War Correspondent Reports from Culture War Front

All I can say, reading the "White Man Faculty" piece on "Academic Hysteria Part II," is I thank God I don't live and work in the trenches of the culture war. Instead I am with the artillery, shooting off rounds every now and then, and not worrying too much where the shells will land.

And I don't seem to worry about wokey artillery shells landing on me. Maybe I should!

Of course the WMF piece is full of things like the absolutely useless and ignorant black females that teach many of the CRT courses and seminars. But what struck me was the go-along-to-get-along attitude of the whites in the academy.

I'm not too surprised, since I've just finished reading The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz. It's all about artists and writers captured by the post-WWII communist governments in Poland and the Baltics. The fact is that humans are go-along-to-get-along animals. Especially artists and writers. Which is another way of saying we are social animals.

White Man Faculty writes about how many of the CRT presenters look like they belong in Seattle's CHAZ/CHOP zone, and how "presentations are incredibly illogical, inconsistent, non-factual, and disjointed."

And yet, no matter how bad the presentations are, no matter how obviously wrong the information provided is, and no matter how transparently illogical and inconsistent it all is, I note that my colleagues, with few exceptions, accept it all without question and parrot the most astonishing nonsense without the slightest hesitation or question.

He goes on:

I note as well a strong correlation between those who blindly accept non-political nonsense without question and those who swallow the political social justice nonsense also without question. Amusingly, all of these dogmatic and conformist leftists, without the slightest shred of irony or self-awareness, decry the “closeminded” and “rigid” and “unthinking” attitudes of all those dastardly (White, of course) people out there (all living in trailer parks, no doubt) who oppose the social justice agenda.  

But really this is no different than the judgments of any religious group members against other groups and churches. We all confidently expound upon the closed minds, the bigotry, the superstition of other faiths and world views.

And academics are really the modern equivalent of the universal Catholic Church. They are priests in gubmint seminaries, and gubmint expects them to support its agenda. If you don't support the pope's dicta on Christianity you don't belong as a priest in the Catholic Church. Ditto to our modern academics.

But I am not downhearted. That's because, as you know, I regard reigns of terror, purges, and cancel cultures as the sign of a religious movement failing to deal with its failure of prophecy.

When prophecy fails, humans don't abandon the faith. Not right away. Instead they amp it up. For a while.

And I think that the fundamental reality of our age is that the faith of our Wokies, from silly liberal ladies and their #WeBelieve signs to bigoted academics, is that the whole idea of a society ruled by its educated class is crumbling into dust.

And the reason it is crumbling into dust is the fundamental error at its heart, that a human society can be directed from the top by wise educated experts and ethicists. Doesn't work that way. The only thing a political elite is good for is directing a war -- and usually the war is not really about defending the people but an excuse for the rulers to flex their muscles. Hello climate change!

Did I mention my Four Laws that illustrate the truth of this?

1. Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises)
2. Bureaucracy cannot work because it lacks bandwidth (Hayek)
3. Regulation cannot work because "regulatory capture" (Stigler)
4. Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill)

There is one government program that rulers can cut. They can and do cut military spending after the end of a war. That's about it.

So, I am not downhearted. I believe we are heading into a golden age where the prestige of revolution and politics will be reduced to a dull roar. I express this by saying that the Age of Revolution is over, activists. And the Age of Politics is over, politicians and bureaucrats.

But what will this new age look like?

I have no idea.

But it won't get much of a start until our young'uns tell their teachers and CRT facilitators to go take a jump in the lake.