What’s next: anti-male quotas in science education

File under: Liberalism in hyperdrive. This extremely disturbing article, “Quotas Limiting Male Science Enrollment: The New Liberal War on Science,” is by Hans Bader at Open Markets.org. Here is the beginning of it:

Quotas limiting the number of male students in science may be imposed by the Education Department in 2013. The White House has promised that “new guidelines will also be issued to grant-receiving universities and colleges” spelling out “Title IX rules in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.” These guidelines will likely echo existing Title IX guidelines that restrict men’s percentage of intercollegiate athletes to their percentage in overall student bodies, thus reducing the overall number of intercollegiate athletes. (Under the three-part Title IX test created by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, where I used to work, colleges are allowed to temporarily comply by increasing the number of female athletes rather than cutting the number of male athletes, but the only viable permanent way to comply with its rule is to restrict men’s participation relative to women’s participation, reducing overall participation.) Thus, as Charlotte Allen notes, the Obama administration’s guidelines are likely to lead to “science quotas” based on gender.

Earlier, writing in Newsweek, President Obama celebrated the fact that 25 percent fewer men than women graduate from college, calling it a “great accomplishment” for America. Ironically, he lamented the fact that a smaller gender disparity—17 percent fewer women attending college than men—had once existed before Title IX was implemented. To Obama, gender disparities are only bad when they disfavor women. Under his strange idea of equality, equality means men losing out to women. [Bader article continues.]

Let us step back and realize that every single anti-discrimination law, regulation, and practice, whether governmental or private, is or has turned into an anti-white, anti-male quota system, and that there is no real opposition to this revolutionary perversion of our society. If there were a serious conservative movement, racial and sex quotas would be as big an issue as Obamacare. Conservatives across the country would be on fire against the systematic discrimination against white men that has killed careers, prevented untold millions of white men from pursuing the career of their choice, and elevated in their place sub-competent women and nonwhites. But we hear almost nothing. The conservative opposition to quotas, such as it is, amounts to dry little complaints written by dry little demi-men at outlets such as NRO. (I do not include Ward Connerly in that criticism.) There is no passion, no crying out against the injustice and harm wreaked by this anti-white system.

Why? First, because it involves “equality,” and since conservatives subscribe to equality as much as liberals, they are unable to oppose the egalitarian agenda on a principled and moral basis. Second, because the harm is being done to white men and boys, and mainstream conservatives, who live within the magnetic field of liberalism and are in fact liberals, cannot find it in themselves to defend whites as whites. The very thought disgusts them.

If I were to write a book about American conservatism, I would give it the same title as a famous James Joyce story: “The Dead.”

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Laura Wood writes:

You wrote:

First, because it involves “equality,” and since conservatives subscribe to equality as much as liberals, they are unable to oppose the egalitarian agenda on a principled and moral basis. Second, because the harm is being done to white men and boys, and mainstream conservatives, who live within the magnetic field of liberalism and are in fact liberals, cannot find it in themselves to defend whites as whites. The very thought disgusts them.

There is a third reason. White men are ambivalent about their loss of authority. When a parent spoils a child, he does it not for sake of the child but for himself. It is easier to abandon authority than to maintain it. Many white men enjoy things as they are.

Gintas writes:

You wrote:

If I were to write a book about American conservatism, I would call it by the same title as a famous James Joyce story: “The Dead.”

If you include a lot of zombies, it’d be a hit. Maybe people are interested in zombies because we are a zombie nation—moving, destructive, feeding on life, but dead. The idea of zombies reveals the truth about ourselves, and the truth is horrifying. I have never understood how people like horror stories, but there has to be something about horror that draws people. Maybe Thomas Bertonneau can explain it.

Thomas Bertonneau writes:

Recently Mr. Auster has made reference to T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men.” Zombies represent an intensification and vulgarization of Eliot’s critically acute “Hollow Men” metaphor. Zombies signify the reduction of the full human being to mere feeding materiality, on the level of a shark. That, in the usual scenario, they stem from a plague, is particularly provocative, since, in myth, “plague” often functions as a metaphor for social breakdown and the radical dissolution of trust. In the Zombie films and mini-series, the walking dead form packs and mobs that prey on the scattered, fully human survivors. The Zombie Myth resembles the story of Euripides’ tragedy, The Bacchae, where a total breakdown of civic order afflicts Thebes. First the women desert the city for the mountainsides, where they engage in bestial behavior, hunting down animal prey and devouring it alive; next the men begin to imitate the women. King Pentheus, like a modern Republican senator, is bewildered and indecisive. The Bacchae lure him into a deadly trap and, surrounding him, tear him to pieces in the classic Dionysiac sparagmos. (The lure is the prospect that he might get a chance to spy on the all-girl orgies of the Maenads.)

Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros borrows the Euripidean plot. Everyone is becoming a rhinoceros, which, in the allegory, means that everyone is assimilating to the conformist-totalitarian mentality. Those who have undergone the transformation bellow inarticulately and copulate like beasts. An episode of South Park, “Die, Hippie, Die,” owes a debt equally to The Bacchae and Rhinoceros. “College Know-It-All” hippies invade South Park and decide that it is the perfect place for their Howard-Zinn-and-Noam-Chomsky-inspired “progressive rock concert” that will “bring it all down.” As the citizens of South Park assimilate to the swelling “hippie drumming circle,” Cartman, like the main character in Rhinoceros, uniquely resists the allure of anti-normative conformity.

My friend and sometime collaborator Kim Paffenroth links the Zombie Myth to St. Paul’s Vision of the Resurrected, but the theme of contagion that invariably accompanies the theme of the walking dead inclines me to see the zombie as the metaphor, not for resurrected life, but for death-in-life, and for the sacrificial demand that the living must become food for the dead. (Kim’s books on the Zombie Myth are worth investigation.)

One encouraging fact about zombie movies, especially the recent TV mini-series The Walking Dead, is that they inspire reactive and defensive commentary from the left. There is something healthily un-PC about the Zombie Myth.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 17, 2012 03:25 PM | Send