A Certain Idea of America, page 12
A peculiarity of subtle psychopaths is that, while they don’t seem to feel shame, they are preoccupied with being thought of as highly moral. Ms. Holmes was simply trying to help sick people get their blood tested more easily. This was part of her origin myth—a relative’s illness made her sensitive to the needs of the suffering. Mr. Bankman-Fried gave away millions and became the public face of a movement called effective altruism. He was just trying to help the less fortunate live better lives! And he was so modest about it, eschewing material things, clad in rough sandals, a thin T-shirt, shorts. Like the young Saint Francis, stripping himself naked that his robes might be sold for the poor.
I don’t know if Elon Musk fits in this category. I hope he’s an eccentric genius with a moral core and not a psychopath. We’ll find out! It’s good he’s in space. His buying Twitter has excited lots of people, frightened others. If he merely changes that public square from an entity of the left to an open entity, good. We’ll see how content moderation goes. But many conservatives see him as a kind of savior. Is he? Saviors by definition save others.
Does he strike you as preoccupied by the needs of other people? Evince an old-fashioned interest in the public weal? He offers to buy the site, changes his mind, tries to back out, is forced to honor his agreement, takes over. In the ensuing chaos he tweets out memes of a whore tempting a monk, to illustrate, strangely, his invitation to Donald Trump to rejoin the site. He tweets out photos of his bedside table—two life-size handgun replicas and scattered cans of Diet Coke. It looked as if a school shooter lived there.
“He stands for free speech.” Mr. Bankman-Fried stood for selflessness and “responsible” regulation of crypto. Ms. Holmes stood for thinking outside the box and breaking through false limits. They all believe in something.
My fear with Mr. Musk is that if a scientific paper came out saying eating baby parts will add half a century to your life, he’d tweet, We can grow the babies in discarded ship containers and eat them—for the squeamish, God didn’t make them, I did, so there’s no soul or anything.
But again, most interesting in psychopaths is the lack of remorse. They don’t like being caught—that upsets them—but they don’t mind causing others harm. It’s their superpower. They’re not hemmed in by what limits you.
Which is a conscience. People often refer to their consciences—they say things like “My conscience is clear.” It’s not an unknown entity to them. But they seem to think it’s something they were born with, like a sense of smell. When actually a conscience has to be formed and developed or it doesn’t work.
Every major faith in the world has thoughts here. In Catholic teaching, says Father Roger Landry, Columbia University’s Catholic chaplain, the traditional definition of “conscience” is “a judgment of the practical reason applying moral principles to concrete circumstances leading to the conclusion to do or not do something.”
“Many people today confuse their conscience with their opinion or even with their feelings about what is the right thing to do or avoid,” he said in an email. “Many think that if their intentions were good, and they desired a good outcome, then the action would be morally fine. But, as is obvious, sometimes we will feel good about doing something wrong (‘I stole, but he was rich’; ‘I insulted her, but she deserved it.’).” A conscience must be informed “with the truth that comes from God—the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, corporal and spiritual works of mercy, other passages in Sacred Scripture, the moral teachings of the Church.” These things “illumine our eyes so that we may see things more clearly.
“Conscience can make erroneous judgments, either because it identifies wrong principles (e.g., personal autonomy as the supreme value), or has the right principles in a disordered rank (prioritizing not hurting others’ feelings over helping the person give up drugs).” But to form a conscience we have a duty “to tune into God’s frequency rather than our own echo chamber, or the confused noise that can come from culture.”
We need better consciences. If we got them, we’d have fewer psychopaths.
AMERICA’S UNIVERSITIES ARE SELF-DESTRUCTING
December 14, 2023
Fareed Zakaria opened his CNN show last weekend with a commentary that seemed to me a signal moment in the DEI/woke/identity-politics wars. I don’t know how Mr. Zakaria would characterize his political views, but there was a quality of something building within him that finally came out. It was an earnest commentary that perhaps took some daring.
“When one thinks of America’s greatest strengths, the kind of assets the world looks at with admiration and envy, America’s elite universities would long have been at the top of that list,” he said. “But the American public has been losing faith in these universities for good reason.” He scored the three presidents who’d come under fire in the House for their “vague and indecisive answers when asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their institutions’ codes of conduct.” Their performance was understandable if you understand that our elite universities “have gone from being centers of excellence to institutions pushing political agendas.” Those agendas, “clustered around diversity and inclusion,” began in good faith, “but those good intentions have morphed into a dogmatic ideology and turned these universities into places where the pervasive goals are political and social engineering, not academic merit.
“In the humanities, hiring for new academic positions now appears to center on the race and gender of the applicant, as well as the subject matter, which needs to be about marginalized groups. A white man studying the American presidency does not have a prayer of getting tenure at a major history department in America today…. New subjects crop up that are really political agendas, not academic fields.
“Out of this culture of diversity has grown the collection of ideas and practices that we have now all heard of—safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions.” Schools have instituted speech codes “that make it a violation of university rules to say things that some groups might find offensive. Universities advise students not to speak, act, even dress in ways that might cause offense to some minority groups.” When the George Floyd protests erupted, universities publicly aligned their institutions to those protests. “In this context, it is understandable that Jewish groups would wonder: Why do safe spaces, microaggressions, and hate speech not apply to us? If universities can take positions against free speech to make some groups feel safe, why not us? Having coddled so many student groups for so long, university administrators found themselves squirming, unable to explain why certain groups (Jews, Asians) don’t seem to count in these conversations.”
The House testimony “was the inevitable result of decades of the politicization of universities. America’s top colleges are no longer seen as bastions of excellence but partisan outfits.” They should “abandon this long misadventure into politics…and rebuild their reputations as centers of research and learning.”
This was a realistic and straightforward assessment of where the universities are and what they should do. It would be helpful if all on the sane left would drop their relative silence, rise up, and end the misadventure.
I make two points connected to Mr. Zakaria’s larger statement. He emphasized the decreasing number of Americans who have confidence in our elite universities. I have been reading Edmund Wilson’s 1940 classic, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History. It famously offers a portrait of the groundbreaking French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874), a father of modern historiography. The whole section reads like a tribute to the idea of learning, of understanding, of telling. It is not too much to say it is a kind of paean to the idea of the university.
What a scholar Michelet was, what a searcher for truth. His early life, in Wilson’s words, was “sad, poor and hard.” Natural brilliance drove him to and through the academy. He received honors, tutored princesses, but he was really a historian. He longed to know the facts of the past and to understand them. Appointed to the civil service, he was put in the Record Office. He was in charge of the archives of all of France. Wilson: “No one had really explored the French archives before; the histories had mostly been written from other histories” and by hired hands. Over the coming decades Michelet would write the first serious, documented, comprehensive history of France from its beginning through the 1789 revolution.
Michelet said there came to him in the archives “the whispers of the souls who had suffered so long ago and who were smothered now in the past.” His approach was rational and realistic, not romantic, though there was plenty of color and sweep in his work. The story of Joan of Arc interested him because her story was fully documented—“incontestable”—and because he saw her as the first modern hero of action, “contrary to passive Christianity.”
Michelet said the historian is one who, “taking history as something more than a game, makes the effort in good faith to enter into the life of the past.” He treated history as the crowded, jagged thing it is, Wilson observes, and he didn’t simplify. He saw the story of France, and history in general, as complex, braided, intertwined, and driven in the end more by the masses than their leaders.
The idea of this man—a true scholar who attempts to find the honest truth—seems inapplicable to the current moment. And the reason is the three words he uses—“in good faith”—to define how the historian must act. In the DEI/woke regime, the good faith of the scholar is sacrificed to political fashion. In going all in on the regime, those who run the universities negate their own worth. Faculty and professors, administrators and department heads, lower their own standing. Because they are not now seen as people of the mind, of the intellect, but as mere operatives, enforcers. They thus give up their place of respect in the public imagination.
Regular people used to imagine what a university looks like—rows of gleaming books, learned professors, an air of honest inquiry. That isn’t now a picture the public can see. Now it’s something else, less impressive, less moving. Less important to our continuance as a people.
The elites who run our elite colleges are killing their own status. They are also lowering the esteem in which college graduates are held. Your primary job as a student is taking in. You read, learn, connect this event with that, apply your imagination, empathize, judge. It is a spacious act—it takes time to absorb, reflect, feel—which is why you’re given four whole years to do it. But if the public senses that few are studying like independent scholars in there, not enough are absorbing the expertise of their field, that they’ve merely been instructed to internalize a particular worldview and parrot it back…
Well, if that’s the case, who needs them? Is it even worth having them around in the office? The people of a country have a greater stake in all this than universities and their students understand. And the elite schools are lowering their own standing more than they know.
DEMOCRACY IS NOT YOUR PLAYTHING
May 18, 2017
This will be unpleasantly earnest, but having witnessed the atmospherics the past ten days it’s what I think needs saying:
Everyone, get serious.
Democracy is not your plaything.
This is not a game.
Almost four months into his administration the president of the United States has produced a building crisis that is unprecedented in our history. The question, at bottom, is whether Donald Trump has demonstrated, in his first hundred days, that he is unfit for the presidency—wholly unsuited in terms of judgment, knowledge, mental capacity, personal stability. That epic question is then broken down into discrete and specific questions: Did he improperly attempt to interfere with an FBI criminal investigation, did his presidential campaign collude with a foreign government, etc.
But the epic question underlies all. It couldn’t be more consequential and will take time to resolve. The sheer gravity of the drama will demand the best from all of us. Are we up to it?
Mr. Trump’s longtime foes, especially Democrats and progressives, are in the throes of a kind of obsessive delight. Every new blunder, every suggestion of an illegality, gives them pleasure. “He’ll be gone by autumn.”
But he was duly and legally elected by tens of millions of Americans who had legitimate reasons to support him, who knew they were throwing the long ball, and who, polls suggest, continue to support him. They believe the press is trying to kill him. “He’s new, not a politician, give him a chance.” What would it do to them, what would it say to them, to have him brusquely removed by his enemies after so little time? Would it tell them democracy is a con, the swamp always wins, you nobodies can make your little choices but we’re in control? What will that do to their faith in our institutions, in democracy itself?
These are wrenching questions.
But if Mr. Trump is truly unfit—if he has demonstrated already, so quickly, that he cannot competently perform the role, and that his drama will only get more dangerous and chaotic, how much time should pass to let him prove it? And how dangerous will the proving get?
Again, wrenching questions. So this is no time for bloodlust and delight. Because democracy is not your plaything.
The president’s staffers seem to spend most of their time on the phone, leaking and seeking advantage, trying not to be named in the next White House Shake-Up story. A reliable anonymous source who gives good quote will be protected—for a while. The president spends his time tweeting his inane, bizarre messages—he’s the victim of a “witch hunt”—from his bed, with his iPad. And giving speeches, as he did this week at the Coast Guard Academy: “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.” Actually, Lincoln got secession, civil war, and a daily pounding from an abolitionist press that thought he didn’t go far enough and moderates who slammed his brutalist pursuit of victory. Then someone shot him in the head. So he had his challenges.
Journalists on fire with the great story of their lives—the most bizarre presidency in U.S. history and the breaking news of its daily missteps—cheer when their scoop that could bring down a president gets more hits than the previous record holder, the scoop that could bring down the candidate.
Stop leaking, tweeting, cheering. Democracy is not your plaything.
There’s a sense nobody’s in charge, that there’s no power center that’s holding, that in Washington they’re all randomly slamming into each other.
Which is not good in a crisis.
For Capitol Hill Democrats the crisis appears to be primarily a chance to showboat. Republicans are evolving, some starting to use the word “unfit” and some, as a congressman told me, “talking like they’re in a shelter for abused women. ‘He didn’t mean to throw me down the stairs.’ ‘He promised not to punch me again.’ ”
We’re chasing so many rabbits, we can’t keep track—Comey, FBI, memoranda; Russia, Flynn, the Trump campaign; Lavrov, indiscretions with intelligence. It’s become a blur.
But there’s an emerging sense of tragedy, isn’t there? Crucially needed reforms in taxing, regulation, and infrastructure—changes the country needs!—are thwarted, all momentum killed. Markets are nervous.
The world sees the U.S. political system once again as a circus. Once the circus comes to town, it consumes everything, absorbs all energy.
I asked the ambassador to the U.S. from one of our greatest allies, “What does Europe say now when America leaves the room?” You’re still great, he said, but “we think you’re having a nervous breakdown.”
It is absurd to think the president can solve his problems by firing his staff. They are not the problem. He is the problem. They’re not the A-Team, they’re not the counselors you’d want, experienced and wise. They’re the island of misfit toys. But they could function adequately if he could lead adequately. For months he’s told friends he’s about to make big changes, and doesn’t. Why? Maybe because talented people on the outside don’t want to enter a poisonous staff environment just for the joy of committing career suicide. So he’s stuck, surrounded by people who increasingly resent him, who fear his unpredictability and pique and will surely one day begin to speak on the record.
A mystery: Why is the president never careful? He doesn’t act as if he’s picking his way through a minefield every day, which he is. He acts like he’s gamboling through safe terrain.
Thus he indulges himself with strange claims, statements, tweets. He comports himself as if he has a buffer of deep support. He doesn’t. Nationally his approval numbers are in the mid- to high 30s.
His position is not secure. And yet he gambols on, both paranoid and oblivious.
History is going to judge us by how we comported ourselves in this murky time. It will see who cared first for the country and who didn’t, who kept his head and did not, who remained true and calm and played it straight.
Now there will be a special prosecutor. In the short term this buys the White House time. Here’s an idea.
It would be good if top Hill Republicans went en masse to the president and said, “Stop it. Clean up your act. Shut your mouth. Do your job. Stop tweeting. Stop seething. Stop wasting time. You lost the thread and don’t even know what you were elected to do anymore. Get a grip. Grow up and look at the terrain, see it for what it is. We have limited time. Every day you undercut yourself, you undercut us. More important, you keep from happening the good policy things we could have done together. If you don’t grow up fast, you’ll wind up abandoned and alone. Act like a president or leave the presidency.”
