RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/12/beyond-reason-how-shame-and-disgust-shape-law-and-society/

Some time ago, I participated in a conference about “policing in an age of terror.” One big topic was the place of informed hunches in the armory of the police.  Was it okay, or was it culpably racist, for the police to act on educated hunches when going about their jobs? Should they “profile” certain groups of people and, in some circumstances and in some neighborhoods, “stop and frisk” people they thought looked suspicious? Well, the heart, as Pascal famously assured us, has its reasons that reason does not know. About this, as about most things, Pascal was right. But what does it tell us about “rational hunches” or “policing in the age of terror?”

Before I endeavor to answer those impossible questions, I should acquaint you with my qualifications for intervening on this large topic. My short-form disclosure is: I have none. I am not a lawyer, judge, or police officer. I am not even an academic. In terms of qualifications, I am like the man on the Manhattan omnibus or subway—a chap I shall revert to later. That is, I bring no specialized or professional knowledge to the table, merely the advantages—if they are advantages—of commonplace sentiment.

Let me begin by acknowledging the air of paradox that surrounds the topic of the conference. “Rational Hunches.” Doesn’t that phrase express a paradox, not to say an oxymoron? The relevant sense of “hunch,” the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, refers to “a premonition or intuitive feeling.” Curiously, that sense of “hunch” is of relatively recent vintage. It isn’t listed in the main part of my edition of the OED; you have to look in the supplement to find it. But what business does a “premonition” or an “intuitive feeling” have consorting with the adjective “rational”: that which is based on reason, argument, and logic? Do we not usually, and rightly, oppose what is rational to what is intuitive, silently supplying the adverb “merely” before so cognitively challenged a mental operation? And do we not always, and rightly, do so when dealing with subjects as serious as law enforcement?

The honest answer is, not really. “Life,” as Samuel Butler ob­served, “is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”

We do not like to admit that. In many ways, modern Western culture is also a Cartesian culture. We are rationalists and empiricists. Like the state of Missouri, we negotiate our way through the traffic of life with the challenge “Show me” announcing our progress.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/hysterics-for-hamas

The female voices rose high-pitched and shrill above the crowd:

“Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terrorist state.”

“We don’t want no Zionists here, say it loud, say it clear.”

“Resistance is justified when people are occupied.”

The voices that answered them were also overwhelmingly female, emanating from hundreds of students chanting and marching around tents pitched in front of Columbia University’s neoclassical Butler Library, part of an effort in late April to prevent the university from uprooting the encampment.

The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. True, when activists need muscle (to echo University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests), males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example. But the faces behind the masks and before the cameras are disproportionately female, as seen in this recent gem from the Princeton demonstrations.

Why the apparent gender gap? One possible reason is that women constitute majorities of both student bodies and the metastasizing student-services bureaucracies that cater to them. Another is the sex skew in majors. The hard sciences and economics, whose students are less likely to take days or weeks out from their classes to party (correction: “stand against genocide”) in cool North Face tents, are still majority male. The humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female. (Not surprisingly, males have spearheaded recent efforts to guard the American flag against desecration.) In progressive movements, the default assumption now may be to elevate females ahead of males as leaders and spokesmen. But most important, the victim ideology that drives much of academia today, with its explicit enmity to objectivity and reason as white male constructs, has a female character.