In June of this year N.J. English teacher Dana Stangel-Plowe, a well-respected member of her Bergen County prep school, chose to resign in opposition to what she was being asked to teach. Part of her letter to her “superiors” read as follows: “The school’s ideology requires students to see themselves not as individuals but as members of a group, forcing them to adopt the status of privilege or victimhood.” Such categorizations, she suggested, were based upon grossly simplistic assumptions such as the notion that if you lack melanin [i.e., if you are White] you are by definition an oppressor. This, which is the ludicrous informing principle of Critical Race Theory, had apparently led to a number of decisions regarding the literary content of what she could teach that she found absurd.
More recently Lars Jensen, a professor for 22 years in a Nevada Community College, was threatened with dismissal for objecting to his school’s “progressive” decision to reduce the standards of traditional college math courses to the level of remedial math courses. This violation of the very concept of merit, to Jensen, seemed a violation of common sense itself. Ought not the very best minds equipped with the very best information, rise to the top of their professions in whichever field of human endeavor they choose to pursue? Would you be happy to discover the accountant to whom you had entrusted your financial future had only a “remedial” knowledge of math? Would not a civilization run by those of “remedial” qualifications be a civilization in decline? In November, fortunately, a five member panel decided Jensen could keep his job.
Stangel-Howe’s objection to the curriculum imposed upon her was that it resorted to grossly simplistic conclusions based on Identity while ignoring the multitude of factors besides Gender and Race that determine human outcomes. Similarly Jensen’s defense of his academic standards rests upon his conviction that the Left’s inclination to sacrifice them out of compassion for all those who fail to meet their requirements represents a crass betrayal of Man’s capacity as an Intelligent Being. Yes, the champions of Inclusiveness would seem to be saying, intellectual merit doesn’t really matter in our absurdly reductive vision of both human history and nature.
Investigate the subject of Meritocracy and you will discover a host of recent books suggesting that Capitalism’s claim to reward those who truly deserve it is utter nonsense, indeed that those who flourish here in the Democratic West do so not as a result of their merits and hard work but because of the inherent flaws in Capitalism itself. For the hundredth time I must state that even those societies fervently committed to “social justice” will be riddled with injustices due to the givens of human nature. Freedom inevitably entails the freedom to act badly. But the critiques of Capitalism we shall discuss in my next blog disingenuously conflate the Freedom Capitalism engenders with Evil itself, the Socialist solutions to which they subscribe ultimately being both anti-Freedom and anti-Life.
The inclination to reduce us to mere statistics, to suggest that if 20% of a given population is purple, then 20% of its various institutions must be occupied by the same, represents a truly superficial vision of both the Species and the Facts of Life, that superficiality inevitably entailing arbitrary political agendas which, as history clearly suggests, often end in death camps. Yet this vision, sadly, has become the dominant narrative of the “enlightened” contemporary Left.