My copy of the semiannual Reed Magazine arrived yesterday. The feature article is about a Maria Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington state, who led a campaign in the Democratic primary to oust an incumbent Congressman who was not sufficiently woke. Most of the photos of students and young alums are of women.
The president, Audrey Bilger, installed a couple of years ago, is an in-your-face lesbian. Her article on the first page of the magazine, entitled "Tell Me What You See", subhead "This Must Be the Place" includes a paragraph "In keeping with our commitment to antiracism, I want to position Reed is the most multiracial, multicultural, intellectual college in the world. I want to ensure that a Reed education is accessible to students from a diversity of backgrounds, and that every student finds a sense of belonging on the campus."
In the class notes, there are two birth notices from the class of 2007, women approaching 40. One indicates an older sibling. The only other birth announcement, class of 2015, to parents who do not share a surname, says "young Ronan is already getting involved in the Alaska political scene." There were two notices of marriages, both to couples who had lived together for a long time. I note wryly that my post three years back of a birth to the class of 1964, an event I considered somewhat newsworthy, received no comment from anybody. Married white men don't fit the zeitgeist.
Three births in six months, six per year, is not very high fertility for a college that graduates 300 people a year. It is a far cry from the 300 it would take to populate the class of 2044. Total enrollment has been fairly flat for the past decade.
Here is a picture of me wearing my student designed (1961) Reed College T-shirt, emblazoned with the motto "Communism, Atheism, Free Love." To me it is the ultimate expression of the concept of a free lunch.
Communism allows everybody to live at other people's expense. Everywhere it has been tried, the capable people do their best to avoid having the fruits of their labor appropriated to feed others. Those who can emigrate. The United States and West Germany were attractive destinations when I lived in them. Most Soviet citizens, including my father- and brother-in-law, are content to slide by with a minimum of effort and not make a fuss. As the Soviet era joke went, " We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." California, take note.
Atheism is another expression of the free lunch concept. It denies the individual's obligations to society, ignoring the fact that society invests a great deal in the individual. Schools, neighbors, church, local government, volunteer organizations and others all contributed to forming me to be the man I am. An atheist holds that he is his own agent and owes society nothing in return. In particular, atheists often feel no obligation to bear and raise children for the next generation, to carry on their culture and civilization, or even to support them in their old age.
Free love is a third something-for-nothing concept. It was the earlier instantiation of the Tinder or hookup philosophy, the belief that sex was nothing more than a plaything, intended to satisfy a person's desires of the moment. The notion was that one could have sex without any emotional entanglements or obligations either way. It was expressed in the music of the 1960s. "Just call me angel of the morning," "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with" and "Me and Bobby McGee" come immediately to mind. These are blues songs. Yes, the whole concept is downbeat. In love also there is no free lunch.
Yesterday I posted my video entitled "The Rise and Fall of Intelligence" to YouTube and rumble. I am surprised to see that 60 people have already viewed it on YouTube, giving it three likes. The message, as I wrote yesterday, is rather gloomy. There cannot be a political solution to a problem brought on by evolution. If you give it some thought, the Reed College I describe above is a product of evolution. So was the dodo.
Which brings me back to today's agenda. Oksana and I are going to Zoriana's first grade where we will pull the furniture down from the attic and set up the classrooms. Eddie went to his orientation yesterday and came back pumped up. We are looking forward to the school year.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, which is celebrating the first day of fall by the Ukrainian calendar with a day in the 70s, a relief after two of 95°.
My Dad was acting president of Reed College when he died of Hodgkins Disease in 1986. He (and most of his contemporary faculty colleagues) are rolling in their graves given the woke crap that Reed and ALL insitutions of "higher" learning are peddling as education these days.
Atheism and free lunch don't connect for me. All the atheists I know including myself are committed volunteers, putting in a lot of time to ensuring that society continues to support its members. Atheism does NOT mean only looking out for yourself, taking what you can get and giving nothing back. It means not relying on churches to take care of everything according to their questionable and often damaging values. It means examining morals closely and thinking how to create a good society, rather than simply accepting the gospel of past millennia, trusting the priests and ministers with authority over your life choices, and knowing that the God of the flood will kill most everyone off again if he finds it necessary.