None has more contempt for what it is to be a man than they who make it their profession to lead the crowd.
Søren Kierkegaard, in Walter Kaufmann, ed., Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, p. 96.
On January 6, 1907, Maria Montessori opened her first school and daycare center for working class children in Rome, Italy.
In 1912 on this date New Mexico became the 47th state of America’s United States.
On this date in 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his “Four Freedoms” State of the Union speech, emphasizing vague “freedoms” that enabled government to usurp definable freedoms.
On January 6, 2021, lame duck President Donald John Trump gave a speech in Washington, D.C., aiming to rouse his supporters to pressure the U.S. Senate not to certify some states’ Electoral College votes in Election 2020, to address “election fraud.” Before his speech ended, and under questionable circumstances, some of his supporters (along with some possible false flag agents) broke into the Capitol to set off one of the great political controversies of our time.
“Maine Secretary of State Claims Politics Played ‘No Role’ in Booting Trump Off Ballot,” is how The Epoch Times headlined the story.
Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has unilaterally barred former President Donald Trump from the Maine presidential primary ballot. As in the Colorado case, the excuse rests with the January 6, 2021, protest rally and mob entrance into the capitol building. She says that “the weight of evidence” she “reviewed indicates that it was an insurrection.”
Knowing what real insurrections are, and what words mean, and the long history of protests that get out of hand, including in recent times, most non-partisan people, as well as all Trump supporters, must conclude just the opposite: no insurrection was even attempted.
Bellows may actually believe that the January 6 events constituted an insurrection, that her job allows her to do what has never been done in American history, and that this would be good for the nation.
On the insurrection issue, she and Democrats rely upon motivated reasoning. People worked up in a cause can believe almost anything that would aid the cause. Still, the common-sense guess is that almost no one really believes her . . . but of course her Democratic comrades must pretend.
On the scope of her position, prudence would usually steer a partisan such as herself away from doing such a radical thing.
On the good of the nation, the clear hyperpartisan appearance would exacerbate tensions around the country, widening the divide into a chasm.
What may really be in evidence, though, is that leftists are mimicking the radicalism of the pandemic lockdowns, driven by the sheer frenzy of their vision of themselves as embodiments of righteousness . . . always to exercise arbitrary power.
An enthusiasm that spreads virally. As a mania.
Thus does extremism work.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously.
Sinclair Lewis on the protagonist of Elmer Gantry (1927).
On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company announced an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage of $5 for a day’s labor.
The controversies have made Gay, a black woman, very visible. She may have been subjected to racial attacks in emails or on somebody’s blog. I haven’t seen reports of such. It’s possible.
But her letter makes it seem as if she feels all of it, all the criticisms of her understanding of policies regarding the treatment of Jews on campus and criticisms of her own treatment of the words of others in her published work, were “fueled by racial animus.”
If only blacks alone were ever charged with ambiguity about antisemitism or committing plagiarism, the implication might be at least superficially plausible.
But it’s not.
Yesterday, I discussed the considerations that properly affect campus speech policies (“The Resignation”).
Here let me note, first, that scholars of all hues and sexes have been plausibly accused of plagiarism. Example: historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, white woman. Male example: Steven Ambrose.
And, second, that Harvard’s backing and filling and own animus in response to documented charges of plagiarism have converted the matter from a problem mostly for Claudine Gay personally to a problem for Harvard as an institution. By violating its own policies for dealing with the charges and by attacking the messenger, Harvard seemed to be saying that standards of scholarship like “Don’t plagiarize” don’t matter.
But they do.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress, Volume II: Reason in Society (1905), Chapter V, “Democracy.”
On Jan. 4, 1642, King Charles I of England sent soldiers to arrest members of Parliament, beginning England’s slide into civil war.
On Jan. 4, 1649, the English “Rump Parliament,” having purged those members willing to restore Charles I to the throne, voted to put Charles I on trial for high treason. Before the month was over, the king had been executed.
Her resignation letter focused on the recent congressional hearings in which she found herself in the uncomfortable position of selectively defending free speech against a Republican politician slinging charges of “genocide” and “racism.”
It was all very . . . the opposite . . .
And that is the most important context. Her letter’s evasion of discreditable cases of academic plagiarism — at Harvard, no less! — while not honorable, was at least politically apt. One administrator’s fraudulent academic history is no match for the issue of freedom of speech.
Which, as a legal matter, is as Ms. Gay said it was, a matter of context. You have the right to advocate genocide or say racist things on your property or on hired property. You do not have the right to shout such things just anywhere.
But college campuses aren’t just anywhere. They are allegedly places for intellectual debate. The practice of academic freedom means that the property and customs of universities and institutions of higher learning allow differing opinions to be aired.
In classrooms; in papers; in auditoriums.
Still, these student academic free-speech norms don’t extend anywhere and everywhere, in all campus contexts. No student may hide behind “free speech” or “academic freedom” to corner and scream hatred of Israel at every Jew on the quad. That’s where Ms. Gay’s answers in congressional hearings were so unsatisfactory. Especially since Harvard and other major higher education institutions have been disallowing some speech from academic contexts and celebrating other quite threatening speech in the university’s public places.
Gay’s resignation reminds us of Al Capone’s imprisonment for tax evasion: a work-around at best. The underlying issues remain unresolved.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.
Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920).