The Juilliard Raciss Meltdown

The Juilliard School is, obviously, part of the ruling class. When you get a school, founded in 1905, devoted to academizing and bureaucratizing the performing arts -- music, dance, and drama -- to inject a steady stream of highly-trained professionals into the non-profit performing arts, well, it has to be part of the ruling class, holding up a mirror for the ruling class to admire itself.

And now the Juilliard School has got itself tangled, hook, line, and sinker, in the race wars.

See, according to the incomparable Heather Mac Donald at City Journal in "The Revolution Comes to Juilliard School," the Drama[!] Division is convulsed in race activism. See, the Drama Division is 50 percent black, and it looks like they are all "trained Marxists" from Black Lives Matter.

Now, according to Data USA, the Juilliard School in 2019 was 34.5% white, 11.9% Asian, and 6.25% black. So, if the Drama Division is 50% black...

See, back in June 2020, right after George Floyd Day, the students got up a petition, a Call To Action.

The Call to Action charged Juilliard with “systemic injustice.” It demanded an end to the school’s “almost completely Eurocentric” faculty, curriculum, and performances and a “complete in-person season featuring the works of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] artists.” It called on Juilliard to create #BreonnaTaylor and #GeorgeFloyd scholarships in music, drama, and dance.

But get this. In the Drama Division things are much worse.

Its “racist environment is hazardous to BIPOC students’ bodies,” the letter charged. “Some students are silenced, broken, and limited by racism within the Drama Division . . . [They] have to endure harm and violence [and] sacrifice their physical and mental health every day in this institution.”

I suppose you could say that liberals had this coming. It is like the story of the submarine firing a homing torpedo that circles back and blows up the submarine that launched it.

Here are the things that, to me, are tragically comical about all this. If there is such a thing.

"Silenced, broken... mental health" Hello, honey! The whole point of the performing arts is that it is a brutal animalistic survival of the fittest and the best and brightest. Many are called, but few are chosen. Most likely, very few of the students in the Drama Division will go on to get a professional career after graduation. If you don't have the steel balls or intestinal fortitude to rise above your fears and hesitations, if you don't have the courage to confront your weaknesses, if you don't have the single-minded determination to succeed at all costs, if you aren't bat-shit crazy, then this performing arts world is not for you. Honey.

"Almost completely Eurocentric" Well, yeah! The whole point of the "arts" is that it is an expression of the highest and most exotic and most fancy-pants stuff imaginable. That means that the "arts" is going to be almost completely European high art, Hindu high art, Mughal high art, and Chinese high art. Everyone else need not apply. At least, not yet. My primary interest in the arts is with Drama and Music. I'm really interested in Shakespeare, and I'll watch an August Wilson play out of his "Pittsburgh Cycle." I really like Tom Stoppard, but frankly you can take your average lefty drivel and put it where the sun don't shine. Why? Because lefty playwrights and lefty directors are recycling dead-as-a-doornail memes from the last 200 years that have nothing to do with the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

Only 11.9 percent Asian? I would expect the Music Division to be 75% Asian, because Tiger Moms. Unless, of course, there is racial discrimination going on. And I expect that the 50% blacks in the Drama Division are deeply conscious that they are mere flotsam and jetsam compared to the Tiger-Mommed kids in the Music Division.

See, back in the day, half a century ago and more, when I was a teenager, I understood that I was not going to go to Oxford or Cambridge for university. Because I wasn't brilliant, I wasn't a top-tier student, I wasn't driven, I just didn't care that much about dominating the world.

And one thing I would have understood perfectly would have been that, as a pretty desultory music student -- I had studied piano until my early teens -- I wouldn't have had a hope in hell of getting into a top-notch music school. By the way, I notice that all the music schools today are careful to notice how they are really into jazz and pop and electronic music.

But see, notice how the music schools are basically conservative. Jazz? None of the jazz greats went to music school. They learned it on the streets and from fellow musicians. Pop? The pop music greats didn't go to swank music schools. They figured it out on their own; that is the meaning of "garage band."

That's why they call music schools "conservatories." Because they are in the business of conserving the arts. Until some fool comes along and destroys the whole edifice, because "mental health" or "Eurocentric." And when some cool new art comes along, out of the street, then in the next generation the sons and daughters of the ruling class want in, because "coolness."

Roger Scruton on Life, the Universe, and Everything

Back in 2014 the recently departed Roger Scruton published The Soul of the World. The book is about God and the two basic facts of life: "the nature of reality" and "how we should live." The point is that you may know everything about the nature of reality but the knowledge tells you nothing about how you should live.

Our current atheist educated class teaches us that science tells us how we should live. But the Islamists have another approach, that "originates in a need for sacrifice and obedience." They

believe that they are called to sacrifice themselves on Allah's behalf, and that their lives will acquire a meaning when thrown away for Allah's sake.(p.1)

And not just Islamists.

The desire for sacrifice is rooted deep in all of us, and it is called upon not only by religious but also by secular communities, especially in times of emergency and war.

Scruton calls this "cognitive dualism," that the world can be understood in two ways, "the way of science, and the way of interpersonal understanding." The natural world and the "lifeworld," or Lebenswelt for us intellectual snobs.

But then Scruton divides the lifeworld into two. There is the Order of the Covenant, of which the best known is the covenant between God and the Jews,

a binding agreement, in which God commands obedience only by putting himself under obligations toward those whom he commands.(p.78)

But then there is the Order of Creation, "another world beyond our daily negotiations." This is

another order, where being and nothingness, creation and destruction, wrestle together with no fixed result.(p.177)

This, says Scruton, is the world of sacrifice, of giving and forgiveness. In the Order of the Covenant, nobody has a right to forgiveness, only "to honor his obligations and receive his rights." But in the Order of Creation,

Forgiveness comes, when it comes, as a gift... It is a moment of mutual recognition, when who people lay down their resentment in an exchange of gifts.(p.182)

(Is this why women have such a culture of "gifting?")

Now comes the heavy stuff.

The experience of the sacred is the revelation, in the midst of everyday things, of another order, in which creation and destruction are the ruling principles. the great junctures of life are precisely those in which this order shines through, so that deals lose their meaning and vows come in their place.(p.183)

And so to the junctures, each in turn:

New life is a gift from the place where things are created and destroyed for no merely human reason. Birth is therefore marked by rituals of acceptance and gratitude...

Sexual love is the moment in which two people make a gift of themselves, and also prepare themselves for the sacrifices required by family and the love of children.

Death is the moment when the gift of life is surrendered and the funeral is the recognition in retrospect of the gift[.](p.183)

Community and its web of deals, its Order of the Covenant, cannot long endure without people making the gift of the sacrifice of themselves, in renouncing resentment and vengeance, and even making the ultimate gift, the sacrifice of life. Thus the need for rituals that extol the sanctity of sacrifice.

And in the end, God, the eternal question: "why?"

It is thrust upon us in those moments in extremis when the Order of Creation irrupts around us. It is then that we cry out to God -- who will tell us why we suffer, why we live, and why we die... In the faithful frame of mind we are aware that being is not simply a fact but also a gift, and aware that gifts have reasons. And the response of faith is to recognize that we too must give.(p.191)

And so, Scruton argues, we create a "space at the edge of reason, where faith can take root and grow."

Faith looks beyond nature, asking itself what is required of me by way of thanks for this gift.. It is open to God, and actively involved in the process of making room for him.(p.192)

And what does that mean, you ask?

It's a good question. I'll think about it. 

Abolish Cops and Billionaires? Oh Please!

I was walking around Green Lake in super-liberal North Seattle, and noticed a "tag" on the path. It said: "ABOLISH COPS & Billionaires." Oh, and "Defund / SPD / ^^ / (100%)."

 

Aren't they special, those highly intelligent AntiFa types!

Because that slogan encapsulates exactly what we should not do.

COPS: Imagine no policemen / It isn't hard to do. But what would it mean?

Why does a society create a police force? The answer is that if you don't have a police force then people will enforce the peace with vigilante groups and gangs -- where the gangs could be criminal gangs or clan enforcers. Oh, and lynching. 

OMG! I can't even! Yes did you know that back in the day, whites were lynched as well as blacks. You didn't?  OMG! Like, Whatever! Sure, blacks were lynched more than 3 to 1 over whites. But still! OMG! Here are the numbers on lynchings from The University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School. If you want more details the original table breaks the numbers out by states.

US Lynchings: 1882-1968

White	Black	Total
1,297	3,446	4,743

To give you a flavor of what a world without cops means, read Ayaan Hirsi Ali in on "Tribalism has come to the West."

Philip Carl Salzman recounts meeting tribesmen in Baluchistan. What, they had asked Salzman, would he do if he faced a real danger in his home country? Well, Salzman replied, he would call the police. The tribesmen roared with laughter, then looked at him pityingly: “Oh no, no, no, they said: only your ‘lineage mates’ will help you.”

See what I mean? To the pre-urban human, you only get protection from the people related to you by blood, your kindred. Or we would say, your clan, your tribe, your ethnic group. And the idea that there is any other way is laughable.

The whole point of a police force is to take the maintenance of the peace away from warring kindred groups -- or in US cities ethnic gangs -- and give the job to boring bureaucrats. Or Mr. Plod, as they say in Britland.

So, if you turn the clock back, and "ABOLISH COPS" then you are going to find that the maintenance of law and order will devolve upon the enforcement arms of other groups. Actually, we already know how this works, because in many US lower-class urban neighborhoods the police hardly dare police; the local ethnic gang is the de facto government and police force. This is clearly happening in so-called "no go" areas where Muslim immigrants live in cities like Paris and Stockholm. It also occurs in US cities where the citizens are afraid to testify in court -- because intimidation from gangbangers.

The point is simple. One way or another, somehow, someone will enforce the peace and go after peace-breakers. And one way or another those peace-breakers will be the kind of lawless young men that our liberal friends have recently canonized: the George Floyds of the world, the kind of guys that Curtis Yarvin calls the "human rubble of the old regime's failed experiments." And you aren't going to like the rough justice of gangs and lynch mobs, you nice liberal ladies.

BILLIONAIRES: Imagine there's no billionaires / You can do it if you try. But what would it mean?

It would mean that nobody was creating businesses that made a really significant improvement over the status quo. You know the stand-out guys of the last 200 years. The chap that invented the steam engine used to pump out the mines in Cornwall. The chaps that invented steam railway locomotives. The guy that turned the Bessemer process for making steel into a mega-business, mining coal and iron ore and then transporting them to the smelters to make steel. The chap that invented the modern business of refining and distributing illuminating oil for lamps. The guys that systematized the manufacture of automobiles. The guys that invented and manufactured electric generating equipment and electric motors. The guy that paid $50,000 for an operating system that he modified and sold to IBM to power its IBM PCs. And so on.

These millionaires and then billionaires made staggering fortunes not because they "accumulated" wealth from the surplus labor of workers but because they created businesses that utterly changed the world for consumers. And the consumers flocked to buy their products and the workers flocked to work for the billionaires.

We know what happens when you ABOLISH BILLIONAIRES. You get the Soviet Union, in which millions died in a government-induced famine, and millions were sent to slave-labor camps in Siberia. You get Mao's China, in which about 30 million died in a famine when Mao decided that the farmers were going to make steel out in mini-furnaces in the countryside.

And when you decide to allow billionaires again then your economy revives a bit, as in today's capitalist -- but KGB-ruled -- Russia. Or it takes off, like in capitalist -- but Communist-ruled -- China.

Now, the real question is: how do AntiFa twerps come to believe the twerpish things they believe? How can they believe five impossible things before breakfast, and imagine that there were no policemen. And no billionaires? And not know that that would be a really bad idea?

But that is a topic for another day.

The People of the Creative Self

Most ordinary Americans do not raise their sights above the notion of ordinary life: following the rules, going to work, obeying the law. You might call it the agenda of ordinary human flourishing: forming families, owning property, doing it for the children. 

But some people, as Charles Taylor writes, yearn for something higher, fuller -- you know -- creative. In his Sources of the Self Taylor calls this experience "expressive individualism." These are people that want to live a creative life, maybe as a writer, an artist, a videographer, an activist, a revolutionary. They don't want to follow the rules, they want to discover new rules. They don't just want to go to work, they want to reinvent work. They don't just obey the laws; they want to make new ones. In their religion humans, not gods, are now become the creators of the world.

I call such people the People of the Creative Self.

It is important to understand how radically new and revolutionary this is.

Back in the old days humans understood that they lived under the sway of powerful gods and spirits that might, at any moment destroy them, just because. Then, in the Axial Age, humans invented new gods that created the world, announced a book of rules -- a Ten Commandments or a Hammurabi's Code -- and left humans to get on with it.

But now, with the marriage of science and technology, it seems that humans can create their own world, that with human intelligence and creativity and scientific knowledge we can fashion the world ourselves. we don't need a god to create the world and then set forth the rules; we can invent the future; we can set the rules. Gods need not apply.

But not everyone. It is clear, from the fact of oppressed peoples and other marginalized humans, that some people still experience the world as a chaotic place under the sway of malevolent forces. It is clear from the emergence of middle-class populism that there are a lot of people that just want to be told the rules so they can get on with it.

So the People of the Creative Self are a minority, but an influential minority, because they are the most educated, the most evolved. And, since their culture encourages them to create and imagine they naturally reinvent everything, from architecture to business to politics to sex. 

There is a tendency in creative people to imagine themselves as "free spirits" as opposed to the rest of mankind's "fettered spirits." As Nietzsche says in Human, All Too Human, 

He is called a free spirit who thinks differently from what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would have been expected of him. He is the exception, the fettered spirits are the rule[.]

Nietzsche doesn't like the "fettered spirit," especially because of its tendency to anathematize the "free spirit" and the "free spirit's" tendency "to shock and offend... in actions incompatible with sound morals." 

As a rule, though, [the free spirit] will nonetheless have truth on his side, or at least the spirit of inquiry after truth: he demands reasons, the rest demand faith.

Thing is, of course, that any creative work, successful or unsuccessful, will cause what Joseph Schumpeter so famously called "creative destruction." Creative destruction means that people are going to get caught in the undertow. If you start a business with a brilliant new invention, then it is likely to put people out of work in other businesses. If you implement a brilliant political idea, it may change the world for the better and inaugurate a glorious era or peace and prosperity, or it may change the world for the worse and cause millions of deaths and ruin tens of millions of lives. Moreover, it is also true, for instance in business startups, that many are called but few are chosen. Most creative endeavors, whether in business or politics or the arts, end in failure.

As Nietzsche teaches, if you want to be creative you have to be hard. You also have to cast off the Christian culture of Good and Evil. That's because the creative project necessarily goes Beyond Good and Evil. It accepts the basic fact of all living things: the will to power; my life and my posterity over your life and your posterity. If I am to create something new, well, I will have to break some eggs to make an omelette. This is perhaps better understood in the Jungian notion that creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin; if you are working on a creative project then you are also involved in project to destroy something else. 

This truth has not yet penetrated to the heart of the People of the Creative Self. They are creative because they were raised to be creative. To them, a normal life is a creative life, full of interesting challenges and projects. Nobody has taught them that creativity is hard, and likely to fail. They tend to think of themselves as the beneficent Oz spreading goodness and light everywhere. They are concerned about the Precautionary Principle where fossil-fuel companies are concerned, but not with respect to their own creative plans.

But creative people run the world: get used to it.

Capitalism Isn't Accumulation. Get It?

Because I've been reading around Marxist economics recently I have developed an allergic reaction to the word "accumulation." Marx and his epigones are always using the word in respect of capitalism, as in:

Primitive Accumulation: Marxists say this started with the enclosure of land and the expulsion of the resident population to create a landless proletariat. OK. Good point. Only it wasn't the capitalists that did this but the feudal nobles who, upon being disarmed by the absolute monarchs, kicked the peasants off their land because they couldn't use them as soldiers any more. By the way, Sir James Steuart, quoted by Marx, was a mercantilist who believed in a ban on the export of gold and silver (thus encouraging their "accumulation.")

Capital Accumulation: In Marx's notion (from La Wik), 

capital accumulation is the operation whereby profits are reinvested into the economy, increasing the total quantity of capital. Capital was understood by Marx to be expanding value, that is, in other terms, as a sum of capital, usually expressed in money, that is transformed through human labor into a larger value and extracted as profits.

Do you see the problem here? Marx and his epigones assume that capital accumulation is simply a mechanical or hydraulic operation. You pump your profits back into the economy and it accumulates as more profits. But it's not that simple.

Let us start with the profits from an investment. What should the capitalist do? Should he spend the money on a yacht? Should he reinvest it in his existing business? Should he put the money into creating a new line in his business? Should he start a completely new business? Should he invest the money in stocks and ETFs? If so, which ones? Should he invest the money in government bonds? The point is that his profits from this year do not just "accumulate." They must be spent or invested in a good idea, a good idea that works. To talk about this as "capital accumulation" completely misses the point.

Over-accumulation: According to the Marxists "A crisis of overaccumulation of capital occurs when the rate of profit is greater than the rate of new profitable investment outlets in the economy" and this is what causes capitalism to self-destruct and lead to socialism. I think that what he means here is that opportunities for profitable investment tend to reduce over time, leading to a crisis of capitalism.

Of course, there is a grain of truth in this. A General Motors may grow itself into the biggest automaker in the United States, but then what? What does it do for an encore? What does it do when the profits in auto-manufacturing start to level off and even decline? What does it do when business turns down and it can't afford to pay the above-market wages its workers have come to regard as their birthright? What does it do when the talent of its CEOs and managers reverts to the mean? 

We see this all the time in business. Any big corporation tends to be tuned up to do one thing. And then the world changes. And the corporation drops out of the Dow Jones Industrial Index of 30 top corporations.

OK. Enough about Marx. Let's talk reality, and the reality is that accumulation has nothing to do with the case.

"Intangible Capital:" The naked truth about capitalism is that that it bares the facts of human cooperation. Nothing is guaranteed; nothing works forever; even hard work isn't enough; good luck doesn't go on forever. You must serve the consumers or go broke.

And the biggest fact of all is the fact in the World Bank's study of capital: "Where is the Wealth of Nations?" Guess what: in the advanced nations, 80 percent of "capital" is so-called "intangible capital."

In other words, if you want to understand "wealth," the biggest part of it is not "natural capital," like oil or gold or silver or land. It is not "produced capital," like factories and industrial plants. It is the knowledge and know-how, the "intangible capital" that humans carry around with them between their ears.

Let's create a little table from the World Bank's Appendix 2 on the Per-Capita Wealth of Nations in 2000.

National Capital in $ per Capita

Country	Natural Capital	Produced Capital	Intangible Capital	Total Capital
Iran	$14,105	$3,336	$6,581	$24,023
Ireland	$10,534	$46,542	$273,414	$330,490
United States	$14,752	$79,851	$418,009	$512,612

Yipes. Notice how our three candidate countries all have about the same amount of "natural capital." But that don't mean nothing. Hey, "produced capital" ain't beanbag, but it is still second tier. The only thing that matters is "intangible capital."

So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Chuck old chap. And the same to all you Marxists and lefties and all the ships at sea.

The Importance of "Victims with Attitude"

I had a minor Aha! moment over the weekend. It had something to do with the Hamas rocket attacks in Israel and the Associated Press's Sergeant Schultz moment when they said that they Knew Nothing about the Hamas offices in the same building as theirs.

In other words, what's with the left that they are so wedded to victim groups like the Palestinians?

And then I realized that for the Allyism thing -- oppressed peoples, their allies, and white oppressors -- to work the oppressed peoples can't just be sitting around like slaves on a plantation or touching their forelocks like the folk on Bathsheba Everdene's farm in Thomas Hardy's Wessex.

The victims need to have Attitude. They need to be protesting; they need to complain about the cops; they need to make "the boss" into a villain; they need to burn it all down. Otherwise the lefty process doesn't work.

So that's why our lefty friends have continued to radicalize blacks in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Revolution. That's why all good BDS believers think that the Palestinians are helpless victims and the Israelis are Literally Hitler.

Blacks are "victims with attitude." Palestinians are "victims with attitude." And so are all the Islamist communities in Europe and Britain. So are "trans" people.

You don't count as a registered "oppressed people™" unless you have "attitude."

Hispanics in the US need not apply. They are too busy getting on with their lives, urging their children to go to college, starting a small business, rising up the social ladder.

East Asians need not apply. They are Ice People. Not enough attitude. They just get on with life, working hard every day and helping family and other East Asians.

Brahmins? They seem to be auditioning in the US as Allies. Not victims, but leaders of the victims. Although, of course, Dalits, untouchables from India, need not apply.

When you think about it, the need for "victims with attitude" is essential. And really, not just for lefty Allyism, but for all politics.

The point is that, unless you are making a ruckus, and telling the ruling class that unless they trim their sails you very well might bust up the place, then you don't exist in the political firmament. Because politics is all about Us and Them, how We are the noblest, most innocent, most virtuous people since the Creation. And those Them, they are rascals and monsters, and if we don't take arm against that sea of troubles, we will get run over and demolished, maybe even annihilated.

The trick of our lefty friends is that they are the ruling class, but justify their power because they care about the helpless victims. Only, of course, they need to select as victims folks who are not just victims -- after all, slavery has existed since the dawn of time -- but  victims with attitude who are not going to take it any more.

And guess what: if the victims du jour don't have enough attitude we activists and advocates and Rules for Radicals chappies will teach you the rules of Attitude. We will lead you into a glorious future of perfect equality and justice. And hey, you deserve that 50-inch 4K TV down at Walmart!

Note that all politics needs this dynamics. It's just that populist nationalist politicians don't need a local source of "victims with attitude." They assert the innocence of the nation and then blame the Russkies or the Chinese or the Deep State for all our problems.

So, a candidate for president like Donald Trump represents himself as the leader of the Commoners against the overclass of the Deep State. He is almost playing the same game as the Allies of Allyism. Because, of course, in reality Donald Trump is part of the overclass and when he represents himself as a Commoner he is pulling a fast one. He is no more a Commoner than Bill Gates, billionaire son of an establishment lawyer.

So what is the difference?

Donald Trump advertises himself as the leader of the American Nation of Commoners against the Deep State: the leader of the whole nation of ordinary Americans. Anyone can be an ordinary American, even members of the overclass that have half a brain.

The liberal overclass represents itself as a avant-garde of Allies fighting for the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors.

So what's missing? In the Trump version, he is missing the fact that there are a lot of lower-class Americans who identify more with their class or ethnicity or religion than as American.

In the lefty Ally narrative, everything is a lie, including "and" and "the." The Allies are not the allies of the oppressed peoples. They are simple power-seekers using the oppressed peoples as their political foot-soldiers until they degrade into "human rubble." The oppressed peoples are not really that oppressed, except as being enslaved by the welfare state and its failed programs run by the Allies. The white oppressors are not really white oppressors: they don't have the power. In fact, like the LTC in the Space Force they can be fired for any crime against the narrative right here right now. 

So. The left's politics requires victims, but victims are no use unless and/or until they have attitude. Thus the importance of "Victims with Attitude."

You read it here first.

The Left: Just What Is Their Problem?

I've been reading a number of books that deal with the lefty mindset, not exactly in an organized project to dissect the lefty world view, but just because.

For instance, in Ellen Meiksins Wood and her The Origin of Capitalism she is trying to advance the notion that things were pretty good before agrarian capitalism came along and marketized the agricultural sector. OK, so in the modern era people live under a "market imperative" instead of what I would call a feudal imperative. Instead of having to keep a weather eye on the local lord and his use and abuse of power we moderns have to think about our skills and how they are priced in the market. The Horror.

With Marx and The German Ideology we get another directed analysis of the move from feudal to market society. Marx's intent is to unearth the secret of how the bourgeoisie with their money and their capital and their circulation got to turn the world upside down and put the working class into wage slavery. The Horror.

Now I am reading Wittgenstein's Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin. The premise is that Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is not really about the philosophy of language but is an ethical commentary on the decline and fall of the Hapsburg empire. What the heck does that mean? Well, Vienna in the pre-WWI decades produced a gaggle of commentators who wanted a moral revolution away from the bourgeois ethos of late-19th century. 

There was Karl Kraus, the polemicist and satirist, who, the authors assert, held that the "tender fantasy [of womankind]... forms the unconscious origin... of all inspiration and creativity." And what he hated was the hypocrisy of the bourgeois culture that harassed prostitutes and homosexuals.

There was Adolf Loos, the father of modernist architecture, who hated decoration and the bourgeois "craze for totally meaningless articles of decoration" in their houses, "all purely for show."

There was Arnold Schönberg, the composer that gave us "the twelve-tone row" and whose music represents "attacks on the pseudo-sophistication of bourgeois aestheticism." See, Schönberg, like the critic of Wagner, Eduard Hanslick, "considered the question, how a composition sounds, as having no importance."

So the "beautiful" in music is, for Schönberg, a by-product of the composer's integrity, a function of his search for truth[.]

Just what is their problem?

And just what is the problem, in our own day, of the academicians and Wokeys and activists whose whole world view is about The Horror! The Horror! of ordinary middle-class people and their "systemic racism?"

Here's a piece on "The Paranoid Style in Progressive Politics" by Lee Siegel echoing the famous book of Richard Hofstadter's essays on The Paranoid Style in American Politics. You know: Red Scares and McCarthyism. It was the status anxiety of small-town America wot did it, according to Hofstadter. Maybe, just a teeny bit. But maybe the opposite is true, in spades.

Today status anxiety and paranoia are entrenched on the liberal side. It is the status anxiety of young editors, reporters, and producers, working in a collapsing profession, that is behind the generational combat that has driven the media to the far Left.

So maybe the feverish anti-bourgeois culture of the educated rich kids of the late 19th century is reflected in the feverish anti-deplorable culture of the educated not-so-rich kids of the early 21st century. It is good old fin-de-siècle all over again.

In The Soul of the World the recently departed Roger Scruton cuts through all this. What does it mean, he asks, to be a human in human society?

I exist as a subject, that is, as a self-conscious being with immediate knowledge of an inner realm, which defines my point of view of the world... [But then there are] others, with whom I share language... And language presupposes a shared world, a Lebenswelt, in which others are represented as subjects like myself.

The beginning of wisdom, in his understanding, is to step outside of your own self-obsession and think about other people from their own point of view. The amazing result is that you may find yourself able to share that world with others.

Do you see how the lefty world presupposes that the world cannot be shared? Not with those capitalists, not with those stupid Viennese bourgeois and their over-decorated houses, not with bloody Wagner and his reduction of music to pure emotion, not with those deplorable racist-sexist-homopbobes?

Just what is their problem?