Culture: January 2020 Archives
How the Church lost its flock over Brexit - UnHerd
Anglican pastor Giles Fraser writes about "a gathering of 60 or so church leaders of various denominations... at Lambeth Palace to discuss the way forward for the churches after Brexit."
"The most interesting thing that I took away from the day, listening especially to German Christians, was how the EU became, for them, a sort of project of atonement for the consequences of German nationalism - that the shame of Nazism led them to reject any starry-eyed or romantic conception of the nation and to replace it by what Professor Heinrich Bedford-Strohm from the University of Bamberg called a 'nationalism of rules'.
"In other words, that a particular people might be united not by the dangerous emotionalism of flag waving but by a decidedly unemotional common bureaucracy that could be rolled out to embrace different nations, united under a set of administrative rules and procedures. One German academic there spoke of the need for the UK to be 'integrated into the European cultural synthesis'. I shuddered and thought of the Borg in Star Trek, a hive mind where all cultural distinctiveness will be assimilated. Forget subsidiarity. 'Resistance is futile,' say the Borg.
"As Brits, our reaction to the Second World War was inevitably entirely different from that of the Germans. We didn't experience the humiliation of our nationalism, but quite the opposite: its overwhelming endorsement. For it was precisely through the sort of communal solidarity and fellow feeling that nationalism provides that we summoned the strength to stand against Nazism and help defeat it.
"The massive outpouring of feeling and relief at the end of the war, the 'never surrender' attitude, the solidarity forged by the Blitz, those familiar images of thousands of demobilised soldiers waving the union flag in Piccadilly, all that and more is why it is inevitable that the Germans and the British are going to have entirely different approaches to the moral valence of the nation state....
"...the whole point of a family, a church and a nation is that they accept people uncritically - and not on the basis of how clever they are, how mobile, how rich or how solution focused. This is indeed the love that asks no question. You belong to the group and are valued by it simply because you are a member of it. The family, the church and the nation are spaces where all are welcomed and esteemed irrespective of class, talent or ethnicity. This is the moral case for the nation state."
I've often heard about Ike warning of the "military-industrial complex," but never knew that he warned about federal money corrupting science in the same speech. Edward Archer writes:
"...in his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that the pursuit of government grants would have a corrupting influence on the scientific community. He feared that while American universities were 'historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery,' the pursuit of taxpayer monies would become "a substitute for intellectual curiosity' and lead to 'domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment...and the power of money.' ...
"Nowhere is the intellectual and moral decline more evident than in public health research. From 1970 to 2010, as taxpayer funding for public health research increased 700 percent, the number of retractions of biomedical research articles increased more than 900 percent, with most due to misconduct. Fraud and retractions increased so precipitously from 2010 to 2015 that private foundations created the Center for Scientific Integrity and "Retraction Watch" to alert the public. ...
"Harvard is the wealthiest university in the world and, despite being a private institution, received almost $600 million in public funds from the NIH and other agencies in 2018. In fact, some faculty received more NIH funding than many states, and these funds are sufficient to pay for tuition, room, board, and books of every undergrad at Harvard. Nevertheless, Harvard's faculty has an ever-increasing number of retractions due to misconduct or incompetence. In one case, Harvard's teaching hospital was forced to pay $10 million because its faculty had fraudulently obtained NIH funding. The penalty was only a fraction of the NIH funds acquired by the guilty faculty. ...
"The widespread inability of publicly funded researchers to generate valid, reproducible findings is a testament to the failure of universities to properly train scientists and instill intellectual and methodologic rigor. That failure means taxpayers are being misled by results that are non-reproducible or demonstrably false.
"A number of critics, including John Ioannidis of Stanford University, contend that academic research is often 'conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure.' In other words, taxpayers fund studies that are conducted for non-scientific reasons such as career advancement and 'policy-based evidence-making.'
"Incompetence in concert with a lack of accountability and political or personal agendas has grave consequences: The Economist stated that from 2000 to 2010, nearly 80,000 patients were involved in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted."
'Civil Rights' And Totalitarianism | The American Conservative
Rod Dreher quotes form Christopher Caldwell's new book, The Age of Entitlement:
"Not just excluded and exploited Southern blacks but all aggrieved minorities now sought to press their claims under this new model of progressive governance. The civil rights model of executive orders, litigation, and court-ordered redress eventually became the basis for resolving every question pitting a newly emergent idea of fairness against old traditions: the persistence of different roles for men and women, the moral standing of homosexuality, the welcome that is due to immigrants, the consideration befitting wheelchair-bound people. Civil rights gradually turned into a license for government to do what the Constitution would not previously have permitted. It moved beyond the context of Jim Crow laws almost immediately, winning what its apostles saw as liberation after liberation.
"The civil rights movement was a template. The new system for overthrowing the traditions that hindered black people became the model for overthrowing every tradition in American life, starting with the roles of men and women....
"In the quarter-century after Reagan, conservatives lost every battle against the substance of political correctness. ... Political correctness was not a joke after all. It was the most comprehensive ideological capture of institutional power in the history of the United States.
"... This language of '-bashing' and '-phobia' and 'bigotry' and 'lies' was new. No longer was the irreconcilability of individuals' and society's sexual priorities a tragedy or a disagreement. Recast in the categories of civil rights law, it was a crime, a crime that was being committed against a whole class of people. The customs and traditions in the name of which it was being committed were mere alibis.
"... Once social issues could be cast as battles over civil rights, Republicans would lose 100 percent of the time. The agenda of 'diversity' advanced when its proponents won elections and when they lost them. Voters had not yet figured that out. As soon as they did, the old style of democratic politics would be dead."
All the Single Ladies - Quillette
"The dating market for women is getting tougher. In part, this is because fewer men are attending universities. Why would male enrollment in higher education matter for women? Because women, on average, prefer educated men. One source of evidence comes from women's personal responses to dating profiles posted by men. Researchers analyzed 120 personal dating ads posted by men on the West Coast and Midwest. They found that two of the strongest variables that predicted how many responses a man received from women were years of education and income. ...
"For now, many young men understand that women want educated and successful partners. Why not work harder to adapt to this preference? In their book, The Demise of Guys, psychologists Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan suggest that the answer is twofold: fake war and fake sex. They argue that many young men have a natural desire for conflict, struggle, and accomplishment. Video games satiate this desire. They are designed to induce a sense of gradual achievement in the face of obstacles adapted to be just above the player's ability. Alongside this, young men also have a natural desire to seek sexual partnerships. Digital porn satiates this desire. Porn provides a virtual experience of sexual fulfillment with multiple different partners. Many young men may have simply decided to derive a sense of accomplishment from gaming, and a sense of sexual satisfaction from porn."
