Manners and Morals

Mini-quote: On Changing History to Conform to Ideology

July 8, 2011
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Mini-quote: On Changing History to Conform to Ideology

Singling out a segment of the population for specific inclusion in school studies programs on the basis of their sexual preferences elevates what — rightly or wrongly — many see as a form of sexual perversion, to a civil right. The bill, SB 48, passed on a party-line vote , adds lesbian, gay, bisexual and so-called transgendered people as well as those with physical or mental disabilities to the list of groups that schools must include in the lessons. It also would prohibit material that reflects adversely on gays. Unless I’m badly mistaken, what the legislature has done is to classify sexual preference as a form of disability, meaning that those who adopt the lifestyle are mentally or physically disabled though no fault of their own. Somehow I seriously doubt that gays or cross-dressers will appreciate being classified as disabled as a result of their sexual orientation or preferences. This is just another example of the tendency of legislators sticking their noses into the personal lives of the citizenry. It will prove instructive to see how the state’s lawmakers go about the job of implementing this absurd legislation. Will they, for example, rule that textbooks must describe

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‘Gone with the Wind’: ‘The Politics Are Uncomfortable’

June 25, 2011
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‘Gone with the Wind’: ‘The Politics Are Uncomfortable’

CNN reports that Thursday will mark the 75th anniversary of the publication of Gone With the Wind, and love for the novel and the movie based on it still seems to be going strong. Fans dubbed “Windies” (because as one notes, it sounds better than “Goners”) have get togethers and visit Margaret Mitchell’s grave while dressed in period garb. Meanwhile, back at my college, I taught Kipling to my Brit survey class yesterday — we read “Man Who Would Be King“, “White Man’s Burden“, and “Recessional.” In a full semester class, I’d follow that with a week on Heart of Darkness, but it’s a 5-week term, so there’s really no time for novels. I don’t think you can teach the survey without discussing the Empire, and Kipling works as well for that as anyone. But GWtW and Kipling’s works are problematic today, and in the CNN piece, film critic Molly Haskell notes that in the case of the Mitchell novel, “the politics make us uncomfortable.” And the same could be (and has been) said for Kipling — a former classmate of mine once dismissed the Nobel winner as a troglodyte while admitting she had never actually studied his work, or

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Quote of the Day: Bruce Deitrick Price on Several Prevalent Sophistries

June 20, 2011
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Quote of the Day: Bruce Deitrick Price on Several Prevalent Sophistries

. . . . don’t imagine sophistry to be a dull topic. This stuff’s as juicy as a good bank swindle and for the same reasons. Mark Twain said lies are like cats except cats have only nine lives. Lies, it seems, just go on and on. Witness some of the major philosophical currents of the last 75 years. Looked at closely, they turn out to be all too sneaky and sophistical. . . . . SITUATION ETHICS has been used for decades to undermine religious and moral absolutes. While pretending to be a disinterested look at life’s tough choices, situation ethics usually functions destructively. . . . . DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS starts from a sensible insight: that anthropologists should be humble and unintrusive when studying foreign languages or cultures. In short, the locals are the experts about their own culture and language, especially spoken-only languages. Visiting scholars should keep their own values and opinions to themselves. descriptive linguistics also a tremendously handy tool for educators engaged in dumbing down the schools. These people actually say: it’s not scientific to make kids learn to write good English. Whatever the children do, that’s fine—they’re the experts regarding how they

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“Decent fellow, in his way. But not one of us” — Class Warfare in the Works of Agatha Christie

June 17, 2011
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“Decent fellow, in his way. But not one of us” — Class Warfare in the Works of Agatha Christie

By Mike Gray I have just been reading Agatha Christie’s short stories. But to enjoy her fully today, I suspect, you need to be a social historian — or a novelist. In everything she wrote, she employed one deep secret of her craft. But she may not even have been conscious of it. It took 70 years of cultural change to reveal it. That secret is, simply, that she shocks the reader with endless social transgressions. Her every story is coded with social prejudice and her characters are class-labelled on arrival. Whenever her characters are in conflict, it’s not simply a case of whodunnit? A little class war is also being played out. — John Yeoman According to Yeoman, the secret of Agatha Christie’s success lay in who comprised the bulk of her readership: Given that Christie’s readers were largely lower middle class, they must have gained great satisfaction in seeing their social betters unmasked as rogues. Xenophobia  and racial prejudice are everywhere in Christie, and provide rich opportunities for social conflict. Nobody born south of the English Channel can be entirely trusted. A rich American or ex-colonial might be admitted cautiously to one’s parlour but only once the ladies

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Quote of the Day: Frederic Bastiat on “Organized Injustice”

June 17, 2011
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Quote of the Day: Frederic Bastiat on “Organized Injustice”

You say: “There are persons who have no money,” and you turn to the law. But the law is not a breast that fills itself with milk. Nor are the lacteal veins of the law supplied with milk from a source outside the society. Nothing can enter the public treasury for the benefit of one citizen or one class unless other citizens and other classes have been forced to send it in. If every person draws from the treasury the amount that he has put in it, it is true that the law then plunders nobody. But this procedure does nothing for the persons who have no money. It does not promote equality of income. The law can be an instrument of equalization only as it takes from some persons and gives to other persons. When the law does this, it is an instrument of plunder. With this in mind, examine the protective tariffs, subsidies, guaranteed profits, guaranteed jobs, relief and welfare schemes, public education, progressive taxation, free credit, and public works. You will find that they are always based on legal plunder, organized injustice. — Frederic Bastiat, The Law (1850)

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Draw Your Own Conclusions

June 16, 2011
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Draw Your Own Conclusions

By Mike Gray Study this graph carefully: What, if anything, do you infer from it? Let us know.  

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“Aggressive Desecration”: Are There Links Between Materialism, Darwinism, and “The Impoverishment of Beauty”?

June 16, 2011
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“Aggressive Desecration”: Are There Links Between Materialism, Darwinism, and “The Impoverishment of Beauty”?

By Mike Gray For now, of course, we all live under a suffocating blanket of materialism. Many fight to breathe fresh air. Others seem strangely content and smug about being able to endure it and even urge us to give up the struggle and join those brave New Atheists as they revel in the foul, close atmosphere, boasting of its superiority to any alternative. This condition of our culture probably explains the pervasive ugliness of modern media life . . . . — David Klinghoffer To commit art is a human act. Much of today’s art celebrates the ugliness of the world and, by implication, the hideous human psyche. But Klinghoffer thinks Intelligent Design (ID) has the potential to rehabilitate the artistic endeavor: If art can make a case for ID, it’s equally true that art itself points to a design transcending our natural world and would be devastatingly blunted in a world where materialism and Darwinism had driven out the sense of life’s enchantment. This, at any rate, is the argument of some philosophers who you might not otherwise think of as ID advocates. The threatened impoverishment of beauty deserves consideration as being at stake in the cultural struggle

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A Lack of Adult Speaking and Writing Skills Betokens an Infantile Culture

June 11, 2011
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A Lack of Adult Speaking and Writing Skills Betokens an Infantile Culture

By Mike Gray The impairment of literate thought has been slowly and inexorably tunneling through the culture since the John Dewey-inspired, child-centered, “progressivist” movement in education of the 1920s. Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916) was a manual for the precocious subversion of the mind. Western education then received a resonating shock from the intellectual anarchy that erupted in the 1960s and it has been atrophying ever since, as is glaringly obvious not only in the performance of our students but in the mental emaciation of our politicians, journalists, academics, and public intellectuals. These are people many of whom, with only a few welcome exceptions, can no longer think straight, some of whom cannot formulate a coherent sentence, and others of whom are reduced to relative helplessness without external devices to shepherd them through a political speech. — David Solway, “Infantilizing the Culture,” Pajamas Media Solway believes that the deterioration of culture  — which can with some justice be blamed on bad governmental policy — has resulted in more than merely “dumbing down” society: The problem can be tersely and accurately described as the ongoing infantilization of the culture, a pathology that needs to be attacked at the root, if it

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Fresh Out of Frankenstein’s Lab: Roborats, Bugbot Weapons Systems, Glow-in-the-Dark Critters, Zorses, and More!

June 2, 2011
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Fresh Out of Frankenstein’s Lab: Roborats, Bugbot Weapons Systems, Glow-in-the-Dark Critters, Zorses, and More!

By Mike Gray Clearly, this fellow—Paul Root Wolpe, the chief bioethicist at NASA—is having second thoughts about all these developments. Is he justified? What system of morality can he raise to oppose them? Darwinian ethics? But didn’t Darwin insist that there’s no purpose to blind, randomized evolution—and that being so, how can one product of those blind processes—that is, we human beings—possibly object to such experimentation? How can there be love or pity in Darwin’s unplanned cosmos, where design by a moral agent is ruled out a priori? The video runs 19 minutes 42 seconds. Follow the links to learn more about Mr. Wolpe.

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Study Says Only 1.4% of Population Homosexual

May 27, 2011
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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Study Says Only 1.4% of Population Homosexual

A scientific study commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has found that only 1.4 percent of people are homosexual. I suppose that that must surprise you. The first thing I thought of when I read  Michael Medved’s article about the study was how different the facts are from what the contemporary culture tells us. When watching television, after all, it seems as if 50 percent of the population is homosexual. It’s evident that a tiny minority of Americans have enormous power in Hollywood, the entertainment capital of the world. Similarly, our cultural elites in media and education unanimously profess to believe that sexual orientation is not a choice but as innate as skin color; that has indeed become the dominant cultural message about this issue. In light of such an onslaught, is it any wonder that so many young people are reported as struggling with their sexuality? I have an example. My daughter grew up with a friend, a boy, who danced with her for the nine years she was involved in a local park district dance company. They even had a bit of a romantic involvement early in

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Why We Are Doomed

May 24, 2011
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Why We Are Doomed

By Lars Walker I’ve been waiting to see a response from other social conservatives to the recent Gallup Poll which reports that Americans now favor “gay” marriage by a percentage of 53% to 45%. This year’s nine-percentage-point increase in support for same-sex marriage is the largest year-to-year shift yet measured over this time period. Two-thirds of Americans were opposed to legalized same-sex marriage in 1996, with 27% in favor. By 2004, support had risen to 42% and, despite some fluctuations from year to year, stayed at roughly that level through last year. I haven’t seen much yet along those lines, so I’ll say something myself. I don’t expect to convince anyone of anything (I rarely do), and it goes without saying I’ll be compared to a Nazi, but I’ll do it anyway, because it’s been on my mind. First of all, I’m not entirely convinced by the figures. My experience is that people with liberal views are generally oversampled in such polls. But that doesn’t alter the fact that, beyond question, acceptance of homosexuality has been growing rapidly among Americans. Among young people, it’s barely an issue anymore. Barring some major critical event, like a movement of the Holy Spirit

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Academic Rap-ture — Or Rupture?

May 13, 2011
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Academic Rap-ture — Or Rupture?

By Mike Gray The idea of a perpetual black underclass has served rappers well as an excuse to cover up lack of artistic merit.  And it’s the justification for a certain kind of politics, namely one that seeks to promote racial and class conflict in the service of a socialist agenda. — Mary Grabar Many college profs share the President’s enthusiasm for hip-hop culture: It’s rare that poetry explications are done on Fox News, but guests weighed in on the depth of meaning in a line like “burn a Bush for peace” and a panegyric to convicted cop-killer and Black Panther Assata Shakur with “May God bless your soul.”  The “poet” in question was the rapper Common, invited to the White House on May 11 for workshops and readings, along with Rita Dove, Billy Collins, and others. Those on the left trotted out the usual defenses, citing poetry’s “purpose” (to “challenge us”), free speech, and a subtlety to the poetry that right-wing critics just are too dense to understand. The White House, of course, cautioned against taking a few objectionable lines out of context and stressed Common’s charitable organization (Common Ground enjoys the advice of Cornel West on

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"Culture is the expression of the guiding philosophy of the day."—Murray Rothbard
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