RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Cleverness is not wisdom.”
— Euripides, the Bacchae

At the height of the sophistic age in classical Athens, the playwright Euripides asked an eternal question in his masterpiece, the Bacchae: “What is wisdom?”

Was wisdom defined as clever wordplay, or as the urban sophistication of the robed philosophers in the agora and rhetoricians in the assembly?

Or instead was true wisdom a deeper and more modest appreciation of unchanging human nature throughout the ages, which reminds us to avoid hubris, tread carefully, always expect the unlikely, and distrust the self-acclaimed wise who eventually prove clever fools? At the end of the play, a savage, merciless nemesis is unleashed on the hubristic wise of the establishment.

Euripides would have appreciated the ironies of the 2016 election.

Millions of Americans, far from the two coasts, kept largely quiet. They either did not talk much to pollsters or they politely declined to reveal their true feelings. They tuned out talking heads and ignored blue-chip pundits. They did not listen to the shrill bombast of President Obama on the campaign trail or pollsters who ad nauseam declared Hillary Clinton the sure electoral-college winner.

They were not shamed or much bothered by the condescension they receive from the media and the Washington elite, who proved wrong or biased or both in their coverage. They believed that free trade was not worth much if it was not fair trade, that illegal and politicized immigration was as subversive as legal and diverse immigration was valuable, that real racists were those who used race and ethnicity to encourage others to break the law for their own political and elite interests, and that it was stupid to trust their job futures to those who never lost their own jobs while often losing those of others.

So, to return to Euripides, what really is wisdom in the 21st century?

Is it to be judged according to the values of those who inhabit the Podesta WikiLeaks archive? Is being smart defined as being on lots of corporate boards, having an impressive contact list of private cellphone numbers, name-dropping one’s Ivy League degrees, referencing weekends in the Hamptons or on Martha’s Vineyard, or being ranked in the top 100, 1,000, or 5,000 of some cool magazine’s list of go-getters and “people to watch”?

What would we do without psychological studies about sex and gender? We’ve had studies that most women are “part lesbian” and a lack of access to sports bras deters girls from playing sports. We’ve had a study showing that women are more likely to become lesbian if they don’t have ready access to men and a landmark study showing that female chimpanzees are more likely to be domineering feminists.

And now we have a new study concluding that white, masculine men are more likely to be mentally ill, conducted by Y. Joel Wong, a man who isn’t white, may not be masculine, and actually…who knows if he is really a man for sure?

Men who have “playboy” attitudes and believe in power over women may face a higher risk for mental health trouble than men who don’t, a broad new research review suggests.

The finding on sexism, and other so-called “traditional views” on masculinity, stems from an analysis of 74 studies conducted between 2003 and 2013. The studies included nearly 19,500 predominantly white male participants, the researchers said.

The research “looked at expectations about what it means to be masculine, and how that relates to mental health outcomes among men,” explained study lead author Y. Joel Wong.

“What we found overall is that the more that men conformed to masculine norms the poorer their mental health, and the less likely they were to seek mental health services,” he said.

Wong’s team focused on data concerning the embrace of 11 different types of so-called “masculine norms,” including the desire to win; to retain emotional control; to take risks; to engage in violence; to exert dominant behavior; to participate in a “playboy” lifestyle; to be self-reliant; to elevate work to the highest level of importance; to retain power over women; to maintain a disdain for homosexuals; and to pursue “status.”

Desiring to win = mentally ill. Retaining emotional control = mentally ill. Making work a priority = mentally ill. But I’m glad that at least these are traits associated with “masculinity.” I’m not 100% sure what a “playboy” lifestyle or “retaining power over women” means; by these twisted standards, it may simply mean a refusal to be subservient to women like these emotionally castrated guys.

There have been many excellent post-election analyses since Trump’s improbable win, most of have which have identified the disaffected working class and the failure of the Democrats’ politically correct identity politics as the driving factors.

But one thing that seems to be overlooked is the Tea Party, the reasons for its beginnings, and its underlying anti-establismentarianism in this election.

It was not just the failure of the Democrats’ urban-centric political focus on minorities, women, and income inequality that deep-sixed Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Walking it back, what has outraged so many grassroots conservatives was the phony conservatism under George W. Bush, culminating in the financial crisis of 2008. It pushed them overboard to no longer get fooled by the Republican establishment that had been basically a milder form of the big-government progressivism that had taken over the Democratic Party following the loss of Hubert Humphrey in 1968 to Richard Nixon. It was that crushing loss that sent Democrats on a far-left trajectory for decades to come.

Bush did nothing to cut back the size and growth of government. Instead, he actually expanded it through his unfunded Medicare Part D prescription drug program and the “No Child Left Behind” federally mandated education program. There were no efforts at all to rein in spending and the size of the federal government. And the war with Iraq added untold billions to the ever expanding annual federal deficits.

Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” was liberalism in disguise. From “Decision Time for the GOP Elite” at AT:

Remember that the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress during the presidency of George W. Bush and yet nothing was done to control the size, scope, or cost of the federal government.