Let me introduce you to the new cultural and media elite

These two people make the old elites look cowardly, incompetent and irrelevant -- the old elites just haven't realised it yet.

Jun 17, 2022

Happy Friday!🥳

I have made no secret of my contempt for our cultural-media-political ruling class, who I argue have debased themselves in pretty much every conceivable way in the last few years. So today I spotlight the work of two people — who I am also happy to call my friends now — who are doing the interesting work, the important work, the brave work. From outside the Cathedral walls. If you are reading this at all, you too are most likely outside the Cathedral walls. The good news is — that’s where all the cool, interesting stuff is happening.

I am in New York this week!

I came to watch Jodi Shaw be given the Heroes of Intellectual Freedom Award by the American Council of Trustees and Alumna.

It was an inspiring event. I’ve written about Jodi Shaw before — both for my Substack and for The Spectator USA — so I was not surprised that an event held in her honour would be a great comfort to people like me who are trying desperately to make sense of our suddenly bizarre and soulless world. It was held not in an auditorium or boring conference hall. It was held in The Bitter End in Greenwich Village, that mecca of 1960’s bohemian folk counterculture, the source of a flowing river of American icons, people like Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie.

She not only delivered a speech that — in my humble opinion — will go down in history as one of the most insightful critiques of our socio-political derangement ever delivered. She also played a gig, performing her now-infamous “Library Rap” and a selection of American patriotic songs that brought tear to this cynic’s eye. I want to share her speech with you all, and I ask you all to take heart, and to share it.

I believe I am the only non-academic to receive this award, is that true? Thank you, ACTA. In giving me this award, you not only honor my actions, but recognize that the fight for intellectual freedom is not just for academics. The reality is, that this thing, some call it critical theory –some call it social justice ideology, some call it woke– was created by academics. And, there was a time, when it was still confined to the campus, that academics could have pushed it back.
But the virus has escaped the lab.
The ideology has now gone on to infect every aspect of our society. And what I mean by that is that it is now attacking load bearing pillars of our culture. The arts, religion, sports, comedy, the workplace, the boy scouts, the shrink’s couch, elementary education and is now even found in our most intimate spheres - our marriages, our children and even in our bedrooms.
And I’m sorry to say -my apologies to the academics in the room, higher education is not a load bearing pillar of our culture. It is instead -as my friend Jenny would put it - the cherry on top. Liberal arts institutions are the result of a culture that is functioning as it should, and our culture is not functioning as it should. That is why it is so important that the rest of us stand up and do something. Now.
If it looks like we’re losing, that’s because we are. But there are signs of hope. More and more “regular people” outside the gates of the academy are risking or have lost their livelihoods to blow the whistle. Paul Rossi of Grace Church School and Andrew Gutman of Brearley Academy, for example, both of whom are here this evening.
And others who have taken on the unenviable task of filing a legal action. One is Nicole Levitt, who has filed a legal action against her employer in Philadelphia and is now poised to file a federal lawsuit.
And my last thank you is to Smith College. Smith, you have given me an unexpectedly thorough education. As some of you know, I received my bachelor’s degree from Smith College in 1993. As a student at Smith, I interacted –for the most part– with other students and my professors. I’m ashamed to say though that the staff- the men and women who cooked my meals, cleaned my toilet, fixed my light bulbs, and otherwise facilitated my access to everything I needed to ensure my physical well being - were largely invisible to me.
It was not until I returned to Smith 24 years later, for part 2 of my Smith education, in the role of a staff member myself, that I started to see things much differently.
As a student at Smith, I studied anthropology, which is relevant. Traditionally, anthropologists leave their own culture to live in a much different one. They do this ostensibly to study the customs, religions, language of the culture they are visiting. The work they produce as a result is called an ethnography. More often than not however, the ethnography is less a record of the knowledge they collect, than it is an act of self-reflection. It unearths deeply held beliefs and assumptions that the anthropologist carries with him when he enters this new culture.
So if part 1 of my education at Smith was the study of the theory of anthropology. Part 2 was my ethnography. And I am happy to announce that I am at work on writing this ethnography right now.
And now…intellectual freedom.
I'm not an intellectual –although now that I've gotten this award I might be able to pass as one– I'm an artist. I recognize that the intellect is a powerful tool. But I also know, we must be wary of the intellect.
If this ideology has taught us anything, it is that the intellect is not a reliable narrator.
I once saw a bumper sticker that read “don't believe everything you think.” And is very apropos. Also important –but not often talked about– is the realm of the emotions.
We feel what we feel. It is a feeling that calls our intellect to attention, that say “hello, there’s something really interesting over here!” Or “yo, better pay attention, this does not feel good!” and asks our intellect to decipher for us what is going on.
When I listen to Mozart’s Requiem, I get chills up and down my spine. I might then ask my intellect to explain to me, what that is? Why am I having these feelings? This is something that a music scholar or critic might do.
So the intellect acts as a translator. It assigns meaning to our emotional experiences.
But, here’s where things get wonky.
The intellect is highly suggestible. It is easily persuaded, and easily compromised.
What we are doing, when our intellect interprets an emotional experience for us, we are telling ourselves a story.
Sometimes the story is accurate, sometimes it is not. And oftentimes, if we take the time to examine closely the stories we are telling ourselves, we find that in many cases they are not even our own. The intellect’s habit of incorporating and adopting stories that do not belong to us is not new. It’s something most of us have been doing since birth.
And this is at the heart of what makes this ideology so powerful, and so dangerous. It capitalizes on something we already know how to do, and that we have already been doing for a very long time.
As a Smith employee I had a feeling something was not right. My intellect was fooled however. I was told systemic racism is a problem. White Privilege is a problem. I was told that I harbor implicit racial bias simply by virtue of my skin color. And what’s more, I was told that the feeling I had, that something was not quite right, was evidence to support this story.
Intellectually, I had no reason not to believe this interpretation of my feeling. After all, it was coming from the mouths of learned professionals of higher education. And all of the faculty were going along with it.
And, as an alum, I trusted Smith. I loved Smith, Not for one minute did I believe Smith had anything but my best interest in mind.
My intellect then, was at odds with my heart. And I chose, like many of us do, to privilege my intellect. I chose to tell myself, not that something is wrong with this ideology, but that something is wrong with me. I had granted an outside authority power over my own mind and I adopted a story that was not my own.
But my feeling that something was not quite right persisted. My response? I tried to suppress that feeling. It’s kind of like trying to hold an inflated beach ball under the surface of water. It is not easy. It is very uncomfortable. And it’s exhausting.
In the end, after much wrangling with my own mind, I was finally able to tell the right story to myself, which is that my feeling that something was wrong, was because something was wrong.
And that is when I became a free woman.
Freedom is not something somebody else grants to us. Freedom is a process, freedom is something we do. It is a lifelong endeavor. It is something we practice, over and over again, until we get it right. And those of us who have been working at it for a long time now cherish our freedom. And we are not going to go down easily.
This also answers, at least for me, a question I’ve been asking myself for a long time, why do some people stand up for freedom and others don’t? Is it because they don’t care about freedom? No. It’s because they were never free to begin with.
My concern is that if enough of us suppress our feelings in response to a false story, our capacity to feel will diminish. If that happens, then the effort to preserve the great legacies of western civilization, our books, our musical scores, our philosophies, our language will be meaningless.
If Mozart’s Requiem fails to stir me on a deeply emotional level, I have no reason to even listen to it, let alone ask my intellect to assign meaning to it.
Likewise, to teach children to deny the evidence of their own senses, to convince them to use their intellect to wage war with themselves, against their own heart, to reinforce the human tendency to adopt the stories of others as our own, is -especially the case of this ideology especially- to cause them harm. It is an abuse of power and it is a grave injustice. Likewise, we commit the same injustice to ourselves when we allow others to do it to us.
All of this I am talking about has implications far beyond this particular ideology. The stories we tell ourselves, about who to love and how to love, what is funny and what isn’t, and even how to die and be born, are in essence who we are.
There are times when we can and probably should invite people more knowledgeable than us to weigh in on things, and the role culture plays is undeniable. But in the end it is up to us, as individuals, to take ownership over our intellect, and to tell our own stories.
This is the essence of intellectual freedom.
This is the real fight.

Saving Culture (from itself)

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