RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/the-meritocracy-trap

The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite, by Daniel Markovits (Penguin Press, 448 pp., $30)

In 1958, the English sociologist Michael Young famously invented the term “meritocracy.” Sixty years later—after a financial crisis, a major recession, record-high inequality, and stubborn racial gaps have led to skepticism about opportunity in America—Young’s formulation is afire. In less than a decade, we’ve seen an outpouring of articles and books on meritocracy’s contribution to America’s ills.  The library includes MSNBC host (and Brown graduate) Chris Hayes’s Twilight of the Elites, Harvard law professor Lani Guinier’s The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, and Cornell economist Robert Frank’s Success and Luck: Good Fortune and The Myth of the Meritocracy; soon to come is Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit.

The Meritocracy Trap, by Oxford-educated, Yale law professor Daniel Markovits, is the latest entry into this crowded arena. Markovits is fully aware of the irony of his resume, given his disgust with the system by which American society chooses its elites, and he’s got lots of company. As economist (yes, Harvard-educated ) Tyler Cowen has quipped: “The best critiques of the meritocracy have come from those with extreme merit.”  I’ll come back to this puzzle later, for it’s one that Markovits’s book, like others in the genre, doesn’t fully explore. 

The current meritocratic system began as an effort to open up a hereditary WASP elite to outsiders—and for a while, as immigrants, minorities, and women earned their way into America’s legacy campuses, writes Markovits, it looked like it was working more or less as intended. In the last few decades, however, the system has morphed into a do-or-die tournament for the prize of an Ivy League degree and a bonus-rich job at a swanky address. Instead of being democracies of talent, Harvard and Yale and their elite cronies are now quasi-exclusive clubs for the children of wealth. Money gives rich parents the means to groom their kids for these clubs as early as infancy with classes, books, and trips to museums meant to enhance kids’ development. They move to wealthy neighborhoods, where schools offer a vast array of (ahem) “enrichment” activities, including test prep and college-essay tutoring. Alternatively, they put their kids through 12 years of $40,000-a-year-plus private schools, whose administrators just happen to be chummy with Princeton admission officers. 

https://nypost.com/2019/10/13/inside-the-medias-relentless-crusade-to-destroy-president-trump/

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the mainstream media has shed its once-noble mission — the pursuit of the truth — and instead adopted a new purpose: to take down the president. In an excerpt from her new book, “Resistance at All Costs: How Trump Haters are Breaking America,” out Tuesday, KIMBERLEY STRASSEL examines how far the press will go in its relentless crusade . . .

Last week The Washington Post revealed the alarming news that House Democrats were considering having their anonymous “whistleblower” testify from a remote location, and in disguise. Just as shocking as the details of this plan was the justification the Post ladled on this Democratic effort to hide impeachment information from the public.

It explained, high up in the story, that the cloak-and-dagger approach was merely Democrats expressing “distrust of their GOP colleagues, whom they see as fully invested in defending a president who has attacked the whistleblower’s credibility and demanded absolute loyalty from Republicans.”

This, from a newspaper with a tagline of “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Maybe the better journalistic epitaph is: Democracy dies in bias. How did journalism get here?

I’ve never engaged much in media criticism, because it’s almost too obvious. Yes, the mainstream media is liberal and biased. But at least in the past, that bias was largely a function of insularity. Most reporters weren’t even fully aware they were prejudiced politically; everyone they worked and socialized with held the same left-of-center views.

That’s changed in the age of Trump. The press has embraced its bias, joined the Resistance and declared its allegiance to one side of a partisan war. It now openly declares those who offer any fair defense of this administration as Trump “enablers.” It writes off those who question the FBI or Department of Justice actions in 2016 as “conspiracy” theorists. It acts as willing scribes for Democrats and former Obama officials; peddles evidence-free accusations; sources stories from people with clear political axes to grind; and closes its eyes to clear evidence of government abuse.

This media war is extraordinary, overt and increasingly damaging to the country.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/11/the-original-nation

How to Fight Anti-Semitism
by Bari Weiss

Hate: 
The Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism in France
by Marc Weitzmann

No one views Israel with indifference. As an old joke puts it, a philo-Semite is just an anti-Semite who likes Jews. Bari Weiss quotes this joke (to disparage Donald Trump) without grasping its deeper meaning. Anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism respond to the same thing, namely, God’s promise to the descendants of Abraham and Sarah. Supersessionist Christians hate the Jews because they covet the Election of Israel. Other Christians take heart from the miracle of Jewish survival and bless the Jews in the spirit of Genesis 12:3 and Romans 11.

The same people may do either at different times. The great-­grandparents of today’s evangelical Christians were the Protestants who blocked Jewish immigration before and during World War II. When everyone professed Christianity, it was fashionable to despise Jews as recalcitrant holdouts against the manifest truth of the gospels. When the cultural tide turned against Christianity during the 1960s, though, the miracle of Jewish national rebirth in the Holy Land appeared as a sign to Christians that the God of the Bible kept his promises.

Israel’s success is the point of departure for both the new philo-­Semitism and the new anti-Semitism. The mainstream American Jewish ­organizations put the Holocaust at the center of their representations to the broad public. But revulsion at the mass murder of Jews did not cause the surge of sympathy for Israel among Christians. On the contrary, the ­Holocaust at first reinforced the common ­Christian belief that God had abandoned the Jewish people. Israel’s rebirth and flourishing moved Christian opinion. Israel’s victory in the 1967 war was seen as a validation of God’s promise to the Jews and a beacon of hope to Christians.

https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/arts-culture/2019/10/what-saul-bellow-saw/

In May 1949, a year after the establishment of the state of Israel, the American Jewish literary critic Leslie Fiedler published in Commentary an essay about the fundamental challenge facing American Jewish writers: that is, novelists, poets, and intellectuals like Fiedler himself.

Entitled “What Can We Do About Fagin?”—Fagin being the Jewish villain of Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist—the essay shows that the modern Jew who adopts English as his language is joining a culture riddled with negative stereotypes of . . . himself. These demonic images figure in some of the best works of some of the best writers, and form an indelible part of the English literary tradition—not just in the earlier form of Dickens’ Fagin, or still earlier of Shakespeare’s Shylock, but in, to mention only two famous modern poets, Ezra Pound’s wartime broadcasts inveighing against “Jew slime” or such memorable lines by T.S. Eliot as “The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot” and the same venerated poet’s 1933 admonition that, in any well-ordered society, “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”

How should Jewish writers proceed on this inhospitable ground?

There was a paradox in the timing of Fiedler’s essay, since this was actually the postwar moment when Jews were themselves beginning to move into the forefront of Anglo-American culture. The “New York Intellectuals”—the first European-style intelligentsia on American soil, clustered around several magazines and publishing houses—were beginning to gain prominence as writers, thinkers, critics, and professors. Fiedler was thus not a petitioner requesting permission to enter American letters but someone already in place and intending to stay. Indeed, by the end of his essay, after laying out the problem, he proposes an answer:

[We] can begin to build rival myths of our meaning for the Western world, other images of the Jew to dispossess the ancient images of terror. Several, of varying dignity and depth, are already in existence: the happy Hebrew peasant of the new Israel; the alienated Jew as artist (Kafka’s protagonist Josef K.) or dilettante (Proust’s Charles Swann) or citizen (Joyce’s Leopold Bloom); the sensitive young victim of the recent crop of American war novels; the ambiguous figure of Saul Bellow’s novel [The Victim], both victim and oppressor.

According to Fiedler, the response to existing negative stereotypes was to create autonomous new representations. For him, as for others at the time, the modern Jew could possibly even become a literary archetype: the new Everyman of a society in which many felt somewhat alienated, or marginal. In charting this proposed new path of Jewish fiction, Fiedler singles out such forerunners as Kafka and Proust and then, as a contemporary exemplar, Saul Bellow, whose second novel, The Victim, about a New York Jew who is being stalked by an anti-Semite, had been published two years earlier.

It was an auspicious choice of writer and book.

https://quillette.com/2019/10/02/gilead-resembles-

Margaret Atwood, whose work I have long admired, is now being hailed as a prophet. It is quite the phenomenon. According to the pundits, Atwood’s 1985 work, The Handmaid’s Tale, which Mary McCarthy once savaged, and the recently-published 2019 sequel, The Testaments, are dystopias which aptly describe the contemporary climate change crisis, toxic environments, the rise in infertility, and the enslavement of women in Trump’s America.

Is this all Atwood is writing about? Do the increasing restrictions on abortion in America parallel the extreme misogyny of Gilead, the theocratic state in Atwood’s saga? Is the unjust separation of mothers and children, a la Trump on the southern border, what Atwood has foretold? Every review and interview with Atwood that I could find strongly insists that this is the case.

Michelle Goldberg, in the New York Times, attributes the current popularity of The Handmaid’s Tale to Trump’s ascendancy. She writes: “It’s hardly surprising that in 2016 the book resonated—particularly women—stunned that a brazen misogynist, given to fascist rhetoric and backed by religious fundamentalists was taking power.”

Michiko Kakutani recently reviewed The Testaments for the New York Times. She writes:

Atwood understands that the fascist crimes of Gilead speak for themselves…just as their relevance to our own times does not need to be put in boldface. Many American readers and viewers of The Handmaid’s Tale are already heavily invested with the story of Gilead because we’ve come to identify with the Handmaids’ hopes that the nightmare will end and the United States—with its democratic norms and constitutional guarantees—will soon be restored. We identify because the events in Atwood’s novel…now feel frighteningly real. Because news segments on television in 2019 are filled with images of children being torn from their parents’ arms, a president using racist language to sow fear and hatred and reports of accelerating climate change jeopardizing life as we know it on the planet.

At the anti-Trump pro-women’s rights marches around the country, some feminist protesters dressed like Handmaids in billowing, shapeless red dresses, their facial identities obscured by large, white Victorian-era bonnets, carrying signs that read: “Make Margaret Atwood fiction again” and “The Handmaid’s Tale is not an instruction manual.”

They have a point. Abortion rights are being steadily challenged and nearly eviscerated in the formerly slave-owning American states. Right-to-life lawyers insist that the protection of unborn children without any gestational markers is the law of the land. We now have free states and slave states in terms of access to high quality, insurance-funded abortions. Pregnant, drug-addicted women are being jailed for child abuse.

However, Atwood’s Gilead reflects and foretells two other profoundly devastating realities, which neither the critics nor Atwood dwell upon.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/09/an-uncanny-gift-for-prophecy

The backdrop of Michel Houellebecq’s novel is by now well established. In this — his eighth — the bleak, essentially nihilistic nature of life is once again only relieved by equally nihilistic humour and sex. From the opening of Serotonin it is clear that we are in safe Houellebecqian hands. About the new anti-depressant that the narrator has been prescribed: ‘The most undesirable side effects most frequently observed in the use of Captorix were nausea, loss of libido and impotence. I have never suffered from nausea.’

There are also those volcanic side explosions which are occasionally mistaken for bigotry by people who don’t recognise that Houellebecq suffers just one bigotry, which is species disgust. The Dutch get it early and twice from the narrator of Serotonin — ‘a race of opportunist polyglot people’.‘Holland isn’t a country, it’s a business at best.’ The narrator of Serotonin is a typical creation of the author, which is to say essentially indistinguishable from Michel Houellebecq.

Florent-Claude Labrouste is a man in his late forties whose parents have killed themselves in a suicide pact. He dislikes his name, has no friends, works in the Ministry of Agriculture and hates Paris, where he lives. Mentioning his diesel 4×4 he says: ‘I mightn’t have done much good in my life, but at least I contributed to the destruction of the planet.’

His girlfriend, for whom he feels nothing but disgust and contempt, is Japanese. He discovers that she has been cheating on him in orgies, though is neither surprised nor even bothered by the extremity of the details. Finally he chooses to leave her, resign from his job, walk out of his rented flat and do something else. ‘Clearing my office took me a little under ten minutes. It was nearly four o’clock; in less than a day I had reconfigured my life.’

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/05/camille-paglia-now-more-than-ever/

More than anything, Camille Paglia’s style and élan vital invites readers to think further about culture and ideas and, in a society dominated by ideology, this is something we need now more than ever.

Ever since she burst onto the intellectual scene with the publication of Sexual Personae (1990), Camille Paglia has been challenging the norms of what it means to be a public intellectual. Her critiques of culture, art, and society have garnered a lot of attention from friends and foes alike. Love her or hate her, when Camille Paglia speaks, the world listens. As it should. She is a writer of enormous intellect, who has a feel for the nuances and intricacies of how being human works. She is a great synthesizer of the large and great ideas upon which civilizations were built and crumbled, and her views on gender, sexuality, and art are delivered with a verve and speed only a few can match.

Paglia’s new book, Provocations, is a collection of essays written over the course of the last 20 years. As one might expect, the essays cover a multitude of topics: feminism, politics, gender, higher education, film, and art. In many ways, Paglia has continued the approach of analysis and synthesis of ideas she did in Sexual Personae. She has the ability to take a large idea that encompasses one civilization in history and show us that those signs never left us.

Paglia certainly did this in Sexual Personae, in which she brilliantly posited the theory that the Apollonian and Dionysian divide in man never really left us despite the cultural and chronological distance of ancient Greek myths. Men are still thrusting toward the need to conquer and women still nurture but also have an incredible power over men. These are tough pills to swallow in today’s society of identity politics in which the struggle to erase the differences between men and women is all consuming, but according to Paglia, we are still re-enacting the most primal archetypes of humanity.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/book-review-the-education-of-an-idealist-samantha-power/

Samantha Power’s new memoir unwittingly crystalizes the weakness and amorality of Obama’s foreign policy.

In The Education of an Idealist, a new memoir of her government service, former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power relates a breathtaking moment from the White House Situation Room in 2013. In the course of a meeting on the mounting humanitarian and strategic crisis in Syria, President Obama, brushing aside Power’s arguments in favor of more assertive action against the Assad regime, grumbled, “We’ve all read your book, Samantha.”

The president was referring to A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, in which Ms. Power, then the executive director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights, detailed America’s long, deplorable record of inaction in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocidal war.

A Problem from Hell opens with the lethal persecution of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, in whose behalf the U.S. ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, issued urgent but unavailing dispatches to Washington reporting the outbreak of “race murder.” Power fleshed out her survey of modern genocide (a term, she reminds us, coined by the scholar Raphael Lemkin) by turning to the Holocaust, Iraq in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s 1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds, Rwanda in 1994, and the Balkans for much of the Nineties. Power’s personal journey into this ghastly subject began as a freelance reporter in Sarajevo, where she witnessed what Slobodan Milosevic’s project of “Greater Serbia” meant for ethnic minorities in the former Yugoslavia.

With the partial exception of Bosnia and later Kosovo, where the United States led belated rescue operations under NATO auspices, these campaigns of systematic slaughter were greeted by fatal indifference by the outside world and permitted to take their hideous course. In A Problem from Hell, Power condemned generations of American policymakers for their declared realism—more precisely, to borrow a concept from Christian philosophy, their amoral quietism—in the midst of systematic persecutions and massacres of minorities.

In his devastating new book The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray examines the twenty-first century’s most divisive issues: sexuality, gender, technology and race. He reveals the astonishing new culture wars playing out in our workplaces, universities, schools and homes in the names of social justice, identity politics and intersectionality.

We are living through a postmodern era in which the grand narratives of religion and political ideology have collapsed. In their place have emerged a crusading desire to right perceived wrongs and a weaponization of identity, both accelerated by the new forms of social and news media. Narrow sets of interests now dominate the agenda as society becomes more and more tribal–and, as Murray shows, the casualties are mounting.

Readers of all political persuasions cannot afford to ignore Murray’s masterfully argued and fiercely provocative book, in which he seeks to inject some sense into the discussion around this generation’s most complicated issues. He ends with an impassioned call for free speech, shared common values and sanity in an age of mass hysteria.