Outrageous ramblings on ‘The Age of Outrage’

In the Wriston Lecture at the Manhattan Institute in November, Jonathan Haidt rained down absolute fire on the cult of intersectionality and how it’s shortchanging those in higher education and destroying so much of what’s left of intellectual life in America and a good part of the West:

“The identity politics taught on campus today is entirely different from that of Martin Luther King. It rejects America and American values. It does not speak of forgiveness or reconciliation. It is a massive centrifugal force, which is now seeping down into high schools, especially progressive private schools.

“Today’s identity politics has another interesting feature: it teaches students to think in a way antithetical to what a liberal arts education should do. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world. By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a Utilitarian or a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any one situation. But nowadays, students who major in departments that prioritize social justice over the disinterested pursuit of truth are given just one lens—power—and told to apply it to all situations. Everything is about power. Every situation is to be analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education. This is induction into a cult, a fundamentalist religion, a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety, and intellectual impotence.”

 

 

 

 

The necessity of defending the right kind of culture wars

From The Australian, Chris Kenny argues that Brexit/Trump voters aren’t necessarily the nationalist bigots they’re made out to be by the political/media class, but that they represent something much more intelligible:

“The nation-state matters. Borders are meaningful. Immigration needs to be organised. The rule of law and equality before it must take precedence over cultural tolerance.

“This is not reactionary. This is not a redneck backlash. This is rat­ional. It is common sense.

“And it represents a commitment not to squander the unequalled gains and privileges of Western civilisation.

“To the extent we are seeing culture wars, they are eminently justifiable. Our culture and what it has nurtured — from science and technology, through democracy and the rule of law, to high art and unprecedented standards of living — represents the pinnacle of civilisation to this time, and the aspirations of just about everyone on the planet except those who would tear it down to create a bleak caliphate.

“Mainstream people know this, even though the political/media class has made us almost ashamed to say it.

“There should be no need to apologise for defending this bounty, this legacy.”