The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, The Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies condemns that tendency in today’s university toward political correc The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, The Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies condemns that tendency in today’s university toward political correctness, the suppression of speech, and the punishing of academics who violate the long—and growing--list of left-wing cultural norms. Lest you be inclined to dismiss this collection of essays as just one more right-wing screed, know this: its author Robert Boyers—English Professor at Skidmore for the last fifty years, director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute, editor of the esteemed intellectual quarterly Salmagundi—is as close to a card-carrying liberal as you are going to find.
Boyers—a teacher of fiction, a champion of multicultural works—has long been a proponent of diversity and tolerance. Over the years, though, as he has watched academia change, he has become worried by the changes he has witnessed. He is glad that the diversity of peoples and their differences are now universally tolerated, but he is dismayed to see that diverse opinions—and the free and open public expression of those differences—is too often seen as a threat to the “safe space” that the universal consensus demands. Ironically, the “liberal” university is becoming a threat to the liberal tradition itself.
The nine essays in this book touch on a variety of questions, including the meaning of “identity” (culturally, racially, personally), political correctness, privilege, “safe” and “unsafe” spaces, disability policing, cultural appropriation, microaggression. and “junk thought” (the use of slogans instead of ideas). Boyers treatment of these matters is thoughtful and measured. In short, Boyers, even at his most impassioned, is everything a liberal professor should be.
He offers no solutions. He does, however, provide us with a list of what not to do:
Not to be done:
The promulgation of ideas entertained without seriousness, that is, without any corresponding consideration of what would be entailed were they actually to be effected.
The use of ideas such as privilege, appropriation, ableism, and microagression to sow hostility, persecute other members of a community, and make meaningful conversations impossible.
The use of the classroom and the seminar to indoctrinate students and thus to send them off parroting views that they have not adequately thought through or mastered.
The creation of an “us versus them” orientation, underwritten by enemies lists and fueled by a sense that on matters for which a consensus has been reached no dispute may be tolerated.
The weaponization of “virtue” for what Marilynne Robinson calls “class advantage,” with zealots adept mainly at trumpeting their own superior status and making “a fetish of indignation.”
In July of 2017, in New York Magazine, David Wallace-Wells published an article on climate change entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth.” It began with th In July of 2017, in New York Magazine, David Wallace-Wells published an article on climate change entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth.” It began with these words: “It is, I promise, worse than you think.” Now Wallace-Wells has turned that article into a book, and—if anything—he has doubled down. “It is worse,” the book begins, “much worse, than you think.”
It is, it surely is. And Wallace-Wells pulls no punches. He does not fog the facts with statistics, or conceal his rage and sorrow under a scientist mask. No, for this is not a book of science; it is just what he says it is. “This is not a book about the science of warming; it is a book about what warming means to the way we live on this planet.” He paints pictures of what human life will be like at various degrees of warming; grim even if we mitigate the rising temperature, horrific if we continue to do virtually nothing.
The entire book is good, but the opening sequence “Cascades”—a section of roughly thirty pages--is particularly powerful. Wallace-Wells makes it clear that our warmer future will not consist of isolable challenges; no, instead everything will hit the fan at once. As Hamlet’s uncle Claudius once said, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies,/ But in battalions.” Wallace-Wells puts it eloquently too:
The assaults will not be discrete—this is another climate delusion. Instead, they will produce a new kind of cascading violence, waterfalls and avalanches of devastation, the planet pummeled again and again, with increasing intensity and in ways that build on each other and undermine our ability to respond . . .”
The second sequence, “The Elements of Chaos,”—a hundred pages or so—artificially isolates twelve of these cascading dangers (Heat Death,” “Hunger,” “Drowning,” etc.) into individual chapters, and discusses the contribution of each. In these chapters Wallace-Wells often becomes frighteningly specific, mentioning deleterious effects I would never have anticipated. Consider this passage in “Hunger”:
Over the past fifteen years, the iconoclastic mathematician Irakli Loladze has isolated a dramatic effect of carbon dioxide on human nutrition unanticipated by plant physiologists: it can make plants bigger, but those bigger plants are less nutritious. . . Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third.
Or this little parable in “Plagues of Warming”:
But consider the case of the saiga—the adorable, dwarflike antelope, native to Central Asia. In May 2015, nearly two-thirds of the global population died in the span of just days—every single said in an area the size of Florida . . . The culprit, it turned out, was a simple bacteria, Pasteurella multocide, which had lived inside the saiga’s tonsils without threatening its hosts in any way, for many, many generations . . . Suddenly it had proliferated . . . Why? “The places where the saiga died in 2015 were extremely warm and humid . . . When the temperature gets really hot, and the air gets really wet, saiga die. Climate is the trigger, Pasteurella is the bullet.”
In the third section, “The Climate Kaleidoscope”—about seventy-five pages—Wallace-Wells treats briefly with some ways we can attempt to make sense of the climate crisis, as we contemplate the possible death of humankind, alone—at least as far as we can tell—in a vast universe (“Storytelling," “Crisis Capitalism,” The Church of Technology,” etc.), and he ends the books with a brief coda—”The Anthropic Principle”—in which he shares the somewhat optimistic way in which he has come to view the human dilemma. True, it is “a sort of gimmicky tautology” that reminds me of the circular logic that brought us, in earlier centuries, the dubious comforts of Anselm’s ontological argument and Pascal’s wager. It is certainly a leap in the dark. Still, it’s better than nothing:
[T]he Anthropic Principle . . . takes the human anomaly not as a puzzle to explain away but as the centerpiece of a grand narcissistic view of the cosmos. . . . [H]owever unlikely it may seem that intelligent civilization arose in an infinity of lifeless gas, and however lonely we appear to be in the universe, in fact something like the world we live on and the one we’ve built are a sort of logical inevitability, given that we are asking these questions at all—because only a universe compatible with our sort of conscious life would produce anything capable of contemplating it like this. . . .
There is one civilization we know of, and it is still alive and kicking—for now at least. Why should we be suspicious of our exceptionality, or choose to understand it only by assuming an imminent demise? Why not choose to feel empowered by it?
Sarah Weinman’s The Real Lolita is perhaps unique in the annals of true crime because of the double mystery it explores. The first mystery: to discove Sarah Weinman’s The Real Lolita is perhaps unique in the annals of true crime because of the double mystery it explores. The first mystery: to discover the real girl behind a half-forgotten news story, the kidnapping in 1948 of eleven-year-old Sally Horner by fifty-year-old pedophile Frank La Salle and their subsequent twenty-one month odyssey from Camden, New Jersey to San Jose, California. The second mystery: to discover the relationship between Sally and her fictional counterpoint Lolita by sifting through the hints and evasions the writer left us in his notes and comments, and breaking through the barriers thrown up by his wife Vera, the fierce and jealous defender of Vladimir Nabokov and his legacy.
This is a clever and ingenious book, not least because little remains today of Sally Horner’s story (Sally avoided interviews at the time of her rescue, and she died two years later in a car crash at the age of fifteen). Author Sarah Weinman is, however, adept at including what might otherwise might seem irrelevancies (the habits and character of La Salle’s prosecutor Mitchell Cohen; the Nabokov’s cross country butterfly trip; the subsequent life of Sally’s rescuer Ruth Janisch, the memories of her daughter Rachel; and the sad account of the doomed musical Lolita, My Love—book by Lerner and Lowe of My Fair Lady fame, music by John “Goldfinger” Barry). Weinman has an astute sense of how much space to give to each of these tangential topics, and how to make them subordinate to her central theme: the recovery of the uniqueness of one little girl, her memory lost half a century ago in the pages of a masterpiece:
Sally Horner can’t be cast aside so easily. She must be remembered as more than a young girl forever changed by a middle-aged man’s crime of monstrous perversion. A girl who survived adversity, manipulation, and cross-country horror, only to be denied a chance to grow up. A girl immortalized, and forever trapped in the pages of a classic novel of satire and sadness, like a butterfly with wings damaged before ever having the chance to fly.
If the name “Erik Loomis” sounds familiar, that may be because you have read him in the politically progressive blog “Lawyers, Guns & Money” under the If the name “Erik Loomis” sounds familiar, that may be because you have read him in the politically progressive blog “Lawyers, Guns & Money” under the headings “Erik Visits a Grave" (410 entries to date) and “This Day in Labor History," in which he introduces his readers to such memorable events as the Creation of the Colored Farmer’s Alliance (1886), the Battle of Blair Mountain (1921), the Hard Hat Riot (1970), and the Kader Toy Fire (1993).
Loomis, a professor at the University of Rhode Island, knows his labor history, and, in A History of America in Ten Strikes he has found an effective vehicle to convey this often neglected subject to the average reader. Loomis chooses ten “strikes” in ten different periods, each of which exemplifies a different theme. He chronicles the events leading up to it and stemming from it, and then underlines its importance in the development of the labor movement. Although the narrative can be a dry at times (since—by the nature of the labor struggle—it customarily deals with collective action, not individual heroics), it is studded with illuminating anecdotes and brightened with notable names.
In “The Lowell Mill Girls” (1830’s), Loomis shows us how workers, often female textile workers, struggled from the first against a new industrial system they did not yet understand. Then our author moves on to consider “Slaves on Strike,” and how what we usually think as slaves abandoning their plantations during the Civil War was in effect a labor action, a protest that not only paralyzed the South but also brought about the end of slavery. Loomis goes on to write about the “Eight-Hour-Day Strikes," how, in the Gilded Age, the Knights of Labor’s aggressive push and the hysteria that followed the Haymarket Bombing (1886) led to owner reprisals and a virtual war between capital and labor. By way of contrast, he then demonstrates, in “The Anthracite Strike” (1902), how the rare action of a progressive elected official on the side of a union—in this case by president Theodore Roosevelt in support of the coal miners—could tip the scales in the favor of workers' rights.
Loomis then shows us how a new radical movement led by the IWW (the "Wobblies") shaped the nature of “The Bread and Roses Strike” in the Lawrence, Massachusetts textile mills in 1912, and how they succeeded through an expert use of propaganda:
With the strikers destitute, the IWW thought to place worker’s children with sympathizers in different cities. This spread the Lawrence workers' cause. On February 10th, 119 children boarded a train to New York dressed in their rags, with their name, age, address, and nationality pinned to them . . . They all found families when they arrived, as five thousand socialists met them at the train station to celebrate their arrival.
Although the Wobblies’ uncompromising radicalism—and their promotion of violent “direct action”—never brought about the worker’s revolution they hoped for, the slow, steady growth of the union movement and the election of important Democratic allies in government led to significant union gains by 1940. Loomis sees the crucial event of this period to be “The Flint Sit-Down Strike” (1937). In this action, not only the GM workers, but their wives played a part:
A women's auxiliary formed to support the workers, bringing them food, clean clothing, newspapers and other items to help them spend the long nights inside the plant. Genora Johnson, a mother of two and the wife of one of the strike leaders, took the microphone and urged the women of Flint to stand up (or sit down!) to GM and fight for the men inside. She shouted, “We will form a line around the men, and if the police want to fire then, they’ll just have to fire into us.”
Wages had bee been artificially frozen throughout WWII, and the demand for increased wages eventually led to a wave of post-war labor actions, which Loomis illustrates here in his treatment of “The Oakland General Strike.”
For two days, Oakland shut down. Despite the cold December rain, over 1000,000 workers participated . . . All businesses except for pharmacies and food markets, which the workers deemed essential for the city, closed. Bars could stay open but could only serve beer and had to put their jukeboxes outtside and allow for their free use. Couples literally danced in the streets . . . Workers allowed children to visit Santa in front of a department store to give their Christmas wishes. Recently returned war veterans created squadrons to prepare for battle against the police.
Labor made wage gains throughout the postwar years, but eventually a new generation of workers began to agitate for a change in dehumanizing working conditions. For Loomis, the crucial event in this phase of the struggle was the “Lordstown” strike (1972) in Youngstown, Ohio. (Equal treatment for women and minorities was also an important theme during this period, and Loomis does a good job of treating these issues too.)
Unfortunately, the ‘80’s brought with it the ascendancy of the Republican party and its deliberate attempt to break the back of unions. The crucial event in this phase, according to Loomis, was “The Air Traffic Controllers Strike” (1981) when Ronald Reagan fired all the strikers who refused to return to work, thereby crushing a powerful public sector union and setting the tone for years to come. Private sector unions as a force in the U.S. have now been virtually neutered, and what remains of the public sector unions—teachers, firefighters, police—are continually subject to attack. The only bright spot in union growth now lies in the organizing of minority and immigrant labor in low wage service industries, which Loomis sees exemplified in the rise of the SEIU (The Service Employees International Union) and the “Justice for Janitors” movement in 1990’s in L.A.
America’s history of labor in ten strikes. It is an account of painful gains through more than a century, followed by a forty-year decline. Loomis, although not optimistic, is still hopeful that Americans will listen to the lessons of history and continue to fight:
We came very far in the struggles of workers in the two centuries before today. In the past four decades, we have given back much of our freedom. Only through our combined struggle to demand the fruits of our labor can we regain our lost freedoms and expand those freedoms into a better life for all Americans.
I enjoyed this graphic version of Jon Lee Anderson’s biography Che: a Revolutionary Life (1997). As I did not read the original biography, I cannot co I enjoyed this graphic version of Jon Lee Anderson’s biography Che: a Revolutionary Life (1997). As I did not read the original biography, I cannot comment on its faithfulness, but since Anderson himself created it (in collaboration with Jose Hernandez, political cartoonist for Mexico City’s La Jornada) I assume it is an accurate reflection of its source. In addition, since I knew little of Guevera’s life before reading this graphic, I cannot comment on its historical accuracy either.
What I can say, though, is that Anderson and Hernandez gave me a vivid feel for Latin American in the ‘50’s and ‘’60’s, and, although it made clear Che’s uncompromising vision and dedication to revolutionary justice, it also revealed the man, warts and all: he was an implacable foe but also an intractable ally; a revolutionary saint capable of murder; a lover of humanity who had little time for his wives and his children.
Much credit for the book’s success may be attributed to the drawings of Hernandez: the foggy, noir imagery of cigars glowing in shadows, a world never far from the sea; the vividly specific evocations of the great cities: Buenos Aires, Guatemala City, Mexico City, Havana; the faces, the unchanging intensity of Guevara in each of his many disguises, and the many mercurial expressions of Fidel—always himself though always changing.
I recommend this book to every United States citizen. It does us good to read a book where Uncle Sam is the villain—for a change....more
Did you watch Zuckerberg testify before the Senate committees about Facebook and the 2018 election? Were you struck by how blithely unrepentant he see Did you watch Zuckerberg testify before the Senate committees about Facebook and the 2018 election? Were you struck by how blithely unrepentant he seemed, how convinced that his titanic, poorly monitored data base—which he habitually describes as “a community”—is an unalloyed benefit to us all? “Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” Zuckerberg claims, “It was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected.”
So how is it that a billionaire like Zuckerberg can presume to appear so smugly virtuous? Although a few reasons come immediately to my mind—a poorly chosen defense strategy, the habitual arrogance of wealth, some personality or character defect—I believe the truer explanation is more universal. It lies in the philosophical attitude toward wealth and social change of all the Silicon Valley billionaires, which is shared in large part by the Wall Street/Clinton Foundation crowd too. Such people inhabit a distinct intellectual universe, and an excellent way to learn about their world is to read Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridhardas.
Giridhardas calls this universe “MarketWorld”, and he encountered it up close and personal when, in 2011, he was chosen as a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, an “’organization of leaders’ that seeks to deploy a “new breed of leaders’ against ‘the world’s most intractable problems.’” It involved an inspiring series of one-week seminars, held in luxurious places, where he “mingled with the ultra-rich in decorated mansions.” Still something made Anand uneasy about the whole thing:
Even as I savored these luxuries and connections, I found something amiss about the Aspen institute. Here were all these rich and powerful people coming together and speaking about giving back, and yet the people who seemed to reap most of the benefits of this coming together were the helpers, not the helped. I began to wonder what was actually going on when the most fortunate don’t merely seek to make a difference but also effectively claim ownership of “changing the world.” . . .
I began to feel like a casual participant in . . . a giant, sweet-lipped lie. . . . Why were we coming to Aspen? To change the system, or to be changed by it? To speak truth to power, . . . or to help make an unjust, unpalatable system go down a little more easily? Could the intractable problems we proposed to solve be solved in the way that we silently insisted—at minimal most to elites, with minimal distribution of power?
Giridharadas continued to think about these matters, and five years later, at his Aspen Institute summer reunion, he delivered a speech in which he summed up what he called the Aspen Consensus: “The winners of our age must be challenged to do more good. But never, ever tell them to do less harm.”
This, essentially, is the philosophy of “MarketWorld.” We can all—especially the rich--”do good by doing well.” Apply market solutions, empower a few, attempt to solve a few isolated social problems, and—guess what?—we can make ourselves even more money and feel better about ourselves while we do it. We’ll work with governments, sure, but only if necessary (for democracy is messy and difficult to control), but please don’t speak to us about increasing corporate regulations, or raising marginal tax rates, or increasing estate taxes, and—while you’re at it—leave that deduction for the purchase of private jets alone too.
Giridharadas attends and takes notes on many MarketWorld events, conducts interviews with a few of the ultra-rich and many of their minions (an interview near the end of the book with Bill Clinton is particularly illuminating), and in addition he speaks with a number of aspiring entrepreneurs who adopt the MarketWorld philosophy.
But he speaks with critics of MarketWorld too, one of the most incisive being Chiara Cordelli, professor of political philosophy at the university of Chicago. She argues that one of the most dangerous things about the MarketWorld method is that it not only routinely marginalizes government institutions but also insists on benefits (tax breaks, elimination of regulations) which damage and hamper its mechanisms, and that as a result these institutions are becoming more and more ineffective. And after all, Cordelli says, “The government is us.”
If you are an agnostic with few illusions who seeks the consolations of philosophy; if you are fortified by Ligotti’s bleak analysis (A Conspiracy Aga If you are an agnostic with few illusions who seeks the consolations of philosophy; if you are fortified by Ligotti’s bleak analysis (A Conspiracy Against the Human Race) and sustained by Cioran’s grim maxims (A Short History of Decay); if the fiction of J.G. Ballard, Will Self, and Jim Crace is congruent with your assumptions, congenial with your attitudes; then John Gray’s Straw Dogs may be the book for you.
The atheist Gray, who rejects the assumptions of Christianity, here targets the contemporary consensus of humanism. In ridding itself of theistic illusions, Gray believes, secular humanism didn’t go nearly far enough.
For Gray, Utopianism is a variant of the Kingdom of God, progress a non-theistic version of salvation history, the exaltation of human consciousness and the celebration of free will little more than the vestiges of a repressed belief in the integrity and persistence of the immortal soul. Gray argues that there is no real evidence for any of these commonly accepted beliefs: human consciousness is fitful, free will illusory, progress a fiction (history is cyclical, not forward-looking), and ”utopia”—given the contrary nature of man—will be (at best) the occasional result of autocratic, repressive regimes.
Although Gray’s book challenges our comfortable assumptions, it also offers its own severe form of consolation. If we cease to believe in progress, to yearn for utopia, we may save ourselves from continual disappointment; if we cease to believe in a unitary self in command of fictive choices, we may more easily immerse ourselves—as the Daoist and Zen Buddhist do—in the successive ebb and flow of time, the "lucid dream" which constitutes humankind’s richest simulacrum of reality.
Although Gray’s laconic style lacks Cioran’s witty ironies and Ligotti’s deadpan humor, he makes up for it with his wide-ranging scholarship and the concentrated power of his thought. There is much in this book to ponder, much to which a thoughtful reader may return, again and again.
Here are eight of my favorite passages:
* * * * * The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, 'Western civilisation' or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.
* * * * * Cities are no more artificial than the hives of bees. The internet is as natural as a spider's web. As Margulis and Sagan have written, we are ourselves technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as means of genetic survival: 'We are a part of an intricate network that comes from the original bacterial takeover of the Earth. Our powers and intelligence do not belong specifically to us but to all life.'
* * * * * Among us, science serves two needs: for hope and censorship. Today, only science supports the myth of progress. If people cling to the hope of progress, it is not so much from genuine belief as from fear of what may come if they give it up.
* * * * * Over the past 200 years, philosophy has shaken off Christian faith. It has not given up Christianity's cardinal error — the belief that humans are radically different from all other animals.
* * * * * Postmodernists parade their relativism as a superior kind of humility — the modest acceptance that we cannot claim to have the truth. In fact, the postmodern denial of truth is the worst kind of arrogance. In denying that the natural world exists independently of our beliefs about it, postmodernists are implicitly rejecting any limit on human ambitions. By making human beliefs the final arbiter of reality, they are in effect claiming that nothing exists unless it appears in human consciousness.
* * * * * Even the deepest contemplation only recalls us to our unreality. Seeing that the self we take ourselves to be is illusory does not mean seeing through it to something else. It is more like surrendering to a dream. To see ourselves as figments is to awake, not to reality, but to a lucid dream, a false awakening that has no end.
* * * * * Action preserves a sense of self-identity that reflection dispels. When we are at work in the world we have a seeming solidity. Action gives us consolation for our inexistence. It is not the idle dreamer who escapes from reality. It is practical men and women, who turn to a life of action as a refuge from insignificance.
* * * * * Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?
This is an informative and useful exploration of how the lack of basic cognitive structures--as elementary as Piaget's "conservation of constancy" ("I This is an informative and useful exploration of how the lack of basic cognitive structures--as elementary as Piaget's "conservation of constancy" ("Is a shot in a shot glass the same amount when it is poured into a brandy glass?", for example)--or the wisdom of when to apply them may be what prevents struggling students from real learning. Most teachers take for granted that such concepts are mastered in the first seven years of life, but many students may have surprising gaps in development.
Garner details the various cognitive structures, and demonstrates by anecdote and practical exercises how students may be led to master these basic concepts. Many of the anecdotes are moving, as we see a student finally "get it," realizing that learning can be more than mere rote memorization. Except for Garner's coinage of "metability," a superfluous neologism that means "the ability to change," the book is remarkably free of the usual educationalese cant and consequently very readable....more
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