NEW FAITHS OF THE SELF

C. S. Lewis wrote that to be modern is to be consumed by the magical impulse “to subdue reality to the wishes of men.” This entails giving up one’s soul in exchange for power. “Once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.” We will also have forsaken the ancient wisdom which holds that the soul is only truly free when in harmony with what is real.

Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton’s survey of America’s post-secular religious landscape, examines prominent twenty-first-century attempts to “subdue reality” by force of will. Contrary to the popular perception that America has become increasingly secular, Burton shows that religion is flourishing, albeit in non-traditional guises. Insofar as “religion,” in Burton’s functionalist usage, names those beliefs and practices that serve “both individually and societally to give us a sense of our world, our place in it, and our relationships to the people around us,” it has always and everywhere suffused human life. Today that suffusion is apparent even in avowedly “secular” institutions like the Supreme Court, which recently enshrined the sacral metaphysics of gender theory in law. The George Floyd protests also demonstrate the power of the progressive social justice religion to effect a nationwide Durkheimian “collective effervescence.”

Burton describes the new religions practiced by more than fifty percent of Americans today as “Remixed.” The religiously Remixed, “shaped by the twin forces of a creative-communicative internet and consumer capitalism,” prefer “intuitional spirituality” to institutional churches. They mix and match different practices to form their own rituals and belief systems. While most Remixed are “nones” or “spiritual but not religious,” many self-identified Christians also practice Remixing.

Remixed religion, Burton suggests, would be impossible apart from our long conditioning by consumer capitalism. At its heart, Remixed religion is selfish, choice-obsessed, therapeutic, and adaptable to expediency—making it a natural bedfellow of progressive politics. These new religions of the self may partially satisfy the human need for narrative and wonder, but they threaten to dissolve our civic institutions in a sea of “personal authenticity and experiential fulfillment.”

Burton traces the roots of the Remixed to the intuitionalist faiths of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially Transcendentalism, Spiritualism, and Quimby’s New Thought. While the postwar economic boom accelerated individualist trends in American religion, America has always been fertile ground for self-worship and charlatanry.

Today’s charlatans are the “spiritual entrepreneurs” who reinvent snake oil in the myriad guises of a “wellness” industry worth $4.2 trillion, exemplified by Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudoscience bazaar Goop. The theology of wellness is gnostic, pitting the intuitional self against society. According to the gospel of wellness, we each have a “moral responsibility to take care of ourselves first before directing any attention to others.” But because the work of “self-care” is never complete, care for the other is never quite justified.

Among the darker forms of self-worship, Burton examines the recent explosion of occultism among American progressives. This movement drew scrutiny last year when the proprietors of Catland, an occult supply store in Brooklyn, ritually cursed Brett Kavanaugh and President Trump. Modern witchcraft combines “progressive feminist politics with a fervent opposition to institutional Christianity—which is dismissed and derided as a bastion of toxic patriarchy, repression, and white supremacy.” Dakota Bracciale, co-owner of Catland, is an apologist for “black magic,” which is countercultural, dangerous, and a tool for resisting oppression. Bracciale, a white male, argues that non-whites and queer people should “decolonize” witchcraft and restore its African roots by embracing the language of white European Luciferianism. Such farce is typical of the incoherence of the Remixed.

Even apart from witchcraft, Remixed religions consistently exhibit Lewis’s magical impulse. For the Remixed, nature—especially our sexual nature—exists to bear the imprint of human will. “If wellness culture centers the perfectibility of the body as the locus of personal spiritual growth,” writes Burton, “then sexual utopianism takes that corporeality to its logical conclusion . . . why shouldn’t sexuality be the place for us to access not just pleasure but meaning and purpose?” Remixed sexuality casts a vision of a transformed social order. And that vision is increasingly popular. One-fifth of Americans admit to experimenting with “ethical non-monogamy”; even more have experimented with BDSM and other kinks. Authenticity, after all, requires acting on our desires. Refusing to indulge one’s kinks is thus to forsake one’s own perfection.

While the Remixed faith of the sexual utopian may seem like New Thought by way of Thelema, it is perhaps best understood as—to coin a phrase—neoliberalism of the body. Remixed religion is so appealing, in part, because it “is inseparable from a consumer-capitalist model of sexuality.”

But not everyone has the same purchasing power in the sexual marketplace, and thus not everyone can access the meaning-making power of Remixed sexuality. In her penultimate chapter, wryly titled “Twilight of the Chads,” Burton examines the ressentiment of “incels,” men who for want of good looks, money, or social skills are “involuntarily celibate.” Incels want to burn the world down (along with all the sexually successful Chads and Staceys), and Burton’s characteristic empathy is muted as she walks us through their misogynistic world. Incels are a small but noisy subset of what Burton calls “nihilistic atavism,” a Remixed religion focused on reclaiming ground lost to feminism and progressivism. At its most reasonable, the new atavism may resemble Jordan Peterson’s program of renewed male responsibility. But it is best characterized by outsized denizens of the “manosphere” such as Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), who advocates a muscle-bound, homoerotic Nietzscheanism that longs for the emergence of Übermenschen worth submitting to. It is hardly accidental that BAP’s obsession with submission resembles the sexual utopian’s affinity for kink.

Burton believes three rival strands of Remixed—social justice culture, nihilistic atavism, and Silicon Valley’s techno-utopianism—are battling to become America’s new civil religion. Each belligerent resembles the others. Whereas intersectional feminists want to destroy society for its misogyny and racism, new atavists want to destroy it for having yielded to the enervating forces of progressivism. Both the cult of social justice and the cult of techno-utopianism prize disruption, valorize the self, and see nature as an obstacle to the body’s perfection.

By emphasizing narrative, Burton renders complex phenomena accessible to general readers without sacrificing precision, and her analysis flows directly from the testimony of the Remixed themselves. But readers will be left with questions. To what extent is the egocentrism of American religion intrinsic to the American project itself? In the context of liquid modernity, are genuinely new faiths possible? Or are all new faiths doomed to serve only as therapies for the “spiritually fluid”?

Remixed religion is mutable and prone to imitation because, at its heart, it preaches only the self and its will to power. No civilization whose civic religion is so crassly nihilistic can long survive. And no self whose faith is Remixed can long endure as a self. Remixed religion is in the business of producing what Malachi Martin called “aspiring vacuums”: denatured souls dispossessed of the ability to will that which is proper to their natures; that is, individuals ripe for possession by the will of another. Most despairing of all, the Remixed are trained to welcome such demonic subjugation. One woman interviewed by Burton explains that during BDSM sessions she pictures herself as a “hollow cane of bamboo,” an empty vessel for external will (“energy”), rejoicing in the annihilation of self.

This is the false re-enchantment of the magician’s bargain. The unmaking of one’s soul is disguised by therapeutic appeasement. And yet re-enchantment remains perhaps the most important task for a civilization incapable of experiencing the meaning inherent in our world. That meaning cannot be “chosen” by humans. It can only be discovered—by participation in what Lewis called “Deep Magic,” the unbegotten power that sang the world into existence. Burton says in her introduction that she has rediscovered such enchantment in a return to faith. I’m not alone in hoping she will share that journey in her next book.

By Tara Isabella Burton and published in First Things on June 29, 2020 and can be found here.

Defining Social Justice | Dr. Voddie Baucham

Every now and again I come across something the warrants posting here; I recently came across this a video which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

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STEVEN PINKER’S MUSCULAR SECULARISM

Steven Pinker, as his blurb reminds us, has been reckoned by Time magazine among the “hundred most influential people in the world today.” In Enlightenment Now he devotes more than five hundred ­pages to making the case for “reason, ­science, ­humanism, and progress.” It’s not really clear why pushing a rolling stone downhill should be such hard work, but Pinker seems to think that the four horsemen of the Acro­polis are under attack now as never before. I can’t say I’d noticed. There aren’t that many people against reason or science, and as for humanism and progress, well, it all depends on what you mean.

For the most part, Enlightenment Now is an effective enough demonstration against professional doom-mongers that the world ­today is populated by more, healthier, ­wealthier, longer-lived, better-housed, better-educated, and better-equipped people than ever before. If Pinker confined himself to setting people straight on some key facts, no problem. But there is an element of mission creep as he glides effortlessly from the domain of facts and science to the domain of values and judgments—a domain in which the scientific method certainly has not managed to produce consensus. For Enlightenment Now is not just a recitation of reasons to be cheerful. It is also an exercise in confessional polemics, and it displays the virtues and vices of its genre. The polemics are in aid of secular humanism rather than Christianity or Islam, but the methods are much the same. It is often jolly and entertaining, especially when on the attack against confessional targets such as religion or postmodernism, but it can be preachy and it tends to the prolix. And it subjects its own presuppositions to somewhat less ­critical scrutiny than those of its opponents. Tedium is likely to beset those readers who simply want to focus on the arguments, though the liturgical incantation of the ­triumphs of the truth will comfort true ­believers. The tricks of the trade are all on show: selectivity, special pleading, sleight of hand, straw men, strategic statistics, suggestio falsi, suppressio veri.

Pinker is not averse to having his cake and eating it. For “Enlightenment” turns out to be shorthand for “what I like.” And “­Enlightenment thinkers,” likewise, seem to cash out as “people like me.” Is it mere coincidence that the Johnstone Family Professor of ­Psychology at Harvard University sees the members of this various group as “inquisitive psychologists”? When they receive the Pinker seal of approval, they are “Enlightenment thinkers.” At other moments, they are peremptorily excommunicated. Thus ­Rousseau, an Enlightenment thinker on page 10, becomes on page 30 a Romantic reactionary pushing back hard against Enlightenment values, before being readmitted to the fold two hundred pages later.

The “Enlightenment thinkers” invoked throughout this story therefore remain an ill-defined and ill-assorted bunch. Their role in the argument is reminiscent of that of the “Fathers” in Christian controversy, with Pinker as the self-appointed pope whose ex cathedra obiter dicta decide what is, and what is not, in the authentic tradition. These “Enlightenment thinkers” are the subject of bold if unsubstantiated claims. Thus “most” of them, it seems, rejected the idea of an “anthropomorphic God” (as do most theologians). But “some” of them were deists (though not theists) and “others” pantheists, while “few” were Christians. In the absence of definitions or numbers, it is rather difficult to put this taxonomy to the test. It bolsters that sneaking suspicion that “people like me” is indeed the functional criterion.

But then again, some of the lists of “Enlightenment thinkers” call even that into question. The presentation of opponents of war gives us Swift, Dr. Johnson, Pascal, and Voltaire: two Tory Anglicans, a Jansenist, and a Jesuit-educated deist anticlerical. Historical scholarship on the Enlightenment has for quite some time deprecated the simplistic secularism of the interpretation that Pinker espouses. Enlightenment Europe remained predominantly Christian (though deism and atheism were now firmly on the intellectual and moral menu), and most of those who read the Enlightenment thinkers, and were influenced by them, were themselves Christians. Education, health care, and social and political reform (such as the abolition of slavery) may indeed have been Enlightenment causes, but this did not stop them being Christian causes as well, or at least causes for Christians. Christians of all kinds, Presbyterians, Quakers, Evangelicals, Catholics, clergy and laity alike, were busy in the processes by which what Pinker defines as Enlightenment values were given real expression in the nineteenth century. But confessional partisanship often encourages polemicists to exaggerate the achievements of their own side and to diminish those of others. There is no obvious reason why confessional atheists, or humanists, or rationalists like Pinker should break that particular mold.

The glide from science to ethics is accomplished with the aid of the trademark Pinker graphs, seventy-five in this book. Graphs make things look very simple and persuasive. In books like this, that’s what they’re for. But they depend on counting things, and counting things depends first and foremost on deciding what does and doesn’t count. Counting things has worked very well where “things” are clear-cut, predominantly in the natural sciences. But in the tangled webs of human society, things aren’t always like that, as Pinker is well aware. Counting things does not always make for good history (as was once said, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, count”) and is virtually useless for purposes of philosophy. Moreover, carefully selected and carefully drawn as they are, Pinker’s graphs do not always bear out his slick ­generalizations.

The first education graph, for example, apparently informs us that until the Enlightenment, all languished in ignorance, while since that happy dawn, all have come to the light. But the graph itself tells a less ­binary story, showing a long, differen­tiated rise in much of Europe and the West since the later Middle Ages. In ­Pinker’s version of the story, religion is mentioned only to explain why Spain remained so long in benighted ignorance: all those nasty clergymen in control of the schools, teaching only creeds and catechisms. Maybe so: Education and literacy arguably advanced slowest in Europe where the Inquisition was strongest. Yet it was the clergy also, or at least definite Christians—including, toward the end, nuns—who provided almost all the schooling anywhere prior to 1800, and most of it over the next hundred years. In many countries, the march to near universal literacy was achieved largely under the leadership of priests and pastors—fastest, after the Reformation, in Protestant countries, perhaps because direct familiarity with the Scriptures was so highly prized. Over the longue durée it was the Church, and then the churches, which built up so many of the institutions of learning. Within the context of European culture, the high social valuation of education that Pinker appropriates for his secular Enlightenment was a Christian and even a medieval cultural legacy. But we hear nothing of this. Pinker himself is only too well aware of the insidious effects of cognitive bias. So it is salutary to observe how easy it is for even Steven, the high priest of reason, to succumb to it.

That the world as a whole sees less per-capita everyday lethal violence than in the early modern era, and vastly less than in ancient and again in prehistoric times, has become something of a truism. To get a sense of what living in the ancient world was really like, for example, try reading Josephus’s Jewish War, his account of the century or so culminating in the Roman sack of ­Jerusalem. But the self-­congratulatory narrative graphed in Enlightenment Now fails to persuade. It is difficult to see “the Enlightenment” as the bringer of peace when we consider the spectacular destruction and death tolls of the wars of the ensuing two centuries. Of course, using the vigorous gymnastics of controversial exigency, one can deflect responsibility for those wars onto “Counter-Enlightenment” forces. But it is harder for those who are not confessionally committed to the Enlightenment to exonerate it so completely from responsibility for revolutionary fervor, nationalism, imperialism, and Marxism—the driving forces of the ensuing slaughters. Pinker chalks up World War I to a populist nationalism that he feels entitled to cut off from the Enlightenment. But the Kultur of German propaganda in 1914–1915, endorsed by hundreds of scientists and academics, sounds like a war cry for Enlightenment values (or some of them) against decadence on one front and primitivism on the other.

Nor is one entirely persuaded by the secondhand statistics of Matthew White’s “necrometrics,” adduced to justify such claims as that “religious wars” (a tricky category if ever there was one, at times little more than a construct by which the emerging secular nation-states sought to legitimize their own power), particularly of an earlier age, were so much more destructive and lethal than the wars of the era of mature nation-states and global empires; and that civil wars tend to be less destructive and lethal than other wars (as say on page 164, before undercutting that view on 199). Of course it helps to define civil wars such as those in Britain in the seventeenth century and in France in the sixteenth century as “wars of religion.” (Pinker himself manages to insinuate that the American Civil War might somehow belong in that category.) And it may be just as helpful to set the innumerate claims of medieval chroniclers on a par with the meticulous casualty lists of modern conflicts, or to gloss over the extent to which, until relatively recent times, so much mortality in war was a matter of epidemic disease in unsanitary encampments (thus, often, displacing and intensifying the impact of disease rather than indexing brutality and cruelty). The whole exercise of weighing up wars in this way, though well worth the attempt, is fraught with those problems of definition and verification on which, in other contexts, Pinker himself is the first to insist.

What some critics identify as the bitter fruits of the Enlightenment, then, Pinker simply picks off and hangs on other trees. Populism, to which he is as allergic as the next bien pensant, owes part of its appeal to a thoroughly Enlightened rejection of aristocracy and authority. Nationalism is hardly unconnected with the Enlightenment. Some “Enlightenment thinkers” may have been “citizens of the world,” but most were more specifically rooted than that. Romanticism itself, which Pinker sees solely in terms of a “Counter-Enlightenment,” is a product of the Enlightenment as well as a reaction against it. The nation-state and nationalism, treated alike with aloof disdain, are a major part of the explanation for that massive decline in everyday levels of violence which Pinker documents. Either they are part of the Enlightenment, or they are not. Either way, the Pinker thesis will have to give a little.

For a more delicate and differentiated inquiry into the intellectual and moral condition of modernity, one might turn to Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, which combines historical rigor with philosophical acuity, and fully acknowledges the material and moral achievements of Western modernity, while not allowing itself so readily to absolve that same modernity of the excesses and atrocities that Pinker offloads onto the obscurantist enemies of Enlightenment. Gregory’s disquieting but irrefutable observation that “the fundamental categories at the basis of Western modernity’s most influentially institutionalized philosophy—liberalism—cannot be rationally legitimated on the terms of the scientistic naturalism that prevails in research universities in the public sphere” offers a robust counter to Pinker’s humanistic huffing and puffing. Modern liberalism and modern science are both, from one point of view, products of the Enlightenment, but that does not make them the same thing, nor does it even establish any logical or necessary relation between them.

Liberalism and science both presuppose the fact-value distinction of the Enlightenment, but science is all about facts, and liberalism is all about values. The Pinker ­project, pursued through its seventy-five graphs, is to make us think that the values of liberalism can be established by the methods of science, that morality can be established em­pirically. Well, we’ve known since Kant that it can’t. Kant labored valiantly to base morality on reason alone, offering the dogmas of conscience and the categorical imperative as the dictates of pure practical reason. But here we have to take some heed of Nietzsche, who, more mercilessly than anyone else, called out the empirical nakedness of the Kantian imperator. At one level, all he does is stand Kant on his head, responding to the categorical imperative—“You must”—with the equally categorical interrogative of the obstreperous child: “Why should I?” It’s a good question.

While he figures in Pinker’s narrative simply as the arch-enemy of the Enlightenment, Nietzsche takes us to the heart of the problem. For if he is the Enlightenment’s most potent critic, he is likewise its rebellious child, turning its distrust for authority against itself. Pinker is quite right to quote the immortal Jeeves’s lapidary judgment that Nietzsche was “fundamentally unsound.” But the Wodehousian allusion brings ­irresistibly to mind another of the master’s comic creations, the Reverend Harold ­Pinker, the clumsy clergyman who could not be trusted within ten feet of any occasional table freighted with ornamental crockery. An exponent of muscular secularism rather than muscular Christianity, Professor ­Steven Pinker shoulders his way into the china shop of history with equally devastating effect.

By Richard Rex and published in August 2018 in First Things and can be seen here.

Ethnic Gnosticism | Dr. Voddie Baucham

Every now and again I come across something the warrants posting here; I recently came across this a video which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

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C. S. LEWIS ON MERE SCIENCE

By M.D. Aeschliman in October 1998 and can be found here.

In The Abolition of Man C. S. Lewis noted that nothing he could say would keep some people from saying that he was anti-science, a charge he was nevertheless eager to refute. In fact he had received the kind of philosophical education at Oxford that enabled him, like John Henry Newman before him, to resist the two opposed temptations that the historian of science Richard Olson has labeled “science deified” and “science defied.” On this centenary of Lewis’ birth, we might describe his attitude as an appreciation of “mere science.”

“Science deified” is scientism, radical empiricism, materialism, or naturalism, an implicit or explicit rejection of all nonquantifiable realities or truths, including the truths of reason. Its logical terminus is determinism or “epiphenomenalism,” Huxley’s notion that the brain and mind are fully determined by-products of irrational physical processes. As the German materialist Bernhard Vogt put it, “Thoughts come out of the brain as gall from the liver, or urine from the kidneys,” implying that thoughts are just as irrational and beyond our control. Vogt and the other materialists contradict themselves, though, because—as Lewis often noted—they claim that their own scientific thoughts are true.

The deification of science first became explicit in the writings of the atheistic French philosophes La Mettric, D’Holbach, and Diderot. Thoughtful twentieth-century commentators such as Lester G. Crocker and Aldous Huxley have seen its reductionism leading straight to the moral nihilism of the Marquis de Sade, and later to Social Darwinism and the Nietzschean transvaluation of values in the interest of amoral strength and force. Lewis’ Abolition of Man is, inter alia, an extended treatise against the deification of science.

Yet there is an opposite temptation that Lewis also criticized—the temptation to defy science, from the standpoint of either romantic/pantheistic gnosticism or theological fideism. The first was familiar to him from the theosophy of his close friends Owen Barfield and A. C. Harwood and from the whole history of Romanticism, culminating in the work and world of W. B. Yeats. (Yeats was probably the model for the magician in Lewis’ Dymer and for Merlin in That Hideous Strength.) The appeal of pantheistic gnosticism was something that Lewis understood and withstood; it lies at the heart of occult “New Age” spirituality, “Deep Ecology,” and a good deal of “Eco-feminism” today. Romantic self-absorption and pantheistic gnosticism are targets of Lewis’ satire in The Pilgrim’s Regress. Much as he criticized radical empiricism and its sterile, truncated rationalism, he was himself too much of a rationalist in the classic, Aristotelian sense to countenance esoteric or occult mysticism and the depreciation of reason. He would not defy science on romantic or gnostic grounds.

Lewis knew that science was one of the great products of the human mind, but he insisted that it was a subset of reason and not simply equivalent to it. Scientific reason, if accurate, was valid, but it was not the only valid kind of reasoning: noncontradiction, validity, truth, value, meaning, purpose, and obligation were necessary presuppositions of the scientific method but not themselves scientific phenomena. Lewis thought that, in Alfred North Whitehead’s words, scientists who were “animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.” He satirically depicted such scientists in That Hideous Strength, especially in the figure of Frost. Of all radical empiricists, from La Mettrie and Hume to A. J. Ayer, who would undermine the authority of reason and its procedures, Lewis tirelessly pointed out this contradiction. He believed in the old adage that “the only way to avoid metaphysics is to say nothing,” because in some important sense language and thought themselves are non-natural, supernatural, transcendent, and metaphysical. “In order to think,” he wrote in 1942, “we must claim for our reasoning a validity which is not credible if our own thought is merely a function of our brain, and our brains a by-product of irrational physical processes.”

Lewis’ love of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was due largely to his loyalty to an epistemology that he thought had been caricatured and misunderstood by Bacon, Descartes, and the French Encyclopedists of the eighteenth century. As a careful student of the history of philosophy and ideas, he knew that the great flowering of scientific thought in the seventeenth century had not only Greek roots, but medieval ones. Whitehead pointed out long ago, in Science and the Modern World, that the habits of medieval rationalism prepared the way for the scientific discoveries of the seventeenth century, an insight given far more documentation, depth, and scope in the writings of the historian and philosopher of science Stanley L. Jaki in our time. Long before Bacon, Jaki has written, Christian philosophy had steadily inculcated “the conviction . . . that since the world was rational it could be comprehended by the human mind, but as the product of the Creator it could not be derived from the mind of man, a creature.” The “metaphysical realism” of St. Thomas Aquinas (and of Richard Hooker in England) avoided the extremes of empiricism and idealism and thus paved the way for Newton.

Jaki’s work has confirmed some of Lewis’ insights about the origin and development of Western science, and particularly its indebtedness to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo to escape from mistaken Aristotelian ideas about time and matter. The importance of the medieval thinkers Buridan and Oresme for science had been rediscovered by the great twentieth-century French physicist Pierre Duhem, whose own work Jaki has done so much to restore to the prominence it deserves. The active intellectual discrimination against Duhem, and subsequently against Jaki”despite their enormous erudition and unquestionable distinction—would not have surprised the man who wrote “The Inner Ring,” “Bulverism,” The Abolition of Man, and That Hideous Strength.

For among historians of science it is most prominently Duhem and Jaki who have provided the documentation of the importance of theism and “metaphysical realism” not only for the origin and development of modern science, but also for the possibility of its coherent continuation and moral direction. Duhem and Jaki have provided security for Lewis’ claim that “Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it. Two significant developments have already appeared—the hypothesis of a lawless sub-nature, and the surrender of the claim that science is true. We may be living nearer than we suppose to the end of the Scientific Age.”

And as a believer in the essential sanity and continuity of Western Civilization, Lewis would surely have concurred with Jaki’s characterization of the Middle Ages: “In Western philosophy that was the first and thus far the last major epoch in which broadly shared respect was paid to the fundamental difference between ends and means . . . . If we do not wish to help turn this most scientific age of ours into the most barbaric of all ages, we had better stop using the term ‘medieval’ as synonymous with obscurantist. In doing so, we may make our mental eyes more sensitive to that light which comes from the Middle Ages.”

Does Systemic Racism Exist in the United States Today? Ben Shapiro and Dr. Walter Williams Discuss

Every now and again I come across something the warrants posting here; I recently came across this a video which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

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Famed Economist Slams Claims Of American ‘Systemic Racism’: ‘It Just Doesn’t Cut The Mustard’

On Tuesday, famed economist Walter Williams, speaking with Daily Wire Editor-In-Chief Ben Shapiro, slammed the idea that there is “systemic racism” in the United States, asserting, “The civil rights struggle is over, and it’s won.” Commenting on the charge that the police are “systemically racist,” Williams stated that in Chicago, “There’s a person shot every three hours and a person killed every 14 hours, and so far this year there have been about 280 people shot and killed, and most of them are black and by blacks. In Chicago, the police have killed three people. So if you’re concerned about black lives, who should you pay most attention to?”

Williams offered a salient example of how some inequalities were “unavoidable” by using the example of students granted high school diplomas in Baltimore without proficiency in math or reading, then later citing racism for their failure to advance in their jobs without realizing that they had been given a “fraudulent” high school diploma.

The conversation began with Williams asked about the concept that America harbors “systemic racism” and that inequality between racial groups is primarily due to inequity.  Williams responded:

I don’t think you can get very far. You can’t offer a lot of evidence that we’re “systemically racist’ or there’s “institutional racism” in our country. I think one of the things that people need to know is that at least for black Americans, the civil rights struggle is over, and it’s won. That is, at one time black Americans didn’t have the same constitutional guarantees as everybody else, but now we do.

Now that in fact the civil rights struggle is over and won does not mean that there are not major problems, but they’re not civil rights problems. They don’t have anything to do with  racial discrimination — which is not to deny the existence of residual racial discrimination.

Williams commented about the notion that the police were “systemically racist,” “There are policemen who do not do their jobs, do not take their oath of office seriously enough, but the problems that policemen have, particularly with black people, is just the crime rate; slightly over 50% of the homicide victims in the United States are black and it turns out that the perpetrators, 90-some percent are black. So the problems with police pale small in comparison.”

He continued, “Just take the case of Chicago. Chicago, there’s a person shot every three hours and a person killed every 14 hours, and so far this year there have been about 280 people shot and killed, and most of them are black and by blacks. In Chicago, the police have killed three people. So if you’re concerned about black lives, who should you pay most attention to? It seems to be not what the police are doing in Chicago, but what other black people are doing in Chicago.”

Shapiro asked, “What do you make of the argument that racism can be blamed as the cause for today’s inequality?”

Williams answered:

I think for a lot of young people, they just don’t have the historical background, but I’m in my eighty-fifth year of life, and I grew up in the slums of North Philadelphia. At that time we did not go to bed with the sounds of gunshots. Most people left their doors open until the last person was in. I had a number of friends, I’d just knock on the door and somebody’d holler, “Come in!”

And there were no bars at the window; and other attributes about the black community is that my father deserted my mother and sister and I when I was three and she was two. We lived in Richard Allen Housing project … and we were the only kids in the neighborhood who did not have a mother and father in the house. Today it would be exactly the opposite.

And you can look at the black family structure; in 1880, 85 to 95 percent of black kids lived in two-parent families. Today, we’re much further away from slavery and less than a third live in two-parent families. You look at illegitimacy rates: today, illegitimacy rate among blacks is 75% and among whites it’s slightly over 30%, but if you go back to 1940, the illegitimacy rate among blacks was 11% and among whites it was 3%.

And so it turns out that on a lot of measures of socioeconomic characteristics, blacks were better off in terms of family structure and violence in earlier times. Which is not to say I want to go back to the old days where was gross racial discrimination in our country, but I think that a lot of things that people are blaming on slavery and discrimination, it just doesn’t cut the mustard, unless you say that this stuff skips a generation or two.

Williams noted:

If you look at some of the inequalities, they’re unavoidable. For example, in Baltimore, in the city of Baltimore, and this is a feature in other major cities as well, in 13 out of the 39 in Baltimore, not a single student tested proficient in mathematics and only 3% tested proficient in reading. And if you look at six other schools only 1% tested proficient in math and across the city only 15% tested proficient in reading.

Now these kids graduating from high school are getting a diploma which is fraudulent in the first instance, but here’s what a kid will say. He’ll graduate from, let’s say, Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore, and he’ll try to get a job, and he’ll say, “Well, look, this white guy, he’s moving along faster and he’s being promoted faster that I am, and I have a high school diploma and he has a high school diploma. So the reason why we’re treated differently is because of race.”

But see, the black kid doesn’t realize that is high school diploma is fraudulent, that his training is highly deficient, but he doesn’t realize that and he’ll blame any difference in treatment on racial discrimination.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that if you look at black people as a group, you’ll find that as a group, black Americans have made the greatest gains over the shortest period of time over some of the highest hurdles than any other racial group in the history of mankind — and here’s the evidence for that: in 1865,at the end of the Civil War, neither a slave nor a slaveowner would have believed that blacks could make the kind of progress that we’ve made in a little bit less than a century and a half.  And the progress is that if you added up the income and spending of black Americans and just though of us as having our own GDP, we would be in the top twenty nations in terms of the top 20 richest nations.

Williams concluded, “In 1865, neither a slave nor a slaveowner would have believed that these kinds of gains were possible, and as such, they speak to the intestinal fortitude of a people, but just as importantly it speaks to the greatness of a nation such as the United States. These kinds of gains could not have been achieved anywhere in the face of this earth except in the United States.  I think a lot of people ignore that great progress that black Americans have made and played the blame game, and played the racial discrimination game instead of looking at the hard facts that you and I are talking about.”

 

Published in The Daily Wire by Hank Berrien on June 16, 2020 and can be found here.

Why are sitcom dads still so inept?

By Erica Scharrer and published on Yahoo on June 16, 2020 and can be found here.

From Homer Simpson to Phil Dunphy, sitcom dads have long been known for being bumbling and inept.

But it wasn’t always this way. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, sitcom dads tended to be serious, calm and wise, if a bit detached. In a shift that media scholars have documented, only in later decades did fathers start to become foolish and incompetent.

And yet the real-world roles and expectations of fathers have changed in recent years. Today’s dads are putting more time into caring for their children and see that role as more central to their identity.

Have today’s sitcoms kept up?

I study gender and the media, and I specialize in depictions of masculinity. In a new study, my co-authors and I systematically look at the ways in which portrayals of sitcom fathers have and haven’t changed.

Why sitcom portrayals matter

Fictional entertainment can shape our views of ourselves and others. To appeal to broad audiences, sitcoms often rely on the shorthand assumptions that form the basis of stereotypes. Whether it’s the way they portray gay masculinity in “Will and Grace” or the working class in “Roseanne,” sitcoms often mine humor from certain norms and expectations associated with gender, sexual identity and class.

When sitcoms stereotype fathers, they seem to suggest that men are somehow inherently ill-suited for parenting. That sells actual fathers short and, in heterosexual, two-parent contexts, it reinforces the idea that mothers should take on the lion’s share of parenting responsibilities.

It was Tim Allen’s role as Tim “the Tool Man” Taylor of the 1990s series “Home Improvement” that inspired my initial interest in sitcom dads. Tim was goofy and childish, whereas Jill, his wife, was always ready – with a disapproving scowl, a snappy remark and seemingly endless stores of patience – to bring him back in line. The pattern matched an observation made by TV Guide television critic Matt Roush, who, in 2010, wrote, “It used to be that father knew best, and then we started to wonder if he knew anything at all.”

I published my first quantitative study on the depiction of sitcom fathers in 2001, focusing on jokes involving the father. I found that, compared with older sitcoms, dads in more recent sitcoms were the butt of the joke more frequently. Mothers, on the other hand, became less frequent targets of mockery over time. I viewed this as evidence of increasingly feminist portrayals of women that coincided with their growing presence in the workforce.

Studying the disparaged dad

In our new study, we wanted to focus on sitcom dads’ interactions with their children, given how fatherhood has changed in American culture.

We used what’s called “quantitative content analysis,” a common research method in communication studies. To conduct this sort of analysis, researchers develop definitions of key concepts to apply to a large set of media content. Researchers employ multiple people as coders who observe the content and individually track whether a particular concept appears.

For example, researchers might study the racial and ethnic diversity of recurring characters on Netflix original programs. Or they might try to see whether demonstrations are described as “protests” or “riots” in national news.

For our study, we identified 34 top-rated, family-centered sitcoms that aired from 1980 to 2017 and randomly selected two episodes from each. Next, we isolated 578 scenes in which the fathers were involved in “disparagement humor,” which meant the dads either made fun of another character or were made fun of themselves.

Then we studied how often sitcom dads were shown together with their kids within these scenes in three key parenting interactions: giving advice, setting rules or positively or negatively reinforcing their kids’ behavior. We wanted to see whether the interaction made the father look “humorously foolish” – showing poor judgment, being incompetent or acting childishly.

Interestingly, fathers were shown in fewer parenting situations in more recent sitcoms. And when fathers were parenting, it was depicted as humorously foolish in just over 50% of the relevant scenes in the 2000s and 2010s, compared with 18% in the 1980s and 31% in the 1990s sitcoms.

At least within scenes featuring disparagement humor, sitcom audiences, more often than not, are still being encouraged to laugh at dads’ parenting missteps and mistakes.

Fueling an inferiority complex?

The degree to which entertainment media reflect or distort reality is an enduring question in communication and media studies. In order to answer that question, it’s important to take a look at the data.

National polls by Pew Research Center show that from 1965 to 2016, the amount of time fathers reported spending on care for their children nearly tripled. These days, dads constitute 17% of all stay-at-home parents, up from 10% in 1989. Today, fathers are just as likely as mothers to say that being a parent is “extremely important to their identity.” They are also just as likely to describe parenting as rewarding.

Yet, there is evidence in the Pew data that these changes present challenges, as well. The majority of dads feel they do not spend enough time with their children, often citing work responsibilities as the primary reason. Only 39% of fathers feel they are doing “a very good job” raising their children.

Perhaps this sort of self-criticism is being reinforced by foolish and failing father portrayals in sitcom content.

Of course, not all sitcoms depict fathers as incompetent parents. The sample we examined stalled out in 2017, whereas TV Guide presented “7 Sitcom Dads Changing How we Think about Fatherhood Now” in 2019. In our study, the moments of problematic parenting often took place in a wider context of a generally quite loving depiction.

Still, while television portrayals will likely never match the range and complexity of fatherhood, sitcom writers can do better by dads by moving on from the increasingly outdated foolish father trope.

Shelby Steele On “How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country”

Every now and again I come across something the warrants posting here; I recently came across this a video which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

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John McWhorter: America Has Never Been Less Racist

Every now and again I come across something the warrants posting here; I recently came across this a video which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

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