Links to Consider

Chris Rufo's white paper; Matt Lutz on words that divide; Niall Ferguson worries about the West losing; Josh Barro on Harvard

[Substack stats show me that fewer people click on the links than I would like. I mean, when I write a full book review, often I think to myself “If people only read my review and don’t read the book, they won’t have missed much.” I do not feel that way about my “links to consider.” Usually the essay has much more worth thinking about than the excerpt that I post and whatever commentary I provide. So this is a public service reminder that you should consider clicking on the links.]

Chris Rufo writes,

The Right doesn’t need a white paper. What it needs is a spirited new activism with the courage and resolve to win back the language, recapture institutions, and reorient the state toward rightful ends. 

Pointer from Rod Dreher. The rest of his white paper essay attacks mainstream conservatives for being insufficiently aggressive.

The activist must begin with status quo reality: the institutions which today shape public and private life will exist for the foreseeable future. The only question is who will lead them and by which set of values. The New Right must summon the self-confidence to say, “We will, and by our values.”

I’m not on board.

For me, a major issue is the difference between a dominance hierarchy and a prestige hierarchy. In a dominance hierarchy, you defer to those above you out of fear. In a prestige hierarchy, you defer to those above you out of respect.

In the intellectual world, I think that the prestige hierarchy has always been somewhat distorted. Even many years before the “Woke wars,” I thought that non-Harvard people deserved a bit more prestige than enjoy do now and Harvard’s students, alumni, and faculty deserved much less.

Now I feel even more strongly that Harvard in particular and the leading institutions of higher education in general are over-rated. I see the dominance games being played by the social justice activists as self-discrediting from a prestige standpoint.

Claudine Gay was self-discrediting. If you took away the plagiarism allegations, she would still be self-discrediting.

Instead, Christopher Rufo has allowed the social justice activists to console themselves with a narrative in which Claudine Gay was railroaded out by the Right. He himself revels in that narrative.

If you want the Right to win by intimidation, particularly in the intellectual world, then Rufo-ism may win you some battles. But you undermine what I want, which is competition for prestige, not a dominance hierarchy.

Intellectual elites turn to intimidation when their prestige is in trouble. Fauci and friends squelching dissent on the origins of the virus. Harvard threatening to sue the New York Post for accusing Claudine Gay of plagiarism.

As intellectual elites turn to intimidation, I would hope that we would not have to answer in kind. Instead, do the work of raising the prestige of better intellectuals, those who do not need to intimidate in order to win.

Matt Lutz writes,

The concept behind pragmatics is that sentences frequently imply much more than they say. One standard example is from Paul Grice, the 20th-century philosopher who developed an influential theory of pragmatics. Suppose you read a letter of recommendation that a professor wrote for one of her students, and the letter says, “This student is punctual and has excellent handwriting.” You would understand that to be a very weak letter of recommendation.

…While neither “black lives matter” nor “all lives matter” is intrinsically offensive, both statements can have offensive implications if used without care.

Saying “black lives matter” can imply hostility toward whites. Saying “all lives matter” can imply lack of sympathy for blacks. If you don’t intend those implications, you need to be more careful.

Several public intellectuals are asked to make predictions for 2024. Niall Ferguson takes the question especially seriously.

just imagine that there is a Taiwan crisis and they send two aircraft carrier groups, and the Chinese just sink both the carriers, and the U.S. finds it has to sue for peace, and Taiwan is taken over, and Xi Jinping does the ticker-tape parade through Taipei. What then? What does that mean? I think a lot of people haven’t really got anywhere close to thinking that through. 

They don’t realize that ceasing to be number one, losing the Pax Americana, has massive costs.

My prediction for 2024: assuming Mr. Trump wins, there will be massive demonstrations by young people on the left, trying to bring the country to a standstill. An insurrection, if you will.

Josh Barro writes,

The demand that we should define academic honesty down in order to address the fact that Harvard’s first black female president is a plagiarist is insulting to academics of all races who don’t copy other people’s works, even the “banal” parts of them. And the insistence that this is how it always was, that actually this kind of copying is a standard industry practice, is just gaslighting. I went to college. I know that’s not true.

As I see it, his point is that Harvard and other academic institutions need to live up to high standards if they want to recover their prestige.

substacks referenced above:

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Universities Are Not on the Level

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Going Pantsless? An Economic Boom? World War III? Our Predictions for 2024

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The Apparent Conflict Between Universal and Particular Language

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St. Petroc Returns To Devonshire