RUTHFULLY YOURS

One hundred and forty-six people in Halifax, Nova Scotia wait on a list to borrow a library book. A question hangs over them: Will activists let them read it?

The book is mine — Irreversible Damage — and it is an investigation of a medical mystery: Why is the number of teenage girls requesting (and obtaining) gender reassignment skyrocketing in the United States, Canada, Scandinavia and Europe? In Great Britain, it’s up 4,400% over the last decade.

Though it shouldn’t be, this has become a highly controversial area of inquiry. The book is an exploration of why so many girls would, in such a short timeframe, decide they are transgender. And it raises questions about whether they’re getting appropriate medical treatment.

The book is not about whether trans people exist. They do. And it is not about adults who elect to medically transition genders. As I have stated endlessly in public interviews and in Senate testimony, I fully support medical transition for mature adults and believe that transgender individuals should live openly without fear or stigma.

Yet since publication, I have faced fierce opposition — not just to the ideas presented, challenged, or explored — but to the publication of the book itself. A top lawyer for the ACLU called for it to be banned. Powerful organizations like GLAAD have lobbied against it and pressured corporations — Target and Amazon among others — to remove Irreversible Damage from their virtual shelves.

There’s a pattern to such censorship campaigns. A fresh example presented itself this past week at Science-Based Medicine, which bills itself as “a group blog exploring issues and controversies in the relationship between science in medicine.”

On Tuesday, one of the blog’s long-time contributors, Dr. Harriet Hall — a family physician and flight surgeon in the Air Force with dozens of publications to her name — posted a favorable review of my book. She examined the scientific claims as well as the medical ones and wrote that the book “combines well-researched facts with horrifying stories about botched surgeries, people who later regret their choices and therapists who are not providing therapy but just validating their patient’s self-diagnosis.” Dr. Hall not only shared my criticisms of “affirmative care” — that is, immediately agreeing with a teen’s self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria and proceeding to hormones and surgeries — but also noted that many physicians and therapists feel the same way but are afraid to say so.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/07/01/how-flawed-social-science-leads-us-astray/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

There are two classes of people in the world, the old saw goes, those who divide hu­manity into two classes, and those who do not.

The charms of easy categorization and broad generalization have tempted social scientists for centuries. But the trend has picked up speed, especially in psychology, over the last several decades, as Jesse Singal capably demonstrates in The Quick Fix, his engaging and persuasive examination of the growing, unfortunate popularity of faddish theories and their prosperous purveyors.

A heterodox liberal who wrote for various center-left outlets before succumbing to the Substack revolution and starting a popular podcast with fellow nonconformist Katie Herzog, Singal characterizes his book as “an attempt to explain the allure of fad psychology, why that allure is so strong, and how both individuals and institutions can do a better job of resisting it.” The product of rigorous research and thoughtful interviews, The Quick Fix surveys a broad expanse of social-science findings and methodically assesses their flaws.

Singal bemoans the all-too-typical “jump from claims that are empirically defensible but complex and context-dependent to claims that are scientifically questionable but sexy and exciting — and simple.” Instead, he argues in favor of slow, incremental progress in social-science research that, while less flashy than the regnant style of inquiry, would not be as susceptible to debunking.

The Quick Fix takes aim at a wide range of pop-psychological trends, including those originating on the left (such as the self-esteem movement, inaugurated in Northern California) as well as those coming from the right (such as the “superpredator” theory of juvenile crime in the mid 1990s, which conservatives championed and which even Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden came to embrace). These swiftly adopted theories all fell woefully short in practice, however, frequently confusing correlation with causation, falling prey to attribution error (unduly emphasizing personality-based explanations over situational reasons for a given phenomenon), and confounding scholarly and popular work.

Particular forms of statistical manipulation have come to infect many of the studies purporting to document key psychological trends. One such method is “p-hacking”: massaging data so that they fit snugly under a widely accepted statistical threshold designed to help exclude results that could have been the product of pure randomness. “Hidden flexibility” is another: suppressing testing results not congenial to the desired hypothesis and instead publishing only supportive data. “File-drawing” is yet another: ignoring unpublished studies that revealed results contrary to the published ones. Then there is “range re­striction”: clustering data samples in a particular segment of distribution, yielding a misleading result.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/book-review-war-of-shadows-the-key-that-unlocked-world-war-ii/

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East, by Gershom Gorenberg (Public Affairs, 474 pp., $34)

Russia, Winston Churchill famously said on the eve of World War II, “is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.”

In an illuminating, thoroughly researched new book, Israeli journalist and historian Gershom Gorenberg provides a different kind of key to another mystery involving a different sort of Enigma, namely the Nazi system of codes that proved critical to their failure in the Middle East and their ultimate defeat.

In War of Shadows, Gorenberg unlocks a central mystery that befuddled military historians for decades: How was the famed Nazi field marshal Erwin Rommel able to steamroll British and Allied forces in North Africa for more than a year, reaching the brink of conquering Egypt and cracking the British Empire nearly in half, only to suffer an ignominious and consequential humiliation at El Alamein in July 1942 that began to turn the tide of the war?

Gorenberg describes his own book as “a distinctly new portrait of one of the great turning points of the last century.” Indeed, he has marshaled an impressive array of diplomatic cables archived at various British, Israeli, German, Italian, and American facilities, as well as the personal papers of numerous key figures in the story.

Enigma was, at least in theory, an immensely complex system, comprising nearly 2 billion possible settings in its original design. It relied on three toothed wheels containing a nest of wiring that connected a keyboard to a lamp board and enabled encryption. Each keystroke moved the first wheel a single notch, and, after 26 entries, the second wheel ticked one slot. Only after the second wheel completed its full rotation would the third wheel move as well, meaning it took more than 17,000 (26 to the power of three) keystrokes for the wheels to return to their original setting.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-shutdowns-and-masks-suit-the-elite-11624038950?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

A marvelous review in these pages last November inspired me to read a new book by O. Carter Snead, “What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Human Bioethics.” It was published by Harvard University Press on Oct. 13. Covid-19 had begun its transformation of American life a few months before, and of course the book made no mention of it.

Yet Mr. Snead’s volume helped explain the bizarre and at times perverse response of prosperous Western nations to the pandemic: the long discontinuation of economic life, the belief that pixelated screens can facilitate human relationships, the prohibitions on ordinary social interactions, the fetishization of masks. These policies and practices weren’t handed down from the ether by Reason and Science but bore the weight of contemporary assumptions about—to borrow Mr. Snead’s title—what it means to be human.

His book isn’t about public health but “public bioethics”—the effort to make humane laws and rules for biotechnology and medical care. Mr. Snead’s premise and theme is that humans are embodied creatures, not mere wills and intellects. That premise stands in contrast with the dominant modern worldview, which he calls “expressive individualism”: the belief that the human self “is not defined by its attachments or networks of relations, but rather by its capacity to choose a future pathway that is revealed by the investigation of its own inner depths of sentiment. . . . Because this self is defined by its capacity to choose, it is associated fundamentally with its will and not its body.”

Mr. Snead is a law professor at Notre Dame and director of its de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. On a recent trip to the Midwest, I drove to South Bend to ask what the pandemic year has revealed about our understanding of humanness.

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.