RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ms. Cohen is a dean and English professor at Drexel University.

There was a time when both literature and the study of literature came under the delightful rubric belles lettres—beautiful letters. When the phrase was introduced in the 18th century, literature was considered, at its best, beautiful. Devotees tried to emulate that beauty in their response to it.

Modernism was a turning point, when literature became more alienated and combative with respect to society. American literature, with its muscular, democratic associations, contributed to the change. Belles lettres seemed too elitist, not to mention too French, to describe early-20th-century writing.

The prestige of belles lettres was further impaired by the rise of science as civilization’s potential savior. Science was necessary to defend democracy, first during World War II and then during the Cold War. Now, it is the means of moving ahead in a competitive, technological society. Who has time for beauty when there is serious work to be done?

The death knell for belles lettres came with a 1959 lecture by the scientist and novelist C.P. Snow, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” Snow seemed to call for cooperation between science and the humanities, but he was really decrying the scientific illiteracy of writers and critics who, unlike him, didn’t happen to be scientists as well. His lecture touched a nerve. It spoke to the insecurity of the humanist who wished to have the hard knowledge and social status of the scientist.

The eminent literary critic F.R. Leavis delivered a rebuttal in 1962. He took issue with Snow’s tone and sense of superiority. But his critique was not so much about Snow himself (though it was taken this way) as about the assumption that science and the humanities could be judged by the same standards. Literature, according to Levis, had a role in society that had no bearing on what science—a focused, fact-based discipline—could do.

Leavis’s argument met with mockery and abuse. It was labeled foolish, intemperate and overly personal—which is to say original, emotional and subjective, the very qualities associated with the human condition that are central to the humanities.

He had few supporters at the time, but he never retreated from his position—and he turned out to be prescient. Snow’s scientific bias has infected all humanities disciplines at all levels. We have seen the prestige of numbers and facts take precedence over imagination and discernment.

The problem, as Leavis understood, is that science and the humanities are inherently incommensurate endeavors. Science builds on its discoveries. It moves forward, so that the past is the literal foundation for the present and future. Literature does not move forward in this way. Poets and writers may be influenced by their predecessors, but they do not have to be. One need not read Shakespeare to write a play or a poem. By the same token Shakespeare is as relevant today as he was when he wrote. That cannot be said of Ptolemy.

The simple truth that progress is central to science but not to the humanities is difficult to grasp for people who seek improvement in every walk of life. It fuels the drive to render the humanities scientific—through the use of technical jargon, general theories about social texts, and quantitative tools to analyze word choice, sentence structure and other aspects of literature. There are even efforts to measure the imagination using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

All this is fine as it pertains to political science, linguistics and neuroscience. But literature and literary criticism—belles lettres—ought not to be usurped in the process. Their purpose is different. Literary study ought to be concerned with the search for meaning and value in life. The humanities teach wisdom—or at least exercise the faculty that leads to that elusive end. Without wisdom, so-called progress can lead to corruption and devastation.

When the humanities desert their mission and seek to ally themselves with progress, they become dangerous adjuncts to ideological agendas. Students come to feel there is a definitive, “virtuous” reading of an event or a text; they excoriate great authors of the past for not abiding by the standards of the present; they come to see the world as divided into victims and oppressors. They create a climate that arouses opposition from those who feel excluded or demeaned by such thinking but who lack the humanistic training to do more than lash out.

The unique role of the humanities is to recognize genius, revere complexity, and be deliberative in judging character and action, in life as in art. Without training in this habit of mind, we become a polarized society with no tools to communicate across difference. Nothing happens except name-calling and retribution. CONTINUE AT SITE

After promising Americans for seven years that it would fix the Affordable Care Act, the Republican Party failed. This is a historic debacle that will echo politically for years.

A divided GOP Senate could not muster a majority even for a simple bill repealing the individual and employer mandates they had long opposed. Nor were they able to repeal the medical-device tax that some 70 Senators had gone on record wanting to repeal in previous Congresses.

The so-called skinny bill that failed in the Senate would have gone to a conference with the House, which had signaled its willingness to work out a compromise. That arduous process is the way the American legislative system works. A strong majority of the GOP caucuses on both chambers supported the effort to repeal and replace ObamaCare, but that was undone by an intransigent and petulant minority.

Where to begin in comprehending John McCain’s last-minute defection? Early Friday morning Senator McCain turned his thumb down on the bill, which doomed this long effort. Explaining that vote, Mr. McCain said the bill “offered no replacement to actually reform our health care system and deliver affordable, quality health care to our citizens.” This is hard to credit, because his “no” has left the American people with ObamaCare in toto.

On Thursday, with three other Senators, Mr. McCain said he wanted assurances that House Speaker Paul Ryan would negotiate in conference. Mr. Ryan said he would, and the other three voted yes. Senator McCain nonetheless chose to cast the decisive vote that broke the GOP promise.

The Arizona Senator’s politics has always been more personal than ideological. His baffling, 11th-hour vote makes us recall Donald Trump’s infamous campaign slight about Mr. McCain’s war imprisonment. Whatever his motives, the greater shame is that his vote keeps the edifice of ObamaCare in place with all of its harm to patients, the health-care system and the national fisc.

There were many other contributors to this debacle. The Freedom Caucus dragged out the process in the House, which created time for opposition to build. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski betrayed her many previous votes and public statements. Two GOP Governors, Ohio’s John Kasich and Nevada’s Brian Sandoval, grandiloquently assaulted the bill for their own political gain, which made life difficult for their states’ Senators, Rob Portman and Dean Heller.

The Senate’s GOP moderates conspired to kill both a historic Medicaid reform and repeal of ObamaCare’s myriad taxes. Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee worked to defeat Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s compromise draft to no good end. We cannot recall a similar effort by so many to subject their own party to such an abject public humiliation.

Mr. Trump in a tweet blamed the three GOP Senators who voted no, but he was also an architect of his own defeat. Mr. Trump was elected in no small part on his promise to do big deals like this one. In the end he couldn’t close. He never tried to sell the policy to the American public, in part because he knows nothing about health care and couldn’t bother to learn.

His chaos theory of White House management, on morbid public display this week, also means no one on Capitol Hill knows who is in charge. As his approval rating sinks below 40%, few in politics fear him and increasingly few will step forward to defend him.

What next? The Senate failure has burned the reconciliation process available from last year and thus the ability to pass anything with 50 votes. The next reconciliation bill is earmarked for tax reform, if the hapless GOP can first pass a budget outline. Meanwhile, the ObamaCare exchanges will continue to deteriorate. This means the Trump Administration will face a choice of how much money to spend to keep some of them from collapsing. HHS Secretary Tom Price can give insurers more flexibility, but premiums will keep rising while choices for consumers decline.

The Republicans who did so much to kill repeal and replace will now clamor for bipartisan action. And it would be nice to think Democrats would meet Mitch McConnell halfway. But Democratic leader Chuck Schumer knows he has Republicans on the run, and his price for 60 votes will be a costly bailout of ObamaCare, which liberal health-care academics are already proposing. Good luck repealing the law’s mandates and taxes, or deregulating insurance markets.

Mr. Schumer knows that a “bipartisan” Senate insurance bailout will further divide the GOP and put the House on the spot if it fails to go along. With the House majority in jeopardy in 2018, Speaker Ryan could face an excruciating choice: Attempt to save the seats of his party’s moderates by voting with Democrats to bail out the exchanges, or get blamed by Democrats and the press for all of ObamaCare’s ills.

Republicans will now try to salvage what is left of this Congress with tax reform. But the tragedy remains: Republicans in their selfish political and personal interests squandered a once in a generation chance to show that their principles can make life better for Americans.

Not the supposed protectionist Donald Trump, but the “free trade” wing of the Republican Party have taken the United States into a trade war that it can only lose. New sanctions against Russia passed by the House and Senate last week force Europe into a de facto alliance with Russia against the United States, and by extension with China as well. It is the dumbest and most self-destructive act of economic self-harm since the United States de-linked the dollar from gold on August 15, 1971, and it will have devastating consequences. The charade in the House and Senate may embarrass Trump, but it also poses a threat to European energy supplies as well as an extraterritorial intrusion into European governance. Berlin, Paris and Rome will conspire with Moscow to circumvent the sanctions while attacking the United States at the World Trade Organization and other international fora.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), and their counterparts in the House of Representatives allowed their dudgeon against a sometimes provocative president to overwhelm their sense of self-preservation. The sanctions will hurt Russia, but not nearly as much as they will hurt the United States over the long term. The White House envisioned sanctions as a bargaining chip, to be used to persuade Moscow to behave in the Ukraine and to limit the ambitions of its Iranian ally of convenience. In their present form, however, the president will have no authority to remove sanctions imposed by Congress. That turns a feint into a threat. Wars have been started over less.

The Democrats along with the McCain Republicans, it will be remembered, accused Trump of undermining the Atlantic Alliance, of isolating the United States, and of handing a diplomatic victory to Russia. Not Trump, but his detractors, have given Moscow a degree of leverage over Western Europe to which it has not aspired since the height of the Cold War in 1983, when Soviet premier Yuri Andropov considered a pre-emptive Russian attack in response to Western plans to deploy medium-range missiles in Germany.

Supposedly it was Trump who ignored the exigencies of international relations in favor of domestic political theater. Yet it is the Establishment wing of the Republican Party and its Democratic allies who combined to embarrass the president, without a moment’s consideration of the consequences of their actions. Among Washington’s elite, Trump Derangement Syndrome has nothing to do with ideology. It is about jobs and patronage. This is not hypocrisy. It is chutzpah.

Trump humiliated the Democrats and the Establishment rump of the Republican Party last November, who now face the prospect of permanent exile from political life. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement July 25, historian Edward Luttwakpredicted a Trump dynasty lasting sixteen years, in which Ivanka Trump Kushner would succeed her father. “No wonder that leading Democrats and non-Trumpers continue to act hysterically even eight months after the election. President Trump’s plan threatens to exclude them all from office until long past their retirement age,” Luttwak wrote. The hopes of high office of the defeated Establishment can be realized only by stifling the Trump Administration in its cradle.

That is the motivation behind the Black Legend of Russian collusion that continues to occupy the waking hours of the American media while putting most Americans to sleep. As Sen. McCain said after the Senate vote July 27, the sanctions “respond to Russia’s attack on American democracy…We will not tolerate attacks on our democracy. That’s what this bill is all about. We must take our own side in this fight, not as Republicans, not as Democrats, but as Americans.”

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Obama, the humanitarian huckster-in-chief, weakened the United States for eight years presenting his crippling diversity policies as altruistic when in fact they were designed for destruction. His legacy, the Leftist Democratic Party with its “resistance” movement, is the party of the Humanitarian Hoax attempting to destroy American democracy and replace it with socialism.

Diversity is an anthem for the Leftist Democratic Party. They rail against Republicans as exclusionary racists, sexists, misogynists, homophobic anti-immigration elitists insensitive to diversity. The Left’s deceptive inclusionary message was codified in Hillary Clinton’s campaign slogan “Stronger Together.” So let’s examine the subjective reality of the leftist fiction being propagated by these humanitarian hucksters.

The history of diversity began in 1948 when President Truman signed Executive Order 9981 that desegregated the military making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, or natural origin. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made discrimination in the workforce illegal and broadened the categories making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or natural origin. In the mid to late 20th century diversity was still an issue of appearances. What race are you? What color are you? What religion are you? Are you male or female? Where were you born?

Workforce diversity was historically an issue of form not content because our Constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech implies freedom of thought. Diversity of opinion was a moot point. No one asked What do you think? And then came the radical socialist huckster-in-chief Barack Obama.

Presenting himself as the agent of change and protector of all Americans Obama deceptively focused diversity on race, gender, and ethnicity and deliberately ignored thought. Obama publicly spoke of inclusive diversity and privately pressed his left-wing liberal agenda into every sphere of American life. The echo chamber that he and Ben Rhodes created in the White House extended to every mainstream media outlet and entertainment medium. The medium became the message. There is virtually no distinction between Obama’s radical liberal views and what is presented as educational curriculum and entertainment in the United States. Americans are being deceptively propagandized toward collectivism and socialism in the name of diversity.

There is no media diversity when conservative political voices are not hired as political analysts or allowed to speak as guests. There is no entertainment diversity on television or at the movies when conservative script writers, actors, and producers are not hired to present an alternative voice. There is no academic diversity on campus when conservative voices are not hired or allowed to speak as guests.

In a stunning sleight of hand ex-president Barack Obama successfully perpetrated the Humanitarian Hoax of diversity by pressuring conformity and silencing opposing voices. When there is no freedom of speech there is no freedom of thought and there is no real diversity – there is only the appearance of diversity. Thomas Sowell famously remarked, “The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”

Georgetown University adjunct professor Preston Mitchum recently tweeted, “Yes, ALL white people are racist. Yes, ALL men are sexist. Yes, ALL cis people are transphobic, we have to unpack that. That’s the work.”
http://www.libertyheadlines.com/georgetown-univ-prof-white-people-racist/?AID=7236

Fomenting racism is a despicable pursuit that should never be tolerated under the guise of academic freedom. Imagine if Georgetown Law hired an adjunct law professor who tweeted that all black people are racists. The outrage from the Left would be deafening. Preston Mitchum is a disgrace and should be fired and never allowed to return to campus. Reverse racism is still racism and the pretense of diversity is not the reality of diversity.

Currently, the historian Thucydides is the object of debate among those within the Trump Administration and its critics, who, like scholars of the last three millennia, focus on lots of differing Thucydidean personas. https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/26/everyone-suddenly-quoting-thucydides/

Did Thucydides warn in deterministic fashion about ascendant powers like Athens that disrupt the existing order of Sparta and its Peloponnesian League—and thus prompt preventive attacks from established nations (“the Thucydides trap”)?

Is the historian thus a guide to how to handle a rising China? Or did he remind us how wrong-headed (but nonetheless free and correctable) choices can turn a tense situation into a catastrophe?

Was Thucydides, an admiral and man of action, a voice of the aristocratic elite, or sympathetic toward small landowners who were neither oligarchic nor radically democratic?

Translated into modern terms, was he like-minded with the contemporary elite Washington establishment or a likely supporter of what are now the forgotten Red-State middle classes between the coasts?

Did he despise the reckless democracy that exiled him, or develop a grudging respect for its dynamism and powers of recovery from its own self-inflicted wounds—and become especially complimentary of Periclean leaders who can act forcefully within democratic checks and balances?

Some 2,400 years after Thucydides wrote the Peloponnesian War, scholars still argue over why and how he crafted his history.

Unchanging Human Nature and the Thin Veneer of Civilization
Are there, then, any guiding principles in reading his history that are beyond debate and must be respected in all current and often politicized efforts to channel the great historian?

In fact, there are two.

One, Thucydides assumes that human nature remains unchanging and thus he thinks his history will transcend the Peloponnesian War and become “a possession for all time” (ktêma es aei) that can enlighten us about wars and their consequences across time and space. On that score, he was quite right. Today his history is still mined for wisdom about conflict in the present waged by people inherently no different from Spartans and Athenians of the past. Thucydides would approve of his contemporary utility. He certainly did not believe that enlightened intellectuals, with reliance on resources like greater education and wealth, can change the nature of man and thereby always eliminate war through rational compromise and higher wisdom.

Two, Thucydides believes that the veneer of civilization is precious and thus when ripped off—by the plague at Athens, the revolutions at Mytilene and Corcyra, the ultimatums to and dialogue with the Melians, and the expedition to Sicily—man’s innate nature is revealed as savage and reduced to its circumstances. He is of the tragic, not the therapeutic, bent, and at odds with the later Tacitean sense of the noble savage.