicate the album’s sound at the label’s usual recording home, WOR studios in New York City, but was told by its resident engineer that it wasn’t possible and that he should contact the person who made the Mellé recording. And that’s how Blue Note found the man who would give them their classic sound.

Blue Note began recording exclusively at Hackensack from 1953 onwards, and the impeccable sound quality of their Van Gelder-engineered sessions – defined by clarity, depth, warmth, and sonic detail – didn’t escape the attention of other jazz labels. In fact, rival jazz indie Prestige, run by Bob Weinstock, also began hiring Van Gelder’s studio and services in an attempt to emulate the Blue Note sound. But this didn’t trouble Blue Note – rather, the improvement in audio quality benefitted jazz as a whole, and the label’s albums still sounded unique. That was a result of Alfred Lion being particular about what he liked. Evidently, as a producer he was more specific than Weinstock – he liked the music to swing, for one thing – and, consequently, was more organized. Lion had clearly focused goals in mind and paid the Blue Note musicians for several days’ rehearsal before the sessions. In contrast, Weinstock and Prestige just brought the musicians in cold to the studio to jam without much prior preparation. There was a gulf in quality that gave Blue Note an advantage.

At World, Andrew T. Walker asks, "What does Christian Nationalism Even Mean?"

I have sympathies with some of the ideas commonly associated with Christian nationalism. I understand and appreciate the unique role that Christianity played in shaping our nation’s tradition and values. Neither do I want that Christian influence to recede. As a conservative, I believe resolutely in the need for traditions to shape our common culture. Cutting a culture off from its good roots is nothing less than cultural self-hatred. Moreover, apart from a transcendent foundation for law and morality, no nation can long survive. I want a public morality influenced by Christianity but done so organically from the bottom up by the genuine and voluntary religious commitments of its people.

I also have major concerns with Christian nationalism. As a Baptist, I am convictionally opposed to identifying regeneration with nationhood. The Christian faith comes down to personal salvation and regeneration. The apparatus of government is ill-equipped to promote the supernatural end of man even if government requires supernatural foundation to keep it accountable (“In God We Trust” works for me). Whatever the personal faith of the office holder, I am opposed to magistrates as magistrates dictating theological matters for others.

Nicholas Harris, writing at UnHerd, demonstrates that the cat is out of the bag regarding Greta Thunberg. She's blossomed from a climate alarmist into a full-service leftist:

Interspersed among the usual directives about the need to pressure political leaders, her message was more radical and more militant than it has been in the past. There is no “back to normal”, she told us. “Normal” was the “system” which gave us the climate crisis, a system of “colonialism, imperialism, oppression, genocide”, of “racist, oppressive extractionism”. Climate justice is part of all justice; you can’t have one without the others. We can’t trust the elites produced by this system to confront its flaws — that’s why she, much like Rishi Sunak, won’t be bothering with the COP meeting this year. COP itself is little more than a “scam” which facilitates “greenwashing, lying and cheating”. Only overthrow of “the whole capitalist system” will suffice.

Frederick Hess of The American Enterprise Institute wonders how a man of actual depth and substance like Ben Sasse will fare as a college president in an age when that role has become largely ceremonial:

. . . the reality is that presidents generally don’t have that much real authority to shape a major university. They’re constrained by a board of trustees, faculty governance, entrenched campus power centers, endowment rules, major donors, and sprawling bureaucracies.

The day-to-day of the job tends to be dominated by its ceremonial, political, and money-chasing dimensions, with the president responsible primarily for fundraising, forging relationships with public officials, and serving as the public face of the institution. If one wants to get comprehensive, the job also includes financial management, working with the governing board, and leading the executive team.

Once upon a time, things were different. A half-century ago, it was expected that college presidents would be public intellectuals. They wrote influential books, gave major speeches, and were seen as major national voices. Today, it’s safe to say that most Americans would have trouble naming a single university president. Moreover, presidents just don’t have much day-to-day influence over curriculum, hiring, or what gets taught. And, as should be obvious, their views on same-sex marriage, gun control, and abortion don’t have much impact on campus life.  

At Glenn Loury's Substack, he and John McWhorter have one of their customary rollicking conversations, the kind that one can only have with good buds who understand each other well. This one focuses on the upcoming Supreme Court decision about affirmative action. Along the way, they talk about the problem they both have: their books, regardless of subject matter, getting relegated to the "black studies" sections of bookstores:

. . . you're going to go to something called a “bookstore” if it still exists. And you know where they're gonna put it. They're gonna put it in “African American Issues,” “Black Studies,” as if that's all that you are. I've seen some of my books put in the black section that weren't even about race, just because my name is mine. And that's the way it would be. Even on websites: “black books.” That's where they're gonna put you, and that's where they would put me, as if that that sums up our entire existence. 

At Merion West, Matthew Wardour asserts that, while we generally elevate authenticity as a virtue, those who have gained their celebrity with some degree of fakery have a lesson for us:

Many of us also like impostors because, deep down, we understand that to exist only matter-of-factly, without fiction, would be intolerable. Sir Walter Scott in his Journal, one of wisest autobiographies ever written, wrote that “Life could not be endured were it seen in reality.” People with no feeling of the romance of the world are among the people I least trust. Possibly their plainness ought to be interpreted as honesty, but I fail to see it—quite the opposite, in fact. I have sometimes reflected that Jesus’ desire not to reveal himself publicly until a later date has a jolly, even playful quality that makes him, paradoxically, more trustworthy and believable. This humble hoaxery distinguishes him, as far as I know, from any other god-figure.

Carl Trueman has a piece at World on the cost our society is paying for putting a higher priority on identity politics than on public health:

There are so many predictable aspects to this debacle. There is the obvious subordination of public health to identity politics. This is not the first time this has occurred. Who can forget the fact that churches meeting during Covid were considered highly controversial because of the risk of spreading the disease, while Black Lives Matter protests were seen as legitimate? This exposes the duplicitous rhetorical imperative, “Follow the science.” Following the science is always an empty term because science is descriptive, not prescriptive. It can tell you how to save a life, but it cannot tell you why a life is worth saving.

In short, science is not, in and of itself, a social policy. Social policy surely takes account of science but then must be formulated in terms of other factors, such as risk assessments in the light of a hierarchy of social goods. 

Further, we see the lengths to which the modern world will go in its desperate need to keep alive the myth that sexual activity is a cost-free recreation. For many years, society has taught us that, if all participants are in agreement, no particular sexual act or pattern of behavior can be rejected as wrong. Now it seems that this type of political judgment is to be extended beyond morality to matters of health as well.

And finally, my latest at Precipice is actually something that first appeared at Medium five years ago. I hadn't looked at my archive of pieces there for a long time. I thought this essay on profanity, entitled "Expletives and Blasphemy: As With Pungent Seasonings, Easy Does It," merited a re-up. Hey, our culture sure hasn't become any less coarse in the last half-decade.

 

 

 

Sunday roundup

 Daren Jonescu is a writer I agree with more often than I disagree with him. Sometimes I do indeed wonder where he is coming from, but there is no such perplexity regarding this piece entitled "A Border Dispute." He's spot on:

“Why should the world risk nuclear annihilation over what is essentially just a border dispute between Russia and Ukraine?” So ask the Glenn Greenwalds and Tucker Carlsonsof the world. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that such people are not being directly instructed by the Kremlin to pose the question that way, but that it represents their sincere, independent view of the situation. How shall we answer them?

How, that is, shall we answer a question deliberately framed so as to obscure or deny most of what we actually know about the nature and development of the situation: about its recent antecedents and parallels, about the explicit statements and aspirations of the Russian president, about the past century of Russian brutality against neighboring countries, about the moral and rhetorical distinctions between the Western democracies and a strongman tyranny under the lifetime control of a former KGB officer who openly pines for the glory days of the USSR, about the obvious one-sided reasons for the continued “cold war atmosphere” between Russia and the NATO countries today, about the ongoing war of terror and mass murder against the civilian population of a sovereign country? 

BTW, the Ukraine invasion is making Russian TV weirder and scarier by the day. 

I'm utterly certain that I'm a Christian, but prayer is something I still head-trip about. (That may just be one more manifestation of my tendency to overthink everything.) I did find this piece by David Deaval at The Imaginative Conservative  titled "Deepening Prayer and Hearing God'sVoice" helpful in that regard.

At the Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley shows how "BLM's Anti-Police Racket Is Coming Undone."

At The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan engages with listeners to his podcast. A taste:

This next listener dissents over the Haidt convo:

I try not to be a scold, but sometimes the temptation is too great. Early in your talk you talked about how you didn’t understand young kids these days — why they are killing themselves at a high rate, since everything for them is so much better than it was in the old days. It sounds just like all of us old guys not getting youngsters. Haidt did talk about how he learned to approach unfamiliar cultures like an anthropologist — a good place to start for us old folks. 

While I agree with you about the proliferation of gender types, it was not so long ago that homosexuality raised the same kinds of questions that you ask, and it was looked at the same way. Some people questioned the reality of such a thing, or saw it as a simple choice that perverse people made, or as a psychiatric illness that required treatment, and of course as a crime. I don’t think you intend to imply any of those things, but you do seem to veer in that direction. How people’s identity is created is still an open question — and someday we may know more. 

That said, I agree with you that medical interventions for children is very very premature and should not be happening. Let people grow up first. 

You seem to imply that biology supports a simple dichotomy, but sexual expression is more complex than that. As for cultural/religious acceptance, Joseph Campbell, in The Hero Of A Thousand Faces, discusses some civilizations that saw gender as fluid and containing both male and female elements.

One more thought: although Plato then, and others now, did raise questions about democracy, I fear that the Republican answer is to emulate the worst counter-examples, such as their current infatuation with Orbán’s near dictatorship. Prof. Haidt mentioned Karen Stenner’s work, The Authoritarian Dynamic, in which she reports that 20% of the population has an authoritarian personality type. She also talks about the conditions that stimulate it to express itself — fear and anxiety, the kind that is stirred up by demagogues and unscrupulous politicians, namely Trump. Stenner’s book also has suggestions on how to tamp down the fear. Maybe a conversation with her is in order.

Thanks for the tip. My best response to my reader’s first point is probably at the beginning of my chat with Bari, where I try to make distinctions between the gay and trans movements, and why the conflicts are inevitable and intrinsic. As for fluid gender, I agree! I don’t believe in a gender binary, just a sex binary. In fact, one reason gender expression exists at all — and is comprehensible at all — is precisely its tension with a fixed, binary biological reality. 

But I also think this over-states the relevance of “gender identity” for the vast majority of humans. Most of us don’t get up every day thinking of how we are a man or a woman and where we fit on a spectrum — because we don’t really have many conflicts. This looms much larger for trans people for whom it is a daily challenge, and to a lesser extent for gay people whose affect contrasts with the stereotypes of their sex. But for most of us, our gender expression is simply our personality packaged in a binary form of biology. And this isn’t just on a scale of Barbie to G.I. Joe. And seeing it that way — as gender ideology does — strikes me as a regression, not a way forward.

And, now, in case LITD isn't enough of a BQ fix, herewith some recent contributions to other venues:

At Merion West, I assert that "The Term Woke Is Losing Its Punch." 

At Ordinary Times, I examine the cultural impact of the Rhythm changes:

Far and away, the most famous and utilized contrafact is the chord changes to “I’ve Got Rhythm” by George Gershwin. He composed this tune for the 1930 musical Girl Crazy. 

What it introduced into American music was the I-VI-II V7 chord sequence, with a cycle-of-fourths middle-eight section that starts two steps above the key of the song and allows a resolution, in eight bars, to the key.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of this codification to the development of American popular music, and, indeed, popular culture.  

The entire form, or sometimes just the A section with a different middle eight, shows up all over the place.

It’s come to be known as the Rhythm changes.

Certainly it’s been used with other melody lines in jazz. Charlie Christian’s “Seven Come Eleven” is over the Rhythm changes, as is “Oleo” by Sonny Rollins, and I’m only scratching the surface. 

It’s been used in a pop context as well.

I give three examples of that context: the Flintstones theme, "Sherry" by the Four Seasons, and "Like Love" by Andre Previn, and why they are artifacts from a time when post-America was America, and had a sense of vitality and loveliness. 

My second-most recent piece at OT is "Confessions of a Rock and Roll History Teacher."

At Precipice, my Substack, I return to a theme I frequently write about there: the infinitesimal piece of real estate on which a non-Trumpist conservative stands. 

And my second-most recent piece there is titled "Disney."

Well, that ought to keep you out of mischief on this first Sunday of May.