Reflections on the Decline of Civil Discourse

In the Ruins of Public Reason, Part I: The Problem of Dialogical Illiberalism

In the Ruins of Public Reason, Part II: The Barbarians at the Gates

In the Ruins of Public Reason, Part III: When the Barbarians Are at the Gates; Fascism, Bullshit, and the Paradox of Tolerance

I found much of the above to be pretty insightful, and at times, a bit uncomfortable reading.

New York City (what's wrong)

This is a really good video explaining what's wrong with New York from somebody who is obviously not hard right in their politics.

David Starkey: What is to be done?

Is 2022 the Year We All Finally Got Tired of Narcissists?

It’s been a good run for the narcissists.

Over the past decade or so, a mix of shameless self-aggrandizement and self-confident charm has served certain people extraordinarily well, turning them into venture-capital darlings, licensed-merchandise magnates, Forbes cover models, social media superstars, Oprah confessors, business-conference keynoters, new-money plutocrats and, in one case, president. Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, Ye (né Kanye West), Elizabeth Holmes, Meghan Markle, Donald Trump: All of them used attention as currency and ego as fuel, and were rewarded, for a time, with what they craved. We’re drawn to people who love themselves.

But somewhere between the fifth and sixth hour of “Harry and Meghan,” the new Netflix documentary series produced by the former Duke and Duchess of Sussex and filmed at their California mansion — which suggests that there is no one more in love, no one more socially conscious, no one more aggrieved — my natural sympathy for the couple started turning to irritation, and it occurred to me that ego has its limits. And it struck me that the overreach that led to the Sussexes’ critically panned mega-series is the same impulse that turned Elon Musk into a terror on Twitter, that prompted Ye to up the ante of outrageous behavior until he crossed the line into blatant antisemitism, that sent Bankman-Fried from the top of the world to a Bahamian jail.

Some of these turns of fate are more dramatic and complete than others. But once we tally up the losses, it could be that 2022 marks the year our love affair with narcissists started to falter. Many of them met this year with declines in fortunes, falls from grace or newfound public skepticism. Many seemed to overstay their welcome in the public glare. And if this is the moment when we started to crave boring public figures for a change — well, to a large degree, the egotists did it to themselves. Maybe they couldn’t help it.

Read the rest here.

Has "Wokeism" Become a de-facto religion for the left?

Growing up in the 1990s, I was raised to be optimistic about American society. That society welcomed my parents from Pakistan with open arms; it produced the Georgia man who, in the days after 9/11, approached my family and told us that if anyone harassed us in any way because of our Muslim faith, he would come to our aid.

I knew the country still had problems. I decided to become a journalist so I could shed light on society’s imperfections. But I did so in a spirit of hopefulness.

In recent years, however, a much darker vision has emerged on the political left. America isn’t a land of opportunity. It’s barely changed since the days of Jim Crow. Whites, universally privileged, maintain an iron grip on American society, while nonwhites are little more than virtuous victims cast adrift on a plank in an ocean of white supremacy.

This worldview has swiftly implanted itself into major institutions, from our universities to our corporations. Why has it captivated so many people?

The Columbia University linguist John McWhorter attempts to answer that question in “Woke Racism,” which seeks to both explain and rebut this ideology. (McWhorter and I both sit on the board of advisers of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.)

McWhorter, who also writes a newsletter for The Times’s Opinion section, is a Black liberal who dissents from much of the left’s views on race issues. In 2000, he published “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America,” where he argued that counterproductive cultural beliefs and practices, not racial prejudice, were the main forces preventing more African Americans from succeeding. Some of his targets in that book were left-wing academics, who he worried were helping transform victimhood “from a problem to be solved into an identity in itself.”

Yet in the two decades since, those academics seem to have become more influential than ever. In his latest book, McWhorter suggests that’s because their ideology has been elevated into a religion.

“I do not mean that these people’s ideology is ‘like’ a religion. I seek no rhetorical snap in this comparison. I mean that it actually is a religion,” he writes. “An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism.”

While praising earlier generations of civil rights work, he objects to what he calls “Third Wave Antiracism,” which preaches that “racism is baked into the structure of society, whites’ ‘complicity’ in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for Black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct.”

Borrowing a term from the author Joseph Bottum, McWhorter refers to the prophets of the Third Wave as “the Elect.” They see themselves as “bearers of a Good News that, if all people would simply open up and see it, would create a perfect world.”

McWhorter says that the Elect’s unshakable convictions have led them to persecute people with unfair accusations of racism. He cites cases like that of David Shor, a young white progressive analyst who was fired from his consulting firm for tweeting a study showing how violent protests can backfire. Many of these inquisitions have been led not by people from minority groups but from the white Elects themselves, who are described as carrying a sort of “self-flagellational guilt for things you did not do.”

Read the rest here.

This prompted me to see if there were any other reactions of a this sort and Google produced no shortage of links to similar reflections. 

The NY Times asks why police are quitting in droves (really)

Just the latest sign that the left is starting to worry about the effects, political and otherwise, of the harsh anti-police rhetoric emanating from their more strident members. With rising crime and civil disorder there are increasing fears of a backlash at the polls against Democrats. 

Read it here.

Making satire redundant

 You can't make this up. 

Communism is evolving. But the new version isn't any less toxic than the old

On Thursday, I debated against the cult Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek at the Cambridge Union. The motion? “This House believes that Marx was right.” It is extraordinary, on one level, that such a debate can still be held. No one would dream of discussing whether Torquemada or Mullah Omar or Anders Behring Breivik was right. In the grisly tally of murder, Marxism stands unchallenged. The abominable Atlantic slave trade claimed ten million lives. The Nazis, their evils protracted by the lights of perverted science, killed 17 million. Communism has so far slaughtered 100 million. Marx may not have killed anyone with his own hands. Neither, as far as we know, did Hitler, but no one tries to claim that this exculpates him from the horrors unleashed by his doctrines. Only communists get a special pass here. Every barbarity they inflict is explained away as “not real socialism”.

To see how absurd that is, imagine arguing that Hitler’s crimes were “not real fascism”. Fascism, like every other doctrine, is judged by its actual record. Only communism is treated as textbook theory, too pure and numinous to be sullied by real- world examples. Yet history has furnished us with some laboratory-standard experiments: China versus Taiwan, East Germany versus West Germany, North Korea versus South Korea. While free-marketeers are generally prepared to accept that, say, South Korea, marred by occasional corruption and abuses, is an imperfect capitalist state, Western communists resolutely refuse to allow similar inferences to be drawn about North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela or anywhere else. Such, at any rate, were my arguments in the debate. But I was uneasily aware as I made them that they were unlikely to hit home. Marxism is more like a religious sect than a political creed. The more palpably absurd its tenets become, the more the faithful flaunt their piety by embracing them. Marx insisted that his doctrines were scientific truths rather than political opinions. Yet every prediction he made turned out to be wrong. The market system did not destroy the bourgeoisie – it enlarged it. It did not concentrate wealth in the hands of a tiny oligarchy – it increased it across the board. It did not exhaust resources – it kept finding more. Most obviously, it did not collapse under the weight of its contradictions.

Yet, in every generation, a new crop of devotees arises to explain that this time it will be different, this time the prophecy will be fulfilled. Marxists resemble nothing so much as doomsday cultists, constantly shifting the date of their Armageddon as it keeps failing to materialise. Then again, religions evolve, adapt, spawn heresies that sometimes displace them. During the debate, Žižek told me that he had become something of a hate figure among younger Leftist radicals because he diverged from the woke line on some gender and identity issues.

Read the rest here. (paywalled)

Birthrate decline in the West is accelerating

During the past year, living in the shadow of Covid, I have been completing a book on the big global trends in population. This forced me to ask – what effect will the pandemic have on birth rates? There are countless factors to consider.

On the one hand, with more time at home and fewer distractions, we might expect there to be a baby boom. On the other, with couples under each other’s feet from dawn to dusk, sexual attraction may be waning. Delayed weddings, a lack of dating opportunities and a shortage of contraception in the developing world will all be taking their toll in various ways, too.

Then there is the fear factor. With the pandemic raging, women don’t necessarily want to get into a situation in which they will end up in a hospital, where the chance of picking up an infection is high. We now know that a woman of child-bearing age is unlikely to get seriously ill from Covid, and the chance of her passing on any infection to a foetus is probably zero – but that was not clear at the start of the pandemic and might have had the effect of putting some couples off procreation. Economic uncertainty and job insecurity compound the fear.

Overall, in more developed countries like Britain, the data shows that the net impact of these various factors has been a sharp drop in birth rates. Surveys of couples during the early days of the pandemic suggested that many were abandoning plans to start or grow a family, both in the short term and permanently. Meanwhile, early data suggests that the number of children born in the US this year will fall by at least half a million. In continental Europe, the picture is worse: in France, it looks like births are down 13 per cent, in Italy and Spain, 20 per cent.

If this were just a short-term dip, the overall economic impact would be limited. But it isn’t short term. Before anyone had heard of Covid, births were depressed across the developed world. Fertility rates in North America and Japan have been below replacement level for decades, and sinking. Even the better performers among the rich countries – the US, the UK, France and Scandinavia – were already set for steady population decline, mitigated only by ever higher levels of immigration. And small family syndrome is catching. The end of the One Child Policy has done little or nothing to increase childbearing in China; an increasingly educated and urban population, focused on material advancement and now long accustomed to small family size, has no interest in taking up the increased rations in family size now permitted to them by the Communist Party.

Read the rest here.

Population decline and its consequences

For many years it seemed that overpopulation was the looming crisis of our age. Back in 1968, the Stanford biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich infamously predicted that millions would soon starve to death in their bestselling, doom-saying book The Population Bomb; since then, neo-Malthusian rumblings of imminent disaster have been a continual refrain in certain sections of the environmental movement – fears that were recently given voice on David Attenborough’s documentary Life on our Planet.

At the time the Ehrlichs were publishing their dark prophecies, the world was at its peak of population growth, which at that point was increasing at a rate of 2.1% a year. Since then, the global population has ballooned from 3.5 billion to 7.67 billion.

But growth has slowed – and considerably. As women’s empowerment advances, and access to contraception improves, birthrates around the world are stuttering and stalling, and in many countries now there are fewer than 2.1 children per woman – the minimum level required to maintain a stable population.

Falling fertility rates have been a problem in the world’s wealthiest nations – notably in Japan and Germany – for some time. In South Korea last year, birthrates fell to 0.84 per woman, a record low despite extensive government efforts to promote childbearing. From next year, cash bonuses of 2m won (£1,320) will be paid to every couple expecting a child, on top of existing child benefit payments.

The fertility rate is also falling dramatically in England and Wales – from 1.9 children per woman in 2012 to just 1.65 in 2019. Provisional figures from the Office for National Statistics for 2020 suggest it could now be 1.6, which would be the lowest rate since before the second world war. The problem is even more severe in Scotland, where the rate has fallen from 1.67 in 2012 to 1.37 in 2019.

Read the rest here.

A last look at summer

Full Sized Image may be found here.

‘My Fellow Liberals, I’m Tired Of You’

 Not going to excerpt this. It's worth reading in its entirety over at Rod Dreher's. 

Daniel Turner: Goodbye, Washington DC.(Must read)

Mayor Bowser broke her contract with residents like me. So we’re leaving...

Read the rest here.
HT: MCJ

This is one of the best pieces I've read in a while.

A Review: “For the Life of the World” (Ecumenical Patriarchate Social Document)

The verdict: It's not irredeemable rubbish. But there is quite a bit that is problematic.

Read it here.

California Shows The Limits Of Progressivism

More than 2 million Californians recently were left without power after the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric—which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year—preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.
 
Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so overregulating utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids.

Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents, and infectious diseases.

Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.

The demand for socialism is on the rise from young Americans today. But is socialism even morally sound? 

Taxpayers in California, whose basket of sales, gasoline, and income taxes is the highest in the nation, quietly seethe while immobile on antiquated freeways that are crowded, dangerous, and under nonstop makeshift repair.

Gas prices of $4 to $5 a gallon—the result of high taxes, hyper-regulation, and green mandates—add insult to the injury of stalled commuters. Gas tax increases ostensibly intended to fund freeway expansion and repair continue to be diverted to the state’s failing high-speed rail project.

Read the rest here.

Eric Zemmour’s Blockbuster Speech

...Progressivism: the religion of progress, a form of millenarianism that makes a god of the individual and a sacred and divine right of even his most capricious desires.

Progressivism is a form of deified materialism that sees men as undifferentiated and interchangeable beings without sex or origin, beings that, like so many Legos, have been entirely constructed and may thus be deconstructed at will.

Progressivism is a form of secularized messianism, as were Jacobinism, communism, fascism, Nazism, neoliberalism and the ideology of human rights.

Progressivism is a revolution. Indeed, you may recall that our dear President titled his campaign book, Révolution. A revolution that can tolerate no obstacle, no delay, no qualms. Robespierre taught us that the wicked must be killed. For Lenin and Stalin. the good were to be killed, too.

The progressive society that values freedom is deadly to freedom. There is no freedom for the enemies of freedom. Saint-Just’s cry is still on the agenda. Since the Enlightenment, since the French Revolution, since the October Revolution and all the way up to the Third Republic and its radical freemasons, all the way till today, it’s always been the same progressivism: freedom is for them, not for the others. They alone can appreciate and exercise freedom. They alone are worthy of freedom.

...To serve this tyrannical power and impose its diversitarian ideology upon us, as my friend BockCôté aptly calls it, a system of propaganda has been created that brings together television, radio, film and advertising, to say nothing of the watchdogs of the internet. It has proven so effective that it makes Goebbels look like a humble artisan and Stalin a timid novice.

Read the rest here.
HT: Dr Tighe

Violence is Coming for Us

A brief reflection on violence in our culture by Fr. Josiah Trenham.

A Brief Reflection on Male Headship

If then, you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth (Col. 3:1-2). 

I commend you because you remember me in everything, and you maintain the traditions even as I have delivered them to you. But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God (1 Cor. 11:2-3).

Male headship: “The head of a woman is her husband.” I suppose there’s nothing as infuriating to modern feminists as this concept. But I wonder if this ordering would be at least a little less infuriating if it were understood in all its sublime glory as another of the multitudinous patterns that the Creator God has wondrously and wonderfully woven into His glorious Creation, and which even reflects the very being and life of God Himself, as He exists forever in Holy Trinity. 

As we all are well aware, patterns of order exist everywhere in our Lord’s glorious Creation, from the paths of electrons and other subatomic particles, to the paths of planets, stars, and galaxies; from the ordering of the seasons to the planting, growing, and harvesting of crops; and in the growth and adulthood of all animate beings, from the insects and fish to the birds and mammals, from the moment of conception to their last breath on this earth. For the Church fathers, all these countless patterns of order all point to the existence of God, the Creator of all this order that is so essential to the peaceful ongoing existence of all things. 

Since human beings are also part of the created realm, we can scarcely be surprised that our own existence would also partake of patterns of order—which, when abided by, greatly contribute to our ongoing, peaceful existence while we live on this earth. This is self-evident, even with no reference to the Lord our Creator. Just imagine the chaos that would ensue if there were no patterns of order—no directional signposts—for cars and trains and airplanes to be governed by. Or if one day every driver and train conductor and airplane pilot decided to disregard all the rules and regulations, and drive and direct the train and fly wherever he or she happened to want to! 

One such pattern of order in nature is male headship, whereby in marriage, the husband has the duty to be ultimately responsible for the physical, emotional, and spiritual well being of his family, along with having the ultimate responsibility for guiding the ongoing mutual decision-making processes that are necessary for this purpose. The man, generally being the physically stronger, taller, heavier, and deeper-voiced of the two, very naturally has been given this role. The Apostle Paul (1 Tim. 2:13) and the Church Fathers also see a certain preeminence in the authority and responsibility of the husband due to the fact that Adam was created first, and then the woman from his side. 

Of course, every husband, as the servant-head, should always be seeking the input of his wife in the decision-making processes, which should always be decidedly mutual, with decisions being reached virtually always by consensus. Similarly, the husband should also be steadily encouraging his wife to contribute greatly to the marital enterprise as a whole, with all her particular strengths and gifts as well. 

Read the rest here.

Some food for thought

It appears that some snowflake has taken their disappointment over the confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court to a potentially perilous level, allegedly posting... "So Who's Gonna Take One for the Team and Kill Kavanaugh?" on Twitter.

This woke champion of all that's right may be about to discover that freedom of expression and the right to protest has limits. Threatening a Federal Judge, and inciting or soliciting others to harm one is a Federal crime covered under Title 18 Chapter 115 of the US Code. If convicted of said offense there is a real possibility that she could end up doing time in a Federal prison. The Justice Department and US prosecutors do not generally have a sense of humor when it comes to this sort of thing. But as vile as this alleged offense is, she should take some comfort.

Because even if formally arrested and indicted, she has rights.

•  The right to legal councel.
•  The right to be tried in an open court before an impartial jury of her peers.
• The right to confront witnesses and evidence against her and to cross examine or otherwise impeach said witnesses and evidence.
• An absolute presumption of innocence, until such time as the jury concludes that the evidence has proven her guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

This is one of those things things that defines us as a country and marks us out as Americans.

Unless your last name is Kavanaugh.

Society hasn't gone down hill at all

Just take a look at this photo of a roller skating party taken in Chicago.