Bob Homans November 4 is up.
Feeling a bit better after my cold, I went to what I like to think of as my kitchen to bake a plum cake. Hah! It is not my kitchen, and it is governed by irrational rules.
The workspace I want to use is covered with clean dishes and silverware. Why? Microbes! Because of microbes we all have to use separate crockery and utensils. Even though everything is washed.
There are two kitchen towels – one for drying dishes, the other for your hands. God help you if you use the wrong one. Microbes!
I spilled some milk on the floor as I put the cake together. I had to ask for a dispensation to use a kitchen sponge to wipe it up. She hid her eyes so as not to see the sanitary sacrilege. Microbes!
A lot of stuff doesn't make sense. I am hectored daily to drink vitamins to get over my cold. The explanations that (1) I take equivalent, but much less expensive vitamin pills every day and (2) vitamins are to keep you healthy, not to cure disease, carry no weight. Though the point is not worth arguing, argument is impossible to avoid.
I made a deal with Oksana. I would drink her vitamins daily for two months, after which she would be quiet about it. The two months was up October 15. We all caught this mild cold. Her mother and the girls, whose vitamin intake she can control, are not getting over it any quicker than I. She is only somewhat quiet.
This morning Marianna asked for cold milk. I looked both ways to make sure there were no cops and gave it to her. Grandma would have had a cow if she felt the cup and it was not warm.
Is it worth fighting? Yes! Tolerating irrationality can have grave consequences. In the past three years we have put up with measures that absolutely made no sense – had never had any scientific justification – such as social distancing, masks and lockdowns. There were others for which we were asked to accept supposedly scientific proofs that simply seemed unlikely on the surface. It has not been a good time to tolerate irrationality.
Irrationality has been gaining ground for decades. Emotion carried the day in the landmark Brown versus Board of Education case in 1954. The federal government should have had no jurisdiction – education was strictly a state matter, not enumerated in the Constitution as a concern of the federal government. The plaintiffs used dolls to persuade the Supreme Court that segregation made the colored children feel so bad it harmed their education. It so tugged the heartstrings that the justices stretched the Constitution to make a decision.
The rest is history. The public accepts that the court made the right decision. Who cares if it did not have the authority. They have followed the precedent and stretched the Constitution in many other ways. For what it's worth, stereotype threat, the theory that children underperform because they are expected to rather than for lack of ability or effort remains unproven. But the hurt feeling argument has made astounding progress.
The same irrationality held for abortion, Roe vs. Wade. The federal government had no constitutional authority to make that decision but felt obliged to do so. Changing things back, as they did last year, was the right move constitutionally but the wrong move politically. The electorate is irrational, emotional. Not constitutional.
On to sex and gender, here's from the February 2005 issue of the Atlantic: "Like religious fundamentalists seeking to stamp out the teaching of evolution, feminists stomped Harvard University President Lawrence Summers for mentioning at a January 14 academic conference the entirely reasonable theory that innate male-female differences might possibly help explain why so many mathematics, engineering, and hard-science faculties remain so heavily male."
Summers was forced to resign over the issue even though he was absolutely right about the science. There is no science to refute Richard Lynn’s 2022 Sex Differences in Intelligence. But it is widely ignored on the theory that hurt feelings count more than facts.
The hurt feelings argument is at the core of Christopher Rufo’s “America’s Cultural Revolution,” which review I will write tomorrow when the kids are in school. Hopefully. If there is no objective truth, only subjective feelings, there can be no consistent law. There is chaos, nihilism. My arch-liberal friend Elaine agreed with me one week that “white lives matter,” but was forced to recant the next week. Nothing makes sense.
The cultural revolution has reversed the progress of the Enlightenment. There is no longer any objective truth, only your truth and my truth. As Bill Maher says, it is madness. I try to align my truth with scientific, objective truth. And I’ll start at home combating silliness about microbes, vitamins and such.
That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man was up to taking the kids for a walk yesterday. We’ll probably make it into town to go grocery shopping today.
I would argue that the entire "politically correct" and "Woke" movements are based on feelings, rather than rationality. You can't say "girl" anymore because it is offensive. You can't say "chick." No slang usage allowed. Only literal meanings and only the certified and approved literal meaning is allowed. Otherwise, somebody might get offended. Certainly, we don't want to "offend" somebody else. Heaven forbid!
Of course, nobody really knows what goes on in a human heart or brain. Some people might be offended while others might not even consider a word annoying. How is it possible to base a society on what people feel? The things that offend most people don't bother me at all. In Russia and Ukraine, you cannot call any woman under the age of 50 "woman." It is offensive. They must be called "girl" until they become babushka. In the US now, you can't call any female a "girl" after the age of about 5 because you might offend. And don't you dare make a mistake!!!
Sexual harassment is based on the perception of women. It's sexual harassments if women feel it is sexual harassment. That by the way is the legal definition. There doesn't have to be any objective action. If you look at another woman the wrong way, you are guilty of sexual harassments in the work place. After all, they know what you're thinking. Some women are offended if you look at them; others are offended if you don't look at them, and still more are offended if you look at other women. I was once accused of sexual harassments and one of the charges against me was that I only spoke to the "pretty women" at work. As I was reading the charge sheet, the list of accusations against me, I thought "which pretty women?" Which are the "pretty" ones? I didn't consider any of them "pretty." not by my standards of "pretty." I wouldn't have hired any "pretty" women because they might have been a distraction at work.
I think all this comes from an attempt to "over-mother" the world. All these perceptions, like micro-aggressions and safe spaces" are the values of women who are trying to over-mother society. No one should have hurt feelings. No one should be treated "unfairly." In over-mothering, we weaken ourselves and we take away "objectivity." This is the exact problem with the "pronoun" issue. Which pronouns must we use in order not to offend? The Gen Z kids growing up these days are so worried about offending somebody, unless they are attacking the Jews, that they freeze up in human contact. They don't want to offend, so they can do nothing.
When I grew up, we got offended regularly. Sometimes it wasn't pleasant, sometimes it hurt, but we managed to get on with life. In fact, it made me tougher. In spite of all the whining, life goes on. Sometimes there is a lesson in a skinned knee and it makes you stronger. Do we all want to live in a bubble? Do we want to live our entire lives worried that we might offend somebody somewhere? The end result if taken to the extreme is that we all curl up in bed and never go outside, because the truth is that we are going to offend someone someplace. In fact, I am offended that I can't speak my mind freely. I have to keep my mouth shut for fear of offending. That's truly offensive.
And watch out for the invisible microbes. They are everywhere ready to kill you. If you drink something cold from the fridge, my god, you're going to die in twelve hours. It's a law of life. Wash your hands because you may have come in contact with germs. I can't even say the word without offending. GERMS. They're everywhere even if you can't see them. They are like nasty words and ethnic Polish jokes. They are now forbidden. Verboten. We must protect ourselves against these invisible demons which will devour us in our sleep.
I'm sorry. I don't mean to be offensive, but I can't leave the house today. There are germs out there and somebody might say something offensive to me or worse I might say something that offends to somebody else. There is nothing worse in life, right?
I thought I'd comment on the new format for the Bob Homan's letter.
I can't really say whether I like it or not, but I've stopped reading them. The print size is small and the layout unfriendly (at least, in my opinion). Part of it is I'm growing older, so I tend to read articles that visually friendly. I am drawn to substack because the print size and layout is easy for me to read, while your new format isn't.
I'm sending this along, not to complain, but to give you some feedback. If I'm making this observation, others might feel the same, but say nothing.