Bob Homans Nov 1. When Berkeley was great. How much to tell the children.

20231102

Glad to hear from several subscribers that you were able to open the Bob Homans piece.  Here is his post for November 1.

When I was young my mother worked as an editor for the University of California. Before the 60s they only had two campuses – Berkeley and Los Angeles.  Berkeley was most famous for atomic physics – Robert Oppenheimer had headed the department, and Glenn Seaborg and E. O. Lawrence remained – but many geniuses in other fields gravitated toward Berkeley. Alfred Louis Kroeber was America’s first PhD anthropologist. My mother edited his wife Theodora Kroeber’s book, Ishi, the Last of his Tribe. Mother was intrigued that Kroeber would have chosen one of his students, 21 years his junior, as a second bride. I wish she had lived to hear about her elder son’s third marriage and adventures in anthropology.  Other luminaries for whom she edited included Erving Goffman and Hyman Minsky.

The names, which she often mentioned around the house, didn’t mean anything to me at the time. I do not think even she had a full appreciation of the impact these people had on intellectual life in America. I can only wish in retrospect that I had not been so oblivious.

At any rate, geniuses such as these built Berkeley’s sterling reputation, which until last year survived every imaginable kind of diversity – racial, gender, and unfortunately, ability – from the presidency down to the newest freshman.  For 2022-23, U.S. News & World Report still put Berkeley in fourth place among famous universities in the world.  For 2023-24, however, it fell to number fifteen nationally while other top schools – Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton – were relatively unchanged.  Reputation mining cannot go on indefinitely.

In my student days travel and communication were not as easy as now.  If you wanted to be around geniuses, you have to go where they congregated.  In the 18^th and 19^th centuries that would’ve been the coffeehouses of London and Paris. In the early 20^th century Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York.

Now, however, the great minds of our time meet on the Internet. They cannot get together on campus because they will too often be disinvited, shouted down, not published and even fired for holding diverse opinions. When they want to meet in person they go to conferences. Even at that, certain conferences, like those on human intelligence, have to be organized quietly and secretly to escape harassment. Favorites of mine like Ed Dutton, Richard Lynn and Kevin MacDonald are at nowhere universities like Oulu, Ulster and Long Beach State, where they can simply be left alone.

This brings me to my theme of the day. The Internet has brought us all in contact with brilliant minds. I have been a paying subscriber to Toby Rogers’ Substack, uTobian, for a couple of years now. He is only one of many I like.  Thomas Pierce, Streamfortyseven and I often mention others. Today, as recommended by Robert Malone, I read Did Liberalism Fail, by Toby.  His thesis is that liberalism is an unstable political system. It requires empire, which in turn requires growth. He brought together several thoughts that had been floating around my own brain without congealing, articulating them in a way that I had not and adding others that had escaped me. It is a brilliant article. Chasing that thread, I found this one from last year entitled Why are they doing this to us? Ten theories of the case.  In it Rogers assesses the theory that malign forces – evil people – are perpetrating many of the misfortunes that beset the modern world. Once again, brilliant.

I ask myself the question, what do I do with these insights? What power do I have? I always come back to the same position. There is not too much I can do that I haven’t done already. I have chosen an out-of-the-way place to raise my family. I write what I see on the Internet, and I say what I can to my family.

There are, however, severe limitations. Oksana doesn’t understand and is not interested. I would far rather have a wife who is a good mother than one who did understand and was wrapped up in these things. I am lucky to have a son who is interested in the questions that occupy me. But they should not occupy him. He should be doing what 12-year-olds do – getting an education and preparing for life. He should not be weighing himself down with the concerns of the adult world. I would be doing him a disservice to drag him into these questions, even if he understood.

This goes all the more for my daughters. They have more girlish interests – clothes, dolls, music and so on. Exactly as they should. They don’t want to get involved in more academic stuff. I gave Zoriana a very brief account of Ishi’s life, as I recall it from Theodora Kroeber’s book. She was bored. I gave up after about three tries, not very disappointed. Far better that she should be a successful woman than a great intellect. There are far too few girls in today’s world who grow up to succeed at being women.

I will end with this note to Kathleen, Celia and other probing intellects among my readership.  I am not jealous of you, Toby, Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, Margaret Anna Alice, eugyppius, David Cole or other great writers. I am grateful to be able to read you. On the other hand, to the extent that I am able to raise successful children, my contribution to humanity may stretch even beyond yours.  I have to have faith, and there is no greater expression of faith in mankind, and the future, than having children.

Graham