A Tuesday's Twaddle
[Mussorgsky for children—more below]
Had a nice chat about the Civil Rights Movement with two friends, Paul Gottfried and Brandon Van Dyck, the other day. Maybe I’ll write up a summary of some of my thoughts on this in the next few days.
Heather Mac Donald on the “feminization of the American university.”
I was asked by a student the other day what I would do with my life if I were an 18 year old high school senior this year. I responded, “I know at least one thing I wouldn’t do. There is no way I would choose the same career path that I did 40 years ago, because I’ve seen too much evidence of how radically the university has deviated in the past few decades from the ideal type that drew me here as a young person.”
The feminization of the academy—which does not mean simply the growing presence of women in it, but rather the increasing dominance of a particular set of values traditionally much more concentrated among women than men—has been one of the major forces driving higher education away from the model that was attractive to me in my youth. That what Heather M. calls “the rhetoric of unsafety and victimhood” has become the dominant mode of understanding of the life of the mind in 2023 is largely attributable to the growing influence of values reasonably defined as “feminine” in higher ed.
Note well: not all women adhere to this rhetoric. Mac Donald herself gives evidence of this, and I know other such women in higher education. But given large numbers of men and women, the general sex skew on this is undeniable.
There are situations and contexts in which an attitude of trepidation about hypothetical harms makes sense. This rhetoric Mac Donald describes would likely prove at least somewhat advantageous in truly dangerous environments, e.g., while driving an automobile in city traffic, or when interacting with caustic chemicals or cancer-causing radiation, or when caring for a fragile newborn baby. Even in such situations, though, there would be a need to avoid allowing the fear of harm to become so exaggerated as to incapacitate action.
And in the university, where the central task we confront is to read books or study phenomena in the world and then think about and discuss those books and the phenomena with the goal of accurately interpreting and understanding the world, that rhetoric is wholly inappropriate, and in fact destructive of the desired goal.
You simply cannot effectively work to objectively understand and debate ideas if everyone involved in the debate is convinced that the very prospect of someone disagreeing with her view is a threat to her mental health and physical safety. It cannot be done given that preset. If everyone is already traumatized, and everything that doesn’t involve monolithic agreement on what the world looks like and what is to be done going forward produces still more trauma, then the screen of higher education is already flashing “Game Over.”
American higher education will not survive the dominance of this value system. The best we can hope for is that the inevitable meltdown of the catastrophically malfunctioning system will be quick and then there will be a commitment to rebuilding by authorities with some understanding of and love for the core intellectual values of the Ancien Régime.
One Heather Mac Donald-related story is particularly relevant here.
I invited her to Bucknell a few years ago. Predictably, a portion of the student body, faculty, and administration reacted as though it had been announced that a group of large and famished carnivorous animals were going to be released on campus and raw steaks would be strapped to the backs, arms, and legs of everyone affiliated with the university.
I was told after her appearance—during which, it bears noting, not a single person on campus was eaten, or roughed up, or threatened with bodily harm, or even referred to with rude words—by a female administrator that she had heard at least one report from a (female) student that said student was so “traumatized” by the thought of Mac Donald’s visit that she had been too afraid to come out of her room for the several days surrounding it.
I said something along the lines of “She was frightened that a speaker was coming to campus? Someone coming here to talk scared her that much? That seems an unrealistic reaction, wouldn’t you say?”
The straight-faced response I was given: “Perception is reality.”
I managed to avoid replying that my perception was that the university I had been hired to work at some decades earlier had somehow disappeared right under my feet and been replaced by a castle made of sand.
There exists a splendid series of books on music for kids that I have test-driven now with both my children. The author, Anna Harwell Celenza, is a Professor of Music at Georgetown, with a long record of scholarly publication in addition to this lovely series for children.
Each of the books takes a great composition and tells the story of its creation. Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is perhaps my favorite, if only because it was the first we acquired and my oldest daughter and I wore it out. That piece was for a very long time her preferred composition in the Western art music canon. The tale of the untimely death of Mussorgsky’s friend, the artist Viktor Hartmann, and the way in which the composer was pulled from depression over his loss through musical creation is beautifully retold, in terms appropriate for children.
I found Celenza’s tributes to the Heroic Symphony and the Surprise Symphony subsequently, and they were just as enthralling. (My youngest enjoys the Beethoven, I suspect in large part because she is fascinated by Bonaparte, just as Ludwig was!)
I just got the one on the Goldberg Variations. The Four Seasons is, alas, out of print and it’s impossible to find any copies online for reasonable prices, but I intend to keep looking.
Hate would seem to be older than love, and much older, if we consult what we know of the history of life on the planet. Reptiles are quite aggressive, but show no compassion or empathy and do not demonstrate care for their offspring beyond some female crocodilians aiding hatchlings to escape their nests. Some reptiles will eat their own children as a matter of course if they happen upon them.
And yet the newcomer love—the mammalian motherly bonding with her children is its origin in natural history, which occurred in the last 5% of the time that life has so far existed on earth—proved such a smashing success that it displaced the loveless reign of the reptiles.
It is so successful that it even makes it possible for us to love reptiles in the unadulterated way my child hugs her stuffed baby Triceratops with the same compassion and cooing words with which she embraces her collection of stuffed dogs and rabbits.
But of course we know it can’t be that. It’s got to be discrimination. Got to be. No other options.
As I predicted, I’ve had no time to dedicate to the “Courses of Ultimate Concern” series to date because of other responsibilities. I think I’ll recalibrate the plan on this and look to try to do some of it at least starting at the end of the semester.
I’ve had a few black students in class over the years who were among the most vehement challengers of the left political orthodoxy on race that I’ve encountered in all my time in this work.
One young man a few years ago whom I’ll remember for a long time took a number of classes with me. He told me one day how uncomfortable it made him when white students in class talked about white privilege and all that made it impossible for blacks to achieve anything in the contemporary US. He said “It’s like they’re denying that I’m in here with them. If everything is so well designed to stop people like me, why am I here? Hello! Can you guys see me? I’m sitting right over here on the other side of the room!”
It was hilariously funny how he said it, and the point is quite powerful. He’s there in the room a few feet away from these white students who are talking about the “fact” (which they’ve been reminded of so many times by so many of my colleagues) that there’s no way he can ever hope to elude the inescapable tentacles of structural racism, seemingly not even seeing him while purporting to be advocating for this person they cannot see. The incredible blindness produced by that ideology.
He was also the single most courteous young person I’ve ever met at this school. Came in to class every day with a “Good morning, sir!” and left at the end of the hour with a “Have a great day, sir!” Constantly smiling. How I would’ve liked to get inside of the angry white woke kids’ heads to see how they made sense of him.
Raquel Welch passed away last month at the age of 82.
Mainstream media accounts of her death have been predictably, boringly politically correct: “The sex symbol who never wanted to be one!”; “she embraced her Latinidad!” (a term I just discovered in that linked article and that I am absolutely certain no native Spanish speaker who isn’t a university professor has ever used); “her fame was tied to her sexuality, what a curse!”
Anyone who ever heard her talk in an interview or elsewhere outside of a film screen would have immediately recognized, of course, that she was more than the glorious genetic randomness of her physical beauty. Ms. Welch was highly articulate, intelligent, and exceptionally charming. Here she is in a few interviews from the prime of her film career in which those qualities show through in abundance.
But what a twisted culture we have made in which we apparently cannot acknowledge without qualification that she was an exceptionally beautiful woman, and that beauty is an aspect of our world that should be openly celebrated, rather than something that always has to be apologized for or augmented in some way with other qualities in order to be seen as a meaningful aspect of reality.
It was the unfathomable calculus of genetic recombination that gave her face and body their symmetry. Why can we not just stand in awe of that mystery and the miraculous consequences it produced, in her case and in that of many others? When did it become mandatory that we see beauty as something that dare not be acknowledged and appreciated on its own terms lest we be seen as simultaneously and inevitably denigrating some other part of the beautiful person’s character, or insulting her in some furtive manner in the very act of noticing her beauty? Why do we not also demand, every time someone talks of how smart someone else is, an equal and immediate recognition of the intelligent person’s physical attractiveness? It’s almost as though we have assigned independent value to the one thing but not to the other…
Just to see her face on the screen when I was a boy was a kind of revelation for me and, I suspect, for just about every other individual of my sex and approximately the same age. She represented a world more perfect than the one in which I walked. This did not make me fail to appreciate that latter world, also lovely in so many ways, but it cheered me to imagine, with the aesthetic aid of her face, something beyond it, and superior to it. Literature and art provoked the same feeling in me, and of course writers and artists have always been inspired by human beauty.
One sometimes has the feeling that the project of our current culture is to make us despise all of those means of imagining other and transcendent worlds unless the imagined worlds are made rigorously to adhere to a monstrous Procrustean utopianism. A world the realization of which requires violently stretching some out of their natural shapes and lopping off parts of others in order to ensure that everyone ends up exactly the same in all characteristics seems to me an evil to be combatted with all available vigor.
I prefer a world in which models of human form and ability—male and female—that by definition exceed the median can be contemplated and admired and desired.
Raquel Welch contributed to the existence of such a world, and I gratefully thank her for that. May she rest in peace and rise in glory.
[Salvador Dali kissing Raquel Welch’s hand in front of his abstract painting of her, an atrocity for which he can be forgiven, given the unattainability of the subject he was attempting futilely to represent.]