America’s Eichmann Industry

 

413727_1280x720Two months have passed since Stanford University’s celebrated student body voted six-to-one against reinstituting a required Western civilization course in its academic curriculum, generating a flurry of commentaries about the majority’s ideological orientation.

Critics didn’t have to look far, as an editorial in The Stanford Daily outlined the views of those on the six side of the equation pretty well. After introducing an excerpt from Rudyard Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden for sneering purposes, the op-ed launched into a scathing attack on Western civilization, peppered with phrases that undoubtedly would have kindled smiles by Marx, Lenin, or Stalin, along with perhaps a few tears of approbation.

Thus, for instance, Africa’s execrable backwardness was the result of Western “colonialism, occupation, and capitalism as driving forces in the creation of poverty.” Of course, understanding this requires students to “think critically,” and not be “[spoon-fed] platitudes from the Western colonial canon.” Stanford students need courses that will “force” everyone to face the “realities of these histories” of Western dominance. For this reason and others, the university needs to hire “more queer and trans faculty, indigenous faculty, and faculty of color.” After all, they’re the ones who have had first hand experience with the exploitations in question and are thus best equipped to mentor American students.

The essay’s conclusion is worth quoting more fully: “A Western Civilizations series would explicitly entrench the idea that the purpose of education is neither to critically question oppression, nor even to critically deal with the problems of our time. Rather, a Western Civ requirement would necessitate that our education be centered on upholding white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism, and all other oppressive systems that flow from Western civilizations; that our education be framed as a tool to carrying out our burden to reform the rest of the world in our own, imperfect, acutely deplorable image.”

Which is a lot of split infinitives spiced by a sprinkling of “criticals” heaped onto a clutch of “critical thinkings” called for throughout the essay. Fair enough, one could suppose; then how about a little “critical thinking” applied to the op-ed itself? Naturally, one cannot develop an argument within the limited confines of a short essay, but at least a few observations can be made. One of which is this: the essay is saturated with intellectually fashionable clichés excoriating “our own, imperfect, acutely deplorable” civilization, a practice well documented by Jonah Goldberg’s witty and informative The Tyranny of Clichés.

Several additional observations are worth making here, the first of which is hardly new, because the contempt that many in American academia have for the United States has been part of our culture for at least the past two generations. Second, many academicians who loathe their country demonstrate an astonishing dearth of critical thinking, especially since they luxuriate in circumstances that could only be produced by a system they yearn to destroy. Or so they say, because if America-haters, such as the writers of the Stanford essay and those who agree with them, don’t really mean it, then it’s time for the lesson that flinging around clichés bereft of serious thinking has serious consequences. In fact, some of the consequences are hideous beyond belief.

No one understood this better than Hannah Arendt, famous for her brilliant study of totalitarianism and reflections on moral issues, and especially for her treatment of Eichmann in Jerusalem. This stunning book gave birth to “the banality of evil,” an expression that has haunted serious minds ever since and launched a scholarly industry exploring its implications. Arendt pointed out that her first impression of “man in the glass booth” was that he was “quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.” Hardly a view one would expect about one of history’s most notorious mass murderers in the Third Reich.

She went on to remark that “…the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past… was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.” (Emphasis added.) Arendt goes on to make some extraordinary observations about this irredeemably evil man: “When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy.” Indeed, Eichmann’s “macabre comedy” of clichés came from a man who, like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, “was hollow at the core.” It is Arendt, again, who has the most penetrating conclusion: “…the more superficial someone is, the more likely will he be to yield to evil. An indication of such superficiality is the use of clichés, and Eichmann … was a perfect example.”

So where does this leave us? Does the comparison made here imply that many American college students represent hordes of Eichmanns-in-waiting? For the majority, of course not; for many of them, maybe; but for all of them, the dangers of not thinking past clichés represents a sort of ever-ticking sociological time-bomb for the country that so many of them profess to hate. College students are saturated with a blizzard of cliché-infected buzzwords — colonialism, imperialism, racism, classism, homophobia, Islamophobia, sexism, white supremacy, micro-aggressions, ableism, ageism, social justice, check-your-privilege — leading many to conclude that all one has to do is to hurl the word at an antagonist to shut down the argument.

Indeed, the repetition of these hackneyed epithets resemble the bleating sheep in Animal Farm — “Four legs good, two legs bad!” — a refrain sufficient to squelch dissent whenever desired. In fact, the hordes of Bernie Sanders supporters among millennials is testament not only to their astonishing ignorance about socialism, but also to their failure to think beyond clichés, about, for instance, “income inequality,” or “the rich not paying their fair share,” or calls for a “political revolution.” Where are the arguments supporting these terms? What are the consequences of enacting policies implied by such expressions? Where else have such policies been tried, and what have been the results?

We conclude with a sickening and now familiar example of how far this process has gone in America, at a facility that practices “sexual and reproductive health and justice.” In 2015 Holly O’Donnell, a former employee for the company StemExpress, was asked by a Planned Parenthood facility to assist in removing organs from recently aborted babies. She stated, “they weren’t looking for a compassionate individual at all,” and that as a phlebotomist, she could “draw quick … They wanted someone who could get the numbers up.” She did as instructed, and ended up blacking out during the process, which apparently was not an uncommon reaction among those doing “such work,” O’Donnell was informed while lying in a hospital bed.

This description is from the Center for Medical Progress: “‘I want to see something kind of cool,’” O’Donnell says her supervisor asked her. ‘And she just taps the heart, and it starts beating. And I’m sitting here and I’m looking at this fetus, and its heart is beating, and I don’t know what to think.’” (Emphasis added.) She didn’t know what to think, she says. Perhaps it was because, for the first time, the horror masquerading as “sexual and reproductive health and justice” — the beating heart of an aborted baby — left her so stunned that, in her own words, she didn’t “know what to think.”

Neither did Adolf Eichmann.

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  1. Marvin Folkertsma Member
    Marvin Folkertsma
    @MarvinFolkertsma

    Clay:Eichmann himself may not be the best exemplar of Arendt’s banality of evil. In Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Bettina Stangneth shows that he presented himself at trial as a mindless cog because he thought it might save his life. She has dug up an extraordinary amount of material from Eichmann’s past, particularly his time in Argentina, that shows he was in fact an ardent Nazi who fully believed that the races are necessarily engaged in a Darwinian struggle with each other, and that the survival of the German people could only be assured by the destruction of the Jews, their natural enemies. Here’s a review that summarizes the book, which came out just a few years ago.

    In any event, the passage from the Stanford Daily nicely embodies the effect of “critical theory” on today’s students. This misnamed pedagogy does not teach them how to think for themselves, but only that a new set of values makes them smart, and the old set makes them stupid. Kids try to meet the standard, but they are not parrots and they cannot help but think, albeit hobbled by their teachers, and the result is incoherent nonsense.

    Yes, you’re correct, thank you.  I’m aware of that work, though I have not read it.  Still, Arendt’s point (made elsewhere) that the actual act of thinking in a penetrating way has the effect of exposing the evil of certain acts.  Certainly, Eichmann was “acting”; he knew he had to try to save himself.

    • #31
  2. Chris Campion Coolidge
    Chris Campion
    @ChrisCampion

    “colonial canon”

    You mean like the ones captured at Fort Ticonderoga by Benedict Arnold?  Cool!

    • #32
  3. St. Salieri Member
    St. Salieri
    @

    Claire Berlinski, Ed.:

     Psychology is number two, which baffles me: Why would students believe there will be a demand for so many psychologists?

    As a high school teacher, one thing that strikes is the number of my students that wish to become psychologists after they graduate high school and attend college.

    To a man and a woman, they are almost all from the lower end of academic achievement, and almost all of them have had horrible homes (though they often love their families).  I have a suspicion it is a place where many wounded-healer types gather that have no idea what to do with themselves.

    My friends who teach at the university echo what Dr. Rahe stated, and find that it is also an easy entry degree into the job market, but few stay in the field.  After an initial entry level position in social work or an agency they soon drift into business, sales, or service positions that simply require any college degree for the job.

    • #33
  4. St. Salieri Member
    St. Salieri
    @

    Chris Campion:“colonial canon”

    You mean like the ones captured at Fort Ticonderoga by Benedict Arnold? Cool!

    If only…

    The likely want to use Shakespeare, the Bible, and Plato as wadding.

    • #34
  5. Seawriter Contributor
    Seawriter
    @Seawriter

    anonymous: What I am saying is that someone who does not understand the second law of thermodynamics, the behaviour of power law distributions, or the dynamics of biological evolution (all things I learned as part of my “training” in engineering) is uneducated and poorly equipped to participate in discussions of public policy in a developed nation.

    They don’t think so. They sincerely believe if you dislike a law, the solution is either to repeal it or ignore it. That is what their teachers have taught them.

    They do believe their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose and that His Pity allows them to drop their job when they damn-well choose.

    Seawriter

    • #35
  6. Paul A. Rahe Member
    Paul A. Rahe
    @PaulARahe

    anonymous:

    Paul A. Rahe: When I was at the Hoover Institution two years ago, I was told that there are more history professors at Stanford than history majors and more philosophy professors than philosophy majors. In 1965, the largest major was history. Today only 7% of Stanford students major in the humanities.

    I decided to look into this. Here’s what I found.

    The only information I could find about undergraduate majors at Stanford is the following, from the “Undergraduate Student Profile, 2015–16”.

    Stanford majors by schoolThis is, of course, completely useless, since almost half are undeclared and the humanities and sciences are binned together. Why “Earth Sciences” merits its own slice eludes me.

    Let’s look instead at the undergraduate degrees conferred between July 1, 2014 and June 30, 2015, from Stanford’s Common Data Set 2015–2016:

    Stanford undergraduate degrees 2014-2015

    If I add together the things which sound like “the humanities” to this engineer’s ear (English; Foreign languages and literatures; Philosophy, religion, theology; Visual and performing arts; and History), I get 10.66% of degrees in those combined fields. If you add in Area and ethnic studies and Communication/journalism (which aren’t science or engineering), that brings the total to 13.77%, which is larger than Computer and information sciences.

    But once again, we have that large opaque bucket called Interdisciplinary studies, which, at 18.56% is only slightly smaller than Engineering, the largest at 18.62%. Who knows what’s in there.

    Right. Where there is clear information is English (2.94%), History 2.07%), Philosophy, Religion, and Theology (.98%), Foreign Languages and Literature (2.71%). Whether at Stanford history counts as part of the humanities I do not know. I shudder to think what Interdisciplinary Studies includes: my guess is that radical indoctrination lies at its heart. Remember that History was once the largest major. Times have changed.

    • #36
  7. Paul A. Rahe Member
    Paul A. Rahe
    @PaulARahe

    anonymous:

    Paul A. Rahe: What I am saying is that someone who has not read and studied Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Locke, Shakespeare, and, say, Jane Austen is uneducated…

    Well, this engineer has read all of those authors. I reject the idea that because I only read three of them as part of formal classwork that I have not “studied” them; I’ve found through all my life that I learn more reading at my own pace and with my own agenda than in a classroom environment.

    What I am saying is that someone who does not understand the second law of thermodynamics, the behaviour of power law distributions, or the dynamics of biological evolution (all things I learned as part of my “training” in engineering) is uneducated and poorly equipped to participate in discussions of public policy in a developed nation.

    That is certainly true. I did not suggest that the authors I listed were sufficient — only that they are necessary. The key problem is that very few students today familiarize themselves with these authors while in college.

    • #37
  8. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Paul A. Rahe: I shudder to think what Interdisciplinary Studies includes: my guess is that radical indoctrination lies at its heart.

    A former colleague (in the biological sciences) used to get up in workshops where we were trying to foster a certain sort of interdisciplinary study, and point out that Interdisciplinary Studies were a place for scientists who didn’t work out too well at the lab bench. He was sort of telling that on himself, as a caution to the rest of us. He moved on and last I talked to him he was doing quite well in his role on the Human Genome project.  (Yeah, it’s been a while.)

    In the sciences there are interdisciplinary studies (good) and there are Interdisciplinary Studies (not always so good).

    • #38
  9. Randy Webster Inactive
    Randy Webster
    @RandyWebster

    Chris Campion:“colonial canon”

    You mean like the ones captured at Fort Ticonderoga by Benedict Arnold? Cool!

    I thought that was Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys.

    • #39
  10. CuriousKevmo Inactive
    CuriousKevmo
    @CuriousKevmo

    I attended school at a public university in Oregon that doesn’t have a good football team.  Generally it went something like this:

    Bright eyed freshman enters as an aspiring engineer or computer scientist only to learn they can’t do the calculus.

    They change to Business with a CS minor only to learn they still have to do quite a bit of math.

    So they change to the Education department and if they can’t make it there the psychology school is the last stop on the way to probation.

    In fact, this is the exact my brother the beer salesman took, when graduated from the public school in Oregon that DOES have a good football team.

    • #40
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