It’s the Mediocrity, Stupid!

I am not particularly alarmed by Harvard President Claudine Gay’s alleged instances of plagiarism because (a) the instances (while a clear professional violation) are trivial, and (b) as an express diversity hire, she is not subject to patriarchal/white/etc “standards” that we know to be mere masks for pernicious “whiteness” (or whatever). What bothers me more is that she felt the need to lift from uninteresting works to craft hackneyed, unoriginal restatements about presumed racial bias that almost anyone could have mailed in with ease. A heavy ideological filter on unoriginal sociological observations (but with footnotes!!) is a pretty low bar for scholarship.

It is not that Gay is black and female, nor even that she was hired largely on the basis of her race and sex but that she represents the militant mediocrity of postmodernism that is disturbing. It is a movement that seeks the destruction of the very notion of excellence and the abandonment of the struggle for truth and wisdom in favor of cant, quasi-magical thinking, and political garbage. What becomes of the mind that earned three credits (and, of course, an “A”) for deconstructing episodes of Gilligan’s Island or the problematic design of toys or cereal boxes but dismisses the entire sweep and scope of Western philosophy as the conspiratorial rantings of white guys?

How did Harvard arrive at this unhappy state of affairs?

Derrick Bell (the first black tenured Harvard Law professor) is generally regarded as the founder of “critical race theory.” On the one hand, his materialist approach to the analysis of disparities in wealth and opportunity could be used as the basis for specific actions and policies to reduce inequality. However, his approach also presumed that white motivations in policy choices are always suspect if not overtly pernicious, thus there can be no real racial progress, and all quantifiable disparities are the result of racism. That pessimism is not conducive to solutions of any kind other than separatism and bitterness.

That ideological legacy would be problematic by itself but sometime beginning in the 1980s critical race theory was taken over by the postmoderns who made things even worse. Critical race theory had been invented and developed by law professors and even if not particularly persuasive, the language of the formative works was intelligible, and the arguments were made coherently. However, once the followers of French intellectual grifters and blathering feminists sucked critical race theory into the intersectionality morass, insanity followed.

Where once we might have looked to material, practical, substantive ways to address the paucity of black physics PhDs, we must now instead decry the inherently patriarchal, racist, and colonialist nature of the science of physics itself. Instead of asking what concrete, actual efforts could be made to support family structure, job readiness, and educational attainment in the black underclass, we must instead embark on a search for the inherent “whiteness” in all things and thus uncover the hidden racist power structure inherent in the vocabulary and grammar of every text in every context. Rooting out all that cognitive evil will transform the unhappier sections of Detroit or Chicago (as well as allow men to have babies and capitalism to dissolve in favor of perfect equity).

The result is that Harvard et al now shape minds that are suitable only for herdlike low-wattage conformity even to the point of an inability to form an adverse judgment of the overt atrocities of Hamas. Does the active suppression of the pursuit of truth and perverse misunderstandings of the rich intellectual and moral legacy of the West have other predictable bad outcomes and adverse side effects?

Montaigne's (rather pedantic) essay on pedantry decries the sort of scholar who can quote all the great works but has not been affected by them such that he actually lives the wisdom, skills, and values therein. He mocks the physician who "knows Galen but not his own patients." Montaigne did not foresee the professional scholar who not only has had little or no contact with substantive works but who strikes a pseudo-scholarly pose by appealing to "context" as a defense of blatantly contradictory positions effected in service to a career of advancing the ideological murder of intellectual life itself, all the while confidently oblivious to both irony and incompetence.