Welcome to the future: look at all the “progress” we’ve made. The Carlyle Club pits George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four against Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in this, the distinctly dystopian final issue of Radish, Volume 1.

Table of Contents

George Orwell vs Aldous Huxley

Our merely social intolerance, kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any active effort for their diffusion. […] And thus is kept up a state of things very satisfactory to some minds, because, without the unpleasant process of fining or imprisoning anybody, it maintains all prevailing opinions outwardly undisturbed, while it does not absolutely interdict the exercise of reason by dissentients afflicted with the malady of thought. A convenient plan for having peace in the intellectual world, and keeping all things going on therein very much as they do already. But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind. John Stuart Mill (1859)

They were the great dystopian visions of the 20th century: Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World—and if more people actually understood them, they would be banned, but instead we call them “the great dystopian visions of the 20th century” and pat ourselves on the back for avoiding all that. If you haven’t read them since high school, I suggest you do so now—and this time, pay attention, because I guarantee you didn’t get it the first time.

Today, as you know, Nineteen Eighty-Four is by far the more famous, because Orwell gave us such wonderfully evocative terms as “Big Brother,” “thoughtcrime,” “Thought Police,” “Newspeak,” “memory hole,” “doublethink,” “Two Minutes Hate,” and of course the all-purpose “Orwellian” (Wik): “describing the situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It connotes an attitude and a policy of control by propaganda, surveillance, misinformation, denial of truth, and manipulation of the past practiced by modern repressive governments.”

Yes, such wonderfully evocative terms—which we have so spectacularly failed to apply. Not that we don’t try to root out tyranny. We try so hard. It’s just that we miss about 97 percent of it, because we’re too busy cheering it on, or screaming at our version of Emmanuel Goldstein.

When you start to notice how tyranny, in recent times, and for fairly obvious reasons, prefers to call itself nice names like “tolerance,” “freedom,” “equality,” and most of all “progress,” which is itself Orwellian; and that our collective blind spot for progressive tyranny results from progressives occupying almost every position of (real) power in the government, which is quite Orwellian; and that all of this is generally considered to be an unremarkable state of affairs and not in the slightest bit Orwellian, which is astonishingly Orwellian; then, and only then, will you begin to see the scope of our failure.

“Uh, no, progressives have barely any power, because—” Right, I know, something something “Republicans in Congress.” Thank you, Noam Chomsky customer, for proving my point exactly: a democratic state is guided by public opinion (this is where you’re supposed to stop thinking, but we barrel on), public opinion is guided by teachers and journalists, and teachers and journalists are guided by college professors, and yet for some reason you, college-educated New York Times reader, are unable to identify the universities and the press as informal branches of the government, which they evidently are. Walter Lippmann is your man here: Public Opinion (1922) is a classic which everyone should read, and no one should read uncritically.

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.

Noam Chomsky, of course, took this idea and twisted it to suit his own, no doubt nefarious purposes. No, Chomsky customer, the corporations, the military and the “anticommunists” aren’t the “power elite” in America; Professor Chomsky and his campus bestsellers are the power elite in America.

Frederick Taylor Gates; Patricia Nelson Limerick with Steven Johnson, Administrator of the EPA

“Academia as a branch of the government?” you cry. “Whaaaaat?” Just so. As early as 1916, Frederick T. Gates, Chairman of the General Education Board, could write (Occasional Papers):

In the state of Wisconsin, now perhaps the best governed of all our states, the University writes the laws that go on the statute books, University professors guide and control the main departments of state administration and inquiry; there is no limit to the financial resources which a grateful people are placing at the disposal of learning, thus consecrated to the service of the commonwealth. Our more ancient seats of learning pride themselves justly on their antiquity, on their dignity, on the reverence in which they are held, on the great names that have been and are associated with them. But it is yet theirs to reign over empires now undreamed; to inherit a kingdom that has awaited them from the foundation of the world; to write the laws of obedient states; to know the love of a reverent, grateful, and generous people; to “Scatter plenty o’er a smiling land

And read their history in a nation’s eyes.”

Truly America has made great strides toward his “beautiful dream” (which is not at all weird and creepy):

In our dream, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply. […] The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one: to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are.

If this doesn’t seem eerily familiar, then you really need to revisit Huxley’s Brave New World—but I digress.

Today’s “progressive” scholar, particularly in the political and social pseudosciences, is pleasantly surprised to discover the scope of her, shall we say, “influence” on “administrative procedural outcomes,” and the magnitude of her “impact” on “public policy decision-making,” not to mention the burden of her “responsibility” to “exercise global leadership,” none of which should ever be confused with any sort of power with which to rule anyone.

I suppose it’s easy to be surprised if you haven’t been paying attention for the last hundred years.

American historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, for instance, seems to have a bit of a blind spot for the history of history professors (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2008):

It is hard for me to remember why other academics choose to feel marginalized in American life. Come on in, the water’s fine!, I would like to say to graduate students and assistant professors. There is certainly plenty of room in this pool. In the early 21st century, there is no limit or constraint on the desire of public constituencies to profit from the perspective of a university-based historian.

“No limit or constraint.”

Even better, the usual lament of the humanities—“There is plenty of money to support work in science and engineering, but very little to support work in the humanities”—proves to be accurate only if you define “work in the humanities” in the narrowest and most conventional way. If, by that phrase, you mean only individualistic research, directed at arcane topics detached from real-world needs and written in inaccessible and insular jargon, there is indeed very limited money. But for a humanities professor willing to take up applied work, sources of money are unexpectedly abundant. There is no need for humanities professors to waste any more time envying the resources available to scientists and engineers. Instead, you can offer to play Virgil to their Dante, guiding them through the inferno of cultural anxieties, laypeople’s misunderstandings, and political landmines.

The role of the humanities professor: to guide us poor ignorant racist dimwits in all matters cultural and political, because we wouldn’t want the rabble to misunderstand such critically important issues as… um…

Another nearly completed project, The Nature of Justice: Racial Equity and Environmental Well-Being, spotlights the involvement of ethnic minorities with environmental issues.

(I assume she doesn’t meaning torturing animals, mutilating pelicans, or defecating on beaches.)

In the current circumstances of higher education, young travelers would be wise […] to travel the prescribed route to tenure, while still hurrying along as fast as they can. The nation and the planet need their help.

In other words, hurry up and make yourself totally immune to public opinion, so you can help me rule the world.

And UC Berkeley history professor David A. Hollinger demands to know why the insolent Red State rabble think they should have a say in how the government redistributes their incomes (Chronicle, 2013):

In 1966, Walter Lippmann published an essay in The New Republic on “The University,” observing that scholars and scientists had become the ultimate arbiters of virtually every question faced by humankind—and a good thing, too. That a Florida governor could today recommend downgrading the humanities, that members of Congress would try to cut NSF funds for the entire discipline of political science—well, Lionel Trilling and his contemporaries faced nothing remotely like that.

Fortunately, this has never, ever even slightly slowed down the monotonically increasing “impact” of political “scientists.” But keep your eyes focused on those Congressmen! They might try to seize some sort of power.

The humanities deserve support not because they always get things right—often they do not—but because they are the great risk takers in the tradition of the Enlightenment. Nothing could be further from the uncritical preservation of traditional culture so often advanced by nonacademics under the sign of the humanities.

The present education conventions fade from their minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk.

It is too easy to assume that the public cannot understand grander aspirations and more-capacious visions of life. Not everyone can be expected to get it. But some will. By running from, instead of proclaiming, the role of the liberal arts and sciences in bringing received wisdom and vested interests under the scrutiny of critical thought, we risk further diminishing the public’s ability to appreciate it.

Stupid peasants are stupid.

All of us, as scholars, have a responsibility to patiently and repeatedly explain the social value of what we do, in common, as children of the Enlightenment. We are the people of Newton and Locke; we are the people of Darwin and Mill, the people of Einstein and Oppenheimer, of Dewey and Arendt and Habermas. We have defined the terms of science and scholarship in the North Atlantic West and beyond since the 17th century. We serve society by placing its inherited pieties and entrenched interests at risk, not in some iconoclastic mode, but rather by way of ensuring that beliefs and entanglements survive only when they are strong enough to meet the most empirically warranted of challenges.

I’m speechless. Really. “Patiently and repeatedly explain the social value of what we do.” “We have defined the terms of science and scholarship.” “We serve society”—good grief. And let us not overlook “empirically warranted” in the context of political “science.” I refer you to my favorite resource on the philosophy of science: the Science Buddies guide to the scientific method. “It is important for your experiment to be a fair test. A ‘fair test’ occurs when you change only one factor (variable) and keep all other conditions the same.” Which makes political “science”—well, not science, surely, but then—what, exactly?

But, again, I digress. What do we consider Orwellian? Surely not the “applied work” of the “humanities” professor, operating in “public constituencies” without “limit or constraint.” But then what? The Iraq War, of course. The “War on Drugs,” obviously. Iranian internet censorship. Cameras on public transportation. Elections, and reality TV in general. And you might want to keep an eye out for any clearly labeled government news agencies.

Not that I approve of any of those things (particularly elections), but bear in mind, we live in a society where “equality under the law” means that the state enforces special privileges for protected classes, a policy we have taken to calling by a meaningless phrase. But never mind that, tell us more about President Bush and his freedom fries. Why, the man is positively Orwellian.

Look out! The skies are filled with drones! Truly the “Orwellian Age” is upon us.

Meanwhile, a Nobel laureate is fired and disgraced for stating an incontrovertible truth deemed politically incorrect.

Miraculously, even under Bushitler’s neo-Confederate totalitarian theocracy, the New York Times (2003) managed to dodge the GOP death squads long enough to turn up a bona fide expert, Professor Geoffrey Nunberg, to put everything in ‘Simpler Terms’ even we peasants can understand:

Orwell is the writer most responsible for diffusing the modern view of political language as an active accomplice of tyranny. As he wrote in “Politics and the English Language,” “Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” That was an appealing notion to an age that had learned to be suspicious of ideologies, and critics on all sides have found it useful to cite “Politics and the English Language” in condemning the equivocations of their opponents. Critics on the left hear Orwellian resonances in phrase like “weapons of mass protection,” for nonlethal arms, or in names like the Patriot Act or the Homeland Security Department’s Operation Liberty Shield, which authorizes indefinite detention of asylum-seekers from certain nations. Critics on the right hear them in phrases like “reproductive health services,” “Office of Equality Assurance” and “English Plus,” for bilingual education.

A fair and balanced take, I think we can all agree. Professor Nunberg is truly bipartisan—possibly even post-partisan. Yet I can’t help but notice that a web search for “weapons of mass protection” turns up less than five thousand hits, whereas “affirmative action” (i.e., government-mandated discrimination on the basis of race and sex) and “hate crime” (literally a form of thoughtcrime) turn up 43 and 202 million, respectively, though neither of them made the list—presumably because only a disgusting racist white racist who deserves to die would question these wonderful policies which no one ever voted on, but somehow became the law anyway.

I also notice that American-style Democracy, that other form of 20th century popular government besides the “suspicious ideologies” of Fascism and Communism, isn’t considered in any way suspicious, or even an ideology (New York Times, 2010):

The more people who have access to the ballot, the better the country will be.

And there the editorial ends. No evidence is necessary, and none is provided. Yes, in spite of the many atrocities Democracy has committed, abetted, and covered up over the years, it is taken as an article of faith by “all sides.” At least, all sides with acceptable viewpoints (PolicyMic, 2012):

A cable news structure with distinctly opinionated networks inherently has the power to define national discourse. […] It’s interesting that news organizations, of all things, are serving as this force.

“Of all things.” Ms. Vamburkar, meet Mr. Lippmann.

Fortunately, the one form of popular government to survive the Century of Mass Murder also happens to be the one good kind. I guess history was on our side. Otherwise we might be stuck with crazy old Hitler, who believed in some kind of weird “Divine Providence” that would lead to his inevitable victory, and had all sorts of tricks for brainwashing ordinary people into believing strange things (Ernst von Salomon, 1951):

The word ‘Democracy’ is one that I have only very rarely, and with great reluctance, employed. I do not know what it is and I have never yet met anyone who could explain its meaning to me in terms that I am capable of understanding. But I fear that Hitler’s assertion—that his ideological concept was the Democratic concept—will prove a hard one to refute. The enlightenment of the world from a single, central position, the winning of mass support through convincing arguments, the legitimate road to power by way of the ballot-box, the legitimisation by the people itself of power achieved—I fear it is hard to deny that these are Democratic stigmata, revelatory perhaps of Democracy in a decadent and feverish form, but Democratic none the less. I further fear that the contrary assertion—that the totalitarian system as set up by Hitler was not Democratic—will prove a hard one to justify. The totalitarian state is the exact opposite of the authoritarian state, which latter, of course, bears no Democratic stigmata but hierarchical ones instead. Some people seem to believe that forms of government are estimable in accordance with their Progressive development; since totalitarianism is certainly more modern than the authoritarian state system, they must logically give Hitler the advantage in the political field.

Thankfully (for us; not so much for the citizens of Hamburg, Dresden, Nuremberg, Tokyo, etc., etc.), the Forces of Good just so happened to have better bombers. Not to mention our excellent ally, the Soviet Union—right up until we remembered it was evil. Seriously, try not to mention that. Especially around Veterans Day (Richard Maybury):

Let me point out that the largest ally President Roosevelt had during the war was Stalin’s Soviet Socialists. […] Instead of staying out of the war and letting the German and Soviet barbarians pound each other to dust on the plains of central Europe, Franklin Roosevelt abandoned neutrality and in June 1941—five months before Pearl Harbor—announced he would back the socialist Stalin. Stalin was the worst known evil in history. […] Franklin Roosevelt backed Stalin, so the worst evil in history won the war, Stalin.

Which is not at all like being “an active accomplice of tyranny.” Complicated stuff, obviously. Thank goodness Professor Nunberg has put everything in such simple terms.

I’m not even going to start on the unexamined notion of “asylum-seekers” (Issue 5), because once again we digress from the matter at hand (Nunberg again):

Which of those terms are deceptive packaging and which are merely effective branding is a matter of debate. But there’s something troubling in the easy use of the label “Orwellian,” as if these phrases committed the same sorts of linguistic abuses that led to the gulags and the death camps.

Linguistic abuses like “equality” and “progress,” perhaps?

In fact, there has never been an age that was so well-schooled in the perils of deceptive language or in decoding political and commercial messages, as seen in the official canonization of Orwell himself. […] But as advertisers have known for a long time, no audience is easier to beguile than one that is smugly confident of its own sophistication. The word “Orwellian” contributes to that impression. Like “propaganda,” it implies an aesthetic judgment more than a moral one. Calling an expression Orwellian means not that it’s deceptive but that it’s crudely deceptive. Today, the real damage isn’t done by the euphemisms and circumlocutions that we’re likely to describe as Orwellian.

Couldn’t agree more, Professor. I think we’re ready to hear about the latest gulag-type “linguistic abuses” now…

Rather, the words that do the most political work are simple ones—“jobs and growth,” “family values” and “color-blind” not to mention “life” and “choice.”

Right, obviously: the real threat of tyranny lies in the Republican Party, which at the time controlled the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court, giving them absolute power. (Meanwhile, in the real world: ‘House GOP extracts no concessions.’) Specifically, it’s their tyrannical opposition—which has been so successful over the years—to abortion (still legal, last I checked), taxation, same-sex marriage, and our old friend “affirmative action,” finally making an appearance—as “extra affirmative action,” for some reason, and as one of those “euphemisms and circumlocutions” that can’t do any “real damage,” as any sophisticated audience knows.

Alas, not one example of doublethink, thoughtcrime or Newspeak made the Professor’s list. Victor Davis Hanson, a less-than-usually hopeless “conservative” (though of what, unclear), comes closer to the awful truth (2009):

We see Barack Obama’s smile broadcast 24/7, in a fashion we have not seen previously of earlier presidents. A Newsweek editor referred to Obama as a “god.” […] Former President George Bush—our new Emmanuel Goldstein—remains a daily target of criticism. […] Last week, the president said those in the past administration caused our present problems—and so should keep quiet and get out of his way. […] There are similar Big Brother attacks on recent critics of the Obama administration’s health-care initiatives. Once-praised dissent has become subversive. Protestors are a mob to be ridiculed by the government as mere health-insurance puppets. […] An official presidential Web site now asks informants, in Big Brother style, to send in e-mails and Internet addresses that seem “fishy” in questioning the White House health-care plans. […] Racial transcendence translates into more racial identity politics, reflected both in rhetoric and presidential appointments. […] We were once told that military tribunals, renditions, the Patriot Act and Predator drone attacks in Pakistan were George Bush’s assault on the Constitution rather than necessary tools to fight radical Islamic terrorists. Not now. These policies are no longer criticized—even though they still operate more or less as they did under Bush. Guantanamo is still open, but no longer considered a gulag. The once-terrible war in Iraq disappeared off the front pages around late January of this year. George Orwell, a man of the left, warned us that freedom and truth are not just endangered by easily identifiable goose-stepping goons in jackboots. More often he felt that state collectivism would come from an all-powerful government—run by a charismatic egalitarian, promising to protect us from selfish, greedy reactionaries. Orwell was onto something.

And a 2013 letter to the editor of the Australian gets it almost exactly right:

Human Rights Commission chairwoman Gillian Triggs continues to expose the totalitarian mind-set that characterises the human rights industry in Australia… Her insistence, at a Senate hearing, that the expression of political opinions that some might find unwelcome should be constrained by government appointed decision-makers like her is Orwellian in the blase manner in which she sweeps aside the most fundamental human right on which our liberal democratic society is based. […] Ordinary citizens know there are a number of political opinions that it is not wise to express in Australia. It appears that Triggs is now proposing that this interdiction should be formalised in law so that we will all have a clear idea of what political opinions we should be terrified of expressing.

On the other hand, American cultural critic Neil Postman wonders if maybe we should all lay off Orwell for a while and pay a bit more attention to Huxley (Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985):

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

Look at all the fake stuff you can pretend to accomplish before you die!

Christopher Hitchens is on the same page (Harper’s, 1998):

We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression “You’re history” as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as text and as date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonistic nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus. Orwell’s was a house of horrors. He often seemed to beg credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and reconstruct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. Whereas Huxley, writing of a California-style utopia of 1932, rightly foresaw that any such regime could break but could not bend. In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. That was the precise moment at which the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught at all.

The questions we sought to answer in this issue of Radish: is the Western world “progressing” more rapidly in the direction of Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World? In the end, will it be Orwell or Huxley? Where are we now, compared to 1990, 1970, 1950? Perform a linear regression on culture and politics (and control for technological advances). Now tell me: toward what dismal sort of future does the arrow of “progress” point?

As always, my fair and open-minded friends, I leave the final judgment up to you.

From Emily Carroll’s Community, Identity, Stability

In Brave New World, Chapter 1, the Director of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre leads a tour for visiting students:

“Just to give you a general idea,” he would explain to them. For of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently—though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.

It is at Hatchery and Conditioning Centres like this that all children are fertilized, classified according to intelligence (as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, or Epsilon), incubated, prenatally conditioned, hatched, and socially conditioned until they reach a productive age. Natural (or “viviparous”) reproduction has been banned, and all related terms, particularly “mother” and “father,” are considered obscene.

The tour begins in the Fertilizing Room. Whereas Alphas and Betas (engineers, scientists, writers, technicians, etc.) are unique,—“one egg, one embryo, one adult,”—lower-caste eggs undergo “Bokanovsky’s Process,” forcing them to divide into batches of up to ninety-six clones.

But one of the students was fool enough to ask where the advantage lay. “My good boy!” The Director wheeled sharply round on him. “Can’t you see? Can’t you see?” He raised a hand; his expression was solemn. “Bokanovsky’s Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!”

The boys copy this key information into their notebooks.

Standard men and women, in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg. “Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!” The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. “You really know where you are. For the first time in history.” He quoted the planetary motto. “Community, Identity, Stability.” Grand words. “If we could bokanovskify indefinitely, the whole problem would be solved.” Solved by standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons. Millions of identical twins. The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.

After the Fertilizing Room comes the Bottling Room, then the Social Predestination Room. The Director is joined by Henry Foster, who explains that seventy percent of female embryos are dosed with testosterone and decanted as infertile but otherwise normal “freemartins”:

“Which brings us at last,” continued Mr. Foster, “out of the realm of mere slavish imitation of nature into the much more interesting world of human invention.” He rubbed his hands. For of course, they didn’t content themselves with merely hatching out embryos: any cow could do that. “We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, future sewage workers or future…” He was going to say “future World controllers,” but correcting himself, said “future Directors of Hatcheries,” instead.

At the 320th meter along Rack No. 11, a Beta-Minus mechanic is reducing oxygen flow to the lower-caste embryos.

“Reducing the number of revolutions per minute,” Mr. Foster explained. “Nothing like oxygen-shortage for keeping an embryo below par.” […] “But why do you want to keep the embryo below par?” asked an ingenuous student. “Ass!” said the Director, breaking a long silence. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that an Epsilon embryo must have an Epsilon environment as well as an Epsilon heredity?” […] “The lower the caste,” said Mr. Foster, “the shorter the oxygen.” The first organ affected was the brain. […] “But in Epsilons,” said Mr. Foster very justly, “we don’t need human intelligence.” Didn’t need and didn’t get it.

Around the 170th meter, embryos on Rack No. 9 enter a kind of tunnel:

“Heat conditioning,” said Mr. Foster. Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miners and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. “We condition them to thrive on heat,” concluded Mr. Foster. “Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it.” “And that,” put in the Director sententiously, “that is the secret of happiness and virtue—liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny.”

After Bottling and Social Predestination comes the Decanting Room, where Henry Foster stays behind as the Director (D.H.C.) and his students proceed to the fifth floor in Chapter 2:

Infant Nurseries. Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms, announced the notice board. […] The nurses stiffened to attention as the D.H.C. came in. “Set out the books,” he said curtly. In silence the nurses obeyed his command. Between the rose bowls the books were duly set out—a row of nursery quartos opened invitingly each at some gaily coloured image of beast or fish or bird. “Now bring in the children.” They hurried out of the room and returned in a minute or two, each pushing a kind of tall dumb-waiter laden, on all its four wire-netted shelves, with eight-month-old babies, all exactly alike (a Bokanovsky Group, it was evident) and all (since their caste was Delta) dressed in khaki. […] Turned, the babies at once fell silent, then began to crawl towards those clusters of sleek colours, those shapes so gay and brilliant on the white pages. […] From the ranks of the crawling babies came little squeals of excitement, gurgles and twitterings of pleasure. […] The Head Nurse, who was standing by a switchboard at the other end of the room, pressed down a little lever. There was a violent explosion. Shriller and ever shriller, a siren shrieked. Alarms bells maddeningly sounded. The children started, screamed; their faces were distorted with terror. “And now,” the Director shouted (for the noise was deafening), “now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock.” […] Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks—already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder. “They’ll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an ‘instinctive’ hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned. They’ll be safe from books and botany all their lives.”

Then on to the fourteenth floor, where the children receive most of their conditioning, in the form of sleep-teaching (or “hypnopaedia”). But they aren’t taught science or geometry that way:

You can’t learn a science unless you know what it’s all about. “Whereas, if they’d only started on moral education,” said the Director, leading the way towards the door. The students followed him, desperately scribbling as they walked and all the way up in the lift. “Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.” […] Fifty yards of tiptoeing brought them to a door which the Director cautiously opened. They stepped over the threshold into the twilight of a shuttered dormitory. Eighty cots stood in a row against the wall. There was a sound of light regular breathing and a continuous murmur, as of very faint voices remotely whispering. A nurse rose as they entered and came to attention before the Director. “What’s the lesson this afternoon?” he asked. “We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes,” she answered. “But now it’s switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness.” […] “Elementary Class Consciousness, did you say? Let’s have it repeated a little louder by the trumpet.” […] “… all wear green,” said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, “and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I’m so glad I’m a Beta.” There was the pause; then the voice began again. “Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able…” […] Roses and electric shocks, the khaki of Deltas and a whiff of asafoetida—wedded indissolubly before the child can speak. But wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour. For that there must be words, but words without reason. In brief, hypnopaedia. “The greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time.” […] “… so frightfully clever,” the soft, insinuating, indefatigable voice was saying, “I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because…” Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob. “Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too—all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!” The Director almost shouted in his triumph. “Suggestions from the State.” He banged the nearest table. “It therefore follows…” A noise made him turn around. “Oh, Ford!” he said in another tone. “I’ve gone and woken the children.”

Three of history’s smuggest pr…esidents

I anticipate certain objections.

“Come now, Carlyleans,” you are perhaps thinking, or shouting at your portable electronic device, provoking stares from other passengers, or, ideally, muttering through clenched teeth whilst sharpening a bayonet in your fortified bunker, “surely you aren’t claiming we subject our children to social conditioning—electrifying the floors of our kindergartens, etc. Besides, isn’t that the sort of thing those awful Communists used to do?”

Indeed it is. As William Henry Chamberlin wrote in Russia’s Iron Age (1934, p. 133):

The huge Soviet propaganda machine works with every available resource to remould the mind of the nation. School and theatre, press and lecture platform, radio and poster, even moving-picture performance and circus, are all pressed into service on what is sometimes called “the ideological front.” From the time when a child can toddle, a red flag is pushed into its hand; it learns the new Soviet songs and is taught in nursery and kindergarten to lisp Soviet slogans. The stream of propaganda, all directed to the purpose of making a new type of man and woman, entirely devoted to Soviet and Communist ideas, becomes intensified as the child grows older. No one can visit a Soviet school without being impressed by the thorough manner in which the pupils are taught to hate “capitalism” and the “bourgeoisie” and to regard the Soviet system as the best in the world. I was once the witness of an amusing scene when a six-year-old American child was showing a picture book to a Russian playmate who was three or four years older. At first the Russian girl enjoyed the colored illustrations. Then an idea came to her; and, turning to her mother, she said: “Mother, this book is bourgeois. It can’t be good, can it?”

Thankfully, as any fool can tell you (and probably will), the Free World under President Barack Obama’s avowedly progressive, Nobel Peace Prize-winning global leadership is absolutely nothing like the Soviet Union under Comrade Joseph Stalin, “Leader of Progressive Mankind.” The USA, unlike the USSR (with which it occasionally collaborated), is not in the business of world domination (Pravda, 1949):

The name of Comrade Stalin has long become the banner of peace in the mind of the peoples of all countries. All who want to struggle against the instigators of a new war know and are convinced that they will do the right thing by rallying around Comrade Stalin, the great defender of peace. Mankind, having lived through the horrors of the last world war, craves for peace and is resolutely opposed to a new slaughter. Precisely for this reason all nations greet with gratitude the resolute, unequivocal policy of peace which Comrade Stalin pursues and upholds. However the warmongers may try to slander our Socialist country, they will not succeed in eradicating from the minds of the common people the conviction that the Soviet Union is the true champion of peace, consistently defending peace all over the world…

Compare America’s solemn duty to exercise global leadership, as explained by President Woodrow Wilson—another famous progressive, winner of the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize (apparently for inserting America into the First World War by misrepresenting German submarine activity):

My dream is that as the years go on and the world knows more and more of America it will also drink at these fountains of youth and renewal; that it also will turn to America for those moral inspirations which lie at the basis of all freedom; that the world will never fear America unless it feels that it is engaged in some enterprise which is inconsistent with the rights of humanity; and that America will come into the full light of the day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity.

The Bellamy salute

And compare that to Hitler’s plot for world domination, which though nonexistent was nevertheless outlined rather convincingly (not to mention creatively) by President Franklin D. Roosevelt—yet another famous progressive, who somehow failed to bag his own Nobel Peace Prize (presumably for inserting America into the Second World War by, again, misrepresenting German submarine activity, and also just making up a bunch of crazy stuff):

Hitler has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the Atlantic Ocean. But his submarines and raiders prove otherwise. So does the entire design of his new world order. For example, I have in my possession a secret map made in Germany by Hitler’s government—by the planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America, as Hitler proposes to reorganize it. […] This map makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States itself.

(This “secret map” was an obvious forgery by the British.)

Your government has in its possession another document made in Germany by Hitler’s government. It is a detailed plan, which, for obvious reasons, the Nazis did not wish and do not wish to publicize just yet, but which they are ready to impose—a little later—on a dominated world—if Hitler wins. It is a plan to abolish all existing religions—Protestant, Catholic, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish alike.

(This “detailed plan” simply did not exist.)

In the place of the churches of our civilization, there is to be set up an International Nazi Church—a church which will be served by orators sent out by the Nazi Government. In the place of the Bible, the words of Mein Kampf will be imposed and enforced as Holy Writ. And in place of the cross of Christ will be put two symbols—the swastika and the naked sword. A God of Blood and Iron will take the place of the God of Love and Mercy. Let us well ponder that statement which I have made tonight.

“All nations greet with gratitude the resolute, unequivocal policy of peace which President Obama pursues and upholds.” “The world will never fear the Soviet Union unless it feels that it is engaged in some enterprise which is inconsistent with the rights of the proletariat.” “In place of the cross of Christ will be put two symbols—the Stars and Stripes.” “All shall know that her flag is the flag not only of National Socialism but of humanity.” I trust the differences are abundantly clear.

Stupid racist white racist Elliott Dearlove was stupid enough to think he’d spotted evidence of recent human evolution in skin pigmentation, thus threatening England’s post-racial paradise. Meanwhile, insane racist Nazi toddlers persist in associating negative qualities with dark skin.

(Like Ms. Shatia “Take His Car Keys” Baldwin’s.)

Brave New Britain (Daily Mail, 2012):

The mother of a seven-year-old boy was told to sign a school form admitting he was racist after he asked another pupil about the colour of his skin. Elliott Dearlove had asked a five-year-old boy in the playground whether he was ‘brown because he was from Africa.’ His mother, Hayley White, 29, said she received a phone call last month to say her son had been at the centre of a ‘racist incident.’ […] Ms White, an NHS healthcare assistant, said: ‘When I arrived at the school and asked Elliott what had happened, he became extremely upset. ‘He kept saying to me, “I was just asking a question. I didn’t mean it to be nasty” and he was extremely distressed by it all.’

Well, of course he was “extremely distressed.” That’s how you teach your stupid white kid not to be such an ignorant little racist: by making him terrified of even the most rudimentary attempts at investigating, understanding or even noticing basic physical (let alone behavioral!) differences between the human subspecies. A worthy goal indeed! Already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly (Daily Mail, 2011):

Teachers are branding thousands of children racist or homophobic following playground squabbles. More than 20,000 pupils aged 11 or younger were last year put on record for so-called hate crimes such as using the word ‘gaylord.’ Some of them are even from nursery schools where children are no older than three. […] Schools are forced to report the language to education authorities, which keep a register of incidents. […] Schools were required by the Labour government in 2002 to monitor and report all racist incidents to their local authority. […] Heads who send in ‘nil’ returns are criticised for ‘under-reporting.’

Even the mighty Register of Incidents may not be enough to bring home the finer distinctions (Telegraph, 2011):

From the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz to Meg, the good witch from the Meg and Mog children’s books, witches have always dressed in black. But their traditional attire has now come in for criticism from equality experts who claim it could send a negative message to toddlers in nursery and lead to racism.

Experts, that is, on conditioning us to believe in “the stupidest absurdities”; e.g., “in one brief word, which includes whatever of palpable incredibility and delirious absurdity, universally believed, can be uttered or imagined on these points, ‘the equality of man,’ any man equal to any other” (Thomas Carlyle, 1867).

Instead, teachers should censor the toy box and replace the pointy black hat with a pink one, while dressing fairies, generally resplendent in pale pastels, in darker shades.

Notice the suspicious failure to carry the argument through to its logical conclusion: if portraying witches in dark colors somehow creates hatred, mistrust, annoyance, whatever, toward dark-skinned people, and we start portraying all the witches in light colors…

Another staple of the classroom—white paper—has also been questioned by Anne O’Connor, an early years consultant who advises local authorities on equality and diversity. Children should be provided with paper other than white to draw on and paints and crayons should come in “the full range of flesh tones,” reflecting the diversity of the human race, according to the former teacher. Finally, staff should be prepared to be economical with the truth when asked by pupils what their favourite colour is and, in the interests of good race relations, answer “black” or “brown.”

“Economical with the truth.”

The measures, outlined in a series of guides in Nursery World magazine, are aimed at avoiding racial bias in toddlers as young as two. According to the guides, very young children may begin to express negative and discriminatory views about skin colour and appearance that nursery staff must help them “unlearn.” If children develop positive associations with dark colours, the greater the likelihood that the attitude will be generalised to people, it says. The advice is based on an “anti-bias” approach to education which developed in the United States as part of multiculturalism. It challenges prejudices such as racism, sexism and ageism through the whole curriculum and teaches children about tolerance and respect and to critically analyse what they are taught and think.

In other words, thought control applied to children on a massive scale by the government through its (moral) education system—which no one could possibly object to, because something something “tolerance and respect.” I mean, what kind of stupid, ignorant person would not want the government programming her children to form “positive associations” with dark-skinned people?

On an unrelated note (KGET, 2009): “The woman had just left the Babies R Us store on when she noticed a man in a tattered military coat lurking in the parking lot, she told police. The woman told detectives she was worried because the man looked like a thug, but she didn’t want to seem racist. … The man then demanded she drive to Fruitvale Junior High, where he raped the woman at gunpoint in front of her daughter.” But I digress.

Recent research by Professor Lord Winston provides evidence that children as young as four can hold racist views. In an experiment carried out for the BBC’s Child of our Time series, children were presented with a series of images of faces of men, women, boys or girls. Only one of the faces in each sequence was white. Children were asked to pick out the face of the person they wanted as their friend and the person they thought would be most likely to get in to trouble. Almost all white children in the survey associated positive qualities exclusively with photographs of white children or adults. More than half of the black children made the same associations. In contrast, people with darker faces were viewed as troublemakers.

Oh no, “racist views!” Because obviously these “associations” could not possibly be legitimate: no one could possibly want to associate with white people based on, like, prior experience or something (Radish 1.6). After all, everyone in the world is exactly the same, except white people are bad; which explains why “anti-racists” can so often be found living in places like Haiti, El Salvador, Cambodia, and Detroit (Radish 1.2). Oh, wait…

In any case, we mustn’t let these little nursery school excesses call into question the utterly and unquestionably legitimate program of “anti-racist” “education” (Telegraph, 2009):

When anti-racist education is extended down to nursery schools, it means something quite different. Anti-racism becomes not about the worthy goals of equality and even-handedness, but about the management of subconscious thoughts and private relationships.

Ah, those worthy goals (Telegraph, 2009):

Ministers have drawn up plans to encourage people to lodge complaints about hate crimes, which they say are being under-reported. […] However, campaigners are now accusing ministers of intensifying their pursuit of hate crime offenders and of allowing prosecutors to go “fishing” for offences, opening them up to accusations of sometimes criminalising apparently innocent remarks and comments.

But I’m getting ahead of myself: we’ll talk more about thoughtcrime later.

Quick tip: this is the exact opposite of how a privileged class would be depicted.

In 2012, Portland public schools expanded their mandate to include a form of moral education called “equity training” (Portland Tribune):

Verenice Gutierrez picks up on the subtle language of racism every day. Take the peanut butter sandwich, a seemingly innocent example a teacher used in a lesson last school year. “What about Somali or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?” says Gutierrez, principal at Harvey Scott K-8 School, a diverse school of 500 students in Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood. “Another way would be to say: ‘Americans eat peanut butter and jelly, do you have anything like that?’ Let them tell you. Maybe they eat torta. Or pita.” Guitierrez, along with all of Portland Public Schools’ principals, will start the new school year off this week by drilling in on the language of “Courageous Conversations,” the district-wide equity training being implemented in every building in phases during the past few years. Through intensive staff trainings, frequent staff meetings, classroom observations and other initiatives, the premise is that if educators can understand their own “white privilege,” then they can change their teaching practices to boost minority students’ performance. Last Wednesday, the first day of the school year for staff, for example, the first item of business for teachers at Scott School was to have a Courageous Conversation—to examine a news article and discuss the “white privilege” it conveys.

Privilege (noun): from the Latin privilegium, meaning private law; “a special entitlement to immunity granted by the state or another authority to a restricted group, either by birth or on a conditional basis” (Wik). Not to be confused with property, like the money you earn at your job, or inherit from your parents; or intelligence, which is largely genetic, and correlates well with educational achievement (Radish 1.7). So someone who earns a lot of money is propertied, not privileged; similarly, someone who does well in school is intelligent, not privileged.

This is staggeringly complicated stuff, obviously.

Proving “white privilege” is a straightforward task. I’m sure you’ve all noticed how white people are entitled by law to a certain share of jobs, promotions, college admissions, etc., in a clear case of privilege. (Remember: the jobs, etc., are property; the privilege lies in the law.) Or how the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department only sue on behalf of white people. Because “white privilege.”

Not to mention that anyone who says anything that can be interpreted, or even deliberately misconstrued, as denigrating white people—let alone threatening them or inciting violence toward them—will come under ferocious attack by the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Daily Show, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and so many other respected and influential institutions. This privilege clearly does not apply to, say, black people, who are of course the least privileged. That’s why you can say “nigger nigger nigger” all day long and nothing bad will ever happen to you—provided you’re white. Because “white privilege.”

I mean, can you imagine if, like, a black singer released an album cover glamorizing black-on-white rape and murder—and went on to star in a hit TV show about a police “special victims unit?” Obviously, if the races were reversed, a white singer would totally get away with it. Because “white privilege.”

Inconceivable, thanks to “white privilege.”

That would be almost as absurd as a talentless black man becoming the poet laureate of New Jersey after (if not because) he wrote: “Come up, black dada/nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape/their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats.” Which, due to the privileged status of white people, no one would ever describe, e.g., thusly (Poets.org): “the lyrics exemplify a ‘highly politicized avant-garde.’” That sort of mainstream praise is reserved for white poets who write about raping and murdering black people—as I’m sure you’ve all noticed. Because “white privilege.”

Amiri Baraka; Eldridge Cleaver

And that would be almost as preposterous as, say, the New York Times (1998) lauding a different black man, who was inspired by that very poem to actually go out and rape a bunch of white girls. Due to “white privilege,” which is a real thing that really exists, nothing like this could ever appear in print:

Eldridge Cleaver, whose searing prison memoir “Soul on Ice” and leadership in the Black Panther Party made him a symbol of black rebellion in the turbulent 1960’s, died yesterday in Pomona, Calif., at the age of 62. […] In the black leather coat and beret the Panthers wore as a uniform, Mr. Cleaver was a tall, bearded figure who mesmerized his radical audiences with his fierce energy, intellect and often bitter humor. […] When “Soul on Ice,” was published in 1968, it had a tremendous impact on an intellectual community radicalized by the civil rights movement, urban riots, the war in Vietnam and campus rebellions. It was a wild, divisive time in the United States, and Mr. Cleaver’s memoir from Folsom state prison, where he was doing time for rape, was hailed as an authentic voice of black rage in a white-ruled world. The New York Times named it one of its 10 best books of the year. “Cleaver is simply one of the best cultural critics now writing,” Maxwell Geismar wrote in the introduction to the McGraw-Hill book. […] In one of the book’s most gripping and brutal passages, he wrote: “I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto—in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of the day—and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically—though looking back I see that I was in a frantic, wild and completely abandoned frame of mind. “Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women — and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact [sic] of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.” There was little doubt he went on, citing a LeRoi Jones poem of the time which expressed similar rage, “that if I had not been apprehended I would have slit some white throats.”

But really, “white privilege” is so obvious, further discussion is unnecessary. Back to Portland we go.

Principal Guitierrez leads an indoctrination session; teacher Kim Wilson confesses her “white privilege.”

If the “racism” inherent in a peanut butter sandwich is “subtle,” Principal Gutierrez’s take on her own school’s racially segregated “lunch-time drum class for black and Latino boys” is downright obscure (Tribune):

At least one parent has a problem with the class, saying it amounts to “blatant discrimination and equity of women, Asians, whites and Native Americans.” “This ‘club’ was approved by the administration, and any girls who complained were brushed off and it was not addressed,” the parent wrote anonymously. Gutierrez denies that any students were turned away from the drum corps, and vehemently rejects any suggestion that it is discrimination to offer a club catering to minority boys. “When white people do it, it is not a problem, but if it’s for kids of color, then it’s a problem?” says Gutierrez, 40, an El Paso, Texas, native whose parents were Mexican immigrants. “Break it down for me. That’s your white privilege, and your whiteness.”

That’s just your whiteness talking, said the highly trained “anti-racist.” Obviously, white people are always forming segregated clubs, which would never, ever be considered “a problem.” Because… well, you know.

Like many if not all of PPS’ leaders, Gutierrez has gone through California-based consultant Glenn Singleton’s “Coaching for Educational Equity,” a weeklong seminar on race and how it affects life; she’s also become an “affiliate,” certified to teach the equity curriculum; and she serves on the district’s administrative committee to address systematic racism, a group that meets every other week.

The seminar is conducted by the Pacific Educational Group, whose stated purpose is “to transform educational systems into racially conscious and socially just environments that nurture the spirit and infinite potential of all learners,” but “especially black children”—which makes sense, because it is run by Glenn Singleton, a race-obsessed black lunatic. The “cash-starved” school district spent $526,901 on the dubious services of the PEG over the course of two fiscal years (Breitbart). Money well spent fighting “white privilege,” I’m sure we can all agree.

Unless you’re a racist.

They may not be literate, but at least they’re “Africentric.”

In 2012, the Toronto District School Board launched a bold new “Africentric” high school curriculum at Winston Churchill Collegiate, “starting with a Grade 9 program in which all five compulsory subjects—math, geography, French, English and science—will have a focus on African heritage” (Toronto Star). Make sure you don’t call it “Afrocentric” by mistake, you colossal racist (Star, 2008):

“[I]t’s African-centered education, and there is no “o” in the word Africa,” said Dr. Patrick Kakembo, director of the African Canadian Services in Nova Scotia. “Why should it be Afro? That’s a hair-do.”

In other news, the Russo-Japanese War will now be known as the Russi-日本の War. That’ll help Russian- and Japanese-Canadian kids learn math and geography—oh, wait, they don’t need special help. I wonder why…

What is an “Africentric” curriculum, anyway? Kathy Shaidle investigates (TakiMag, 2012):

A PowerPoint presentation at the TDSB website offers a sample Africentric class project, circa 2008. Children were assigned the following question: “Why is President-Elect Obama’s win important to science?” Yes, Canadian children. (And this plan was presumably put together before Obama slashed NASA’s budget.) But it gets better, if—imitating our leftist friends—we redefine “better” to mean something closer to “cringe-inducingly horrific.” Because the next photo depicts two black children obediently printing out the following answer, presumably at their teacher’s prompting: “I think it’s important to science because it shows that black people are just as smart as white people.”

Which, of course, it does not (exception fallacy), and which, of course, they are not (race differences in intelligence). So, in this case, “Africentrism” means lying to children about human nature, and teaching them to use invalid reasoning to defend progressive ideology. Words without reason, as the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning put it. And why not? It’s all part of a healthy moral education. “Tolerance and respect!”

Critically important material. “Case-based” is spelled “cased based” on every slide.

Another slide, also in a child’s handwriting:

I think Mr. James Watsons [sic] shouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize because this man was a racist and I’m pretty [sic] a person that won the Nobel Prize should be looked up to but not James Watson. This man said that black people don’t have the intelligences [sic] that white people do but at the end of the day who is are [sic] President? And what colour is he?

Oh, I know this one! Is it high yellow?

In this case, “Africentrism” means retracting a 50-year-old Nobel Prize on account of a biologist’s one-time refusal to let egalitarian ideology rot his field. “Africentrism” is also clear on who can and cannot be guilty of James Watson’s terrible thoughtcrime. From the TDSB’s ‘Package for Educators Grades 7–12’ (p. 70):

While people in different contexts can experience prejudice or discrimination, racism, in a North American context, is based on an ideology of the superiority of the white race over other racial groups. […] The result of institutional racism is that it maintains white privilege and power (such as racial profiling, hiring practices, history, and literature that centre on Western, European civilizations to the exclusion of other civilizations and communities).

In other words, only white people can be “racist.” The TDSB teaching guide to the “International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination” makes this explicit, quoting Martin Jacques:

The fact that whites have no experience of racism, except as perpetrators, means that racism is constantly underplayed by western institutions—by governments, by the media, by corporations.

I’m sure you’ve noticed how the press, the universities, and the formal government never mention “racism.”

Besides corrupting logic, anthropology, and the English and French languages to satisfy its “Africentric” needs, the Toronto District School Board is perfectly willing to rewrite history on behalf of the “Hispanic/Latino community,” as Kathy Shaidle’s husband, Arnie Lemaire, learned from the TDSB’s biography of the loathsome murderer Che Guevara (Blazing Cat Fur and TakiMag, 2012):

Ernesto “Che” Guevara was a leader in Latin America who was born in Argentina. He was a doctor.

No, he wasn’t.

While travelling, he was saddened by how poor people were wherever he visited. He decided that he would give all his time and energy to work to change that.

He made it much worse.

With Che’s vision and the hard work of many people, today Cuba enjoys a literacy enjoys a literacy of over 99.8% (that’s almost 100%, meaning that everyone can read and write).

A dubious statistic—and at what cost?

In 2013, the TDSB struck back against Lemaire, the dissident blogger (Toronto Sun; also Blazing Cat Fur):

Can writing a sarcastic but clearly tame blog comment really land two cops at your doorstep? It happened to Blazingcatfur blogger Arnie Lemaire Wednesday for musing “OISE and the TDSB need to be purged, or burnt to the ground whichever is more effective.” […] In what can be described as more TDSB theatre of the absurd, an obscure six-week-old blog comment resulted in police visiting his home like one might see back in the day of the Stasi in communist East Germany. “We received a knock at our door a little after 8 a.m.,” said Lemaire. “Two detectives from Toronto Police Services identified themselves and asked if they could come in to discuss a matter.” […] They presented “a photocopy of my post about the TDSB teaching children that the Black Panthers were a harmless social justice organization link” and specifically the “OISE and the TDSB need to be purged, or burnt to the ground” stinger. […] He said police told him the complaint came from TDSB spokesman Shari Schwartz-Maltz. […] The TDSB has removed the latest Black Panther link.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled complaining about “white racism.”

An invisible patriarchal conspiracy creates the appearance of differences in pheasants and lions.

Maybe some day feminism will make us all identical.

As everyone knows, sexual dimorphism is a social construct: men are identical to women in both anatomy and personality. Any apparent differences are caused by an invisible patriarchy; “male privilege,” that is, which is exactly as real as “white privilege.” Thank goodness the patriarchy hasn’t been able to stamp out the very few brave feminists, from the very few thousand brave women’s studies departments, who have been fighting so bravely to be treated the same as men. What? Yes, of course that’s what they’re doing—ever so bravely. I mean, that’s what they say they’re doing, after all (Steve Sailer, 2013):

For example, the Harvard article recounted a lesbian dean’s struggle to prevent heterosexual women students from coming to class on Halloween dressed up in “sexy pirate costumes.” In contrast, the Yale tale told by Ms. Pollack, a middle-aged girly girl with an ex-husband and a son, protests how our culture discourages women scientists from wearing sexy clothes such as fishnet stockings in the laboratory. Similarly, while the HBS women are oppressed by a lack of time to finish their homework because future Jack Donaghys keep asking them out on exciting dates, the Yale women in STEM majors (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) are oppressed by a lack of exciting beaus because they find the boys in their classes to be immature Sheldon Coopers.

Meanwhile, Sweden is taking a shortcut to egalitarian paradise—where everyone is exactly the same, and no one is strong or fast or clever or beautiful; a sort of glorious global beehive—by simply banning gender (Slate, 2012):

By most people’s standards, Sweden is a paradise for liberated women. It has the highest proportion of working women in the world, and women earn about two-thirds of all degrees. […] In 2010, the World Economic Forum designated Sweden as the most gender-equal country in the world.

“Gender-equal.” “Women earn about two-thirds of all degrees.”

But for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. The idea is that the government and society should tolerate no distinctions at all between the sexes. This means on the narrow level that society should show sensitivity to people who don’t identify themselves as either male or female, including allowing any type of couple to marry. But that’s the least radical part of the project. What many gender-neutral activists are after is a society that entirely erases traditional gender roles and stereotypes at even the most mundane levels.

Wait, is it many Swedes, or just many freaks (“gender-neutral activists”)?

A Swedish children’s clothes company has removed the “boys” and “girls” sections in its stores, and the idea of dressing children in a gender-neutral manner has been widely discussed on parenting blogs. This Swedish toy catalog recently decided to switch things around, showing a boy in a Spider-Man costume pushing a pink pram, while a girl in denim rides a yellow tractor. Social Democrat politicians have proposed installing gender-neutral restrooms so that members of the public will not be compelled to categorize themselves as either ladies or gents. Several preschools have banished references to pupils’ genders, instead referring to children by their first names or as “buddies.” […] They believe this fulfills the national curriculum’s guideline that preschools should “counteract traditional gender patterns and gender roles” and give girls and boys “the same opportunities to test and develop abilities and interests without being limited by stereotypical gender roles.”

This is totally normal and natural and not at all posed, you sexist fascist Nazi.

Earlier this month, the movement for gender neutrality reached a milestone: Just days after International Women’s Day a new pronoun, hen (pronounced like the bird in English), was added to the online version of the country’s National Encyclopedia. The entry defines hen as a “proposed gender-neutral personal pronoun instead of he [han in Swedish] and she [hon].” […] But not everyone is keen on this political meddling with the Swedish language. In a recent interview for Vice magazine, Jan Guillou, one of Sweden’s most well-known authors, referred to proponents of hen as “feminist activists who want to destroy our language.” Other critics believe it can be psychologically and socially damaging, especially for children. Elise Claeson, a columnist and a former equality expert at the Swedish Confederation of Professions, has said that young children can become confused by the suggestion that there is a third, “in-between” gender at a time when their brains and bodies are developing. Adults should not interrupt children’s discovery of their gender and sexuality, argues Claeson. She told the Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, that “gender ideologues” have managed to change the curriculum to establish that schools should actively counter gender roles. […] Ironically, in the effort to free Swedish children from so-called normative behavior, gender-neutral proponents are also subjecting them to a whole set of new rules and new norms as certain forms of play become taboo, language becomes regulated, and children’s interactions and attitudes are closely observed by teachers. One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys “gender-coded” them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys. Another preschool removed “free playtime” from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely “stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying.” And so every detail of children’s interactions gets micromanaged by concerned adults, who end up problematizing minute aspects of children’s lives, from how they form friendships to what games they play and what songs they sing.

Swedish home-schooling must be crushed at all costs!

When it comes to Swedish moral education, it’s very much no child left behind (CBN, 2012):

Sweden used to be synonymous with freedom and safety. The nation was a haven for political refugees from around the world. But today, Sweden is creating new political refugees: the home-schooler. […] Sweden’s home-school movement has been crushed by a state apparatus that wants children as young as one year old in daycare, and all children in a classroom with a state-approved curriculum. “The Swedish government believes that [the] state takes better care of children than parents,” said Jonas Himmelstrand, president of ROHUS, the Swedish Homeschool Association. “They [the government] are slowly going to more of a police state, where children are more controlled. They have to be in school,” he added. […] Before 2010, it was possible to home-school in Sweden. But new laws now ban the practice in almost all cases and forces private schools to teach the state curriculum. Swedish human rights lawyer Ruby Harrold-Claesson calls what’s happening in Sweden a “parental inquisition.” “Sweden’s treatment of parents in the area of education is totalitarian, essentially. They want to take children from birth to graduation and control them,” said Michael Donnelly, director of international relations at the Homeschool Legal Defense Association.

Don’t worry, this is all happening “ironically” in an otherwise laudable effort to “free” Swedish children from thinking the wrong sorts of things.

Parents are pressured to put their children in daycare at age one. “One mother told me when she went with her 18 month son to his medical checkup, and he was not in daycare. They said, ‘Oh, your son is not in daycare? But he has to go to daycare. He needs that and you need to work,’” Himmselstrand told CBN News. “The argument they give about this is that every child has a ‘right’ to daycare. This is not a right that parents are allowed to interfere with.” […] Donnelly said there is a bad historical precedent for Sweden’s control of children and education: the dictatorships of the last century. “This seems to be what’s happening in Sweden,” he said. “They want to get the kids. They want to socialize them in the way they think is appropriate, and they don’t want the parents involved.” Texan Lisa Angerstig married a Swede and lives in Uppsala with their four children. The couple is fighting fines levied over the home schooling of their son. “Sweden does not believe it’s a parent’s right to choose how you raise your children, period,” Angerstig said. “They believe if you’re keeping your children at home, it’s possible you’re indoctrinating them.” She believes the Swedish government’s actions prove it believes parents are a negative influence on their children. A major issue for the Swedish government is gender equality. The motto for a leading educator in the country states, “Sweden: No more housewives, but higher wages for women.” Tamara Himmelstrand said she used to experience the daily disapproval of stay-at-home moms in Sweden. “The incredible disdain Swedish society has for motherhood and the work that I was doing [made me feel like a bad person],” she said.

Let’s take a moment and remind ourselves that feminist ideology is all about “equality” and “choices,” and not at all about socially conditioning men and women to think, feel, and act a certain way.

Researchers have discovered a progressive bias at American universities? I cannot even begin to express my utter lack of surprise (Forum, 2005):

This article first examines the ideological composition of American university faculty and then tests whether ideological homogeneity has become self-reinforcing. A randomly based national survey of 1643 faculty members from 183 four-year colleges and universities finds that liberals and Democrats outnumber conservatives and Republicans by large margins, and the differences are not limited to elite universities or to the social sciences and humanities. A multivariate analysis finds that, even after taking into account the effects of professional accomplishment, along with many other individual characteristics, conservatives and Republicans teach at lower quality schools than do liberals and Democrats. This suggests that complaints of ideologically-based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study.

Researchers have discovered a progressive bias at American universities? I cannot even begin to express my utter lack of surprise (Campus Reform, 2012):

96% of the faculty and staff at Ivy League colleges that contributed to the 2012 presidential race donated to President Obama’s campaign, reveals a Campus Reform investigation compiled using numbers released by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). From the eight elite schools, $1,211,267 was contributed to the Obama campaign, compared to the $114,166 given to Romney.

Researchers have discovered a progressive bias at American universities? I cannot even begin to express—hey, wait a minute. I feel like we’ve been here before (Washington Times, 2012):

‘Impossible lack of diversity’ reflects ideological intimidation on campus It’s not every day that left-leaning academics admit that they would discriminate against a minority. But that was what they did in a peer-reviewed study of political diversity in the field of social psychology, which will be published in the September edition of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. Psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, based at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, surveyed a roughly representative sample of academics and scholars in social psychology and found that “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues.” This finding surprised the researchers. The survey questions “were so blatant that I thought we’d get a much lower rate of agreement,” Mr. Inbar said. “Usually you have to be pretty tricky to get people to say they’d discriminate against minorities.” One question, according to the researchers, “asked whether, in choosing between two equally qualified job candidates for one job opening, they would be inclined to vote for the more liberal candidate (i.e., over the conservative).” More than a third of the respondents said they would discriminate against the conservative candidate. One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.” […] Generally speaking, the more liberal the respondent, the more willingness to discriminate and, paradoxically, the higher the assumption that conservatives do not face a hostile climate in the academy. […] But Harvey Mansfield, a conservative professor of government at Harvard University, argues that the anti-conservative bias is real and pronounced. He says conservatism is “just not a respectable position to hold” in the academy, where Republicans are caricatured as Fox News enthusiasts who listen to Rush Limbaugh. Beyond that, conservatives represent a distinct minority on college and university campuses. A 2007 report by sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons found that 80 percent of psychology professors at elite and non-elite universities are Democrats. Other studies reveal that 5 percent to 7 percent of faculty openly identify as Republicans. By contrast, about 20 percent of the general population are liberal and 40 percent are conservative. […] In 2011, Mr. Haidt addressed this very issue at a meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology—the same group that Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammer surveyed. Mr. Haidt’s talk, “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” caused a stir. The professor, whose new book “The Righteous Mind” examines the moral roots of our political positions, asked the nearly 1,000 academics and students in the room to raise their hands if they were liberals. Nearly 80 percent of the hands went up. When he asked whether there were any conservatives in the house, just three hands—0.3 percent—went up. This is “a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Mr. Haidt said. […] The statistical representation of self-reported conservatives in the study may be largely moot as long as they are intimidated by a hostile, discriminatory majority. After all, a silent minority can hardly function as the kind of check on the prevailing assumptions of their liberal colleagues essential for robust academic debate. “Because of the way the confirmation bias works,” Mr. Haidt says, referring to the pervasive psychological tendency to seek only supporting evidence for one’s beliefs, “you need people around who don’t start with the same bias. You need some non-liberals, and ideally some conservatives.”

Barry Ames; David Barker; Chris Bonneau; Christopher Carman

Not to worry, universities aren’t actually biased. It’s just that progressives are good, smart people and conservatives are evil, stupid people—according to progressives, who, as we’ve just established, cannot possibly be biased, because they’re so good and smart (Inside Higher Ed, 2005):

Inside Higher Ed recently reported on four University of Pittsburgh professors [Barry Ames, David Barker, Chris Bonneau and Christopher Carman] critiquing the latest survey suggesting ideological one-sidedness in the academy. According to the Pitt quartet, self-selection accounts for findings that the faculty of elite disproportionately tilts to the Left. “Many conservatives,” the Pitt professors mused, “may deliberately choose not to seek employment at top-tier research universities because they object, on philosophical grounds, to one of the fundamental tenets undergirding such institutions: the scientific method.”

Unlike progressives, who adore the scientific method, especially evolutionary biology: Take that, stupid Christians!—Oh, unless it gives racist answers; “behavioral geneticist” Eric Turkheimer (Cato Unbound, 2007):

If I may address my fellow Jews for a moment, consider this. How would you feel about a line of research into the question of whether Jews have a genetic tendency to be more concerned with money than other groups? Nothing anti-semitic, mind you, just a rational investigation of the scientific evidence. It wouldn’t be difficult to measure interest in money and materialism, and it wouldn’t surprise me if as an empirical matter Jews scored a little higher on the resulting test than other groups. As a behavioral geneticist I can assure you without reservation that the trait would be heritable, and, if anyone bothered to take the time to find out, specific genes would have small associations with it. Of course, this research program has already been carried out, at least to the extent the relevant technology was available in 1939. While we are at it we could open a whole scientific institute for the scientific study of racial stereotypes, and finally pull together the evidence on sneaky Japanese, drunken Irish, unintelligent Poles, overemotional women and lazy Italians. Hopefully I am beginning to offend you. Why? Why don’t we accept racial stereotypes as reasonable hypotheses, okay to consider until they have been scientifically proven false? They are offensive precisely because they violate our intuition about the balance between innateness and self-determination of the moral and cultural qualities of human beings. No reasonable person would be offended by the observation that African people have curlier hair than the Chinese, notwithstanding the possibility of some future environment in which it is no longer true. But we can recognize a contention that Chinese people are genetically predisposed to be better table tennis players than Africans as silly, and the contention that they are smarter than Africans as ugly, because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.

For as we all know, the last step in the scientific method is to check your conclusions for ugliness, and make sure no one feels offended by them. You may have violated Newton’s lesser-known Fourth Law, on the “balance” that exists “between innateness and self-determination of the moral and cultural qualities of human beings.”

This coming from the man who coined the “First Law of Behavior Genetics”: “All human behavioral traits are heritable.” There’s definitely something ugly going on here, but it has nothing to do with Africans having lower IQs than the Chinese—which, in fact, they do. (Reality is racist.)

Eric Turkheimer; Troy Duster; Gregg Bloche

Indeed, it may be better to let blacks die of heart attacks than admit race is genetic (New York Times, 2004):

Researchers last week described a new drug, called BiDil, that sharply reduces death from heart disease among African-Americans. That sounds like unalloyed good news, especially because African-Americans have been underrepresented in previous drug trials and because there is already an important class of heart drug that does not work as well in blacks as it does in whites. But not everyone is cheering unreservedly. Many people, including some African-Americans, have long been uneasy with the concept of race-based medicine, in part from fear that it may legitimize less benign ideas about race. […] Some African-Americans fear that if doctors start to make diagnoses by race, then some in the public may see that as a basis for imputing behavioral traits as well. “If you think in terms of taxonomies of race, you will make the dangerous conclusion that race will explain violence,” says Dr. Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University. […] “Anything that invites the perception of African Americans as biologically different is a huge worry,” said Dr. Gregg Bloche, a Georgetown University physician who studies racial disparities in health care.

“Dangerous conclusion.” “Huge worry.” Sounds like science to me! But we’ll talk more about doublethink on genetic race later, and contemplate the consequences for science after that. Back to Inside Higher Ed:

Imagine the appropriate outrage that would have occurred had the above critique referred to feminists, minorities, or Socialists. Yet the Pitt quartet’s line of reasoning—that faculty ideological imbalance reflects the academy functioning as it should—has appeared with regularity, and has been, unintentionally, most revealing. Indeed, the very defense offered by the academic Establishment, rather than the statistical surveys themselves, has gone a long way toward proving the case of critics who say that the academy lacks sufficient intellectual diversity. […] Instead, the last two years have seen proud, often inflammatory, defenses of the professoriate’s ideological imbalance. These arguments, which have fallen into three categories, raise grave concerns about the academy’s overall direction.

Ron McClamrock; Robert Brandon; John McCumber; George Lakoff

1. The cultural left is, simply, more intelligent than anyone else. As SUNY-Albany’s Ron McClamrock reasoned, “Lefties are overrepresented in academia because on average, we’re just f-ing smarter.” The first recent survey came in early 2004, when the Duke Conservative Union disclosed that Duke’s humanities departments contained 142 registered Democrats and 8 registered Republicans. Philosophy Department chairman Robert Brandon considered the results unsurprising: “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.” In a slightly different vein, UCLA professor John McCumber informed The New York Times that “a successful career in academia, after all, requires willingness to be critical of yourself and to learn from experience,” qualities “antithetical to Republicanism as it has recently come to be.” In another Times article, Berkeley professor George Lakoff asserted that Leftists predominate in the academy because, “unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice, as well as knowledge and art for their own sake.” Again, imagine the appropriate outcry if prominent academics employed such sweeping generalizations to dismiss statistical disparities suggesting underrepresentation of women, gays, or minorities.

Progressive academics do seem rather attached to their (apparently unfalsifiable) opinion that blacks and mestizos underperform intellectually because of “white privilege”—which somehow has the exact opposite effect on Asians. But we don’t really need to imagine the outcry when someone mentions that the achievement gaps are accounted for by the intelligence gaps we’re supposed to pretend don’t exist (Radish 1.7); more on that later.

Grover Furr; John Burness; Roberta Matthews

2. A left-leaning tilt in the faculty is a pedagogical necessity, because professors must expose gender, racial, and class bias while promoting peace, “diversity” and “cultural competence.” According to Montclair State’s Grover Furr, “colleges and universities do not need a single additional ‘conservative’ …. What they do need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists—all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never have too many of these, just as we can never have too few ‘conservatives.’”

Grover Furr, by the way, is literally a Stalinist Communist, who has called the Ukrainian famine “a Nazi-inspired myth”; more generally, he believes there were no “‘mass murders’ by the Stalin regime,” they were all “anticommunist fabrications,” and all claims to the contrary are “bullshit” (he screamed, at a student). He attributes the Victims of Communism Memorial to “Nazi collaborators,” and describes Soviet Communism as “one of the greatest triumphs of social engineering of the 20th century”—for which we should be grateful, because I’m not sure we could have survived many “triumphs” greater than that! More on this jolly fellow later.

To John Burness, Duke’s senior vice president for public affairs, such statements reflect a proper professorial role. The “creativity” in humanities and social science disciplines, he noted, addresses issues of race, class, and gender, leading to a “perfectly logical criticism of the current society” in the classroom. At some universities, this mindset has even shaped curricular or personnel policies. Though its release generated widespread criticism and hints from administrators that it would not be adopted, a proposal to make “cultural competence” a key factor in all personnel decisions remains the working draft of the University of Oregon’s new diversity plan. Columbia recently set aside $15 million for hiring women and minorities—and white males who would “in some way promote the diversity goals of the university.” And the University of Arizona’s hiring blueprint includes requiring new faculty in some disciplines to “conduct research and contribute to the growing body of knowledge on the importance of valuing diversity.” On the curricular front, my own institution’s provost, Roberta Matthews (who has written that “teaching is a political act”) intends for the college’s new general education curriculum to produce “global citizens”—who, she commented, are those “sensitized to issues of race, class, and gender.”

How appropriate! Sensitize (verb): “cause (someone or something) to respond to certain stimuli” (Oxford). Not so different from a certain other word, meaning to “train or accustom (someone or something) to behave in a certain way or to accept certain circumstances” (ibid.).

(I note that sensitize can also mean: “make (an organism) abnormally sensitive to a foreign substance.”)

Juan Cole; Russell Jacoby; Erwin Chemerinsky

3. A left-leaning professoriate is a structural necessity, because the liberal arts faculty must balance business school faculty and/or the general conservative political culture. University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, denouncing the “ridiculous and pernicious line” that major universities need greater intellectual diversity, complained about insufficient attention to the ideological breakdown of “Business Schools, Medical Schools, [and] Engineering schools.” UCLA’s Russell Jacoby wondered why “conservatives seem unconcerned about the political orientation of the business professors.” Duke Law professor Erwin Chemerinsky more ambitiously claimed that “it’s hard to see this as a time of liberal dominance” given conservative control of the three branches of government. Professional schools reflect the mindset of their professions: Socialists are about as common on business school faculty as are home-schooling advocates among education school professors. But, unlike business schools, liberal arts colleges and universities do not exist to train students for a single profession. Nor are they supposed to balance the existing political culture. If the Democrats reclaim the presidency and Congress in the 2008 elections, should the academy suddenly adopt an anti-liberal posture?

Not to mention the fact that the universities exercise far greater power (or “influence,” as they prefer to call it) than all three formal branches of government put together, as Mencius Moldbug pointed out in his Open Letter:

My stepfather, a mid-level Washington insider who spent twenty years working as a staffer for Democratic senators, caviled vigorously at the idea that the Democrats are the “Inner Party” and Republicans are the “Outer Party.” He pointed out that between 2000 and 2006, the Republicans held the Presidency and both houses of Congress. I pointed out that he was actually underplaying his hand. During this period, Republican nominees also held a majority on the Supreme Court. By the eleventh-grade civics-class “separation of powers” theory, this would have given the Grand Old Party complete domination over North America. Without breaking a single law, they could have: liquidated the State Department and transferred sole foreign-policy responsibility to the Pentagon, packed the Supreme Court with televangelists, required that all universities receiving Federal funds balance their appointments between pro-choice and pro-life professors, terminated all research in the areas of global warming, evolution and sexual lubricants, etc, etc, etc. Whereas in fact, in all the hundreds of thousands of things Washington does, there was exactly one major policy which the Bush administration and Congress pursued, but their Democratic equivalents would not have: the invasion of Iraq. Which you may support or oppose, but whose direct effect on the government of North America is hard to see as major. Moreover, this applies only to the first term of the Bush administration. We have no strong reason to believe that a Kerry administration would not have adopted the same policies in Iraq, including the “surge.” Why did the Republicans not use their formal control over the mechanisms of Washington to cement real control, as the Democrats did in 1933? There are many specific answers to this question, but the basic answer is that they never had real power. In theory, the Queen has just the same power over the UK, and if she tried to use it all that would happen is that she would lose it. Exactly the same is true of our own dear Outer Party, on whatever occasion it should next get into office. It may get into office again. It will never get into power. (Although it retains the power to fill many juicy sinecures.)

Meanwhile, back in academia, things are unlikely to improve, according to Inside Higher Ed:

The intellectual diversity issue shows no signs of fading away. Ideological one-sidedness among the professoriate seems to be, if anything, expanding. And so, no doubt, will we see additional surveys suggesting a heavy ideological imbalance among the nation’s faculty—followed by new inflammatory statements from the academic Establishment that only reinforce the critics’ claims about bias in the personnel process. In an ideal world, campus administrators would have rectified this problem long ago. A few have made small steps. […] To my knowledge, however, no academic administration has made the creation of an intellectually and pedagogically diverse faculty its primary goal.

Why? I think Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate put it quite well (Boston Phoenix, 2005):

The modern university is the culmination of a 20-year trend of irrationalism marked by an increasingly totalitarian approach to highly politicized issues. Students are subjected to mandatory gender- and racial-sensitivity training akin to thought reform, often during freshman orientation and sometimes as punishment (or “remedial education”) for uttering offensive speech. Faculty members and administrators are made to understand that their careers are at risk if they deviate from the accepted viewpoint. So, even though academic administrators don’t necessarily believe in the official positions, in this brave new world, they must acquiesce for professional reasons. The mantra of the modern campus administrator—usually more a mindless bureau