Reviews and News:
Roger Scruton defends human exceptionalism: “His contention is that human beings are animals but also ‘persons,’ by which he means ‘free, self-conscious, rational agents, obedient to reason and bound by the moral law.’ Personhood, in this view, is not some extra thing to be placed supernaturally atop our organism selves. But neither is it something reducible to our biology.”
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Political correctness on the couch: In Political Correctness and the Destruction of Social Order: Chronicling the Rise of the Pristine Self, Howard Schwartz “theorizes that we are seeing the actions of a kind of narcissist that demands that all contacts from the world at large be loving nurturing, and affirming, and who believes such a state of affairs to be a right, of which he or she has been deprived by the social structure. Such people subconsciously wish to live in the imaginary state of infants who receive all nurture and protection from the mother.”
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Textbook sales in crisis: “Pearson has reported a pre-tax loss of £2.6bn for 2016, the biggest in its history, after a slump at its US education operation.” (h/t: Adam Keiper)
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George Eliot under the microscope: “Until you see this microscopic consideration of a text done well, you do not realise how small a part slow, reflective, thoughtful close reading plays in contemporary criticism, or how difficult it is to do. Davis has a ferocious talent for seizing upon details and teasing out their significance; he pounces on a verb, or a conjunction, or a hesitation in Eliot’s grammar, showing how it elucidates and deepens both the thinking of her characters and the novelist’s own perceptions. Davis is the slow and careful reader George Eliot desired. The results are a revelation.”
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Thomas Hardy in London: The cosmopolitan side of the laureate of Wessex.
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Hercules Segers, master of the unreal.
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Against American liberalism.
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The first Tupperware party, and the woman who made the product a household name.
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Essay of the Day:
In The American Scholar, William Deresiewicz blasts political correctness on university campuses:
“Let us eschew the familiar examples: the disinvited speakers, the Title IX tribunals, the safe zones stocked with Play-Doh, the crusades against banh mi. The flesh-eating bacterium of political correctness, which feeds preferentially on brain tissue, and which has become endemic on elite college campuses, reveals its true virulence not in the sorts of high-profile outbreaks that reach the national consciousness, but in the myriad of ordinary cases—the everyday business-as-usual at institutions around the country—that are rarely even talked about.
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“I recently spent a semester at Scripps, a selective women’s college in Southern California. I had one student, from a Chinese-American family, who informed me that the first thing she learned when she got to college was to keep quiet about her Christian faith and her non-feminist views about marriage. I had another student, a self-described ‘strong feminist,’ who told me that she tends to keep quiet about everything, because she never knows when she might say something that you’re not supposed to. I had a third student, a junior, who wrote about a friend whom she had known since the beginning of college and who, she’d just discovered, went to church every Sunday. My student hadn’t even been aware that her friend was religious. When she asked her why she had concealed this essential fact about herself, her friend replied, ‘Because I don’t feel comfortable being out as a religious person here.’
“I also heard that the director of the writing center, a specialist in disability studies, was informing people that they couldn’t use expressions like ‘that’s a crazy idea’ because they stigmatize the mentally ill. I heard a young woman tell me that she had been criticized by a fellow student for wearing moccasins—an act, she was informed, of cultural appropriation. I heard an adjunct instructor describe how a routine pedagogical conflict over something he had said in class had turned, when the student in question claimed to have felt ‘triggered,’ into, in his words, a bureaucratic ‘dumpster fire.’ He was careful now, he added, to avoid saying anything, or teaching anything, that might conceivably lead to trouble.
“I listened to students—young women, again, who considered themselves strong feminists—talk about how they were afraid to speak freely among their peers, and how despite its notoriety as a platform for cyberbullying, they were grateful for YikYak, the social media app, because it allowed them to say anonymously what they couldn’t say in their own name. Above all, I heard my students tell me that while they generally identified with the sentiments and norms that travel under the name of political correctness, they thought that it had simply gone too far—way too far. Everybody felt oppressed, as they put it, by the ‘PC police’—everybody, that is, except for those whom everybody else regarded as members of the PC police.
“I heard all this, and a good bit more, while teaching one class, for 12 students, during one semester, at one college… The assumption on selective campuses is not only that we are in full possession of the truth, but that we are in full possession of virtue. We don’t just know the good with perfect wisdom, we embody it with perfect innocence.”
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Photo: Trotternish Ridge
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Poem: Maryann Corbett, “Concourse”
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