RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/books/review/how-to-fight-anti-semitism-bari-

Bari Weiss has written what must be judged a brave book. That it must be is a badge of shame for the “progressive” America with which she identifies.

Should it call for courage for a politically liberal American Jew like Weiss to point out that Jews, though a tiny percentage of the population of the United States, are the victims of over half of its reported hate crimes? That anti-Jewish rhetoric, once confined to right-wing extremists, now infests the American left, too?

Should someone like Weiss, an editor and opinion writer at The New York Times, have to expect brickbats from her colleagues for observing that a vicious demonization of Israel and its supporters has become routine in much of the American left and endemic on college and university campuses? That whatever its failings, Israel is a remarkable human adventure that deserves at least as much sympathy as criticism? That it is only natural for a Jew to care deeply about a Jewish state’s welfare and survival? That Jewish solidarity is as legitimate as any other form of human solidarity?

Should she have to fear ostracism or damage to her journalistic reputation for pointing out that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, while theoretically distinguishable, have long merged into a single ugly phenomenon? Or that it is obscene, less than a century after the Holocaust, to class Jews with their historical “white oppressors”?

Unfortunately, as Weiss writes in “How to Fight Anti-Semitism,” the answer to all these questions is yes.

Weiss’s book, whose careful organization and articulate prose belie its hurried composition in the wake of last October’s Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, is not just about the left. (A native of Pittsburgh herself, she retains a strong attachment to its Jewish community.) The Pittsburgh shooter was a lunatic-fringe white supremacist, and “How to Fight Anti-Semitism” seeks to be evenhanded: Its chapter on the anti-Semitism of the left is preceded by a chapter on the anti-Semitism of the right and followed by a chapter on the anti-Semitism of radical Islam. Though not claiming to be original, Weiss is admirably succinct in her explanation of why groups having nothing else in common are united in their dislike or hatred of Jews. “In the eyes of the anti-Semite,” she writes, “the Jew is … everything.” It is not the actual Jew that most anti-Semites hate (many of them have never met one) but what they project onto him. “He is whatever the anti-Semite needs him to be.”

https://www.city-journal.org/html/who-killed-horatio-alger-13413.html

The title character of Horatio Alger’s 1867 novel Ragged Dick is an illiterate New York bootblack who, bolstered by his optimism, honesty, industriousness, and desire to “grow up ’spectable,” raises himself into the middle class. Alger’s novels are frequently misunderstood as mere rags-to-riches tales. In fact, they recount their protagonists’ journeys from rags to respectability, celebrating American capitalism and suggesting that the American dream is within everyone’s reach. The novels were idealized, of course; even in America, virtue alone never guaranteed success, and American capitalism during Alger’s time was far from perfect. Nevertheless, the stories were close enough to the truth that they became bestsellers, while America became known as a land of opportunity—a place whose capitalist system benefited the hardworking and the virtuous. In a word, it was a meritocracy.

To this day, Americans are unusually supportive of meritocracy, and their support goes a long way toward explaining their embrace of American-style capitalism. According to one recent study, just 40 percent of Americans attribute higher incomes primarily to luck rather than hard work—compared with 54 percent of Germans, 66 percent of Danes, and 75 percent of Brazilians. But perception cannot survive for long when it is distant from reality, and recent trends seem to indicate that America is drifting away from its meritocratic ideals. If the drifting continues, the result could be a breakdown of popular support for free markets and the demise of America’s unique version of capitalism.

The fundamental role of an economic system, even an extremely primitive one, is to assign responsibility and reward. In animal packs, the responsibility of leadership and the reward of mating opportunities are generally assigned to the strongest. In human societies, responsibility tends to take the form of employment, and the rewards are money and prestige. Because physical strength has long since lost its importance, economic systems determine in various ways who receives the responsibilities and the rewards. The dominant criterion in traditional society was birth: the king’s firstborn son was the next king; the landowner’s firstborn son, the new landowner; and the son of the company’s owner, the next chief executive. Most modern societies, by contrast, try to select and reward according to merit. Indeed, surveys show that in the abstract, most people in developed countries agree with the idea that merit should be rewarded.

It isn’t easy to decide what constitutes merit, of course. Consider an environment with which I’m familiar: American academia. Let’s say you want to determine who the best professors are. How do you rank publications? Do you value the number of papers that someone has written, or their impact?

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/14/bari-weiss-explains-fight-rise-anti-semitism/

You don’t need to convince me, but for anyone who remains skeptical that rising domestic anti-Semitism is a threat, Bari Weiss’s How to Fight Anti-Semitism offers a compelling survey of the present scene. The New York Times opinion editor and writer examines anti-Semitism on the right, the left, and among Islamists.

Weiss describes her book as being “for anyone, Jew or gentile, who cannot look away from what is brewing in this country and in the world and wants to do something to stop it.” I appreciate her casting a wide net, especially on such a civilizationally important topic, but this is primarily a book by a center-left writer for a center-left audience. That said, because I agree with Weiss that leftist anti-Semitism tends to be “more insidious and perhaps more existentially dangerous,” I didn’t mind that addressing the left was not only her clear passion, but also her strong suit.

This book should still engage readers from the right, though, even if it isn’t pitched squarely at us. Weiss writes knowledgeably about her topic, deftly weaving historical episodes, observations from writers and thinkers, and her opinions into one coherent argument that feels something like an extended version of Weiss’s columns on the subject.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/14/the-war-on-common-sense/

Faltering belief in common sense is behind the rejection of the Founders’ idea of America. More broadly, it is behind the astonishing rejection of Western civilization by its own people.

When Thomas Paine appealed to “common sense” to make the case for American independence, it probably never crossed his mind that there would ever be a need to make the case for common sense itself, at least not in America. But common-sense thinking has fallen out of favor. Because it has been under attack for a very long time, it no longer gets the respect it once commanded. Deep thinkers have discarded it, elites have learned to disdain it, and many of us have had our confidence in its value badly shaken.

The consequences are enormous. Faltering belief in common sense is behind the rejection of the Founders’ idea of America. More broadly, it is behind the astonishing rejection of Western civilization by its own people—a rejection that has reached what looks to be a civilization-ending crisis in Europe.

Examples of the war on common sense are now everywhere in public life. How about the denial of the plain fact that humans are either male or female?

Not long ago, a boy in a tutu and a tiara who claimed he was a girl would still be regarded as a boy. Today, academic and cultural elites, as well as government officials, insist that “gender identity” is more real than biology. They say there are many genders, and one website tells me there are 63. Elites tell us we had better get with the many-gender program, or else. And while we are at it, we had better get politically correct about marriage. We are told that marriage no longer means one thing, a union between a man and a woman. How long will it be until we have 63 varieties of marriage?

The war on moral common sense has reached new heights of absurdity. If we point out a need for common-sense steps to protect ourselves from Islamic terrorists, we are said to suffer a psychological condition called “Islamophobia.” But unlike other phobias, such as claustrophobia, this condition is said to make us victimizers rather than victims. Similarly, if we say that America needs to secure its borders, we are met by cries that “walls are immoral.” Evidently, the common-sense wisdom that good walls make good neighbors has been taken down by the masters of political correctness.