But who maintains those archives, such as they are? In his latest essay, looking back a life spent in academia, Victor Davis Hanson explores the mindset behind that particular groups of monks toiling to maintain the collective records of collectivism:
So what did I learn in the university? I’ll try to be a bit less specific than I was in Who Killed Homer? written over a decade ago.
Lies, lies, and more lies
AdvertisementFirst was the false knowledge — odd for an institution devoted to free inquiry. The university runs like a 13th-century church in which the heliocentric maverick is a mortal sinner. So too on campus the Rosenbergs never spied. Alger Hiss was a martyr. Mao killed only a few who needed killing (see Anita Dunn on that one).
Che was not a murderous thug, but a hair-in-the-wind carefree motorcyclist. Minorities supposedly died proportionally higher in Vietnam — as they supposedly do now in Iraq and Afghanistan. Women are underrepresented as both undergraduates and as humanities graduate students. Anyone with an accented name obviously had picked grapes or was denied voting rights. Adlai Stevenson was an American saint, even more so than George McGovern. Only the unhinged even discussed doubts about global warming. Don’t question any of the above; it was all gospel — as we see now in D.C., from Keynes to Gorism to Cordoba as the beacon of Islamic tolerance during the Inquisition. (Doubt any of that, and that laid-back elbow-patched joking prof who told the class “Call me Bill,” in a flash, Gollum like, turned into a snarling jackal, screaming, “I am Doctor Jones, with important publications on climate change and a doctorate from Berkeley! How dare you question me!”)
Wounded fawns all
Next were the mock heroics. The philosophy professor who mastered his weedeater wanted us to think he had just stormed Iwo Jima. The gadfly who in the Academic Senate pushed through a resolution on a 170-2 approval vote demanding state sanction of gay marriage thought he was Mandela fighting back the forces of Neanderthal apartheid. My colleague the French professor believed that she belonged to the United Mine Workers when she trudged off to teach an 8 AM early-bird class. We heard for two years the Homeric battle of how the sociology prof, Odysseus like (or perhaps more in the Achilles strain), once somehow jump-started his car in the parking lot. We heard a lot that everyone was “tired” and “exhausted,” as if we had been painting all day or digging trenches for an irrigation company.
The World of Arugula
So there was the cluelessness about the material world, and both a repulsion and fascination for it. I farmed “raisin plants.” And why didn’t I let one or two owls do my pest management on 100 acres rather than use the poison that was born at Auschwitz? Machines always had to work — or else. When it hit 110 and the air conditioning went out in our building, profs sighed and damned “them” who couldn’t even keep us cool. (None had been on a roof at 120 or wondered how a compressor ran at all — or how a guy could spend four hours up there in Sahara-like conditions with all sorts of sockets and wrenches before his skull melted. [Note well, the campus machines worked far better than did the idea of graduating literate BAs.]) In the world of the professor, offshore drilling rigs can be started and stopped, come and go, sort of like an evening seminar. No wonder Professor Chu announced that California agriculture would dry up and blow away (and given the present policies, he may be right).
“Them”
Looking back at it all, envy seemed the university lifeblood. Most other professionals, you see, were, in comparison to us, overpaid —especially those whom we had the misfortune of sometimes coming in contact with, or, worse, even socializing among. Go to campus and the present demonization of Vegas, Wall Street, surgeons, and insurers makes perfect sense.
But to get back to the thread that connects Mark’s post from 2002 with Glenn’s post from 2010, as Tom Wolfe wrote in 2000, the early progressive social theorists of the 19th century would have been staggered by the wealth and freedom available to the average person today — or at least as recently as a decade ago:
By the year 2000, the term “working class” had fallen into disuse in the United States, and “proletariat” was so obsolete it was known only to a few bitter old Marxist academics with wire hair sprouting out of their ears. The average electrician, air-conditioning mechanic, or burglar-alarm repairman lived a life that would have made the Sun King blink. He spent his vacations in Puerto Vallarta, Barbados, or St. Kitts. Before dinner he would be out on the terrace of some resort hotel with his third wife, wearing his Ricky Martin cane-cutter shirt open down to the sternum, the better to allow his gold chains to twinkle in his chest hairs. The two of them would have just ordered a round of Quibel sparkling water, from the state of West Virginia, because by 2000 the once-favored European sparkling waters Perrier and San Pellegrino seemed so tacky.
European labels no longer held even the slightest snob appeal except among people known as “intellectuals,” whom we will visit in a moment. Our typical mechanic or tradesman took it for granted that things European were second-rate. Aside from three German luxury automobiles—the Mercedes-Benz, the BMW, and the Audi—he regarded European-manufactured goods as mediocre to shoddy. On his trips abroad, our electrician, like any American businessman, would go to superhuman lengths to avoid being treated in European hospitals, which struck him as little better than those in the Third World. He considered European hygiene so primitive that to receive an injection in a European clinic voluntarily was sheer madness.
Indirectly, subconsciously, his views perhaps had to do with the fact that his own country, the United States, was now the mightiest power on earth, as omnipotent as Macedon under Alexander the Great, Rome under Julius Caesar, Mongolia under Genghis Khan, Turkey under Mohammed II, or Britain under Queen Victoria. His country was so powerful, it had begun to invade or rain missiles upon small nations in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean for no other reason than that their leaders were lording it over their subjects at home.
Our air-conditioning mechanic had probably never heard of Saint-Simon’s, but he was fulfilling Saint-Simon’s and the other nineteenth-century utopian socialists’ dreams of a day when the ordinary workingman would have the political and personal freedom, the free time and the wherewithal to express himself in any way he saw fit and to unleash his full potential. Not only that, any ethnic or racial group—any, even recent refugees from a Latin country—could take over the government of any American city, if they had the votes and a modicum of organization. Americans could boast of a freedom as well as a power unparalleled in the history of the world.
To connect Wolfe’s essay with VDH’s latest post and Steyn’s article from 2002, if you’ve worked so hard to rise to the top of your status-sphere in academia, politics, or Hollywood, you really don’t want to think that the average air conditioning repairman, to use Tom Wolfe’s example above, has almost the same quality of life as you do.
So no wonder the left has become obsessed with putting the toothpaste back into the tube, as one blogger inartfully put it last month. Then add to that regressive worldview a slightly different phenomenon, which, while it may have some overlap to progressivism against progress, is largely unrelated, I think. Governments on all levels, from federal to local that are obsessed with punishing businesses for being successful, whether they’re small or fairly large (aside from the handful that have become such institutions that they’re deemed “too big to fail,” at which point they become quasi-nationalized by the state) and no wonder the economy has red-lined for two years now. As the Professor writes:
“I don’t think doomsday is coming, but I don’t think we’ll see substantial job growth or recovery until people are convinced the government won’t shaft them.”
But of course, that first involves replacing the mindset of those who control government — which brings us to November and beyond. But it also involves opening up the minds of so many government employees who labor under them, and the academia where they take their lead, and the entertainment industry that inspires their doomsday rhetoric. Changing all of that is an infinitely more daunting task, but one that a few hearty souls have recently attempted. It’s a long march indeed, but as a previous generation proved, long marches through our social institutions are far from impossible.
And just to wrap up a post that’s gone for way too long, here’s the perfect metaphor for the bedrock a century of “Progressivism” was built on.
Update: As Amity Shlaes writes in the Wall Street Journal, “This weekend we celebrate Labor Day in a country divided between two kinds of workers:”
The first is the private-sector worker, the vulnerable one who rides the business cycle without shock absorbers. The second worker, who works for the government, lives a cushioned existence in which terminations take years, pension amounts are often guaranteed, and recessions are only thunder in the distance. Yet worse than this division is the knowledge that the private-sector worker will pay for public-sector comfort with ever higher taxes.
How did we get here? Over the course of the past century, officials and politicians of both parties have sought to shut unions out of government or, when that failed, constrain their power within government. Early 20th-century strikes by police and other public employees were effective but proved politically damaging. Over time, the unions opted for a more quiet form of coercion—what might be called compensation coercion. Their success in this area brought them to the privileged ground they hold today.
Doug Ross wonders how November will impact the way that history will record our generation.
The question becomes: What year was it when everything in the environment was right? I guess the unenlightened among us need a clearer target to shoot at. These regressives actually call themselves progressives making it certain, in the opening stanza of their enviro-diatribes, that they are always liars.
I guess we would have to go back to those good old days before man was here. Like when the whole earth was one boiling cauldron of volcanic activity. When only peaceful environmentally friendly creatures like T Rex and velociraptors frolicked amongst the ancient forests. Or maybe the econuts like Paul Watson and his band of hippies on Whale wars could guide us to nirvana.
I have trouble with those espousing the mass suicide of the entire human race. I figure they can either be hypocrites or they can be dead.
Personally, when debating those who seek the extermination of humanity, I have a simple, two-word response that I invariably use:
“You first.”
That usually either stops the debate cold, or gets them off into why they should be exempt and everyone else needs to die, which has the wonderful effect of making them look like the absolute lunatics they are.
Reminds me of a guy I talked to one time who was a member of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. He said they were a non-violent group who wanted to get people to choose to not reproduce, so that the Earth could go back to being a natural place without people screwing it up. He also said that if not enough people chose to do so voluntarily, VHEM would “have to take steps to ensure it happened anyway.”
As a graduate in humanities within the past decade, I can verify that a lot of people were silent over these matters. I was lucky to not have ever heard of Howard Zinn and the whole lot. I had only one professor who got angry that I did not share his views. But that was around the time of the tipping point. Soon afterwards, around the time of the voting recount in Florida, a fellow student (used loosely since he was the typical 30-something with a poneytail taking a history undergrad class) stormed in and yelled, “If Bush wins… I am leaving this country!” My professor replied with a half-chuckle, “I’m sure we’ll miss you. What was your name again?” We never saw that guy in class again. I believe something snapped around that time, that made everyone on the left lose that little filter between their brain and mouth. As one of my professors told me about her fleeing from Cuba during the communist invasion, “That revolution helped no one but the people who designed it, and hurt everyone underneath.” Sadly, I fear this country is being forced towards a revolution.
I, too, fear a revolution is at hand. Obamunist and his Marxist cohorts are the best gift the right has ever been given. We have one advantage: Having won two world wars and having survived several depressions and recessions, we are hardier and more determined. They fight for Utopia, an impossible dream; we fight for the Constitution as our forefathers did, as Americans always will.
A little leaven leavens the whole loaf.
It is good that a rich and prosperous society can support critics and gadflies. The very fact that we can support such people is a mark of our strength, just as the peacock’s otherwise useless display demonstrates Darwinian fitness.
Yes, and it is good for us to pause from time to time and reflect on how we can do better.
But now we’ve become all tail and no bird.
I’ve often wondered why those that thought the Human Race was a “cancer” on the planet didn’t “Lead the way” with a spectacular offing of themselves as a demonstration of how it should be.
Bravo Mr. Driscoll, Bravo!
This is grossly unfair. The bridge is to the 15th century.
No, really. See “Medieval elites”:
http://vulgarmorality.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/medieval-elites/
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I have often reflected, stepping way back to get the full historical view, that the two major totalitarian movements of the twentieth century were based on political and philosophical rationalizations for theft. Communism, for example, said that we should steal from the capitalistic rich and middle class, giving their ill-gotten swag to us, the virtuous working class; and the nazis said that we should eliminate the jews, take their sneakily amassed wealth (they’re all rich, aren’t they?) and re-distribute it to us, the noble Aryans. With regard to the totalitarian green movement, it’s possible that only the snout of the beast has so far revealed itself. It would fit the pattern for the full-blown radical green ideology to become that we should eliminate the capitalistic, wealth-creating despoilers of the earth, take all their goods and property and give it to us, the nature-loving and environmentally sound moral elite. After all, it’s just the further greedy creation of wealth that ruins the environment — wealth that’s already in existence need not be destroyed but should instead be re-allocated to those who most deserve it, who work hard day and night to preserve the environment.
Seeing that you discussing movements global green movement and you have mentioned some revolutionariesFeel that you will find a lecture given by Olavo de Carvalho
The Structure of the Revolutionary Mind
Near the end of a fairly long lecture in answering a question fromh is audience he builds up to:
The phrase ‘filthy human babies’ sounds like Invader Zim, the alien invader who really hates humans, especially human children.
They advocated abortion, not sterilization
Actually the eugenics movement advocated both, with sterilization the ultimate goal and abortion merely a stopgap measure. The eugenics literature of the period suggests that abortion should be illegal for the “correct” people, and mandatory for the “wrong” ones.
Scratch the surface of the pro-abortion movement and you will find eugenics. This is why I can’t call myself pro-choice, even though I think this issue is best dealt with outside the province of government.
Its all well and good to throw stones at the narcisstic nihilists, an awkward phrase that nonetheless seems to cover the ground well. But I think what is lacking is a conservative theory that upholds the value of personal decision making and a person’s control of their own welfare, without slopping over into hedonistic or amoral excess. I think we need a new Burke. Its not that the left is winning, its that the left seems to be the only one left on the intellectual field.
Until then, we are all in an intellectual Jonestown, and the trick is to know when today’s menu is koolaid.
It is very sad that so many on the libertarian centre-right have a blind spot regarding the environment. They don’t understand that all sustainable species are strictly limited in number by predators and disease. Whenever these limits are removed – H. sapiens seems to be in that position, but there are many prey-predator feedback cycles that illustrate this – the result is catastrophic. Those who oppose limits on human population are asking for catastrophe.
And you’d think the simple economics of resource logistics would both appeal to those on the libertarian centre-right and be understood by them. But no: many of them call anyone who is suspected of the ‘heresy of environmentalism’ a ‘far-left moron’.
It’s very sad, as any unthinking recycling of dumb slogans is.
Please answer the question in #1. Your population explosion fear mongering doesn’t hold water since never in the history of our species have we been able to feed as high a percentage of our population as we can right now.
Yoni, human population appears to have limits other than predation and disease.
Look at any society that has become wealthy in the technological age, and you see a massive, rapid decline in birth rates. Most “first-world” nations are at or below the replacement rate.
Wealth is not what the neo-Luddites claim. Wealth based on industry and technology, for a number of reasons, leads to a limit on population. It’s poor agrarian societies, those that DO live “in the stone age”, in a “sustainable” way (what a joke), that produce profuse numbers of offspring.
Is this an exact description of the progress of Islam in any society where tolerance has allowed it to metastasize? Can’t blame them. Their tactics have worked well with amazing adaptation to circumstances since their exodus from Mecca in 622. Their success has been simply amazing considering that history has proven cessation of all their aggression with burial of their dead wrapped in pork skins and embalmed in lard. A bag of pork skins in every marines back pack might be a cure for the malignancy if used in administering Muslims’ last rites.
Actually, after the rapture you can call “it” a bridge, an enviromental catastrophic event, a resourse logistics problem, an eugenics movement, a revolutionary movement’s unity, a revolution, nirvana, a discourse, A UFO event, whatever you want. But it will be too late for anything else. A little time spent researching bible prophesy now, will be worthwhile later. God bless to all.
This, right here:
“…if you’ve worked so hard to rise to the top of your status-sphere in academia, politics, or Hollywood, you really don’t want to think that the average air conditioning repairman, to use Tom Wolfe’s example above, has almost the same quality of life as you do.”
Nail, meet hammer. Remember reading about the aristocrats of old and their opinion of the “nouveau riche”? How gauche they were, and how tacky in their expenditures? They just didn’t understand how the wealthy were supposed to act. The bottom line is, these elitists do not want anyone else to achieve their level of prosperity or prominence. After all, if anyone can reach the pinnacle of success, then their achievement is a whole lot less special and they are just (gasp!) another regular person, just like anyone else.
Elite politicians have speech writere and handlers, top of the line Hollywood actors follow a script while carrying out the director’s instructions, our news from the msm comes from a person reading the news prepared by other reporters and writers and managed by the editor and all using technology none of these people created. I forgot many elites got their money from their ancestors. These are the elites we are supposed to listen to. Pardon the grammer.
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