The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (16 page)

But the reason why there’s no scandal in the eyes of Lee Bollinger is that their true ideological agenda is not educational at all. On one level it is to construct a rationale for making racial preferences permanent. Racial and gender quotas were originally conceived of as a way to redress past wrongs. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair,” Lyndon Johnson famously declared in his 1965 commencement address to Howard University.
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Whatever the merits of that contention, and there were obviously some, the fact is that racial preferences are no longer about redressing past wrongs. Preferences are given to African immigrants, Hispanics, and women of myriad backgrounds, life experiences, and races—often with little or no regard for how many have lived lives economically and culturally identical to the WASP next door. Such spoils cannot be justified under the logic of the original affirmative action regime. Diversity is a way of getting around all of that.

But at a deeper level the agenda behind diversity is about power. It is a way to give permanent license to social engineers. If you make diversity a compelling state interest or social imperative, someone has to decide what does or does not count as beneficial diversity, and that someone is invariably a social engineer like Lee Bollinger. Hence, under Bollinger the University of Michigan assigned a numerical value to the race of applicants. Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans automatically got twenty points out of the one hundred needed to guarantee admission. An outstanding personal essay
was worth three points. An exemplary personal achievement was worth five points, while scoring a perfect grade on the SAT was worth twelve points. In other words, a wealthy black kid with mediocre credentials would start out with the same qualifications as an Asian who aced the SAT, wrote a Hemingwayesque personal essay, and founded a chain of soup kitchens.

But, if you dare oppose such narrow schemes to play with demographics like old Soviet ministers of population, you are “against diversity,” which in far too many circles is simply code for racist.

Not only is this a reprehensible form of moral bullying used to stigmatize people who may in fact value diversity but who also emphasize other, competing, values such as fairness, merit, or, simply, freedom. It is also a deeply pernicious form of reasoning that was once utterly recognizable as unfair discrimination not so long ago.

Before World War II, when four out of five winners of New York Regents scholarships were Jewish, notes historian David Brion Davis, most New York medical schools had a strict anti-Jewish quota—in the name of diversity. The dean of Columbia University’s medical school defended his school’s quota by arguing, “The racial and religious makeup in medicine ought to be kept fairly parallel with the population makeup.”

Today Asians—and to a lesser but still significant extent Jews—face a similar problem. Their accomplishments and experiences—no matter how harrowing or impressive—count for less in admissions at countless universities (though not so much in California and other states that, via popular referenda, have banned racial quotas in admissions). Moreover, the diversity experiment on college campuses does not work as advertised. When minority students are admitted above their abilities they almost always perform poorly academically, which is one reason why drop-out rates for minorities are so high.
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Another point: Is it really true that diversifying a college population will inevitably result in large numbers of minorities interacting with whites? I’ve visited scores of colleges, and wherever I go, the tendency I’ve seen is for self-ghettoization. Black students eat with black students, whites with whites (Asians seem to split; some cluster with each other, some integrate more into the dominant white culture). And such self-sorting seems to be encouraged by faculties and administrators, who celebrate the creation
of various ethnic centers and student associations categorized by race. If the point is to encourage interaction, why create a black student union at all? Meanwhile, students who want to break out of such ghettos often feel there is no place for them. They become isolated, alienated from a campus culture that celebrates diversity to the point where the social experience is cheapened.

This is a troubling parallel to the larger national experiment with diversity. Robert Putnam, a liberal sociologist at Harvard, famously (infamously, for some) found that as communities become more ethnically diverse they in fact become socially frayed. In a survey that included interviews with over thirty thousand people, Putnam found that as a community becomes more ethnically and socially varied, social trust plummets. People tend to “hunker down,” in Putnam’s words banding together with a shrunken and shrinking group of friends or alone in front of the TV. Trust in political leaders, the political process, and even voting decline precipitously. Volunteerism, from charitable giving to carpooling, deteriorates. Political activism increases as people look to government to solve problems that once might have been solved by a simple conversation across a coffee table or a shared fence between neighbors.

Note: Putnam did not find that diversity fuels racism; the vast bulk of the people interviewed for the study were not bigots. What he found was that diversity promotes alienation, disengagement, and social isolation. This all runs counter to a host of prevailing clichés and pieties (see
Chapter 23
, Understanding).

Tellingly, in Putnam’s study and in others, Los Angeles ranks at the bottom of the list of communities in terms of social strength. Residents, not to mention political leaders, spout a lot of “happy talk” (to borrow a phrase from researchers of a similar study) about diversity even as diversity fuels a pervasive unhappiness with the health of the community. People like Barbra Streisand are a good example. Ms. Streisand flits by limo from one gilded cage to another. She famously demanded—through her representatives, of course—that employees of the MGM Grand avoid eye-contact with her when she performed there. When she sang in the United Kingdom, she demanded that her accommodations include peach-colored toilet paper to match her skin tone and a sufficient number of rose petals in the toilet bowl. Hotel staff is instructed not to speak with her unless
given permission. There’s a whole chapter dedicated to her in investigative journalist Peter Schweizer’s
Do as I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy
. In Schweizer’s detailed telling, Streisand treats common laborers little better than vassals even as she spouts liberal talking points about the burning need to improve the plight of the working man.
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Obviously Ms. Streisand is like this largely for reasons that are unique to her. And since she is very rich and powerful, she undoubtedly likes it that way. She can spout off ideas and subsidize politicians who will further implement her conception of how the world is supposed to work while never having to actually cope with the consequences. But for the rest of the greater southern California community, things are not nearly so cozy or comforting. By attempting to stretch their paradigms their living experiences have been cheapened to the point where, brother, they can’t paradigm.

So in at least one sense, I owe Ms. Streisand an apology. Los Angeles is a gamut of voices. And because of the sort of pinched and shrill diversity she demands, the gamut of voices in her own hometown—much like the rest of the country—has been undeniably diluted.

8

SOCIAL DARWINISM

S
ocial Darwinism isn’t simply a cliché. It’s magic, an alchemist’s trick that transmogrifies the gold of freedom into the lead of Hitlerism. Leading intellectuals and journalists cavalierly employ it as placeholder for All Bad Things having to do with genetics, fascism, racism, evolution, free markets, or any human behavior that might be seen as callousness of a right-wing sort. Dropping Social Darwinism into a conversation is like flinging around Eastern philosophical mumbo jumbo (zen, tao, chi, etc.): Everyone recognizes the words; nobody really knows what they mean.

Mario Cuomo, in his famous 1984 Democratic Convention keynote speech—which “electrified,” “galvanized,” and “inspired” Democrats, who went on to lose forty-nine states in the general election—declared that “President Reagan told us from the very beginning that he believed in a kind of social Darwinism.”
¹
Walter Mondale, the Democratic nominee that year, insisted that Reagan preferred “Social Darwinism” over “social decency.”

The same drum beats steady twenty years later: “It’s called the Ownership Society in Washington,” then senator Barack Obama explained in 2005. “But in our past there has been another term for it—Social Darwinism—every man or woman for him or herself.”
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This all goes back, of course, to Herbert Spencer, widely held to be the “founder” of Social Darwinism. A writer for one British paper insists Spencer was “a downright evil man… whose passion for eugenics and elimination made him the daydreamer of things to come.” Edwin Black, in his history of eugenics,
War Against the Weak
, writes that Spencer “completely denounced charity and instead extolled the purifying elimination of the ‘unfit.’ The unfit, he argued, were predestined by their nature to an existence of downwardly spiraling degradation.”
³

Such attacks are beyond common, as the historian George H. Smith has chronicled for years. But perhaps the most telling comes from Richard L. Schoenwald’s psychological autopsy of Spencer in the 1968 summer issue of the esteemed journal
Victorian Studies
, in which the historian reveals that Spencer’s twisted and deformed worldview stemmed from his fascination with shit. Literally.

Starting with Spencer’s childhood, Schoenwald concluded that “Spencer’s self-esteem had been undermined hopelessly in the oral and anal stages of his development; he could commit himself only to paper, not to a woman.” As a baby Spencer rejoiced in his ability to “create excrement.” He never forgave his parents’ efforts at toilet training, which revoked “the anal freedom in which he had gloried.” This “fearful attack from behind” left permanent scars, which is why, for example, Spencer would one day oppose public sanitation regulation, because he “saw in sanitary reform an attack on his magical anal producing powers.”

To put it mildly, there’s something about Herbert Spencer and Social Darwinism that gets under the skin of a lot of people.

Let’s clear the brush away. Herbert Spencer, the British author, sociologist, and reputed creator of Social Darwinism, did not coin the term Social Darwinism. He was not a Darwinist (he had a separate theory of evolution), and he never called himself a Social Darwinist. Neither the term Social Darwinist nor the name Darwin appear in his 1851 book
Social Statics, or The Conditions Essential to Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed
which laid out his theory of the “fittest.” Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner, Spencer’s purported junior partner in Social Darwinism, did not call himself a Social Darwinist either, nor was he particularly indebted to Darwinism.

Simply put, there was no intellectual movement—at least not in America or Britain—called Social Darwinism, and the evil views attributed to so-called Social Darwinists were not held by its alleged founders. A survey of all of the leading English-language academic journals from the mid-1800s until 1937 produced not a single citation, mention, or argument that linked Spencer (dead by 1903) and Sumner (1910) to an intellectual movement called Social Darwinism.
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Even more amazing, in the entire body of Anglo-American scholarly publications—spanning more than a century—there is only one article that actually advocates—rather than criticizes—something called Social Darwinism.

Let me repeat that. Despite the fact that America’s foremost historians, politicians, and journalists routinely invoke and demonize the intellectual movement called Social Darwinism pioneered by Herbert Spencer, there is only one academic publication or article that clearly and unequivocally advocates something called “Social Darwinism”
and it not only wasn’t written by Spencer, it doesn’t mention him either.
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And yet we are told by no less than the
Oxford English Dictionary
that Social Darwinism is “the theory that societies, classes, and races are subject to and a product of Darwinian laws of natural selection.
Often used to justify political conservatism, imperialism, and racism”
(my emphasis). And yet the
OED
fails to identify even a single use by a proponent of the idea. It’s an amazing triumph of intellectual propaganda. “Everyone knows” that conservatives believe in Social Darwinism, but no one can point to a Social Darwinist. “Everyone knows” that Herbert Spencer founded Social Darwinism, but he did no such thing. It’s like those famous help wanted signs that said No I
RISH
N
EED
A
PPLY
that everyone remembers but historians have never found proof of.

But wait, it gets even more vexing. Social Darwinism is routinely used to describe both Hitler’s genocidal racism and eugenic policies as well as mainstream American libertarianism (Social Darwinism is useful in this regard for creating terminological diversity in the liberal vocabulary. Simply repeating the word “fascist” gets tiresome). You too can be a Social Darwinist if you believe in small government and the free market. Or if you believe in herding the lesser races and the enfeebled into camps.