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Last month, a school district committee in Utah decided that the Bible should be removed from elementary and middle school libraries.
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Amanda Gorman reciting a poem during the inauguration.
Maggie Tokuda-Hall declined Scholastic’s offer to license her book, “Love in the Library,” on the condition that she edit her author’s note to remove a description of past and present instances of racism.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has campaigned against what he has described as “woke indoctrination” in the classroom.
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Professor Evan Mandery has some harsh words for elite colleges, particularly Ivy League schools, because they tend to produce people like me. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, he presents an excerpt from his recent book, Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us, and argues that I am not among “the real villains,” despite my having written an essay in 2014 for the Princeton Tory arguing that “privilege” is a useless (at best) and pernicious (at worst) concept for understanding contemporary American life. The real villain is Princeton itself, among the other “institutions that indoctrinated” me into thinking that I had earned my success. All this despite Mandery’s admission that I—more accurately, 20-year-old me—might have deserved my critics’ “contempt.” (Mandery laments that people like me have a hard time learning gratitude, so I suppose I should first thank him for letting me off the hook.)
Mandery, who teaches at the City University of New York (where he has “never seen or heard anyone boast that their college status is deserved”) marshals a few related arguments to prove Princeton’s villainy and that of its peer institutions. His main point is that belief in the myth of meritocracy is generally corrosive, but elite colleges encourage students to believe that they have earned their success. This makes people like me “smug” and “annoying,” and prevents the “recognition that [we] are winners in a game that had been tilted in [our] favor from the start.” Ivy League graduates, moreover “are not the best and the brightest or the hardest working,” but “some of the best, brightest, and hardest working among the very rich.”
There’s a lot in there, reflecting just what a nerve my essay struck and how unresolved its subject remains, despite the moral certainty that characterized so many critical responses. Much of Mandery’s assessment, as a professor criticizing a decade-old piece, is familiar—you’d be amazed how many people have told me that my penniless, liberated-slave grandparents were rich because they didn’t have it as bad as non-whites in America—and seems to extrapolate from a few lines of my essay what it takes my position to be rather than reading it all the way through. Then, as now, most of my critics understood my position to come from a place of entitlement—that I thought I had earned everything I had by hard work alone, and resented being told that the game had been tilted in my favor.
My whole point was that Americans should be grateful for what they have inherited, rather than embrace the totalizing suspicion inherent in the “privilege” discourse.
I will admit I am no great fan of being told that the game is rigged, if only because that theory sorely lacks explanatory power. (How Jews, recent immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, Indians, and white people raised by single parents figure into theories of systemic power is a topic that deserves an essay of its own.) But even getting sucked into that rabbit hole concedes too much. At no point did I deny that many other people’s choices and circumstances played a large role in my becoming who I am. Indeed, my whole point was that Americans should be grateful for what they have inherited, rather than embrace the totalizing suspicion inherent in the “privilege” discourse.
Most readers, many of them precisely the regular Americans Mandery claims I am liable to look down on, understood that. In the months following my essay’s viral takeoff, I got thousands of emails. For every one I received calling me a bigot who “just doesn’t get it” (and there were many of those), I got several more from people across the country, of all ethnicities, every tax bracket, and both sexes, telling me that I had expressed exactly the position they wished elites (people like Mandery) would understand.
It turns out that my essay had proved something of a Rorschach test. To some, my rejection of “privilege” discourse revealed that I was arrogant, ungrateful, and ignorant of the ways in which I was not solely responsible for my success thus far in life. But to others, it was evidence of gratitude and the desire to share my forebears’ recipe for intergenerational mobility as widely as possible, to reject the pessimism inherent in systemic thinking. Interestingly, most of my classmates fell into the first camp. For all Mandery’s theorizing about the Ivy League being awash with the sense that status is justly earned, I was in the minority on my campus for believing generally in just deserts.
The majority view on campus, which Mandery shares, leads to some puzzling places. The belief that elite admissions are inherently unjust would undermine my classmates’ case for attending Princeton, rather than someone who probably needs the mobility boost more than they did. One way that universities avoid this conundrum is to emphasize the college campus as a community meant to be an interesting and fun place to spend four years, and deemphasize the educational outcomes it produces. Top schools are not exactly home to the best and brightest from among the rich, as Mandery claims, but the most multi-talented and unique from among the best and brightest, with uniqueness (of cultivated skills and idiosyncratic interests) correlating closely with wealth.
For Princeton to maintain its median SAT score and intimate campus experience alongside a full complement of sports teams, a cappella groups, comedy troupes, literary magazines, and social justice clubs, it has to choose every one of its roughly 1,500 annual admits carefully. Students who take this view of the campus to heart can simultaneously hold the beliefs that they belong and deserve to be there in some sense, all without believing that those not admitted have lesser intellects or didn’t work hard enough. It is not that hard to conclude that you have to be lucky and good to go to a great college. And it seems praiseworthy to want to share what you believe to be the keys to your good fortune. Yet pessimists like Mandery would rather tear down the notion of earned success than encourage the kinds of behaviors that elite colleges select for, which really do make for vibrant and interesting communities, and whose cultivation, it stands to reason, makes our culture and economy more vibrant as well.
Nonetheless, I must admit that I agree with Mandery’s main point. Elite universities do their students a disservice when they pay excessive attention to student accomplishments at a juncture in their lives when they cannot have accomplished much. That spirit animates a great deal, though not all, of campus culture. What ends up happening is that, to stand out as a social elite among the elites, students begin to tout their unique accomplishments, frequently tied up with unique “identities.” One classmate was heralded for being the first gay man to summit some of the world’s tallest mountains (including, I think, Mount Everest). That kind of Mad-Libs self-branding was central to social climbing—a natural consequence of going from the 99th-percentile SAT score to suddenly feeling like you’re the slowest in your own dorm, not to mention the ridiculously competitive admissions process that encourages any indications of distinction from the outset.
Elite universities do their students a disservice when they pay excessive attention to student accomplishments at a juncture in their lives when they cannot have accomplished much.
But what seems most responsible for colleges fêting their students is the dominant cultural idea that we all deserve celebration just for being who we are. The story is well-worn: universities used to see themselves as centers of preparation for citizenship in a liberal republic, but now exist primarily as a stage for students to find and liberate their inner identities or “true selves” and show the world how terrific they are when they can live authentically. In short, colleges used to celebrate the process of becoming; now, they celebrate being. That is part of a much broader cultural force that encourages people of all ages to reject external constraints (social constructs, inherited norms, and so on) in order to achieve fulfillment through better service to the imperial self. If colleges have skimped on their obligation to fashion humble, grateful, selfless graduates, one need look no further than the liberationist movements that spawned on campus and continue to dominate there. The ones that celebrate every identity imaginable, as if to say, you are worthy of praise simply for being who you are. The “extraordinary accomplishments” referenced in every welcome-weekend speech are those of finding your unique brand; those referenced in graduation addresses refer to the strides students have made in developing the identity they will bring to bear on the world.
Such an observation only brings into sharper focus just how strange it is to blame a kind of conservative or classical liberal attitude about the relation between contribution and desert for the behaviors of individuals shaped by overwhelmingly progressive institutions. More likely is that having rejected the classical liberal view, today’s elite students have replaced the old signs of worthiness—SAT scores, a proper WASP background—with new ones befitting a progressive elite dedicated to an identity-obsessed worldview and its resultant demands for “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”
The new signs are quite like those “virtue signals” we are always hearing about, but they are not just about letting your classmates know you are one of the good guys. In the elite campus context, signaling that you are committed to remedying all group-level disparities, that you understand that members of “oppressor” classes are epistemically stunted due to their privilege, and that you are up to speed on the new terminologies, identities, and problematics—all these show existing members of the progressive technocratic elite that you are prepared to use whatever power you will soon have to take up their cause. Publicly repeating the mantras that life was rigged in your favor and that Princeton is systemically racist is an excellent sign that you are a true believer who can be trusted with power, and that you have been properly trained to handle, for instance, a White House committed to equity and forgiving student loan debt. Fighting elitism qua elitism is just silly: there will always be elites, and there will always be institutions committed to producing those elites and teaching them the right signals. The key question is what kinds of virtues those signals stand for.
Signaling that you understand that members of “oppressor” classes are epistemically stunted due to their privilege, and that you are up to speed on the new terminologies, identities, and problematics—all these show existing members of the progressive technocratic elite that you are prepared to use whatever power you will soon have to take up their cause.
The signals are coming in loud and clear, showing that Mandery has underestimated the reach of the philosophy he seeks to advance at the expense of the one he identifies with me. He derides my “nihilistic straw man” who believes “no accomplishment is deserved.” Yet he notes the inconceivable irony that Michael Sandel’s Harvard students believe in merit despite reading John Rawls, who argues that rewarding socially beneficial behaviors is “unjust, since they’re the result of what amounts to a natural lottery.” Rawls is indeed the enemy of merit and the notion that reward should be commensurate to one’s socially beneficial activity. And joining Mandery on Team Rawls is everyone who has bought into the equity agenda, which aims to remedy disparities between groups that have emerged because of morally arbitrary mass preferences for certain behaviors (politeness, punctuality, preference for the written word, to name a few) that individuals only exhibit due to morally arbitrary factors. My “straw man” does not just exist; he has won the White House, MacArthur Genius grants, and the culture.
Allow me one more word in my defense. Nobody “indoctrinated” me into rejecting Rawls, believing that a combination of talent, work, and luck leads to success. No one brainwashed me into thinking that the whole privilege discourse lacked explanatory power, hurt those it was trying to help, and demeaned us all in the process. (And if they did indoctrinate me, it certainly didn’t happen at the opening exercises Mandery cites; I skipped those and spent the afternoon watching football.)
The privilege essay itself and the firestorm that followed is a microcosm of everything I am talking about. I came to the position I expressed based on a combination of logic, education, and experience, especially the influence of my (City University–graduate) parents. Writing it brought about many negative consequences, and some good ones, too. But nobody made me write it, and no one but me should reap those consequences. No matter who tries to rob my life of agency, or saddle others with accountability for my choices, I know that I alone had the choice whether or not to publish it, and I went ahead and did it. And, as a descriptive matter, this is what has happened: I live with the consequences, good and bad, every day—I and no one else.
I do not think I am exceptional. We all make choices against an infinite backdrop of characteristics, values, and experiences. Some elements of the backdrop are chosen, some unchosen. Some are chosen by those who came before us, who wished us good or ill. How we choose to conceive of our choice—and the choices of others in their own particular circumstances—is up to us. But that conception itself, whatever we choose, has consequences, and picking unwisely can lead only to despair, distrust, and moral backwardness, in which we punish the righteous and reward the guilty.
I will always pick believing that I and those around me have some agency in life. That doesn’t mean we deserve everything we have—we should be grateful for our good fortune—but it does mean that we can use our choices for good. Call me and my belief in desert naïve, but I will always choose to build up rather than tear down, and try to share my recipe for success—more accurately, that of my forebears—with others.
The bill passed by House Republicans has no chance in the Democratic-controlled Senate but appeals to many of the party’s most conservative voters.
A current first grade history lesson in use in Florida.
The University of Pennsylvania law school has been roiled by the statements of a law professor.
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A YouTuber, Marshall Daniels—who has posted far-right-leaning videos under the name “Young Pharaoh” since 2015—tried to argue that YouTube violated his First Amendment rights by removing two videos discussing George Floyd and COVID-19. Years later, Daniels now owes YouTube nearly $40,000 in attorney fees for filing a frivolous lawsuit against YouTube owner Alphabet, Inc.
A United States magistrate judge in California, Virginia K. DeMarchi, ordered Daniels to pay YouTube $38,576 for asserting a First Amendment claim that “clearly lacked merit and was frivolous from the outset.” YouTube said this represents a conservative estimate and likely an underestimate of fees paid defending against the meritless claim.
In his defense, Daniels never argued that the fees Alphabet was seeking were excessive or could be burdensome. In making this rare decision in favor of the defendant Alphabet, DeMarchi had to consider Daniels’ financial circumstances. In his court filings, Daniels described himself as “a fledgling individual consumer,” but also told the court that he made more than $180,000 in the year before he filed his complaint. DeMarchi ruled that the fees would not be a burden to Daniels.
In the last month, three news stories out of Britain have seized the attention of book lovers. First, with the approval of the Roald Dahl Story Company, holder of the rights to the late author’s works, the publisher Puffin Books (a Penguin Random House imprint) announced that Dahl’s celebrated children’s books would henceforth be published in revised editions reflecting the changes recommended by “sensitivity readers.” The result would be to eliminate references “to fatness, craziness, ugliness, whiteness (even of bedsheets), blackness (even of tractors) and the great Rudyard Kipling,” among other changes, as Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Christopher Scalia added in the Washington Examiner that “this compulsion not to offend is especially strange regarding Dahl, whose work is distinctively unsettling. His publishers were once proud of that.”
Subsequent reports informed us that purchasers of ebook copies of Dahl’s children’s stories would see these changes made in the copies they had previously bought but that were stored on vendors’ servers—yet another reason to own paper copies of books. Puffin later announced that “classic” editions of Dahl’s books—with unchanged texts—would continue to be available for future purchase. But the bowdlerized editions have not been withdrawn, as they should be.
The second story, which did not get much attention in the United States, was that a similar “sensitivity revision” has been performed on the James Bond books of the late Ian Fleming. The sexism of Agent 007, and his retrograde racial views, were gone over with a fine-tooth comb, with the approval of Ian Fleming Publications. Henceforth James Bond, of all people, will try hard not to disturb the prejudices of a typical humanities professor of 2023. It’s a wonder he’s still licensed to kill.
The third story, which I did not see any U.S. media outlet notice, was that the Research Information and Communications Unit, part of Prevent, itself an arm of the UK’s Home Office charged with enforcing the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, had identified certain books, films, and television shows that were on favored “reading lists” of right-wing terror groups the unit was keeping tabs on. The list included works by Tolkien, Conrad, Kipling (again!), Tennyson, Chesterton, Huxley, Orwell, Milton, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, as well as films such as The Great Escape, Zulu, and The Bridge on the River Kwai, and the Kenneth Clark art history series Civilisation. Suffice it to say one could begin to build a pretty good education on the foundation laid by works the British government is concerned about.
It is alarming that the impulse to treat the past as the enemy of the present, rather than as a precious inheritance, is rising to a commanding position at the heights of our culture.
Orwell and Huxley would have understood perfectly what’s going on in these stories. Orwell’s Winston Smith, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, works in the Ministry of Truth, which busily rewrites history from day to day, in accordance with what the Party needs people to believe, regardless of whether it is true. Huxley’s Brave New World doesn’t need a daily rewriting of history. Unlike Orwell’s Oceania, Huxley’s World State has no external enemies, and has achieved a complete break with humanity’s distant past. The few remaining copies of “obsolete” and otherwise forgotten books such as the Bible and the works of Shakespeare are locked away in the possession of the elite World Controllers. And in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, books of every kind are simply forbidden, and are immediately burned by the government’s firemen wherever they are found.
These dystopias all feature one form or another of a war on knowledge and truth by those in power. Their victory in that war can only come if the works of the past are revised to suit present needs, or rendered irrelevant and forgotten, or simply banned altogether. It is alarming that the impulse to treat the past as the enemy of the present, rather than as a precious inheritance, is rising to a commanding position at the heights of our culture.
I don’t mean to suggest that the deeply stupid revisions of the works of minor authors such as Dahl and Fleming represent the advent of a dystopian tyranny. In these cases they will only succeed in making the original works more valuable to preserve, while the insipid revisions will not attract the new readers whose “sensitivities” are being catered to. It is the spirit of the revisionists that is repellent and tyrannical, however.
It is the same spirit identified by George Packer in his recent Atlantic article “The Moral Case Against Equity Language,” where he describes the top-down, flattening, and stultifying dictates of various “inclusive” language guides, crafted by busybodies with no appreciation for plain speaking and no ear for metaphor. It’s the spirit of the “new Roundheads” critiqued by Jonathan Sumption, who simultaneously—and without any apparent discomfort caused by holding two incompatible ideas in their heads—believe both that “knowledge and truth are mere social constructs” and that they know their own countries’ histories are a dreary tale of unrelieved evil.
The impulse to censor—to revise the history and literature we inherit, to ban what we think the worst of it, to banish certain ideas—is as natural to human beings as any of the seven deadly sins. In fact, properly understood, censorship is an essential element of education. There are ideas and books that are fit for children, and others fit for adults. Parents, who have the primary and direct responsibility for the rearing of their children, are right to take an interest in what is assigned to them to read, and what is available to them in the school library. The publisher’s revisions of Dahl’s books might be well intended, with the best interests of children in mind. But they do both the author and responsible parents an injustice—the former by converting a talented author’s genius into mush, and the latter by usurping their role of controlling what their children should read. Should children be prepared for a robust, open-minded adulthood, or should certain windows in their minds be permanently obscured by blackout curtains?
The first work in western philosophy to take up the matter of education in the formation of a political community was Plato’s Republic. No sooner does Socrates begin to sketch the education of the “guardians” who defend and rule his perfectly just “city in speech” than he finds it necessary to demand the revision or banishment of much of Greek culture’s poetic inheritance, because it depicts the gods as variously warlike, vicious, and deceitful. The guardians of the best city must be paragons of virtue, and so poetry that might harm the development of their virtue must go. Finally, at the end of the work, returning to this subject, Socrates argues that the great poets—above all, Homer—make false claims to knowledge of the virtues, in contrast to the philosophers, who are the poets’ great rivals. Homer must go; he and his ilk are to be banished for the sake of justice.
My own view of the Republic, which I have taught on and off for four decades, is that Plato is ironically highlighting the impossibility of perfect justice, because it requires (among other absurdities explored in the dialogue) an iron grip on the dissemination of ideas, a grip that no one but omnicompetent authorities could maintain. Plato can no more banish Homer from Greek culture than we can banish Shakespeare; these poets have put an indelible stamp on their civilizations. To say they merit our study and engagement is to state the obvious; to say they loom so large we have no choice but to reckon with them would be more accurate.
Yet the attempt to control thought can do incalculable damage, however doomed it is ultimately. And just as Plato’s guardians are to be kept on the path to virtue by the elimination of all examples of vice, so the self-appointed guardians of contemporary culture have decided that “inclusion” is the virtue of our time, and all literature that might make the path to inclusion a bumpy one must be flattened, bulldozed, paved over. No fat or ugly people in the children’s books of Roald Dahl; no Asian stereotypes in the mind of Ian Fleming’s 007. Readers of Kipling are suspect; Kenneth Clark’s exaltation of Chartres has a whiff of chauvinism about it.
A much-noticed piece in The New Yorker recently concerned “The End of the English Major.” Nathan Heller’s lengthy and depressing overview of the decline of student interest in the humanities, literature in particular, only once or twice barely touched upon what may be the most important cause of the malady it richly described. Students’ interest in the humanities has waned for multiple reasons: careerism in a tough economy (but without a corresponding rebound, as in the past, when conditions improve); the impact of the smartphone on reading habits and attention spans; an increasing emphasis by universities themselves on STEM education (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).
But the humanities have neglected the age-old maxim “know thyself.” At one point Heller quotes a Harvard dean and English professor saying, “Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!” There speaks, not a student mind genuinely curious about literature, but a young drone—with that “ethics of representation” bushwa—already thoroughly schooled by the Ministry of Inclusion. That is, if anyone is actually saying that to the dean at all, which may be doubted.
Later in the article, for just a moment, other voices “suggest that the humanities’ loss of cultural capital has been hastened by the path of humanities scholarship itself.” But it is not simply that it has become too specialized and obscure, as these voices say. It is the relentless drumbeat, in countless English and other humanities departments, for “representation,” and “inclusion,” and the “interrogation” of literature through a “critical,” ideologically focused lens.
No one becomes a scholar of the humanities—of literature, language, philosophy, history—without first becoming a lover of books. And this passion is fed, not by “representation” and “inclusion” of the reader, or by hacking off the sharp corners of square-pegged works of art to fit them into the round holes of our ideological commitments. It is fed by strangeness—by the encounter with worlds hitherto unknown to us, where we begin by feeling disoriented, groping for a sense of direction, and finally getting our “book legs” under us by patient reading and study.
No one becomes a scholar of the humanities—of literature, language, philosophy, history—without first becoming a lover of books.
To acquaint students with works great, good, or merely instructive, it is incumbent on teachers not to flatter them with promises of their “inclusion” in the world of ideas, or to assure them that their ideological priors will be built up and reinforced. It is necessary instead to emphasize to them how they will benefit from being taken out of themselves into places where they do not feel at all included or represented, but where by dint of effort they can come to feel they belong after all.
As in the encounter with Roald Dahl’s grotesques, who have simultaneously repelled and fascinated children for sixty years, the future students and scholars of literature must leave behind the comfy confines constructed by the Ministry of Inclusion and begin again with the experience of strangeness.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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