RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/identity-crisis-politics-race-wreck-america-charles-murray/

The American experiment is fragile. It has always been fragile and always will be fragile because it is so extremely unnatural. ‘Unnatural’ in this context means in conflict with human nature. Jonah Goldberg has described the fragility of the American system by comparing it to a garden hacked out of a tropical jungle. A garden surrounded by jungle is unnatural. The gardeners must tend it with unremitting care lest the jungle return.

Treating our fellow human beings as individuals instead of treating them as members of groups is unnatural. Our brains evolved to think of people as members of groups; to trust and care for people who are like us and to be suspicious of people who are unlike us. Those traits had great survival value for human beings throughout millions of years of evolution. People who were trusting of outsiders were less likely to pass on their genes than people who were suspicious of them. People who were loyal to their tribe were more likely to pass on their genes than people who stood apart.

The invention of agriculture and the consequent rise of complex societies exposed another aspect of human nature that had enjoyed less scope for expression in hunter-gatherer bands: acquisitiveness, whether of money, status or power. Whatever its evolutionary roots may be, the empirical consistency of human acquisitiveness over the eons is impressive. The open-ended desire for more money, status or power has been natural; to voluntarily limit one’s wealth, status or power has been unnatural.

The combination of acquisitiveness and loyalty to the interests of one’s own group (be it defined by ethnicity or class) shaped human governments for the subsequent 10,000 years. The natural form of government was hierarchical, run by a dominant group that arranged affairs to its benefit and oppressed outsiders to a lesser or greater degree, usually greater. The rare attempts to try any other form of government were unstable and short-lived. The American founders’ idealism lay in their belief that an alternative was possible. Their genius was to design a system with multiple safeguards against the forces that had made previous attempts self-destruct.

America proved that a durable alternative to the natural form of government was possible — a constitutional republic combined with carefully circumscribed democracy. The idea behind that alternative eventually spread around the world, but neither the United States nor any other country that has made it work has ever been out of danger. If we decide that our system for tending the garden needs to be replaced, and if the replacement should prove to be even slightly less devoted to keeping nature at bay, the garden will be reclaimed by jungle within a few decades.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/parasitic-mind-how-infectious-ideas-are-killing-jason-d-hill/

Gad Saad is a Lebanese-Canadian intellectual and evolutionary psychologist. He was raised Jewish in Lebanon and migrated to Canada at the age of eleven. Dr. Saad’s perspective on the world is nuanced and multi-faceted. He is as well-known in the United States as he is in Canada – where he is a professor of marketing at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University. In his most recent book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, he exposes how bad ideas, or idea pathogens, are spread unchecked in our culture.

Dr. Saad is a wholesaler in the realm of cognition. He ties together the fundamental premises that unite promulgators of idea pathogens. In the process, he reveals their motives and goals. In Dr. Saad’s view, the advocates and spreaders of the idea pathogens are rooted in the ethical relativism of postmodernism, which denies the existence of an objective reality. With this as the philosophic grounding that operationalizes all their goals as social and existential disruptors in society, Dr. Saad allows us to see connections among seemingly disparate groups. Their goal is the destruction of key foundational tenets of Western civilization. The consequences of their actions are the annihilation of common sense, respect for science, individual rights and human dignity, as well as a wholesale war against reason and the idea of truth. A war on freedom of speech and thought is the method used by these intellectual terrorists to spread these idea pathogens and infect those most vulnerable: young persons and children in the West.  The incubators for these idea pathogens are the universities – which have become indoctrination centers that are turning our youth into enemies of the state and destroyers of the values that undergird our civilization.  

I interviewed Dr. Saad via Zoom to discuss these ideas that are brilliantly explicated and analyzed in his book. His call to action is inspiring. The West cannot be lost.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/12/pushing-through-the-decadence/

When the historian and cultural critic Jacques Barzun died at 104 in 2012, he was not only full of years but full of honors. The honors started early. 

Born in Créteil, a suburb outside Paris, in 1907, Barzun came to the United States with his parents in 1920. His father, a cultivated man who welcomed such celebrated figures as Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Duchamp, Edgard Varèse, and Stefan Zweig to his home, determined that young Jacques should be educated in America. In 1927, he graduated with honors from Columbia University, where was valedictorian and president of Philolexian Society, one of the oldest university literary and debate societies in the United States. He went on to take a Ph.D. at Columbia and was a distinguished professor and administrator there for decades. (Together with the critic Lionel Trilling, he also presided over the once-celebrated course in Western civilization there.)

As the years and the books accumulated—Barzun was the author of more than 40 books on subjects ranging from history, education, and music to poetry, detective stories, and baseball—he scooped up all the recognitions: the Légion d’Honneur from his native country, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (bestowed by President George W. Bush), National Humanities Medal (Obama), and on and on. 

I believe the first thing that I read by Jacques Barzun was a short book called On Writing, Editing, and Publishing (1971). I cannot lay my hands on it at the moment, but I remember from it a good piece of advice for those young ’uns (and their name is legion) who think they want to be writers. 

It is important, Barzun noted, to decide whether you want to write or to have written. A little honest self-scrutiny on that point can save a world of heartache. Obviously, the point can be generalized for all the arts. (How many self-identifying waiters or waitresses have you met in trendy New York restaurants? They scarcely exist. But there are plenty of novelists, painters, and actors who just happen to be waiting tables until their genius is acknowledged.)

Jacques Barzun was a type of public intellectual that is rare in any age and is more or less extinct today. He was in but not of the academy. He wrote beautifully, for one thing, cared passionately about the life of the mind, and never succumbed to the dead end of what is sometimes called “specialization” but really should be denominated arid irrelevancy. Barzun wrote for the general educated reader about the things that matter most: truth, beauty, the perennial challenges to the human spirit with which life confronts us. 

Barzun always had a teacher’s gift of dramatizing ideas and championing what, in Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941), he called “the pluralism of the world of experience.” Although deeply immersed in intellectual matters himself, he seems never to have succumbed to the intellectual’s chief occupational temptation of mistaking abstractions for the realities they adumbrate. This resistance had stylistic as well as substantive consequences. Barzun once noted that “Intellect watches particularly over language because language is so far the only device for keeping ideas clear and emotions memorable.” 

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/but-thou-shalt-endure/

“In his indictment of America’s national decline, Johnston’s belief that America has the wherewithal to restore itself shines through.”

Joseph F. Johnston is an attorney and writer who has read widely in history and philosophy. His new book, The Decline of Nations: Lessons for Strengthening America at Home and in the World, is a deep meditation on the national condition, motivated by the hope that we will escape the almost universal fate of nations to rise and then decline. He believes that our problem began with the abandonment of moral certainty in favor of relativism. His survey of the damage to American culture and mores extends from the expansion of the welfare state and the enervation of private initiative to literary habits, sexual behavior, demographics, and high culture. Every college student in the country should be tied to a chair and made to read it (or, if needed, hear it read aloud).

In his conclusion, he offers a well-considered set of remedies. “Low rates of taxation, limited government, free markets, encouragement of private enterprise, fiscal responsibility, sound money, and the rule of law” are the foundation of economic strength. This in turn depends on educational excellence, by “providing parents with an alternative to public schooling.” Jurisprudence should return to “the objective truths of an acknowledged moral order.” America’s military strength must be rebuilt, focusing on defense against nuclear missiles, terrorism, cyberwar, and space technologies, without overextending our capacity to “protect countries that are unwilling to protect themselves.”

Demographics and Decline

In 2008, the United States was an outlier among the large industrial nations with a total fertility rate of 2.1 live births per woman. That is the total number of births the average woman is expected to have during her lifetime. The US National Center for Health Statistics reported in May that the total fertility rate (TFR) had fallen to just 1.64, close to that of Europe or China. We have heard forecasts of demographic doom for years from the Old World and East Asia; a new study in The Lancet forecasts that the population of the European Union will fall by a third, to 308 million from 446 million, by the end of this century. It appears that the bell also tolls for us.

The long-term consequences of demographic winter will be devastating; in the United Nations’ low-fertility scenario, the US will have 71 citizens over the age of 65 for every 100 of working age (Europe would have 84, and Japan 120). The unfunded liabilities of the Social Security and Medicare systems now exceed $113 trillion by some estimates, and a smaller working-age population would struggle to support them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/making-book-trump-bruce-bawer/

The presidency of Donald Trump was not just a boon for CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. It was also a gift to the book business. There was, publishers found, an apparently insatiable hunger for anti-Trump screeds.

One after another of these tomes hit the bestseller lists. While there were the inevitable differences among them in style and perspective, virtually all shared a single theme: Trump was not just a president whose politics the authors disliked; he was the worst person ever to hold the office, unique in his bigotry, corruption, ignorance, stupidity, egomania – indeed, in the estimation of many, comparable to Hitler. In general, the author paid very little if any attention to Trump’s actual political ideas, programs, or accomplishments; instead, their focus was on his personality and personal views, real or imagined – and, by extension, on the supposed attitudes of Trump’s supporters, whose very enthusiasm for him was treated as a character flaw and, indeed, an existential threat to American democracy, tolerance, and social cohesion. Some, if not all, of the writers did not trouble to hide the fact that their disdain for Trump and his voters was rooted in snobbery, regional prejudice, and ideological rancor.

These books fell into a number of general categories. Some were works of reportage by journalists who covered Trump. Some, such as former FBI agent Peter Strzok’s Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020, 384 pages), former FBI director James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership (Flatiron, 2018, 312 pages), Comey’s Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency, and Trust (Flatiron, 2021, 240 pages), and former FBI deputy director Andrew G. McCabe’s The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump (St. Martin’s, 2019, 288 pages) were by members of the intelligence community and former government officials. Some, such as Michael Cohen’s Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump (Skyhorse, 2020, 432 pages) and Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Creates the World’s Most Dangerous Man (Simon & Schuster, 2020, 240 pages), were by former associates and family members. Some were by psychologists who professed to diagnose Trump’s mental conditions; some were by NeverTrump conservatives; some pushed the Russian collusion narrative; some spun conspiracy theories. And some, such as How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Random House, 2018, 240 pages) by Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley, Twilight of Democracy by Russian author Masha Gessen (Riverhead, 2020, 288 pages), and Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Autocracy (Doubleday, 2020, 224 pages), by longtime Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, linked Trump to historical fascism. We cannot examine each of these categories in detail but let’s take a quick spin through some of the more important ones, highlighting their distinctive qualities, after which we will consider what they have in common and above all what they reveal—not about Donald Trump himself, but about their authors. For Trump is a unique figure in American life who stands as a kind of Rorschach on which people project their deepest fears and prejudices.

First, a look at the works of reportage (to use the term loosely). It’s important to note at the outset that political reporting, as traditionally understood, went out the window when Trump came down that escalator at Trump Tower and, in the view of mainstream journalists, began a years-long national emergency Some even declared openly that this crisis required them to dispense with even an attempt at objectivity. They were now champions of the people against Trump’s tyranny and lies, whose job was not to report the news but to stand as the last bulwark of democracy. This self-dramatizing posture led to a great deal of narcissistic preening. And on this front, no one was more objectionable, and more ridiculous, than Brian Stelter and Jim Acosta-

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“It is this lack of self-reliance that opens the possibility of immense catastrophe of civilization, such as the rule of the Nazis in Germany.”   Sebastian Haffner (1907-1999)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       China in 2021 is not Germany in 1933, nor is the United States. History never repeats itself exactly. The past, despite Antonio’s remark to Sebastian in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is not necessarily prologue. But knowledge of the past provides warning signs. The book is a cautionary tale to those who believe in the goodness of big government. They forget what evil people, in the name of the common good, can do.

In this personal, Orwellian-like memoir, Sebastian Haffner attempts to answer the question of why “no individuals ever spontaneously opposed some particular injustice or iniquity they experienced…”, an accusation, he wrote, that applied to himself. “What,” he asked, “became of the Germans?” Haffner was born in 1907, so his earliest memories are of the Great War, a war that was not fought on German soil. “It took place somewhere in distant France.” To a generation of German school boys, war was seen as a “great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations,” which became “the underlying vision of Nazism.” By the spring of 1919 the Nazi revolution was already fully formed and potent: “It lacked only Hitler.” He quotes Bismarck who once said that moral courage is a rare German virtue but “it deserts a German completely the moment he puts on a uniform.”

We read of the hyperinflation of 1923, the year Haffner turned sixteen: “The old and unworldly had the worst of it. Many were driven to begging, many to suicide. The young and quick-witted did well.” The decade of 1914-1923 was a time when a sense of balance, tradition and continuity were abandoned, and many youths turned nihilistic. How, for example, were elders to explain to the young why Germany lost the Great War. As the 1920s wore on, those like Haffner wanted to see the world they loved preserved, but they were becoming a minority: “We knew we could not talk with many of our contemporaries because we spoke a different language.” Hitler was master of promising “everything to everybody.” He evoked the glorious memories of pre-war 1914, as well as the triumphal, anarchic looting of 1923. In doing so, Haffner experienced the loss of “fun, understanding, goodwill, generosity and a sense of humor.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/06/02/like-his-credibility-faucis-book-has-disappeared-n1451658

On Tuesday, we learned that Dr. Anthony Fauci was publishing a book called Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward.

According to the book description, “In his own words, world-renowned infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci shares the lessons that have shaped his life philosophy, offering an intimate view of one of the world’s greatest medical minds as well as universal advice to live by.”

But on Wednesday, the book had disappeared. Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble have deleted the book’s listings and pre-order options. The book’s removal comes in the wake of the release of emails obtained by a FOIA request revealing that Fauci knew that “the typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material,” despite his urging the public to wear them for safety, and that he had been informed that COVID-19 had “unusual features” that it “potentially look engineered” even though he publicly insisted that it was of natural origin.

It is not clear why the book has been removed from retailers or if there’s any connection whatsoever between the released emails and the decision to pull the book.

There are also unconfirmed reports that the White House is “actively discussing an exit strategy” for Dr. Fauci.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-soul-of-black-conservatism-11622226565?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

“Mr. Riley is a Journal columnist, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and author of “Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell,” from which this article is adapted.”

Economist Thomas Sowell has grown accustomed to a certain type of media query, usually from white interviewers. They want to know how, as a black conservative, he has dealt with criticism from fellow blacks. Charlie Rose once asked: “How was it, though, for you . . . to be an African-American man respected by a cross-section of your peers and yet be so against the grain of fellow African-Americans?”

Mr. Sowell, 90, usually responds by challenging the premise. “I don’t know if we can say [that I go] ‘against the grain of fellow African-Americans,’ ” he told Mr. Rose. “You mean fellow African-American intellectuals. But I don’t think African-American intellectuals are any more typical of African-Americans than white intellectuals are of whites.”

In another interview, Mr. Sowell told C-Span’s Brian Lamb that black strangers regularly stop him in public and compliment his views: “When I checked out of my hotel this morning, the black security guard came over and said, ‘Are you Sowell?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ and he shook my hand warmly and we walked—he walked me the length of the corridor and talked about this and about that. . . . So, it’s not Sowell versus blacks. It’s the black intellectuals.”

There is a long history of conflating the interests of black Americans with those of black organizations, black journalists, black academics and other elites. The media lazily continues to turn to these groups, from the NAACP to Black Lives Matter, as if they speak for all black people.

In December 1980, Mr. Sowell headlined the “Black Alternatives” conference in San Francisco. Its goal was to showcase the variety of perspectives among black politicians, intellectuals and civil-rights activists. “The people who were invited,” he began his keynote address, “are people who are seeking alternatives, people who have challenged the conventional wisdom on one or more issues, people who have thought for themselves instead of marching in step and chanting familiar refrains. . . . We have come through a historic phase of struggle for basic civil rights—a very necessary struggle, but not sufficient. The very success of that struggle has created new priorities and new urgencies. There are economic realities to confront and self-development to achieve, in the schools, at work, in our communities.”