Essays in Idleness

There is a Sanskrit proverb, that if you are facing total loss and ruin, you should give up half. While I doubt they have it from this Indian source, the attitude of most self-styled “conservatives” is to accept this policy of appeasement. Over the course of my adult life (let’s say, fifty years) I have watched them act as if bailing from a sinking ship. Those who live in locales where “conservatism” is being made illegal — one thinks of the drive-in university campuses — need more robust defences.

One’s life is short. From what I can make out, the specific mental injury with which we are now dealing can be traced beyond fifty years; beyond the profligate ‘sixties; and back to the dramatic expansion of miseducation, as a conscious social measure, post-War. Moreover, the demand to accelerate miseducation continues, from its material beneficiaries. For, like any liberal measure, this act of debilitation was and is “done with the best intentions.”

(And deeper still lies the Trahison des clercs; and in layers beneath that, our secularization. …)

Now, you can’t say any place has been “intellectually ruined,” that was an intellectual vacuum to start with, so in that sense I think many of our criticisms of universities may be unfair. The loss is only detectable in the older institutions of the “Ivy League.” It is here that the humanities, which were the core of classical learning, have been trashed, desecrated, submerged, in a swirling tide of malicious idiocies.

The destruction is compounded by the assimilation of topics into university study that do not belong there. By this I don’t mean the rabid insanities of gender, race, and “intersectional” courses, which need annihilation, but studies that ought to be offloaded into “community colleges,” and vocational schools. Indirectly, the importation of things which may have value in themselves, but are not philosophical, have contributed to the capsizing overburden. But this is made less obvious by the fact that the standards in, say, engineering and computer programming, put the “lit” and “phil” courses to shame.

In light of the riots now proceeding through most Democrat jurisdictions in the Natted States, and which are starting to spread like Batflu through susceptibly “liberal” jurisdictions abroad, it becomes necessary to correct my Sanskrit proverb. Rather than continue bailing, sane people must retain their possessions, including, especially, their minds. These are even more lethal weapons than the “military-style” firearms that progressives seek to ban, although guns are also important.

Perhaps the most lethal weapon on the other side, of this rapidly degenerating “cold civil war,” is the bull-crap that is taught, or rather flung, on “diversity.” It has become the staple product of all our left-contaminated institutions. Public bigotry, that had happily become socially indefensible, is being reinstalled, in campaigns to reignite racial conflicts.

The attempts, for example to revive the slavery issue in our public life, when it was long since settled, shriek of this. The victims of it are, inevitably, mostly black. The destruction of black enterprise, both material and spiritual is, like the destruction of the black family by liberal welfare policy, not an accident; it is what these progressives think will serve their interests. There is no difference, today, between Antifa and (if we can find any) “neo-Nazis.” The tactics are the same; the effect is the same, across the range of provocateurs. Most learnt their sordid trades directly through “higher education”; the rest, indirectly.

Their anarchic thinking depends upon the vicious sludge that has accumulated in our universities, through generations of grade inflation. By now, our weaker young minds can’t breathe, because they are drowning in it.

Are you, gentle reader, a racist, sexist, homophobe, or what? These are unambiguously evil slanders, and yet we half concede to them. Do not pull punches when responding to these falsehoods.