Children’s prosocial skills predict key adult outcomes, a new American Journal of Public Health study finds:
For the study, teachers rated 700 children on eight criteria, using a five-point scale assessing how each interacted socially with others.
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For every one-point decrease in the child’s score, he or she had a 67 percent higher chance of having been arrested and an 82 percent higher chance of being in or on a waiting list for public housing at age 25.
Our higher education system fails leftist students, Mike Munger argues:
What happens when a leftist student confronts arguments he or she disagrees with? After all, they sometimes hear views that contradict their own. The problem is that they have always been rewarded for facile rejoinders, the equivalent of one-move chess games.
There is a ceremony that goes with this, something one of my colleagues calls “The Women’s Studies Nod.” When someone makes a ridiculously extreme, empirically unfounded but ideologically correct argument, everyone else must nod vigorously.
Not just a, “Yes, that’s correct,” nod, but “Yes, you are correct, you are one of us, we are one spirit and one great collective shared mind” nod.
What if someone withholds the Nod?
Since the children of the left have never actually had to play a full chess game of argument, they need a response. Their responses are two: “You are an idiot; no one important believes that,” or “You are evil; no good person could possibly believe that.”
At this point, leftist faculty teach the left students several different moves. Let’s consider a few.
Suppose I claim that rent control is a primary reason why there is such a shortage of affordable housing in New York and San Francisco. Here are the responses I have gotten from students:
- Micro-aggression!
- Check your privilege! (If they had a mic, they’d drop it, because this is supposed to be so devastating).
- You must take money from the Koch Foundation.
- Economists don’t understand the real world.
- Prices don’t measure values. Values are about people. You don’t care about people.
Not one of those responses actually responds to, or even tries to understand, the argument that rent controls harm the populations that politicians claim they want to help.
The point is that if you cared about poor people, actually cared about consequences for poor people, you would oppose rent controls. But that’s not how the logic of the left works. Instead of caring about the poor, they want to be seen as caring about the poor.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s “Some Words with a Mummy,” an Egyptian count awakes from his suspended animation to face interrogation from modern, forward-thinking Americans, who find out that the ancients were far, far ahead of them technologically and scientifically:
This disconcerted us so greatly that we thought it advisable to vary the attack to Metaphysics. We sent for a copy of a book called the “Dial,” and read out of it a chapter or two about something that is not very clear, but which the Bostonians call the Great Movement or Progress.
The Count merely said that Great Movements were awfully common things in his day, and as for Progress, it was at one time quite a nuisance, but it never progressed.
We then spoke of the great beauty and importance of Democracy, and were at much trouble in impressing the Count with a due sense of the advantages we enjoyed in living where there was suffrage ad libitum, and no king.
He listened with marked interest, and in fact seemed not a little amused. When we had done, he said that, a great while ago, there had occurred something of a very similar sort. Thirteen Egyptian provinces determined all at once to be free, and to set a magnificent example to the rest of mankind. They assembled their wise men, and concocted the most ingenious constitution it is possible to conceive. For a while they managed remarkably well; only their habit of bragging was prodigious. The thing ended, however, in the consolidation of the thirteen states, with some fifteen or twenty others, in the most odious and insupportable despotism that was heard of upon the face of the Earth.
I asked what was the name of the usurping tyrant.
As well as the Count could recollect, it was Mob.
I first read the story a few Halloweens ago, when it made excellent election-year reading, but I was recently reminded of it.
Over the course of his life and work, Lasch, who was the son of progressive parents and was himself initially drawn to Marxism, grew more culturally conservative as he grew more and more tired with American society’s tendency to equate the good life with mere consumption and consumer choice. Both Democrats and Republicans, he believed, adhered to the “ideology of progress,” a belief system whereby, either through redistribution of wealth or economic growth, “economic abundance would eventually give everyone access to leisure, cultivation, refinement — advantages formerly restricted to the wealthy.”
But Lasch’s conservatism was always idiosyncratic, fusing respect for the conservative traditions of working-class life also celebrated by Charles Murray — such as faith, family, and neighborhood — with a genuine desire for egalitarian democracy based on broad-based proprietorship. As a former Marxist, his analysis always held labor, particularly when self-directed or done voluntarily in cooperation with others, in high esteem because of the ethic of responsibility it produced. Work wasn’t, or shouldn’t be, just a means to put food on the table or a roof over your head. Rather it provided meaning, dignity, and moral instruction, something not found by repeating mind-numbing tasks over and over at someone else’s direction.
After surveying American history, Lasch increasingly latched onto what he described as the producerist ideology animating the young United States throughout much of the 19th century. This meant a celebration of the self-reliance, independence, and modesty of the farmers and artisans who went to work on their own initiative and controlled the means of production, whether that was the plow or the tools of their particular trades. Because of their independence and competence, they could be citizens in the truest sense of the word.
They loathed extreme disparities in wealth and looked upon luxury suspiciously because of the corrosive effect it had on people. “‘Wealth and splendor, instead of fascinating the multitude,’ ought to ‘excite emotions of disgust,’” wrote Lasch, quoting Thomas Paine, whom he considered one of America’s earliest populists. What motivated this revulsion was the belief that the only honest way to accumulate wealth was by what could be produced with one’s hands, which also assured that whatever economic inequality there was would be not only be tolerable but just. “Freedom,” Lasch wrote in The True and Only Heaven, summarizing majority opinion in the early 19th century, “could not flourish in a nation of hirelings.”
Lasch understood the paradox that much of the modern American left and right find contradictory: property could be theft, particularly under capitalist property relations and wage labor, but it also meant freedom for small producers — such as farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers in the 19th century or what today have become small business owners and sole proprietorships — who were able to control the conditions under which they made their living. The rise of mass production for ever-expanding markets and with it the shift to salaried labor destroyed this radical yet deeply conservative outlook on life, turning skilled craftsmen who worked for themselves into interchangeable cogs in somebody else’s machine, both literally and figuratively. Workers understood this, noted Lasch, and reacted by “defending not just their economic interests but their crafts, families, and neighborhoods.”
We may be training the next generation to be unhappy anti-Stoics:
Nearly all of the campus mental-health directors surveyed in 2013 by the American College Counseling Association reported that the number of students with severe psychological problems was rising at their schools. The rate of emotional distress reported by students themselves is also high, and rising. In a 2014 survey by the American College Health Association, 54 percent of college students surveyed said that they had “felt overwhelming anxiety” in the past 12 months, up from 49 percent in the same survey just five years earlier. Students seem to be reporting more emotional crises; many seem fragile, and this has surely changed the way university faculty and administrators interact with them. The question is whether some of those changes might be doing more harm than good.
For millennia, philosophers have understood that we don’t see life as it is; we see a version distorted by our hopes, fears, and other attachments. The Buddha said, “Our life is the creation of our mind.” Marcus Aurelius said, “Life itself is but what you deem it.” The quest for wisdom in many traditions begins with this insight. Early Buddhists and the Stoics, for example, developed practices for reducing attachments, thinking more clearly, and finding release from the emotional torments of normal mental life.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is a modern embodiment of this ancient wisdom. It is the most extensively studied nonpharmaceutical treatment of mental illness, and is used widely to treat depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and addiction. It can even be of help to schizophrenics. No other form of psychotherapy has been shown to work for a broader range of problems. Studies have generally found that it is as effective as antidepressant drugs (such as Prozac) in the treatment of anxiety and depression. The therapy is relatively quick and easy to learn; after a few months of training, many patients can do it on their own. Unlike drugs, cognitive behavioral therapy keeps working long after treatment is stopped, because it teaches thinking skills that people can continue to use.
The goal is to minimize distorted thinking and see the world more accurately. You start by learning the names of the dozen or so most common cognitive distortions (such as overgeneralizing, discounting positives, and emotional reasoning; see the list at the bottom of this article). Each time you notice yourself falling prey to one of them, you name it, describe the facts of the situation, consider alternative interpretations, and then choose an interpretation of events more in line with those facts. Your emotions follow your new interpretation. In time, this process becomes automatic. When people improve their mental hygiene in this way — when they free themselves from the repetitive irrational thoughts that had previously filled so much of their consciousness — they become less depressed, anxious, and angry.
The parallel to formal education is clear: cognitive behavioral therapy teaches good critical-thinking skills, the sort that educators have striven for so long to impart. By almost any definition, critical thinking requires grounding one’s beliefs in evidence rather than in emotion or desire, and learning how to search for and evaluate evidence that might contradict one’s initial hypothesis. But does campus life today foster critical thinking? Or does it coax students to think in more-distorted ways?
Let’s look at recent trends in higher education in light of the distortions that cognitive behavioral therapy identifies. We will draw the names and descriptions of these distortions from David D. Burns’s popular book Feeling Good, as well as from the second edition of Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders, by Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Holland, and Lata K. McGinn.
Burns defines emotional reasoning as assuming “that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: ‘I feel it, therefore it must be true.’?” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as letting “your feelings guide your interpretation of reality.” But, of course, subjective feelings are not always trustworthy guides; unrestrained, they can cause people to lash out at others who have done nothing wrong. Therapy often involves talking yourself down from the idea that each of your emotional responses represents something true or important.
Emotional reasoning dominates many campus debates and discussions. A claim that someone’s words are “offensive” is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feeling of offendedness. It is, rather, a public charge that the speaker has done something objectively wrong. It is a demand that the speaker apologize or be punished by some authority for committing an offense.
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Because there is a broad ban in academic circles on “blaming the victim,” it is generally considered unacceptable to question the reasonableness (let alone the sincerity) of someone’s emotional state, particularly if those emotions are linked to one’s group identity. The thin argument “I’m offended” becomes an unbeatable trump card. This leads to what Jonathan Rauch, a contributing editor at this magazine, calls the “offendedness sweepstakes,” in which opposing parties use claims of offense as cudgels. In the process, the bar for what we consider unacceptable speech is lowered further and further.
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If our universities are teaching students that their emotions can be used effectively as weapons — or at least as evidence in administrative proceedings — then they are teaching students to nurture a kind of hypersensitivity that will lead them into countless drawn-out conflicts in college and beyond. Schools may be training students in thinking styles that will damage their careers and friendships, along with their mental health.
How and why did Political Correctness evolve into the vindictive protectiveness of trigger warnings and microaggressions?
Childhood itself has changed greatly during the past generation. Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers can remember riding their bicycles around their hometowns, unchaperoned by adults, by the time they were 8 or 9 years old. In the hours after school, kids were expected to occupy themselves, getting into minor scrapes and learning from their experiences. But “free range” childhood became less common in the 1980s.
[...]
The flight to safety also happened at school. Dangerous play structures were removed from playgrounds; peanut butter was banned from student lunches. After the 1999 Columbine massacre in Colorado, many schools cracked down on bullying, implementing “zero tolerance” policies. In a variety of ways, children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well.
These same children grew up in a culture that was (and still is) becoming more politically polarized. Republicans and Democrats have never particularly liked each other, but survey data going back to the 1970s show that on average, their mutual dislike used to be surprisingly mild. Negative feelings have grown steadily stronger, however, particularly since the early 2000s. Political scientists call this process “affective partisan polarization,” and it is a very serious problem for any democracy. As each side increasingly demonizes the other, compromise becomes more difficult. A recent study shows that implicit or unconscious biases are now at least as strong across political parties as they are across races.
So it’s not hard to imagine why students arriving on campus today might be more desirous of protection and more hostile toward ideological opponents than in generations past. This hostility, and the self-righteousness fueled by strong partisan emotions, can be expected to add force to any moral crusade. A principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds.” Part of what we do when we make moral judgments is express allegiance to a team. But that can interfere with our ability to think critically. Acknowledging that the other side’s viewpoint has any merit is risky—your teammates may see you as a traitor.
Social media makes it extraordinarily easy to join crusades, express solidarity and outrage, and shun traitors. Facebook was founded in 2004, and since 2006 it has allowed children as young as 13 to join. This means that the first wave of students who spent all their teen years using Facebook reached college in 2011, and graduated from college only this year.
Dan Klein issues this plea:
Please do not describe leftists, progressives, social democrats, or Democrats as “liberal.”
The word liberal began to take on a political meaning around 1770, he notes:
By virtue of textual digitization, we now can pinpoint the inception with remarkable precision and certainty. In figure 4 we see the introduction of liberal in a political sense, in the expressions liberal policy, liberal system, liberal plan, liberal government, and liberal principles.
The inception of liberal as a political term should be credited to the Scottish historian William Robertson, who published a book in 1769 that uses the term repeatedly to mean principles of liberty and commercial freedom.(3) Adam Smith embraced and made important use of the semantic innovation in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Smith used the term repeatedly in a signal way to refer to the sort of policy he advocated, a system that gives a strong presumption to individual liberty, and hence commercial and market freedom.
If all nations, Smith says, were to follow “the liberal system of free exportation and free importation,” then they would be like one great cosmopolitan empire, and famines would be prevented. Then he repeats the phrase: “But very few countries have entirely adopted this liberal system.”(4) Smith’s “liberal system” was not concerned solely with international trade. He used “liberal” to describe the application of the same principles to domestic policy issues. Smith was a great opponent of restrictions in the labor market, favoring freedom of contract, and wished to see labor markets “resting on such liberal principles.”(5)
Klein has considered himself a classical liberal for decades:
Today conservatives and libertarians often use the term liberal to refer to leftists, progressives, social democrats, and Democrats. Here I beg you to stop doing so. But if you are not to say “liberal,” what are you to say? One option is to put “liberal” in quotation marks or to say “so-called liberal.” But even better is to use the words that have always signified the mentality of governmentalization: the terms left, progressive, and social democrat.
Prior to the twentieth century, in English-language discourse there was very little talk of “left” and “right,” as shown in figure 8. As the political term left emerged in the twentieth century, it has always signified political and cultural state centralization, through the governmentalization of social affairs. The extreme left is communism. A supposedly more liberal collectivism is socialism. The meaning of the left has changed somewhat, but, despite its verbiage and false consciousness, it still basically remains centered on the governmentalization of social affairs (although we must recognize that on a few issues, the left does lean toward liberalization). The left pretends to favor diversity, but that slogan is in reality just an agenda for people of diverse backgrounds to come together in a broadly uniform set of leftist beliefs.
As for progressive, the essence was aptly described in 1926 by H.?L. Mencken: “The Progressive is one who is in favor of more taxes instead of less, more bureaus and jobholders, more paternalism and meddling, more regulation of private affairs and less liberty.”(13) That is, the progressive is one who favors greater governmentalization of social affairs. The description has been largely accurate since the word progressive emerged as a political term. As Jonah Goldberg has shown in his regrettably titled book Liberal Fascism, early American progressivism contained rich veins of racism, eugenics, and all-around statism. In figure 9 we see that the political term progressives emerged around 1910.
Sometimes conservatives and libertarians balk at calling the left “progressive,” not wanting to concede the idea of progress. But I say, let them have it. Not only has progressive always signified statism, but the idea of progress is not suited to true liberalism. The idea of progress is goal-oriented: “Are you making progress on your term paper?” It suggests a goal or destination. But in politics the notion of a social goal or destination is baneful. That collectivists should join together for what they imagine to be progress is perfectly fitting. For them the term progressive is suitable. By contrast, conservatives and libertarians look to, not progress, but improvement.
Another fitting term for leftism is social democracy, which is standard in Europe. Social democracy is a compromise between democratic socialism and a tepid liberalism. The socialistic penchant is foremost, but a vacillating liberalism gnaws at the social democrat’s conscience. In figure 10 we see that the term social democracy emerged around 1900.
With the onset of the social-democratic age came a confusion of tongues, a Tower of Babel. Over the course of the twentieth century, as the left came to dominate most cultural institutions, its partisans set the semantic rules, and one either played by their rules or found oneself marginalized or excluded. Besides arrogating “liberal” to themselves, they created categories along the lines of “you’re either with us or against us.” There was the left, and then everything else — classical liberals, defenders of tradition, status-quo interest groups, or whatever else — was “the right.” For good measure they would throw in the Nazis, even though they stood for national socialism. With their absurd construction (“the right”), the left, by demonizing any of the groups placed therein — from religious extremists to skinheads to business-interest cronies — would damage and discredit every group within the set of groups denominated as “the right,” most important the true and perennial threat to the leftists’ worldview and selfhood, the classical liberals. How many times have Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, both of whom described themselves as “liberal,” been called “fascist” and “right-wing”?
Bruce Charlton examines the destruction of civil society by the Left:
Going back to the early 1990s, there emerged a considerable literature and a political movement concerned with Civil Society — which was the layer of organized social life between the government and the family: churches, professions and guilds, charities and clubs and the like.
This movement came in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and most of its satellites and colonies in 1989, and the break up of that empire into ‘democratic’ nations. The idea was that totalitarianism had been characterized by the destruction of civil society (either annihilation — as with many Christian churches, or take over by the state.
By contrast, civil society was seen as a vital characteristic of a health and free society — the idea that Men should have forms of organization that were substantially autonomous was seen as both efficient and also morally necessary.
The idea was that civil societies should be encouraged in the emerging nations of central and Eastern Europe -and indeed elsewhere — so that they might become Free as the West was Free.
What we have seen instead has been the near complete destruction of civil society in the West — and the process has bee all but un-remarked and un-noted as a general phenomenon. Almost all forms of human association have been brought under control of the state, most are irrelevant, participation in civil society is very low and feeble, many churches, professions social hobby groups been severely weakened or become extinct.
By the criteria of 25 years ago, objectively this means The West is not free, and is instead totalitarian.
It happened by a different mechanism than under Soviet Communism — which used direct suppression, making institutions illegal, confiscating their assets. imprisoning their leaders etc. In the West the imposition of totalitarianism was a mixture of subsidy-control and strangulation by regulation.
Don’t criticize the GOP for performing its function, Henry Dampier says:
The purpose of the GOP is to run interference for the left to make it easier for said institutional left to administer the state, and through its administration of the state, the rest of the society. Criticizing the GOP for performing its function is confused — there’s no other role for it to play, considering its non-representation in important institutions like government bureaucracies and, more importantly, universities.
The GOP functions to contain discontent among the population, to channel it into useless issues, and to tell people what they’re allowed to believe and express without provoking social opprobrium and legal consequences.
Wanting to replace the GOP with a new party would just mean taking over its function — which is to perform as a catcher, political policeman, and misdirection apparatus for the state — really not terrible work if you can get it, but nothing like actually controlling the state or changing the methods by which it operates.
Drop the last chapter. You know, the chapter where, after 200 pages of describing some social problem or other, you offer solutions to the problem.
That thought occurred to him after finishing Robert Putnam’s Our Kids.
He offers some advice to readers, too:
There is now a good nucleus of human-science bloggers providing day-to-day commentary on the human sciences. Some of them, like Bruce Charlton and Greg Cochran, are accredited academics; others, like JayMan and HBD Chick, are thoughtful nonspecialists.
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If the study of human nature interests you, spend a couple of hours reading JayMan’s recent rumination on empathy and universalism, or James Thompson’s on African intelligence. Chase down the links and watch the comment-thread jousting.
But looking at them, you see why this country was built successfully—WASPs are chore-oriented. When they came to New York, there were ten times as many hardware stores…. That’s the one weapon that not even the toughest community in New York City was prepared to combat: affability. Guns, knives, bats, but the one thing they never thought you’d get hit with is a can-do attitude. How can you argue with the energy that built the West?…
These new white people hate the white man, too. They’ve been to liberal arts colleges where they learned about oppression and condemn it. And so there they are, these people who look like they stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting, on the sidewalks of Bed-Stuy, singing along with Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ten Crack Commandments,” sanding chairs.
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Supposedly nonjudgmental judgmentalism used to be what Southern California was for, but now it’s encroaching even here in New York—where people are supposed to come to judge things.
The result, McFate predicts, will be a return to the Middle Ages, when private warriors determined the outcomes of conflicts and states stood at the sidelines of international politics. This “neo-medieval” world will be characterized by “a non-state-centric, multipolar international system of overlapping authorities and allegiances within the same territory.” Yet it need not be chaotic, he reassures readers, since “the global system will persist in a durable disorder that contains, rather than solves, problems.”
How can the world avoid replicating the problems generated by hired guns in the medieval era? The answer, according to McFate, is to rely less on mere mercenaries and instead foster “military enterprisers.” The former sell their skills to the highest bidder; the latter “raise armies rather than command them” and thus contribute to stability. During the Thirty Years’ War, military enterprisers included such figures as Ernst von Mansfeld, who raised an army for the elector palatine, and Albrecht von Wallenstein, who offered his services to Ferdinand II, the Holy Roman emperor.
But in sketching out a strategy for dealing with a world of privatized power, McFate is too quick to jettison the state-centric principles that have served the world so well since the end of the Thirty Years’ War. The biggest challenges to U.S. security in the years ahead, from climate change to terrorism to cybersecurity, will require more state-to-state collaboration, not less. And U.S. support, tacit or otherwise, for a free market for force will only serve ?to exacerbate these problems.
McFate offers two in-depth case studies of modern contractors: in Liberia, where they played the role of military enterprisers, and in Somalia, where they acted as mercenaries.
Americans have developed a new religion, John McWhorter explains — Antiracism:
Of course, most consider antiracism a position, or evidence of morality. However, in 2015, among educated Americans especially, Antiracism — it seriously merits capitalization at this point — is now what any naïve, unbiased anthropologist would describe as a new and increasingly dominant religion. It is what we worship, as sincerely and fervently as many worship God and Jesus and, among most Blue State Americans, more so.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example, is a priest of our new religion:
Coates is “revered,” as New York magazine aptly puts it, as someone gifted at phrasing, repeating, and crafting artful variations upon points that are considered crucial — that is, scripture. Specifically, Coates is celebrated as the writer who most aptly expresses the scripture that America’s past was built on racism and that racism still permeates the national fabric.
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People were receiving “The Case for Reparations” as, quite simply, a sermon. Its audience sought not counsel, but proclamation. Coates does not write with this formal intention, but for his readers, he is a preacher. A.O. Scott perfectly demonstrates Coates’s now clerical role in our discourse in saying that his new book is “essential, like water or air” — this is the kind of thing one formerly said of the Greatest Story Ever Told.
I suppose this passage may upset sincere believers:
One hearkens to one’s preacher to keep telling the truth — and also to make sure we hear it often, since many of its tenets are easy to drift away from, which leads us to the next evidence that Antiracism is now a religion. It is inherent to a religion that one is to accept certain suspensions of disbelief. Certain questions are not to be asked, or if asked, only politely — and the answer one gets, despite being somewhat half-cocked, is to be accepted as doing the job.
“Why is the Bible so self-contradictory?” Well, God works in mysterious ways — what’s key is that you believe. “Why does God allows such terrible things to happen?” Well, because we have free will … and it’s complicated but really, just have faith.
It stops there: beyond this first round, one is to classify the issues as uniquely “complicated.” They are “deep,” one says, looking off into the air for a sec in a reflective mode, implying that thinking about this stuff just always leads to more questions, in an infinitely questing Talmudic exploration one cannot expect to yield an actual conclusion.
Antiracism requires much of the same standpoint. For example, one is not to ask “Why are black people so upset about one white cop killing a black man when black men are at much more danger of being killed by one another?” Or, one might ask this, very politely — upon which the answers are flabby but further questions are unwelcome. A common answer is that black communities do protest black-on-black violence — but anyone knows that the outrage against white cops is much, much vaster.
Why? Is the answer “deep,” perhaps? Charles Blow, at least deigning to take the issue by the horns, answers that the black men are killing one another within a racist “structure.” That doesn’t explain why black activists consider the white cop a more appalling threat to a black man than various black men in his own neighborhood. But to push the point means you just don’t “get” it (you haven’t opened your heart to Jesus, perhaps?). Jamelle Bouie answers that there’s a difference between being killed by a fellow citizen and being killed by a figure of authority, but does that mean “It’s not as bad if we do it to ourselves”? Of course not! … but, but (roll of the eyes) “racist,” “doesn’t get it.”
One is not to question, and people can be quite explicit about that. For example, in the “Conversation” about race that we are so often told we need to have, the tacit idea is that black people will express their grievances and whites will agree — again, no questions, or at least not real ones. Here and there lip service is paid to the idea that the Conversation would not be such a one-way affair, but just as typical is the praise that a piece like Reni Eddo-Lodge’s elicits, openly saying that white people who object to any black claims about racism are intolerably mistaken and barely worth engagement (Eddo-Lodge now has a contract to expand the blog post into a book). Usefully representative is a letter that The New York Times chose to print, which was elicited by David Brooks’s piece on Coates’s book, in which a white person chides Brooks for deigning to even ask whether he is allowed to object to some of Coates’s claims.
Note: To say one is not to question is not to claim that no questions are ever asked. The Right quite readily questions Antiracism’s tenets. Key, however, is that among Antiracism adherents, those questions are tartly dismissed as inappropriate and often, predictably, as racist themselves. The questions are received with indignation that one would even ask them, with a running implication that their having been asked is a symptom of, yes, racism’s persistence.
Goodwell Nzou, a doctoral student in molecular and cellular biosciences at Wake Forest University explains, in Zimbabwe, they don’t cry for lions:
When I turned on the news and discovered that the [Facebook] messages [about Cecil] were about a lion killed by an American dentist, the village boy inside me instinctively cheered: One lion fewer to menace families like mine.
My excitement was doused when I realized that the lion killer was being painted as the villain. I faced the starkest cultural contradiction I’d experienced during my five years studying in the United States.
Did all those Americans signing petitions understand that lions actually kill people? That all the talk about Cecil being “beloved” or a “local favorite” was media hype? Did Jimmy Kimmel choke up because Cecil was murdered or because he confused him with Simba from “The Lion King”?
In my village in Zimbabwe, surrounded by wildlife conservation areas, no lion has ever been beloved, or granted an affectionate nickname. They are objects of terror.
When I was 9 years old, a solitary lion prowled villages near my home. After it killed a few chickens, some goats and finally a cow, we were warned to walk to school in groups and stop playing outside. My sisters no longer went alone to the river to collect water or wash dishes; my mother waited for my father and older brothers, armed with machetes, axes and spears, to escort her into the bush to collect firewood.
A week later, my mother gathered me with nine of my siblings to explain that her uncle had been attacked but escaped with nothing more than an injured leg. The lion sucked the life out of the village: No one socialized by fires at night; no one dared stroll over to a neighbor’s homestead.
When the lion was finally killed, no one cared whether its murderer was a local person or a white trophy hunter, whether it was poached or killed legally. We danced and sang about the vanquishing of the fearsome beast and our escape from serious harm.
Recently, a 14-year-old boy in a village not far from mine wasn’t so lucky. Sleeping in his family’s fields, as villagers do to protect crops from the hippos, buffalo and elephants that trample them, he was mauled by a lion and died.
The killing of Cecil hasn’t garnered much more sympathy from urban Zimbabweans, although they live with no such danger. Few have ever seen a lion, since game drives are a luxury residents of a country with an average monthly income below $150 cannot afford.
Don’t misunderstand me: For Zimbabweans, wild animals have near-mystical significance. We belong to clans, and each clan claims an animal totem as its mythological ancestor. Mine is Nzou, elephant, and by tradition, I can’t eat elephant meat; it would be akin to eating a relative’s flesh. But our respect for these animals has never kept us from hunting them or allowing them to be hunted. (I’m familiar with dangerous animals; I lost my right leg to a snakebite when I was 11.)
The American tendency to romanticize animals that have been given actual names and to jump onto a hashtag train has turned an ordinary situation — there were 800 lions legally killed over a decade by well-heeled foreigners who shelled out serious money to prove their prowess — into what seems to my Zimbabwean eyes an absurdist circus.
PETA is calling for the hunter to be hanged. Zimbabwean politicians are accusing the United States of staging Cecil’s killing as a “ploy” to make our country look bad. And Americans who can’t find Zimbabwe on a map are applauding the nation’s demand for the extradition of the dentist, unaware that a baby elephant was reportedly slaughtered for our president’s most recent birthday banquet.
An ardent Bolshevik as a young man, Conquest became a bitter foe of Soviet “Socialism”. He had first visited Russia in 1937 as a youthful devotee of the great experiment. It was a half century before he returned in 1989, having spent his life between chronicling the horrors the country had endured, and emerging, in the view of the Oxford historian Mark Almond, as “one of the few Western heroes of the collapse of Soviet Communism”. “He was Solzhenitsyn before Solzhenitsyn,” said Timothy Garton Ash.
Of his many works on the subject, perhaps the most important was The Great Terror, published in 1968 and detailing the full enormity of what Stalin had done to the Russian people in the 1930s and 1940s. The Mexican writer Octavio Paz paid the most succinct tribute to this book when he said in 1972 that The Great Terror had “closed the debate” about Stalinism.
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Among other interests, Conquest was a lifelong member, later fellow, of the British Interplanetary Society, to which he was recruited by a young civil servant called Arthur C Clarke. He also published a science fiction novel, A World of Difference. His last poetry collection, Penultima, was published in 2009.