February 19, 2005

SMART PEOPLE CAN BE VERY STUPID: THE CASE OF LAWRENCE SUMMERS

        Horsefeathers' sympathy for Lawrence Summers, victim of a spreading academic and media inquisition, is tempered by bemusement that such an intelligent man could be so ignorant of human nature. Summers, himself a liberal, does not yet realize that the contemporary Liberal Imagination is a utopian one, a faith that does not welcome questioning. It is defined by a shared egalitarian fantasy in which most differences and inequalities are imposed by malign social forces. A world in which some individuals possess greater musical, athletic, intellectual or artistic ability, is unfair and unjust. Differences some of us might welcome, and perhaps enjoy, constitute an affront to liberal egalitarians. When utopia never seems to arrive, scapegoats are required to protect the Liberal mind from being forced to question its own faith.
        Stanley Kurtz, in NRO has a very interesting take on the Summers transcript. Kurtz believes the feminist outrage at Summers is not the main motivation for the inquisition: "..it’s pretty clear from this transcript that their deeper goal is to get rid of Summers because he is asking too many uncomfortable questions about the way affirmative action works. In this talk, Summers calls for research on whether affirmative action does what it claims to do. Do diversity searches really find top quality professors who were only being overlooked because they are minorities, or do these searches only yield professors of middling or low quality? Summers also points out contradictions in what diversity advocates are asking for. Some of them want faculty picked on purely objective criteria like number of papers published. This will supposedly eliminate subtle hiring discrimination. But other diversity advocates want the opposite. They call for choosing minority candidates based on subjective considerations like potential and collegiality, supposedly to overcome the discrimination built into “objective” criteria. Summers asks, which is it? He also wants data to back up the choice of strategy. So in this talk, Summers is subtly but clearly exposing the contradictions and secrets of the campus diversity industry. By calling for objective proof that diversity searches really produce faculty equal in quality to color blind or sex blind searches, Summers is laying out a standard that he knows diversity proponents can’t meet..." Summers dares to ask for scientific study of the results of Affirmative Action, one of the central dogmas of utopian Liberalism.
        While Kurtz is correct in praising Summers for raising the issue, it is not affirmative action that has provoked the outburst of emotion and demands for Summers's head now spreading across Ivy League campuses. It is his daring to talk about the possibility of biological differences between the sexes. For example, at Yale, female student "..protesters criticized President Richard Levin for not joining the presidents of Stanford, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in denouncing comments made last month by Harvard President Larry Summers. Summers said biological differences may help explain why more men than women excel in science, but has since apologized several times. "Summers' comments revealed a systemic problem," said Melissa Mason, co-chairwoman of the Graduate Employees and Student Organization. "Levin, as head of an Ivy League university, has a responsibility to respond..."
        Summers doesn't understand that apologizing over and over only inflames his foes, for it makes them believe he shares their view of the injustice he, as a representative of the privileged patriarchy, embodies. In fact, Summers's apologies ARE his pathetic attempt to cling to his own liberal faith. "You're right", he seems to say, "it's unfair that I'm male. I'll be more self-flagellating, I'll make up for the injustice of my being male, and therefore inevitably biased against women. In fact, I'll help you emasculate me if only you'll let me stay." What Summers fails to realize, because he himself resides within the Liberal hive, is that the ultimate intolerable difference for the Liberal imagination is the biological difference between the sexes. One of the major projects of Ivy League Post-Modern intellectuals, has been to impose their belief that 'male' and 'female' are not biologically determined, but rather, "constructed". This is not something logically argued or subjected to factual scrutiny; it's simply dogma, more reminiscent of Stalin than of science. The famous unclarity of Post-Modern writing, its lack of logic and its resemblance to schizophrenic thinking, is the perfect expression of its assault on difference and distinction, the foundations of logic, reason and clarity. If these habits of thought--reason, logic, the scientific method- are regarded as patriarchal constructs, obstacles to the arrival of egalitarian utopia, then they must go. Their defenders, like Summers, must be denounced and excommunicated. Curiously enough, the loathsome imposter, Wade Churchill, understood human nature better than Summers. No apologies from Mr. Churchill; instead he attacked his critics and presented himself as a bold defender of free speech. And who knows? If Summers's foes are less generous than the Inquisition was to Galileo, Mr. Churchill may find his new job search ending in Cambridge, Ma.