by Ben Shapiro
This pathetic illogic has even extended to the realm of scientific staffing. The National Science Foundation, a federal funding agency for science, says that it wants to pursue a “diverse STEM workforce”—not the best scientists of all races, but a specifically diverse group. To that end, the NSF spent millions funding projects on implicit bias research, one of the least-verified, most-hyped attempts to ferret out secret racism ever attempted, as well as $500,000 on studying intersectionality. Science departments around the country are seeking not those with the highest scores or the best credentials, but those with special “contributions to diversity.” As Heather Mac Donald points out, the American Astronomical Society has now asked PhD programs to stop using the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) in physics for applicants, since too few women were doing well. The same is happening in medicine, where schools have been encouraged to stop using the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) for ethnic minorities. The impact: “From 2013 to 2016, medical schools nationally admitted 57 percent of black applicants with a low MCAT of 24 to 26, but only 8 percent of whites and 6 percent of Asians with those same low scores, according to Claremont McKenna professor Frederick Lynch.” How it helps patients to have less qualified but more ethnically diverse heart surgeons remains unexplained.34
We’ve seen this sort of antiscientific blatherskite rear its ugly head over and over. Former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers lost his job as president of Harvard University when professors voted to oust him; Summers had the temerity to cite studies suggesting that there are more men who fall on both the higher and lower ends of the spectrum of test score distribution, thereby creating disparity in the distribution of men and women in particular science and mathematics jobs.35 Jordan Peterson, professor at the University of Toronto, received a letter from his administration warning him that his refusal to use transgender pronouns was “contrary to the rights of those persons to equal treatment without discrimination based on their ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender expression.’” The letter suggested that Peterson’s insistence on using correct pronouns in accordance with biology had been “emotionally disturbing and painful” for some students.36 Lindsay Shepherd, a graduate student at Wilfrid Laurier in Canada, was disciplined after showing a video of Peterson discussing the use of “made-up pronouns” in order to placate transgender people.37 At Boise State, Professor Scott Yenor was called on the carpet for the great sin of writing a piece suggesting that radical feminism’s insistence that gender was a social construct had paved the way for the transgender rights movement.38 Students walked out on Evergreen State College’s Professor Heather Heying when she pointed out that men are taller than women.39 Heying’s husband, Professor Bret Weinstein, lost his job at Evergreen when he refused to leave campus after black students demanded that white teachers not teach on a particular day; students called him a racist and led a takeover of campus buildings.40 College speakers ranging from Charles Murray to Heather Mac Donald to Christina Hoff Sommers have been run off campus, usually following violent protests, for the sin of citing statistics.
Better false statistics and bad social science than to violate someone’s sense of self-esteem.
This antiscientific, anti-reason nonsense is a return to the random chaos of the pagan—a belief in subjectivity above objectivity, a belief in lack of control over your own fate, a belief that reason itself is merely a reflection of power dynamics. The same scientific method, reliance on reason, and belief in individual worth that led to the greatest surge of wealth in human history are now under assault—all on behalf of the quest for self-realization and self-worth.
All of this is deeply damaging to precisely the people who are supposed to be freed by it. Intersectional thinking promotes a victim mentality entirely at odds with the pursuit of fulfillment and success. If you are told repeatedly that your self-esteem is threatened by the system and the structure, and that even statistics and science must not offend you—if you are taught that your bliss matters more than objective truth—you become weak and fragile, unable to cope in the real world. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University points out that the most effective type of therapy for distorted thinking is cognitive behavioral therapy, in which people are taught to break chains of thought by using reason and evaluation—precisely the opposite of what our modern universities have been doing. “The recent collegiate trend of uncovering allegedly racist, sexist, classist, or otherwise discriminatory microaggressions doesn’t incidentally teach students to focus on small or accidental slights,” he writes. “Its purpose is to get students to focus on them and then relabel the people who have made such remarks as aggressors.” This, Haidt concludes, makes society more censorious, and makes students more psychologically unstable: “The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.”41
Even worse, people who perceive themselves as victims are also more likely to become aggressors; as social psychologist Roy Baumeister explains, “Many violent people believe that their actions were justified by the offensive acts of the person who became their victim.”42 Which is precisely what we’ve seen from campus rioters and social media malcontents and the movement to use government force to shut down particular types of disapproved speech.
But, we are told, at least this new awareness of our intersectional problems will bring about a more aware world, and thus perhaps a better one. Not so. Focusing on right-able wrongs is worthwhile; blaming all disparities on discrimination leads to more political polarization and individual failure. Studies show that perceived discrimination is heavily connected with “lower grades, less academic motivation . . . and less persistence when encountering an academic challenge.”43 That’s certainly a case for fighting discrimination. It’s also a case for not exaggerating its extent, or silencing conversations in order to pander to sensitivities.
THE END OF PROGRESS
So, has the vision of the cultural Left provided fulfillment? It’s provided solipsism, for certain. But it’s also provided polarization. It’s not merely that intersectionality has carved off individuals into racial groups, then pitted them against one another. Racial solidarity among members of the intersectional coalition has also driven reverse racial solidarity from the so-called alt-right—a group of racists who have sought to promote white pride. Leaders in this movement include the execrable Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, and Vox Day—all of whom use IQ data to explain racial disparities, while claiming that the roots of Western civilization lie not in ideas, but in race. The alt-right remains a fringe movement, but their arguments have penetrated into more visible circles thanks to a reactionary tendency by some on the Right to embrace anyone who supposedly opposes political correctness.
The cultural Left’s view of reality has driven anger and hatred—polls show that Americans are more divided than ever. That sense that the world is spinning out of control only feeds into intersectionality’s attack on agency. Individual capacity has been abandoned in this worldview—individuals, after all, are mere creations of the systems into which they have been born. Collective purpose, too, has gone by the wayside—after all, it’s the system keeping you down.
But tribal identity is alive and well.
Tribal identity cannot provide prosperity. But it can provide meaning.
The problem, of course, is that tribal identity also tears down the civilization that has granted us our freedoms and our rights, our prosperity and our health. But perhaps all those things are meaningless in the long run. So argues Yuval Noah Harari, lecturer at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harari, unlike intersectional thinkers of the Left, is honest enough to admit the brutal, existential truth of a civilization unmoored from Judeo-Christian values and reason: he says we may have been happier in the Stone Age, and that attempts at meaning are merely ways for our brains to amuse themselves while we journey toward death. History doesn’t progress; history is merely the movie Groundhog Day, albeit with nicer alarm clocks to wake y
ou up every morning.44 Perhaps we can only be truly happy by discarding truth and reality. “Do we really want to live in a world in which billions of people are immersed in fantasies, pursuing make-believe goals and obeying imaginary laws? Well, like it or not, that’s the world we have been living in for thousands of years already,” Harari argues.45 Perhaps humanity will change itself beyond recognition through technology, and save itself from the rut. Perhaps not.
Harari is right about one thing: capitalism, it turns out, cannot fulfill the human longing for meaning, even if it betters our material condition. And so the fantasy of a new humanity promulgated by the Left continues to romance us. We cycle between attempting to fulfill that dream, suffering for that attempt, abandoning that attempt, and taking up the dream again. Our only alternative would be to return to the Judeo-Christian values and Greek reason that undergirded America’s founding. It’s not enough to make the case for the utility of the Enlightenment; the Enlightenment was the ground floor of the building, resting on certain foundational ideas and basic premises. We must shore up those ideas and premises if we hope to keep building skyward rather than adding weight to an already shaky superstructure.
Next, we turn to that task.
Conclusion:
How to Build
America is struggling right now in a lot of ways. But its largest struggle is the struggle for our national soul. We are so angry at each other right now. That anger is palpable. Where did it come from? It came from the destruction of a common vision. We used to believe in the Founding vision, supported by a framework of personal virtue culled from Judeo-Christian morality. We used to see each other as brothers and sisters, not “the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent” or “the privileged vs. the victims.” We weren’t enemies. We were a community, forged in fire and tethered together by a set of values stretching back to the Garden of Eden—a community of individuals working to understand the value of each other as images of God, a community of individuals who believed in our own capacity to change ourselves and the world around us.
We can regain that. We must regain that. Our individual and communal happiness depends on us regaining the values we’re losing all too quickly.
To do so will require boldness.
To do so will require sacrifice.
Perhaps the most polarizing and puzzling story in the Bible is the story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac. It’s a deceptively simple story: God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, Abraham acquiesces without argument, Abraham takes Isaac to the top of a mountain to slaughter him, an angel intervenes and stops the killing, and Abraham substitutes a ram for Isaac rather than killing his son. But the story raises serious questions, obviously. Is God barbaric? Richard Dawkins says yes: “By the standards of modern morality, this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relations, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defence: ‘I was only obeying orders.’” Dawkins says that the story can’t be an allegory for anything praiseworthy. And it can’t teach anything moral: “what kind of morals could one derive from this appalling story?”1
And indeed, religious philosophers have argued over the meaning of this story for centuries. Kierkegaard suggested that Abraham’s binding of Isaac represented the height of religious, personal faith over the ethical. Aquinas saw in Isaac a proto-Jesus figure.
But instead of questioning whether God was right or wrong in this scenario, or whether Abraham was right or wrong, let’s focus instead on the request: to sacrifice one’s child. Now, we know that Abraham has been willing to sacrifice himself in every way for God’s honor: he has left his home in search of an unnamed place God has pledged to show him; he has separated from one of his wives, Hagar, and one of his sons, Ishmael, at God’s behest; he has fought a war with kings; he has circumcised himself. But all of this amounts to a show of Abraham’s commitment to his ideals.
Now God is asking Abraham to commit his own children to his ideals—to consider putting his own son in danger of death for a higher purpose.
As a parent of two children, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the horror with which Abraham must have greeted this commandment. Isn’t it the job of every parent to keep their children safe from harm?
But in reality, this is what we are all asked to do, every day. We are asked to train our children to defend the good against the evil, the light against the darkness. Each day, we are asked to put our children in danger for the sake of a higher ideal. We may think that we are neutral participants in the world—and thanks to the sacrifices of our parents and grandparents, the cost of defending purposeful living has dropped dramatically. But make no mistake: we are still living in a fractious world, filled with people who target those who love individual freedom and Western virtue. That truth came home to us on 9/11; it is a truth that is convenient to forget.
What God asks of us, what our ancestors ask of us, and our civilization asks of us, is not only that we become defenders of valuable and eternal truths, but that we train our children to become defenders of those truths as well. Historically, this has meant putting our own children in direct danger. My own family history is replete with extended relatives murdered in Europe for their devotion to Judaism.
The easiest way to evade responsibility is to avoid teaching our children our values. If we merely let them choose their value system for themselves, we reason, then we put them in no danger; if we act as neutral arbiters, bubbling them off from the possibility of harm through vague shibboleths about tolerance (though we’re never quite specific about just what we’re willing to tolerate). We can leave our chosenness behind. In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye complains, “I know, I know, we are Your chosen people. But once in a while, can’t You choose someone else?”
The answer is obvious: we can opt out. All we have to do is stop teaching our children.
If we wish for our civilization to survive, however, we must be willing to teach our children. The only way to protect their children is to make warriors of our own children. We must make of our children messengers for the truths that matter. That comes with risk. And that is a risk we must be willing to take. As Ronald Reagan put it, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”2
My father is fond of saying that in life, there aren’t six directions (east, west, north, south, up, and down). There are just two: forward and backward. Are we moving toward something, or away from it? Are we teaching our children to march forward, the banner of their civilization in hand, or to back slowly away from it, watching the shining city on the hill receding into the distance?
So, what do we teach our children? When I look at my four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son, what do I want them to know—what must they know to become defenders of the only civilization worth fighting for?
My wife and I will start by teaching our children four simple lessons.
1. Your Life Has Purpose. Life is not a bewildering, chaotic mess. It’s a struggle, but it’s a struggle guided by a higher meaning. You were designed to use your reason and your natural gifts—and to cultivate those assets toward fulfillment of a higher end. That end can be discovered by investigating the nature of the world, and by exploring the history of our civilization. That end includes defending the rights of the individual and the preciousness of individual lives; it includes acting with virtues including justice and mercy. It means restoring the foundations of your civilization, and building new and more beautiful structures atop those foundations. We care what you do; your long-dead ancestors care what you do; your children will care what you do; your God cares what you do.
2. You Can Do It. Forge forth and conquer. Build. Cultivate. You were given the ability to choose your path in life—and you were
born into the freest civilization in the history of mankind. Make the most of it. You are not a victim. In a free society, you are responsible for your actions. Your successes are your accomplishments, but they are also the legacy of those who came before you and those who stand with you; your failures are purely your own. Look to your own house before blaming the society that bore you. And if society is acting to violate individual rights, it is your job to work to change it. You are a human being, made in the image of God, bound to the earth but with a soul that dreams of the eternal. There is no greater risk than that and no greater opportunity than that.
3. Your Civilization Is Unique. Recognize that what you have been given is unique in human history. Most human beings throughout time have lived in poverty and squalor, at serious risk of disease and death; most human beings throughout time have experienced more pure pain in their first few years than you will likely experience throughout your life. Most human beings have lived under the control of others, suffered tyranny and oppression. You have not. The freedom you enjoy, and morals in which you believe, are products of a unique civilization—the civilization of Dante and Shakespeare, the civilization of Bach and Beethoven, the civilization of the Bible and Aristotle. You did not create your freedoms or your definition of virtue, nor did they arise in a vacuum. Learn your history. Explore where the roots of your values lie: in Jerusalem and Athens. Be grateful for those roots. Then defend those roots, even as you grow to new heights.
4. We Are All Brothers and Sisters. We are not enemies if we share a common cause. And our common cause is a civilization replete with purpose, both communal and individual, a civilization that celebrates both individual and communal capacity. If we fight alongside one another rather than against one another, we are stronger. But we can only be stronger when we pull in the same direction, and when we share the same vision. We must share the same definition of liberty when it comes to politics, and, broadly speaking, the same definition of virtue when it comes to creating and maintaining social capital. As Abraham Lincoln said in his First Inaugural Address, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”3