RUTHFULLY YOURS

The month was one of extremes, reminding me of Jim McKay’s signature words about the dozen Olympics he covered: “The thrill of victory. And the agony of defeat.” The month’s news swung between the glory of the Olympics, the tragedy in Parkland, Florida and the return of volatility to Wall Street.

The Olympics showed us at our best, whether in victory or in defeat. For the first time in twenty years, the women’s hockey team won gold. We saw compassion when Brita Sigourney embraced her teammate Annalisa Drew, when the former beat the latter for the bronze in the freestyle skiing halfpipe. The worst of America was seen in Nikolas Cruz, as he shot seventeen people at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high School in Parkland, Florida. The horrific incident also brought out heroes, like 15-year-old Anthony Borges who took five bullets, while saving 20 classmates and football coach Aaron Feis who died saving students and teacher Scott Beigel who died opening the door of his classroom to let in students. There were others. (See my TOTD, “Another School Shooting,” February 22). I hope we resolve this, without naiveté as to causes and without imposing police-state-like conditions. No one should live in fear, least of all children.

The dog-bites-man story of the month is the continuing saga of Russia meddling in our election. The hypocrisy and hyperventilation by the liberal press reminds one of Claude Rains in “Casablanca” – they were “shocked, shocked” that Russia would meddle in our elections. Of course Russians do. They have for decades. It is what propagandists do. The Kremlin is less interested in outcomes, than in making our democracy appear weak and ineffectual – to sow discord. They have succeeded. Exhibit A, B and C are the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, TV news shows like CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, and late-night comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. Meddling served Russia’s purpose: an ineffectual Congress and a polarized people. We have been guilty of the same. Think of Thomas Jefferson’s support for the French Revolution, or the CIA disrupting/influencing elections from South America to South East Asia, or the role of Radio Free Europe during the Cold War. President Obama campaigned against the re-election of Benjamin Netanyahu in 2015 and for Brexit in 2016. Nevertheless, meddling in others’ elections is a violation of international and U.S. law, something we must guard against. If not doing so already, we should deploy our best crypto-security specialists to counter Russian activity.

This is an edited version of a lecture given at the Holy Land Dialogues in Jerusalem last month.

It has become the orthodoxy in the West that freedom, human rights and reason all derive from secularism and that the greatest threat to all these good things is religion.

I want to suggest that the opposite is true. In the service of this orthodoxy, the West is undermining and destroying the very values which it holds most dear as the defining characteristics of a civilised society.

War is being waged against Western culture from within which is in essence a war against Christianity and its moral origins in the Hebrew Bible. By attacking these Biblical foundations in the name of reason and human rights, the culture warriors of secularism are sawing off the branch on which they sit. The only way to defend Western civilisation is to reaffirm and restore its Biblical foundations. My argument is a development of ideas I first explored in my 2012 book The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power.

We are living in an era which extols reason, science and human rights. These are said to be essential for progress, a civilised society and the betterment of humanity. Religion is said to be their antithesis, the source instead of superstitious mumbo-jumbo, oppression and backward-thinking.

Some of this hostility is being driven by the perceived threat from Islamic terrorism and the Islamisation of Western culture. However, this animus against religion has far deeper roots and can be traced back to what is considered the birthplace of Western reason, the 18th-century Enlightenment.

Actually, it goes back specifically to the French Enlightenment. In England and Scotland, the Enlightenment developed reason and political liberty within the framework of Biblical belief. In France, by contrast, anti-clericalism morphed into fundamental hostility to Christianity and to religion itself.

“Ecrasez l’infame,” said Voltaire (crush infamy) — the infamy to which he referred being not just the Church but Christianity, which he wanted to replace with the religion of reason, virtue and liberty, “drawn from the bosom of nature”.
But this Enlightenment did not remove religion so much as pervert it. It took millenarian fantasies, the idea that the perfection of the world was at hand, and it secularised them. Instead of God producing heaven on earth, it would be mankind which would bring that about. Reason would create the perfect society and “progress” was the process by which utopia would be attained.

Far from utopia, however, this thinking resulted in something more akin to hell on earth. For the worship of man through reason led straight to totalitarianism. It was reason that would redeem religious superstition and bring about the kingdom of Man on earth. And just like medieval apocalyptic Christian belief, this secular doctrine would also be unchallengeable and heretics would be punished. This kind of fanaticism infused the three great tyrannical movements that were spun out of Enlightenment thinking: the French Revolution, Communism and Fascism.

I belong to a nonfiction book club. We meet once a month and have read scholarly books, many biographies and current and past books of opinion and prophesy- from De Tocqueville to Orwell to Friedrich Von Hayek, and last month Allan Bloom’s “ The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students” written in 1987.

The book was controversial and successful beyond anyone’s imagination. But, then, it was 1987 and Ronald Reagan was President and the conservative movement was popular.

Allan Bloom was a professor in the University of Chicago who described how ascendant popular culture and “relativism,” a view that ethical truths depend on the individuals and groups holding them, downgraded classics in great music, literature, ethics, philosophy and education. He charged American schools and universities with failure in providing students with information, debate, curiosity, and an open mind to diversity of opinion.

Our club is convivial but often engages in animated discussions and debate, and “The Closing of the American Mind” elicited many criticisms as well as full-throated admiration.

On one thing we all agreed. There is no campus today, where Allan Bloom would find an open-minded and fair hearing- proof of the thesis of his remarkable and prophetic book.

The social critic and academic questions special protections for women (“Speak up now, or shut up later!”) and prescribes classic films to “inform the alluring rituals of attraction” amid Hollywood’s harassment crisis.

It’s open sex war — a grisly death match that neither men nor women will win.

Ever since The New York Times opened the floodgates last October with its report about producer Harvey Weinstein’s atrocious history of sexual harassment, there has been a torrent of accusations, ranging from the trivial to the criminal, against powerful men in all walks of life.

But no profession has been more shockingly exposed and damaged than the entertainment industry, which has posed for so long as a bastion of enlightened liberalism. Despite years of pious lip service to feminism at award shows, the fabled “casting couch” of studio-era Hollywood clearly remains stubbornly in place.

The big question is whether the present wave of revelations, often consisting of unsubstantiated allegations from decades ago, will aid women’s ambitions in the long run or whether it is already creating further problems by reviving ancient stereotypes of women as hysterical, volatile and vindictive.

My philosophy of equity feminism demands removal of all barriers to women’s advancement in the political and professional realms. However, I oppose special protections for women in the workplace. Treating women as more vulnerable, virtuous or credible than men is reactionary, regressive and ultimately counterproductive.

Complaints to the Human Resources department after the fact are no substitute for women themselves drawing the line against offensive behavior — on the spot and in the moment. Working-class women are often so dependent on their jobs that they cannot fight back, but there is no excuse for well-educated, middle-class women to elevate career advantage or fear of social embarrassment over their own dignity and self-respect as human beings. Speak up now, or shut up later! Modern democracy is predicated on principles of due process and the presumption of innocence.

An axiom is a truth nobody can prove. For example, everyone knows that one equals one, but there is no formal proof. However, when one tries to do arithmetic by ignoring that axiom and, say, letting one equal two, then very quickly the math descends into chaos and absurdity. There is no getting around an axiom, even though one cannot prove it.

A similar principle applies to the social sciences. It was an accepted axiom of society that men are men and women are women. No longer. That axiom has been rejected by some elements of society, and the absurd consequences are becoming more apparent all the time.

The late Betty Friedan, a so-called pioneer of the radical feminist movement, once said the only difference between men and women is biological “packaging” – that is to say superficial appearance. It would follow that by changing one’s external appearance, one can change his sex. Liberals accept this as an axiom.

Science clearly refutes this, but radical leftists, and even some conservatives on the more libertarian side, manage to ignore the science, despite growing evidence that the transgender doctrine is harmful to individuals and to society in general.

The science says maleness and femaleness are the two necessary and complementary halves of the human species. They have different functions that serve each other. Morally speaking, the sexes are equal but not equivalent, and that seems to be a point of major confusion to liberals.

In January, when negotiations over the fate of 800,000 DACA recipients broke down, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) blamed the impasse on the alleged racism of President Trump and his senior advisers.

“Last night the president put forth a plan,” Pelosi told the U.S. Conference of Mayors. “Let me just say what I said last night, that plan is a campaign to make America white again.” This was not only an obvious lie, but a spectacularly brazen one, since Trump’s announced plan would provide a path to citizenship not only for the illegal aliens who had benefited from President Obama’s constitutionally suspect Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, all of whom are nonwhite, but for a million additional illegals, mainly from Latin America, who are also mainly nonwhite.

Trump’s general immigration plan seeks to move to a merit-based system, which would give priority to immigrants who can contribute needed skills to the country and would have a reasonable chance of success once they arrived. Giving priority to English speakers would enhance the ability of new arrivals to assimilate and succeed. To oppose such a plan on the grounds Pelosi does, one would have to believe that nonwhite immigrants don’t have skills or don’t speak English. Anti-Trump reporter Jim Acosta made the latter insinuation on CNN. He said Trump wanted only immigrants from majority-white countries like “England and Australia.” In fact, English is the official language in more than 57 countries, including such nonwhite countries as Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Botswana, as well as Caribbean nations like Jamaica and Guyana.

Pelosi’s malicious accusation was even more disconnected from reality, since Trump has never proposed excluding or expelling populations based on race, which would be the only way to “make America white again” (whatever that might mean). Yet this denial of obvious facts in order to gin up a racial indictment of what otherwise would be seen as patriotic policies has become the ever-present theme of the Democrats’ attacks on Trump’s presidency. These attacks began with his first statement on immigration during the opening presidential primary debate. At that time, speaking specifically of people crossing the border illegally, Trump said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best . . . . They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with [them]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

When the human experience is simplistically divided into two worlds, then things increasingly do not easily fit.

Specifically, what happens when the number of victims begins to outnumber the pool of oppressors? At that point can the oppressed become victims of the oppressed?

The following news stories illustrate the increasingly incoherent world of the aggrieved and their aggressors:

Item: Nancy Pelosi is on a tour to blast the new tax reform and reduction law, whose savings often will result in $1,000 or more per annum to families. The law already had encouraged private enterprise bonuses to employees due to employer savings. Pelosi habitually scoffs that such savings are “crumbs.” At a recent speech, after she intoned that income inequality would be exacerbated, a woman in the audience shouted out, “How much are you worth, Nancy?”

Fair question. She and her husband, a developer and property investor (with apparently good connections within the bureaucracy of federal construction, land sales, and property acquisitions) are worth over $100 million. They own more than one multimillion-dollar home. And soon the Pelosis are likely to pay tens of thousands of dollars more in California property and income taxes that are no longer fully deductible under the new law that she so energetically despises.

Could that banal fact explain why Pelosi is so heated about a reform that gives the middle class more take-home pay, and will create more jobs and bonuses from the private sector—partly at the expense of blue-state, high-income professionals like herself?

From this teachable moment, we could conclude that progressivism is so often promoted by the very rich. They are best positioned to game the system and seek exemption through virtue-signaling about the poor. The Pelosis of our postmodern world assume that they are not to be subject to the ramification of their ideologies (she dismissed the rude questioning without answering). And they so often exhibit a peculiar contempt for the working middle classes. The latter are clueless, in need of guidance, and supposedly deluded by the promise of “crumbs”—given their lack of education and sophistication, and the absence of the romance accorded to the distant poor. How did we ever get to a point where a progressive politician on the barricades, worth $100 million, lectures the middle class that their extra $200-300 a month are crumbs?

Albert Einstein’s unsurpassed prowess in physics needs no introduction, but lesser known is that his creative genius and curiosity extended beyond the realm of relativity and photoelectrics into tinkering and inventing. Over his life, Einstein filed patents for a range of innovative products.

The first, and most successful, of his exploits was a refrigerator. In the 1920s, nascent refrigerators used highly toxic, corrosive, or flammable compounds like sulfur dioxide or methyl formate as refrigerants. When passed through tubes and chambers while being pressurized and depressurized, these chemicals could efficiently cool a target chamber. However, moving them around required motors, and thus moving parts, which were subject to breaking down or leaking. When Einstein read a news article about an entire family in Berlin who died in their sleep by breathing in leaking refrigerant fumes, he resolved to do something about it.

He and his colleague Leo Szilard thus spent the early 1930s designing a refrigerator that utilized calmer chemicals – butane, ammonia and water – as well as an ingenious electromagnetic pump. The system required no internal moving parts and was completely sealed. All it needed was an external heat source in the form of a contained natural gas flame.

Promoting the deconstruction of gender roles, as modern feminism urges, works to divorce women from their intrinsic natures—a very unhappy outcome. Worst of all, it creates one more wedge issue suitable for the further aggrandisement of government power.

In December 2016 a special episode of the BBC hit Sherlock reprised in cinemaplexes across the United States. “The Abominable Bride” had had its silver-screen debut eleven months earlier, but popular appeal induced the distributor Fathom Events to bring it back. Although primarily designed for Sherlock’s fan base, the show’s defining conceit, Holmes and Watson in modern dress, was suspended. Instead, the plot warped back to the London of Arthur Conan Doyle, where a succession of cads and bounders have been murdered by what seems a vengeful female ghost. Initially stumped, Sherlock consults his brother, Mycroft, who enigmatically confides that the perpetrators compose an invisible army, found everywhere, who cannot be resisted because “they are right”. Thus guided, Holmes eventually discovers a congregation of hooded feminists in a ruined abbey, plotting the murder of their nastiest victimisers. The drama never quite concludes—it’s but a drugged fantasy of the modern Holmes interrupted by anxious friends—yet there’s no doubt of the heroic status of the homicidal assembly. They’re true social justice warriors, if a bit avant la lettre.

While it never is, or has to be, made explicit, the episode’s moral premise, one that now saturates Western consciousness, is that women rate among the great victims of human history. Certainly none in the audience I joined seemed at all uncomfortable with it. And why should they be? It’s the core message of contemporary feminism, affirmed by politicians, the media and, most especially, our socially engaged professoriate. The latter, in fact, have “theorised” it in the now fabled formula of “race, gender and class”. Settled wisdom in the university, and holy writ for women’s studies, the formula is meant to link women with serfs, slaves and other forms of immiserated labour. Off-campus progressives embrace the equivalence as well—the unity and moral authority of their victims’ coalition demanding no less. Without it the recurrent political trope of a “war on women” would appear as risible as that of a war on cat fanciers.

So, is the formula valid?

Clearly not—at least if one is willing to use evolution’s scorecard in assessing winners and losers. Evolution’s bottom line is reproductive success, how many offspring are produced and, of these, how many themselves survive to reproduction. Prospectively it determines the size of an individual’s contribution to future gene pools. Retrospectively it suggests the degree of wellbeing an individual has likely experienced—wellbeing having much to do with succeeding at what comes naturally.

In defending an aide accused of wife beating, President Trump asked, “Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?” Alas, without defending all such claims, the president has a point that allegation often translates into culpability without an adherence to due process.It is fair to say that without due process, arbitrary judgment would prevail. The presumption behind this legal provision is that the state must respect the legal rights of the individual and guarantee that no accused is punished without an orderly and adequate procedure that is applicable uniformly in all cases.

With an epidemic of sexual harassment cases, due process is very often honored only in the breach. What this means, of course, is that the legal justification for punishment is dubious, even when warranted. British legal precedent passed this provision on to the New World, where it has been refined and ensconced. However, for many who have been victimized, legal machinery works too slowly and cumbersomely to generate the justice being sought.

Yet it would be a monumental mistake to assume due process can be eliminated or down graded. Kangaroo Courts relied on admission of guilt after punishment was meted out. In fact, the system of law this nation has enjoyed would be imperiled by any diminution in due process procedures.