In 1791, the Constitution of May 3, the first modern constitution in Europe, was proclaimed by the Sejm of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
On May 3 in 1915, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae composed the poem “In Flanders Fields,” the most famous poem of World War I. The Canadian physician wrote it after presiding over the funeral of friend and fellow soldier Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, who died in the Second Battle of Ypres. It is in the form of a rondeau.
Institutions of higher learning where foes of free speech flourish include purported bastions of intellectual discourse like Harvard University. In 2022, Harvard ranked 170th out of 203 schools with respect to free speech on campus in an assessment by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
According to a 2023 College Pulse survey, 26 percent of Harvard students say it’s sometimes okay to use violence to stop speech on campus. Only 27 percent say it’s always wrong to shout down a speaker.
“Many, many people are being threatened with — and actually put through — disciplinary processes for their exercise of free speech and academic freedom,” says Janet Halley, of Harvard Law School. “Many people think that they’re entitled not to be offended.”
Jeffrey Flier, medical school professor, says free speech has been in decline at Harvard at least since 2007.
Halley, Flier, and more than 100 other Harvard faculty members have newly formed the Council on Academic Freedom.
Flier says it’s been too hard for professors to simply “[put] their head above the parapet [and say] ‘I think this is wrong.’ There hasn’t been any network of people from across the spectrum that could be able to do this. But that’s what we now have in the council.”
The Council seems to be off to a good start. Now let us see how many of the rest of the school’s 2,400 or so faculty members join up.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Life is the true mystery, not because impenetrable by thought, but because thought penetrates it to the infinite with power equal to its own.
Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic (1913; 1967), Douglas Ainslie, trans., p. 590.
On May 2, 1989, Hungary began dismantling its border fence with Austria, allowing a number of East Germans to defect.
Mid-month, the administration barred Catholic priests of the Holy Name College Friary from providing “pastoral care” to servemembers at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The government contract had been granted, instead, to Mack Global LLC, which the archdiocese characterizes as “a secular defense contracting firm that cannot fulfill the statement of work in the contract.”
Not convinced that this Daily Signal story amounts to “a war on Christianity”?
Well, try The Epoch Times. In “Christians Say Government Targets Them Because They Oppose Left-Wing Agenda,” Kevin Stocklin lists a number of federal government policies that favor left-wing politics over the social and political activism of Catholics and other Christians.
Abortion activists, pro- and anti-, do occasionally engage in what might plausibly be called “terrorist” activities, but the FBI appears avid in hounding pro-life protesters, yet uninterested in doing any actual work to curb the string of “violent attacks, including assaults and firebombings, against pro-life individuals and institutions.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio)’s “subpoena to the FBI earlier this month demanding information on its alleged program to surveil Catholics for ‘signs of radicalization,’” spurred Stocklin’s reporting about the government’s increasing conflict with Christianity.
Why see traditional Christians as enemies of the State? Because they are.
Potentially, at least.
In part, simply because those who worship God see a worshipful attitude towards the State as something akin to idolatry. And apparently vice versa. But sociologists such as Robert Nisbet regard religion as a countervailing power against ever-growing government.
If you are looking for a jealous god, the modern total State fills the bill.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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They say princes learn no art truly, but the art of horsemanship. The reason is, the brave beast is no flatterer. He will throw a prince as soon as his groom.
Ben Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries (1641).
The Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, written by philosopher Benedetto Croce [pictured, above] in response to the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals by Giovanni Gentile, sanctioned the unreconcilable split between the philosopher and the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini, to which he had previously given a vote of confidence on October 31, 1922.
The manifesto was published by Il Mondo on May 1, 1925, which was Workers’ Day, symbolically responding to the publication of the Fascist manifesto on the Natale di Roma, the founding of Rome (celebrated on April 21). The Fascist press claimed that the Crocian manifesto was “more authoritarian” than its Fascist counterpart — a typical leftist dismissal of what used to be called “liberalism” — in Italian, liberismo — but which Croce dubbed liberism, to distinguish it from the dirigiste quasi-socialisms of self-described “liberals” of the time.
Starting with Voltaire, Paul Jacob moves on to Tucker Carlson and even more important matters:
The fact is: almost everything is funny. You just have to have a way of looking at it.
On April 30, 1902, economist Theodore W. Schultz was born. His work studying the quick post-war recovery in Germany and Japan led to his development of “human capital theory,” explicated in books such as Investing in People (1981) and several major papers, including “Investing in human capital” (1961) and “Transforming traditional agriculture” (1964).
He was co-winner (with William Arthur Lewis) of the 1979 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Schultz died in 1998.