The Ivy League scolds come for Amy Wax – The Spectator World
Dean Ruger s list of Wax s violations is funny because it consists largely of truisms, laced here and there with evidence of guilt by association. For example, Wax has said nice things about John Derbyshire, a distinguished author but one who also has fallen foul of the cringing woke commissars in our culture. It would take a very long column to address all of Dean Ruger s accusations, so let me focus on the one that seemed to cause the greatest offense: the idea that not all cultures are equal. All cultures are not equal, she wrote.
Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a first-world, twenty-first-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti- acting white rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants. These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script which the upper middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all.
Is there any syllable of that paragraph that is not true? And yet it is for stating such obvious truths that Wax is being dragged into the Star Chamber at Penn.
I wish Professor Wax the best. Evidently there are true things you are not allowed to say, and false things you at least must not deny. And of course false things you are celebrated for saying, in the modern academy.