Why the Rats Conquer Empires
It is darker than you think. Perhaps you have heard about speech codes on campus, about the intolerance of the Left, about their mob tactics, their fetid hypocrisy, and you thought we who complain about it were exaggerating.
You perhaps thought that, at least here in America, certain ideals and values were so much a part of our way of life, so deeply embedded into the hearts of the people, that there was no real threat to our beloved freedoms.
Those ideals and values are not a part of our way of life any longer. They have not been for twenty or thirty years. We are past the tipping point, and it will be a very, very difficult struggle to get back up the pebbly slope to the brink of the cliff down which we fell.
I could list any number of examples from my own field, starting with the expulsion of Theodore Beale from SWFA based on a false accusation by a leftist, going through my editor at Tor books having his child taken from him based on a false accusation, and ending with my agent at Tor books being fired due to a false accusation by a leftist.
I will content myself with a single item of evidence; you can find countless additional items from sources as wide ranging as the monstrous Peter Singer to the absurd Pajama Boy Ethan Krupp.
A creature named Korn writing in the Harvard Crimson calls for an end to Academic freedom.
I am not kidding, I am not exaggerating, and I am not making this up. Here is the link:
Allow me to quote at length, lest I be accused of misrepresenting the true sewer depth of evil being promoted here, the bland banality of the call for chains and gags.
The Doctrine of Academic Freedom
Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice
By Sandra Y.L. Korn February 18, 2014
In July 1971, Harvard psychology professor Richard J. Herrnstein penned an article for Atlantic Monthly titled “I.Q.” in which he endorsed the theories of UC Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen, who had claimed that intelligence is almost entirely hereditary and varies by race. Herrnstein further argued that because intelligence was hereditary, social programs intended to establish a more egalitarian society were futile—he wrote that “social standing [is] based to some extent on inherited differences among people.”
When he returned to campus for fall semester 1971, Herrnstein was met by angry student activists. Harvard-Radcliffe Students for a Democratic Society protested his introductory psychology class with a bullhorn and leaflets. They tied up Herrnstein’s lectures with pointed questions about scientific racism. SDS even called for Harvard to fire Herrnstein, along with another of his colleagues, sociologist Christopher Jencks.
Herrnstein told The Crimson, “The attacks on me have not bothered me personally… What bothers me is this: Something has happened at Harvard this year that makes it hazardous for a professor to teach certain kinds of views.” This, Herrnstein seems not to have understood, was precisely the goal of the SDS activists—they wanted to make the “certain kinds of views” they deemed racist and classist unwelcome on Harvard’s campus.
(emphasis added)
Harvard’s deans were also unhappy. They expressed concerns about student activists’ “interference with the academic freedom and right to speak of a member of the Harvard faculty.” Did SDS activists at Harvard infringe on Herrnstein’s academic freedom? The answer might be that yes, they did—but that’s not the most important question to ask. Student and faculty obsession with the doctrine of “academic freedom” often seems to bump against something I think much more important: academic justice.
[…]
Yet the liberal obsession with “academic freedom” seems a bit misplaced to me. After all, no one ever has “full freedom” in research and publication. Which research proposals receive funding and what papers are accepted for publication are always contingent on political priorities. The words used to articulate a research question can have implications for its outcome. No academic question is ever “free” from political realities. If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?
Instead, I would like to propose a more rigorous standard: one of “academic justice.” When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.
The power to enforce academic justice comes from students, faculty, and workers organizing together to make our universities look as we want them to do. Two years ago, when former summer school instructor Subramanian Swamy published hateful commentary about Muslims in India, the Harvard community organized to ensure that he would not return to teach on campus. I consider that sort of organizing both appropriate and commendable. Perhaps it should even be applied more broadly. Does Government Professor Harvey Mansfield have the legal right to publish a book in which he claims that “to resist rape a woman needs … a certain ladylike modesty?” Probably. Do I think he should do that? No, and I would happily organize with other feminists on campus to stop him from publishing further sexist commentary under the authority of a Harvard faculty position. “Academic freedom” might permit such an offensive view of rape to be published; academic justice would not.
[…]
In this case, discourse about “academic freedom” obscures what should fundamentally be a political argument. Those defending the academic boycott should use a more rigorous standard. The ASA, like three other academic associations, decided to boycott out of a sense of social justice, responding to a call by Palestinian civil society organizations for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions until Israel ends its occupation of Palestine. People on the right opposed to boycotts can play the “freedom” game, calling for economic freedom to buy any product or academic freedom to associate with any institution. Only those who care about justice can take the moral upper hand.
It is tempting to decry frustrating restrictions on academic research as violations of academic freedom. Yet I would encourage student and worker organizers to instead use a framework of justice. After all, if we give up our obsessive reliance on the doctrine of academic freedom, we can consider more thoughtfully what is just.
Sandra Y.L. Korn ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is a joint history of science and studies of women, gender and sexuality concentrator in Eliot House.
My comment: I had originally intended to answer the points raised by Miss Korn with counter arguments. But I am bewildered to discover that there is no argument to answer. She raises no points and has no reasoning to answer. It is merely an unsupported assertion that Academic freedom is insignificant. One need not read past her subtitle, since nothing is actually said to support the assertion in the subtitle: Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice.
She means what Leftists call “social justice”, that is, the suppression of all viewpoints aside from the politically correct ones.
It is the peculiar leitmotif of the modern age that most discussion and debates consist of one party denying the obvious and asserting a logical paradox while the other party, in bewilderment, tries to explain in simple terms something everyone above age seven knows and has always known.
In this case, the obvious is this: Whether or not certain races, assuming we can define race scientifically, score statistically higher or lower in IQ tests, assuming we can discover what it is IQ tests actually measure, if anything, is a purely scientific question. That is a question of true and false.
Once it has been established whether this is or is not the case, the moral and political debate on what, if anything, manmade laws and customs can do to cure the situation, if anything, can begin. That is a question of justice and injustice.
But there is no point in speaking of the justice or injustice of certain facts to exist. A fact is a fact. If an error has been made in the collection of facts or an error in the deduction of what those facts logically imply, that must be discussed on a factual and logical basis.
Deterring that conversation from occurring is counterproductive precisely because the longer men do not investigate the erroneous statement of fact of logic, the longer the error lingers uncorrected.
A fact cannot be moral or immoral, just or unjust. Only human action can be unjust.
To make it dangerous for a man to discuss a fact is an injustice for which there is no parallel, for it abolishes any use of reason between men, and reduces all things to a contest of cunning and strength, a war of all against all.
Is this unclear? Miss Korn is calling for injustice to triumph over justice in the name of … justice. In the name of ending oppression, she wishes to oppress.
Academic freedom began in the Middle Ages, when the Church created our current university system, and received from the secular authorities an unalienable right to speak, debate, think, write, and research on any matters they saw fit. The ideal was that scholars and their students would be free to investigate any ideas, even unpopular, false or blasphemous ideas, or read the writings of pagans and Mohammedan authors, in order to exercise and train the faculties of reason. The ideal was that the truth was strong enough to defend herself.
The screed of Korn — it is not an argument — consists of a list of successful attempts by the wee thugs of Harvard to shut down or shut up their political enemies, here explicitly identified as the rightwing, but which really includes all those who believe in individual freedom.
From the list, we can see what ideas and ideals the rats and orcs and trolls and other enemies of civilization oppose. The first is scientific truth, and the freedom to speak it. Truth is racist and ‘classist’ (note the use of yet another stupid neologism, one more word in the vocabulary of Newspeak).
The second idea the rats oppose is ‘Islamophobia’ which means, I assume, opposition to Shariah Law. Shariah Law is the totalitarian theocratic code of the Mohammedan. It has nothing to recommend it except that it is barbaric, antichristian, and antiwestern.
Radicals have delighted in barbarism from the days of the Guillotine to the days of the Holocaust of Jews in Germany, the genocide of Kulaks in Russia, the multiple genocides of Mao in China. Anything that opposes Christendom, they adore, and they kiss the bloodstained hands of chic tyrants, or wear their images on tee-shirts.
I note in passing that a certain poor soul calling himself Watermelon occupied some three days and thousands of words recently here on my blog denying that the Left shielded and applauded and supported Muslim terrorists. But Miss Korn rebukes her fellow leftist and shows their true colors.
The Left holds that freedom of religion is Islamophobia. The orcs demand that it must be crushed.
The third thing the rats oppose is modesty. Need anything be said on this point?
I will repeat the obvious: the Leftists love sexual liberty and libertinism, and hate chastity, femininity, masculinity, romance, marriage, love, and beauty. Anything that makes women appealing to honest men or virtuous in the eyes of the angels, they hate. Anything that belittles women, or makes them vapid and shameless and appealing to the lowest and most lust-filled of men, that they like. Ozzie and Harriet, happily married, they despise. Bill and Monica, an adulterer abusing his chump, that they adore.
If you have noticed the schizophrenia between feminists insisting on puritanism and feminists supporting pornography, you are confused. Allow me to cure the confusion: both Puritanism and Pornography are opposed to happy marriages and virtuous women, wives, and mothers. Both are opposed to human happiness and domestic bliss.
The fourth is Israel. The calls for the destruction of the civilized First World Israelis at the hands of vicious Third World barbarians never cease. The Left believes that the Jew must be destroyed. They are anti-Semites so virulent as to make Queen Isabel blench. And yet the rats call anyone and everyone racist.
The second thing the screed contains instead of any reasoned argument is some tepid and ineffective rhetoric. Here Miss Korn cannot be blamed; she is a student, and not skilled at this or anything, due no doubt to her tender years.
But if I were grading her effort, the use of rhetorical figures is poor, consisting of no striking images or metaphors, no attempt to appeal to the emotions of the readers, nothing but some stale name-calling: love of freedom is called “obsessive reliance”; the censorship by the campus thought police is called “frustrating restrictions on academic research” (an euphemism not likely to fool anyone); she appeals to the “workers” — the tin-eared flatness of that particular rhetoric is appalling. It is an artifact from the Victorian age.
The only paragraph that contains anything like an argument is the weak reductio where Miss Korn asserts that since academic research is paid for, therefore (and I frankly cannot imagine by what leap of logic that ‘therefore’ crosses the gulf between two unrelated concepts) it is always politically motivated, and therefore (again, a leap of logic crossing immeasurable gulfs) no “full freedom” in academia exists.
The unspoken argument seems to be that since perfect freedom does not exist, ergo there is no moral imperative to allow any freedom of any kind to any.
Is that clear? I would like the reader to contemplate the full absurdity of the assertion: the argument is that since academic research requires funding, no academician should be allowed to speak and teach on campus except what a particular political party of the extreme left permits.
Now, logically it is not possible that academic research, nor, indeed any work or service of any kind here on Earth, can be accomplished without some use of time and resources, that is, without funding. So the argument devolves to an assertion that because reality is real, therefore only Leftists should be allowed on to speak and teach on campus.
Even granting the premise, however, the conclusion does not follow. Supposing that the process of grant writing for academic research prevents full freedom or perfect freedom from existing, what, if anything, logically follows from this?
If the argument were being made that the current grant writing process unfairly slants to the Right, and therefore deprives the Left of an equal say, making their recourse to thug tactics a regrettable but justified necessity, that at least would be an argument. But such an argument in the current day, does not pass the blow coffee through your nose laughing test. Is there any argument being made that the grant process does not slant to the Left? I would like to hear about the experience of anyone seeking grant money to disprove the theory of global warming.
Again, is the argument being made that since perfect freedom, whatever that means, cannot exist on Earth, therefore freedom is not valuable, need not be sought, and ought to be stamped out? That argument contradicts itself on its face, but, students of history will recognize it as the same argument Marx made in the Communist Manifesto. He argues that private property should be abolished because not everyone under capitalism has private property, and that the family should be abolished because not everyone under capitalism enjoys a solid family, but must send wife or children to work.
Here is a quote:
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.
The logic, or rather, the illogic, is the same. Even granting the rather comical assumption that nine-tenths of private property under the current system has been destroyed, the argument does not follow. Either private property is a value to be cherished and sought, or is not. If it is a value, it should be defended whether or not nine-tenths of it has already been destroyed. If it is not a value, it should not be defended, whereupon whether or not nine-tenths of it has been destroyed is not a condemnation of the current system.
So, here. Miss Korn argues that it is a reproach that perfect academic freedom does not exist. This argument cannot make sense unless academic freedom is something to be valued and defended. She then says that since perfect academic freedom does not exist, no academic freedom should exist. This assertion does not make sense unless academic freedom is not valuable and ought not be defended. In sum the argument is that since freedom is valuable, it is valueless.
Now, in fairness, we could examine the case where an imperfect enjoyment of some value is less valuable than no enjoyment of that value, but here we would be treating a frivolous argument with too much courtesy. That is not a point Miss Korn raises, and to raise that argument on her behalf merely to argue against it would be too much like watching a chessmaster play both black and white.
The final illogic is one that is almost charming in its naivety. She says that the “discourse about “academic freedom” obscures what should fundamentally be a political argument.” She says that anything which creates “oppression” (such as telling women to be modest, I supposed) should be trampled by coercive force.
Oppression in the language of Newspeak does not mean “oppression.” Oppressing means noting whether a statistically significant difference between median test scores on quizzes checking for vocabulary and spatial relations exist between samples taken from different races, usually, a difference less than that found between identical twins; Oppression means saying musical talent or an aptitude for math is genetic; but saying homosexuality is genetic is not oppression. Oppression means a Hindi speaking in less than flattering terms about the Mohammedan, even when the Mohammedan has been terrorizing and slaying Hindus for a generation. Oppression means asking women not to wear hot pants and leather thigh-high boots when they travel in dark and lonely places where predators lurk. Oppression means Jews trying to prevent their innocent children from being blown to bloody tatters by nail bombs or dynamite vests by totalitarian zealots of a seventh-century heresy which has been at war with Christendom through all its history.
In other words, the oppression of which she speaks consists of opining that math talent is genetic, opposing Mohammedan totalitarian theocracy, opining that women should be modest, and opposing Mohammedan terrorism in service of totalitarian theocracy; but it does not consist of using force or intimidation to limit the rights and privileges of even one single other person. Oppression for Miss Korn means thinking and saying something not favorable to the two Siamese twin totalitarian philosophies she wishes would rule the world: Socialism and Shariah.
Oppression means resisting oppression. This doublethink would fit in nicely with the nightmarish slogans of Big Brother: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Of course she means not a syllable of any of this blithering nonsense. What she really means, quite simply, is that her faction is the stronger and that she will have her way.
It is the philosophy of the jungle: Justice is whatever the stronger party says it is. At the moment the Left is stronger and can force the normal people to shut the hell up.
Miss Korn blinks in an innocent astonishment that anyone could be so naive as to believe in talk of academic freedom or freedom of thought: she says that yes, exactly, the poor innocent fool Herrnstein seems not to have understood that removing his freedom of speech was precisely the goal of the SDS activists—his ideas are not free to be discussed or debated. They are thoughtcrimes ergo unwelcome on Harvard’s campus.
The idea that a rightwing, or, better yet, a Mohammedan administration, if ever one seized the levers of power at Harvard, or on other campuses, or throughout the nation, or throughout the West, would then be perfectly just and fair in promoting modesty on women and shutting down all femininst studies where Miss Korn lives and moves and has her being — this idea has not and can not and never will occur to Miss Korn or any of her ilk.
It will never occur to her because the fundamental and simple principle on which all moral reasoning is based, the principle that what applies to me applies to thee, the principle of objectivity in ethics, the principle of having a standard, the principle of the Golden Rule, this is the one sole and only principle the entire tottering and wheezing structure of lies, half-truths, paradoxes and elliptical verbal formulae of the Left is designed to evade. The principle is justice. Justice and Leftism are mutually incompatible as a matter of logic.
Leftism is based on depressing whatever is high and good and calling it evil, and uplifting whatever is low and bad and calling it good. Leftism is based on a double standard. One standard applies to the high, who must be opposed at all points, regardless of whether they are guilty or innocent, and the opposite standard applies to the low, likewise regardless of whether they are guilty or innocent.
The opposite philosophy from Leftism, namely, natural reason, is based on punishing what it guilty because it is guilty regardless of whether the guilty are high or low; and likewise rewarding and protecting the innocent because they are innocent regardless of whether they are low or high.
It is just that simple. Leftism is not a philosophy, it is a sequence of lying-ass emotional defense mechanisms and verbal sleights of hand meant to destroy justice and promote injustice. It is the opposite of natural reason. It is the opposite of common decency. It is the opposite, to be blunt, of life and sanity and logic and goodness and truth and beauty.
Do you think I am kidding, or exaggerating? Reread Miss Korn’s manifesto. She will tell you exactly what she thinks and why.
They are open about what they want. They do not want peace, nor justice, nor fairness, nor equality.
They want anarchy. At the same time they want totalitarianism. They want God dead. At the same time, they want to be God. If they cannot have that, they want you, the normal people, the sane people, the working people, the decent people, the happy people, they want you dead. At the same time they want you to make their world for them and run it to suit them. If they cannot have these things, they want you to shut up.
You may wonder why Leftist are so absurdly shameless in the naked evil of their demands, and so inane in their pretensions to be our moral and mental superiors. Their only claim to moral superiority is that they favor immorality and perversion wherever it appears. Their only claim to mental superiority is their inability to think critically, and their desire to destroy all institutions of higher learning, including the institution of academic freedom.
Asking why Leftists are shameless is like asking why water is wet. Leftism is not a political philosophy, nor any kind or philosophy, nor a disciplined system of thought, nor any kind of thought. Leftism is a set of verbal tricks and tactics which allow the speaker to excuse evil in the name of some undefined higher purpose, usually a phrase that is coined on the spot and has no meaning. Miss Korn coins “Academic Justice” to excuse mob tactics threatening a teacher for teaching.
In other words, the reason why Leftists are shameless is because Leftism is a mental disease, deliberately imposed on oneself, to quell the faculty of self reflection hence of shame. Shamelessness is Leftism; Leftism is shamelessness.
Now, let us turn to the real reason why Miss Korn can use her academic freedom to call for an end to freedom. Why does she not fear that the very tactics she uses to oppress others will be used on her?
The answer is simple and sad. The sane and decent people of the world will never riot or even protest to expel her or shut her up. We don’t do things like that.
Leftists are crusaders who are zealous to change the world, and there is but one way they want to change the world: by force. To them, forcing the politically incorrect truth-tellers off campus, out of the public square, and out of life, all this is as important as recovering the Holy Land was to Godfrey of Bouillon.
On the other hand, to the rest of us, we are not crusaders attempting with the same amount of zeal to keep our civilization and freedoms intact. While we might like a free society, we are not willing to fight to the last bullet over that matter. Most rightwingers are NOT idealistic rightwingers. They are on the right because Conservatism is pragmatic, practical, and it works.
The Founding Fathers were not Rightwingers. They were not practical, pragmatic men who saw defiance of the world’s first intercontinental superpower, Britain, was the most cost-effective way to decrease an arguably lawful one cent tax on tea.
They were idealists for freedom in the same way Miss Korn is an idealist against freedom. The Founding Fathers believed that the rights of man were granted by God; and that no human king, even the most powerful in the world, could take them away. They were a rabble that defied all the kings of the earth, because their vision was of heaven; and hence they were willing to fight to the last musket ball.
Are we willing to fight? Has anyone written even one letter to the newspaper, or to the campus, demanding that this rat gnawing at the hawsers of our liberty be reprimanded, fired from the newspaper, expelled from the school, hanged for high treason? No one? Not one paragraph of angry words? Not one sentence?
Of course not. It would not be practical and pragmatic to get this horrid woman expelled and silenced. Our laws and customs tolerate those who seek day and night to undermine our laws and customs. We are civilized, and so we cannot use barbaric means to fend off the barbarians.
Well, you cannot beat something with nothing. Religious fanaticism is something. Practical pragmatism is nothing. Lukewarm Laodiceans cannot defeat singleminded fanatics.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
