Erasing Naivete

 

Somehow, I have gotten behind in everything.  I’m behind at work.  I’m behind in blogging.  And I’m woefully behind in summer reading… and it’s not even July 4^th yet (Is July 4^th still a thing?).  I just picked up Lawrence Wright’s new book, The Plague Year.  Wright is a talented writer who, like Lionel Shriver, never disappoints.  I like The End of October and God Save Texas and I’ll be interested to read his take on this past year.

But before I set sail on Wright’s journey, I’m going to spin out a few of my own observations—more like surprises, I’d say, as we weathered pandemic and the social unrest of the past year.  Listening to one of Bret Weinstein’s podcasts a few weeks ago, I was struck by one of Weinstein’s quotes, “No matter how cynical I get, I find that I am still naïve.”   I’m with you on this one, Bret.  I suppose the first big surprise has been my own naivete. I mistakenly thought of myself as prudent and appropriately skeptical, but the past year showed that I fell far short.   Here are a few of the areas in which I was taken by surprise.

 

·        I wholly underestimated the number of tyrannical politicians and government officials.  As a bit of an amateur U.S. history buff, I have been fascinated by the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers, the writing and thinking of Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Jay and Hamilton.  I understood the need to constrain government and the propensity of people to abuse power.  But I mistakenly thought that people raised in America with American ideals and values would exercise some restraint.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  With the COVID19 as their pretext,  the Governors Gavin Newsome, Gretchen Whitmer, Andrew Cuomo, and J.B. Pritzker steamrolled the individual liberties of their citizens.  Under the rubric of “flatten the curve,” religious liberty, freedom of association, freedom to travel all got flattened.   As I write this, J.B. Pritzker just extended yet again the 30 day “emergency” with no input from the legislature as COVID19 is receding.   Even worse, was the power grab of the Administrative State—the CDC putting a halt to evictions and Anthony Fauci basking in unelected and unaccountable power.

 

·        The reciprocal of the power grab has been the submissiveness of the American people.  This was a nation founded on rebellion and disobedience.  Yet, we witnessed a great deal of blind obedience to dictates that were not founded on empirical evidence or actual science.  Early on, we learned that there was very little risk of transmission out of doors.  Gyms and restaurants stayed shut with no evidence that they were incubators.  Still, people yelled at other people across the street and admonished them to mask up.   And I still see people walking around downtown Chicago alone, with masks on.  Even more ludicrous are people biking or driving alone with masks on.   I was astonished at how many citizens meekly submitted to their government… and how many turned into willing enforcers.   One day, I was at a Dunkin’ Donuts shop, and inadvertently stepped about a foot over the spacing line that was taped on the floor.  A rather rotund, 260 lb. woman immediately gave me the death stare and wagged her finger at me.  She promptly ordered 3 doughnuts and a coffee with cream and sugar.  I could not resist, “If you’re serious about the risk to your health, you might want to rethink those doughnuts.”  Needless to say, I was hit with a barrage of expletives.

 

·        The third surprise was the collapse of higher education.  It was merely a dozen years ago that I read Jonathan Cole’s book The Great American University in which Cole made a wonderful case, extolling the excellence of America’s university system.  The American university system was the one area in which public and private institutions ran in parallel and made each other better.   He cited Columbia University and The University of Chicago as the best of the best because of their core curriculum requirements.   But fast forward a dozen years and the university system has quickly devolved into a network bloated wokeness indoctrination camps.  Even at the University of Chicago, wokeness has overtaken the school.  The heralded Booth School of Business is now running “white privilege” and “unconscious bias” workshops (with no empirical evidence that such a thing exists).  The English Department announced that it would only admit students interested in Black Studies in its graduate program next year.   The university launched an investigation into economist Harald Uhlig for evidence of “racism” because he had the temerity to assert that BLM was wrongheaded in its demand to defund the police.  And the university is contemplating establishing an entire department devoted to Critical Race Theory.   This is happening all over the country.  Harvard admitted activist David Hogg, who couldn’t get into a number of 3^rd rate schools.  Princeton just deleted its Greek or Latin language requirement for classics majors because it’s not “inclusive” enough.  Yale stopped offering its Western music class for the same reason.  The university system is now leading the way in the illiberal push.  Schools that once taught critical thinking are now purveyors of doctrinal orthodoxy… and overly expensive ones at that.

 

·        Finally, there is the corruption of media.  Media outlets always had a tilt, but now they are engaged in propagating straight falsehoods and distortions.   Donald Trump did not refer to the white supremacists at Charlottesville as “fine people.”   Nicholas Sandmann was portrayed as harassing the old Native American when it was actually the reverse.  Officer Sicknick was not killed by a fire extinguisher during the January 6 protests.  The summer of rioting, looting and burning was ludicrously referred to as peaceful protesting following the death of George Floyd.  The New York Times ran off Bari Weiss with her resignation letter becoming a sort of modern day Declaration of Independence.

 

(https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter)

From the false assertion that Trump urged people to drink fish tank cleaner to its failure to follow up and ask incisive questions about the Nashville bombing or the Las Vegas shooter, or what the mayor of Moscow’s wife was paying for when she wired $3.5 million into Hunter Biden’s account, the media as become corrupt beyond repair.

 

These developments and the depth of the corruption and decline in higher education caught me by surprise.

Maybe they shouldn’t have.