E-Pluribus | February 27, 2024
The Inquisition, New York Times-style; the Western Canon is still alive and kicking; and the science on male and female brains is blowing some minds - it shouldn't.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Adam Rubenstein: I Was a Heretic at The New York Times
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition! The New York Times Inquisition is another matter, however, and conservatives (or even non-conservatives who are perceived as such) have come to expect it from the Old Gray Lady. Adam Rubenstein, a Weekly Standard alumnus, tells a now all-too-familiar story at The Atlantic of his time at the Times.
Being a conservative—or at least being considered one—at the Times was a strange experience. I often found myself asking questions like “Doesn’t all of this talk of ‘voter suppression’ on the left sound similar to charges of ‘voter fraud’ on the right?” only to realize how unwelcome such questions were. By asking, I’d revealed that I wasn’t on the same team as my colleagues, that I didn’t accept as an article of faith the liberal premise that voter suppression was a grave threat to liberal democracy while voter fraud was entirely fake news.
[. . .]
There was a sense that publishing the occasional conservative voice made the paper look centrist. But I soon realized that the conservative voices we published tended to be ones agreeing with the liberal line. It was also clear that right-of-center submissions were treated differently. They faced a higher bar for entry, more layers of editing, and greater involvement of higher-ups. Standard practice held that when a writer submitted an essay to an editor, the editor would share that draft with colleagues via an email distribution list. Then we would all discuss it. But many of my colleagues didn’t want their name attached to op-eds advancing conservative arguments, and early-to-mid-career staffers would routinely oppose their publication. After senior leaders in the Opinion section realized that these articles were not getting a fair shake, the process evolved. Articles that were potentially “controversial” (read: conservative) were sent directly to the most senior editors on the page, to be scrutinized by the leadership rather than the whole department.
[. . .]
In the years preceding the [Tom] Cotton op-ed, the Times had published op-eds by authoritarians including Muammar Qaddafi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Vladimir Putin. The year of the Cotton op-ed, it also published the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece Regina Ip’s defense of China’s murderous crackdown on prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong, Moustafa Bayoumi’s seeming apologia of cultural and ethnic resentments of Jews, and an article by a leader of the Taliban, Sirajuddin Haqqani. None of those caused an uproar. Last year, the page published an essay by the Hamas-appointed mayor of Gaza City, and few seemed to mind. But whether the paper is willing to publish conservative views on divisive political issues, such as abortion rights and the Second Amendment, remains an open question.
[. . .]
As painful as it was in my mid-20s to think that my journalistic career would end as a result of this episode, it’s even more painful to think that newsrooms haven’t learned the right lessons from it. If the Times or any other outlet aims to cover America as it is and not simply how they want it to be, they should recruit more editors and reporters with conservative backgrounds, and then support them in their work. They should hire journalists, not activists. And they should remember that heterodoxy isn’t heresy.
Read the whole thing.
Corbin K. Barthold: “Livelier Than You Are, Whoever You Are”
Old books by dead white guys, or maybe something a little more than that? At City Journal, Corbin Barthold reflects on the 1994 Harold Bloom book on the western canon and the broader questions raised about its value and whether or not its needs replacing with more modern and (supposedly) relevant material.
Published in 1994, Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages turns 30 this year. In his great book on the great books, Bloom, the Yale professor and eminent literary critic, waged a rearguard action against what he called the “School of Resentment”—the movement to replace the canon of Western works (books celebrated, by leading writers across time, for their aesthetic merit) with political “identity” works (books selected, by today’s activist professors and teachers, based on the race, sex, or other “victim” status of the author). Bloom did not expect to turn the cultural tide. He saw his book as an elegy.
No one can say for sure when the idea of the secular literary “Canon” entered the Western mind. It is probably not that old—Bloom traced its birth to the middle of the eighteenth century. Nor can anyone tell you precisely how the Canon formed. The process would seem to be Darwinian; Bloom referenced “texts struggling with one another for survival.” Except in the eyes of the most cynical critical theorists, this contest has something to do with originality, with an author’s capacity to stand out to later generations. Bloom believed that the Canon evolves as great authors influence other great authors. Today’s best writers feel the pull of “ancestral figures”—“greatness recognizes greatness”—and use those figures’ works as starting points for their own. The canonical status of past writers is cemented by the handful of living writers eligible for canonical status in the future, in what amounts to an ongoing conversation among the West’s literary geniuses.
No one can tell you exactly who’s in the Canon, though a few giants, such as Homer, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, would appear on any serious person’s list. Bloom safely claimed that Shakespeare is the Canon’s central voice. The Bard is a “mirror of nature”; he touches “the limits of human art”; he “refus[es] every mode of reduction.” His mastery of language, gift for metaphor, and insight into character remain unparalleled. He invented Western man’s very psychology—our sense of inner self. His “aesthetic supremacy has been confirmed by the universal judgment of four centuries.” He remains “the most original writer we will ever know.”
Shakespeare takes no political, theological, sociological, or ethical sides. This “freedom from doctrine,” in Bloom’s words, is one of his defining attributes. A “miracle of disinterestedness, Shakespeare neither believes nor disbelieves, neither moralizes nor endorses nihilism.” Bloom argued that this elevated attitude can be found throughout the Canon: “Those who can do canonical work invariably see their writings as larger forms than any social program.”
[. . .]
Who lasts? Almost always, it’s a matter of breadth. The great books use exotic characters and situations to say something compelling about humanity as a whole. These works transcend the discrete concerns and fixations of a given society, adapting to new settings and appealing to new audiences. A related point is that they tend to be open: they do not reach for simple conclusions; they resist straightforward interpretation; they “accommodat[e] bewildering antinomies,” as Bloom put it. Only time can confirm that a work has these qualities. We know that Homer and Cervantes and Shakespeare can pass the test because they already have.
Read it all.
Kathleen Stock: Who’s afraid of a female brain?
“Different” does not imply inferior, but you’d never know that from the response of some to the science of sex-differences in human brains, writes Kathleen Stock at UnHerd. Judging the validity of a scientific theory or conclusion based on whether or not someone might “use it against you” is a weak position regardless of your ideological leanings.
Neurobiologists there have discovered that a specially designed “deep neural network”— that is, an AI presumably devoid of the misogynist prejudices of ordinary mortals — can reliably sort brains into male and female categories based on the detection of “hotspot” activity patterns. Worse, it seems that the AI can also use these differences to reliably predict different cognitive performances in men and women on certain tasks, suggesting that functional brain variations have behavioural implications. Though it’s a bit early to say, perhaps we can now look forward to a more harmonious future, where a woman can be proudly unapologetic for her inability to reverse park, and a man gets to blame his brain for repeated failures to notice that his wife is crying. Meanwhile, for the many thinkers who have staked their professional identities to the non-existence of two kinds of brain, now might seem like a good time to move some eggs into a different career basket.
[. . .]
In retrospect, for researchers to rule out systematic brain differences largely caused by biological factors in a sexually dimorphic species like ours — and, even more boldly, before adequate technology had been developed to spot them — was always going to pose a reputational risk; a bit like 16th-century astronomers pronouncing themselves absolutely positive there are no further planets in the solar system just before telescopes are invented. What could explain such apparent recklessness? Partly to blame must have been the fear that modern scientific confirmation of the existence of such differences would be used against women in the long run.
As with progressive arguments about reality generally, sometimes the most pressing task is not to establish what is true or false, but rather to lure people away from accurate apprehension of a socially dangerous idea. And it’s not clear that dire predictions in this respect are wrong. Although now a cliché, it’s still true that, throughout history, a raft of excuses for female ill-treatment and subjugation have been predicated on claims about their supposedly more inferior brains. In many countries, the already parlous state of women’s equality would surely be propped up by any scientific-looking discovery of non-negotiable cognitive and behavioural variations from the male norm. Equally though, in countries like the UK where feminised skills like verbal reasoning and emotional intelligence are increasingly demanded in the jobs market, it could be that the discovery would end hurting men’s life chances more.
Whatever problems might result in either direction, these would be compounded by general statistical illiteracy and an inability not to hear a claim that there are certain patterns across a huge population as an invitation to draw the same conclusions about each and every member. And then there’s also an apparent temptation to start treating some sex-typical behavioural patterns, averaged across a general population with many exceptions, as representing a kind of template definitive of the “male brain” or the “female brain” itself — which can even be lifted from its original genetic context and attributed to individuals of the opposite sex, should their individual qualitative characteristics seem to fit the bill. Bizarrely, given his intellectual background, this appears to be the approach adopted by former mathematical physicist Eric Weinstein, who in a widely circulated clip this week claimed that “there are people with male brains in female bodies, and conversely”, arguing that society should be more compassionate towards them.
Of course, many of us by now are very familiar with the general gambit of adjusting claims about reality to fit better with perceived moral commitments. For its basic form is also present in the progressive doctrine that self-identified transwomen should indeed be classified as women, because it would be very harmful for them if people said otherwise. Indeed, there is an increasingly popular narrative amongst anti-feminist commentators such as Matt Walsh that the current transactivist derangement still gripping many institutions started with feminism. In most ways this is diabolically unfair, especially since radical feminists were at the forefront of fighting transactivist ideas years before Walsh cottoned on. But it’s true that certain feminist academics wrote the playbook for wishful thinking about reality. Time and again in scholarly writing, you encounter the bizarre thought that if an idea has consequences that are helpful to women, that must be a point in favour of its truth; and if unhelpful, it’s a point against.
Read it all here.
Around Twitter (X)
The American Civil Liberties Union has lost some of its early fire (pun intended) on free speech, but the organization is taking a public stand on Texas and Florida laws it says are First Amendment threats.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression did a short thread on how courts in India are influencing online publishing here in the States:
And finally, here’s the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR) breaking down “color blindness.” (Click for video.)