Category Archives: Rationalism

For a period this summer, it was popular to dismiss Liz Truss as a flip-flopper. The argument went something like this: she was a Liberal Democrat, then a Conservative; a Remainer then a die-hard Brexiteer; a modernising Cameroon then a darling of the Thatcherite hard right. In this reading, her free-market overtures during the party leadership campaign were merely the latest act of opportunism, a calculated but hollow pitch to a Tory membership still pining for a new Iron Lady.

This line was never very persuasive, as nothing in Trusss past was fundamentally incompatible with her proclaimed ideological commitment to a small-state, free-market model. And now, just three weeks into her tenure in No 10, it has been comprehensively buried. The unofficial Budget from her like-minded Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, on 23 September, removed any remaining doubt by ushering in the biggest package of tax cuts since the Conservative chancellor Anthony Barbers expansionary dash for growth in 1972, and by targeting the benefit of those cuts overwhelmingly on the richest.

Far from popularity-chasing opportunism, this amounts to a huge experiment that, as the Conservative commentator Tim Montgomerie has put it, effectively treats Britain as a giant laboratory for economically libertarian ideas. The success or failure of that experiment will make or break Trusss government. Say what you like about the wisdom of this approach and the markets have had their say but it is absolutely not the method of a flip-flopper. Rather, it is that of a convinced member of a deep-rooted network of ideas, institutions and thinkers born on the shores of Lake Geneva over 75 years ago. It is impossible to understand the ideological zeal with which Truss and Kwarteng are pushing Britain towards the economic brink without understanding that network.

[See also: The Conservatives are lost in a fantasy world and are a danger to the country]

In 1947 the economist Friedrich Hayek convened the Mont Pelerin Society, named after the bucolic location of the Swiss hotel where this grouping of free-market thinkers gathered. Inspired by Hayeks warnings of a road to serfdom as set forth in his 1944 book of that name they were united in concern at the apparent march of international collectivism, in both its totalitarian (Soviet) and democratic (social democrat and New Deal) forms.

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Over the subsequent decades members and associates of this group established successive generations of influential think tanks advancing anti-collectivist economics. In 1955, Antony Fisher founded the Institute of Economic Affairs in London (IEA). This would help inspire a second wave in the 1970s, including the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC and, in London, the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) and the Adam Smith Institute (ASI). As the historian Daniel Stedman Jones puts it in his book Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics, these transatlantic ideological entrepreneurs provided both a long-term incubator for such ideas and a bridge from high economic theory to applied policy practice. Both Reaganomics and Thatcherism would have been unthinkable without them.

From the 1980s to the early 2000s came the next wave of more public-facing bodies such as Americans for Tax Reform and the TaxPayers Alliance (TPA). Matthew Elliott, who worked at the former before returning to his native UK to found the latter in 2004, would also go on to help establish and lead the Vote Leave campaign in the run-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum.

These bodies are not homogeneous. Cato, for example, is classically libertarian on social issues like LGBT+ rights, whereas Heritage is hard-line conservative. There are also differences of approach. Mark Littlewood, the director of the IEA, who has known Truss since their student days they both attended Oxford in the 1990s differentiates between more upstream think tanks like his own, which are closer to academia and concentrate on disseminating ideas among opinion-forming elites, and more downstream organisations, which are focused on government policymaking (like the CPS) and shaping debate in the mass media (like the TPA).

Marc Stears tutored Truss when she was a PPE student at Oxford and today leads the Policy Lab at University College London. He notes that the more theoretical upstream parts of the libertarian think-tank spectrum have grown in significance as academia has tilted leftwards. There are fewer centres in the big universities where these thinkers cluster, he told me. So that makes the role of think tanks more important.

Yet certain traits are common to the Mont Pelerin think-tank family. One is philosophical. Stears says: Hayeks ideas are really important because of the underlying spirit that animates them: that there is no such thing as collective intelligence; the state does not know things and only individuals can really know things. That faith in the wisdom of the crowd, as expressed in price mechanisms, is very deeply ingrained.

He also points to a shared tendency to be patient, citing the Marxist philosopher GA Cohens observation that the supply-side right has succeeded at keeping the fires burning even through periods in the political wilderness. Littlewood agrees that the greatest strength of organisations like his is to invest in the long-term dissemination of their ideas.

There is also geographical communality. The majority of these think tanks are clustered around Tufton Street, a Georgian terrace in Westminster, and Massachusetts Avenue, a long boulevard in Washington DC (a distinction being that Mass Ave is also home to think tanks of various other intellectual outlooks).

These two worlds have long been linked by transatlantic personalities criss-crossing between them. Prominent examples include Fisher (who founded the Atlas Network, a Washington-based umbrella organisation of international free-market think tanks), Edwin Feulner (a former IEA intern who co-founded Heritage) and Eamonn Butler (an ally of Feulners who co-founded the ASI in London). Today they number Ryan Bourne a Truss ally, formerly of the IEA and now at Cato; Daniel Hannan a Brexiteer former MEP and founder of the Initiative for Free Trade (IFT); and Nile Gardiner head of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at Heritage.

Ideologically, the institutions and thinkers of this world share a common commitment to a low-tax, low-regulation, Anglo-Saxon social model, distinct from the social democratic European one. They tend to favour mechanisms for advancing that model, such as free-trade deals, levelling down state intervention, and demarcated zones pioneering extremely small-state government (variously referred to as freeports, investment zones or charter cities). They instinctively prefer market-led solutions to collective problems, such as climate change, over state-led ones. Perhaps not unrelatedly, many of them draw on opaque funding from big private-sector interests. Cato, for instance, has received backing from corporations such as FedEx and Google, and, in the past, from the tobacco industry which has also been a source of funding for both the IEA and ASI.

In the Britain of 2022 these instincts express themselves in a particular analysis of the state of the country. This, as Truss-ite thinkers explain, starts from the argument that British governments since Margaret Thatcher Conservative as well as Labour have become much too sentimental about the distribution and moral character of growth, and too little focused on raising the overall growth level. As Bourne puts it: Liz Truss would not consider it a failure if she got the growth rate up significantly but not equally across regions.

It is not a politics of pursuing what is popular per se, but of letting what works (defined as whatever lifts the growth rate) speak for itself. They wont be transactional about policies, Bourne says of Truss and Kwarteng. Its the whole string of things. Incrementally, the patient might not like the medicine, but overall they will feel healthier and revived.

Even during her student years in Oxford, recalls Marc Stears, Truss prided herself on defying intellectual convention. Her primary characteristic was a love of controversy, quirkiness and idiosyncrasy Her thinking was always intriguing and contrarian, if not always fully worked through. A brief flirtation with the Lib Dems is not entirely inconsistent with right-wing libertarianism (the partys Orange Book tendency has links with this world too, and as a student Truss was also a member of the Hayek Society). She definitely sat outside the prevailing social democratic orthodoxy even then, Stears says.

Truss worked in think-tank land herself before her election to parliament, serving as deputy director of Reform from 2008 to 2010, a period when the organisation was laying some of the intellectual foundations of the spending cuts and market-led approach to public services that would be introduced under David Cameron and George Osborne. Cameron and Osborne may have been more Thatcherite where Truss is more Reaganite, notes Tim Bale of Queen Mary University of London, a historian of the Conservative Party. But they shared the basic belief that the market should be the main force in economic life, the state as small as possible and the individual as large as possible.

Shared beliefs, yes, but with different degrees of intensity. In 2010, Truss typified a romantically Thatcherite intake of new Tory MPs who thought Cameron and Osborne were being too cautious about slashing the state.

When you think that peoples politicisation tends to take place in their teens and early twenties, it is perfectly understandable that MPs who had come of age around 1997 would equate past Conservative election victories with what they saw as Margaret Thatchers uncompromising free-market ideology, rather than her more compromising reality, Bale says.

Truss rapidly became a figurehead for this generation. Liz was the first convenor of the Free Enterprise Group, recalls Littlewood, referring to the establishment in 2011 of a cluster of like-minded Conservative MPs which was effectively the IEAs parliamentary branch. And Kwasi Kwarteng was the second.

Along with other free-marketeers from the Tory 2010 intake, such as Priti Patel and Dominic Raab, the duo co-authored After the Coalition (2011), and then the more radical Britannia Unchained (2012), both small-statist screeds drawing heavily on Tufton Street thinking.

[See also: Mini-budget 2022 summary: Kwasi Kwartengs major tax cut plans as it happened]

If there is a moment when Truss appears to have been genuinely opportunistic, it was probably not her supposed conversion to the Brexit cause after the 2016 referendum but her initial support for Remain. That would explain the speed and conviction with which she emerged as a born again Brexiteer afterwards, a political rebirth that accelerated in a succession of speeches following her appointment as chief secretary to the Treasury in 2017.

A particularly notable speech was delivered at the Cato Institute in Washington in 2018. In it, Truss called for a new, small-state Anglo-American dream driven by an emergent generation of market millennials used to the freedoms of the app economy Uber-riding, Airbnb-ing, Deliveroo-eating freedom fighters, as she put it elsewhere. Free enterprise is a hymn to individuality and non-conformity, she proclaimed to her Cato audience. Its what allows the young to flower and the anti-establishment to flourish.

Bourne helped set up the speech. I put it to him that her argument ignores strong youth support for the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. Its a case of stated preference versus revealed preference, he said. Lizs essential argument is that, in their actions, young people in both countries are very entrepreneurial, independent, and enjoy the fruits of a liberal, dynamic economy. She thinks there is a latent enthusiasm for markets if we can reform things in a direction that enables these people to fulfil their wants and needs, like starting companies and buying homes.

During that September 2018 visit to Washington, Truss held off-the-record meetings on regulatory reform with representatives of Heritage as well as discussions with Americans for Tax Reform. Her visit was immediately followed by Cato and Hannans IFT publishing an ideal UK-US free trade deal that included input from the IEA and Heritage. It promoted a greater role for private firms in British education and healthcare, an end to the precautionary principle in British food regulation as well as watered-down environmental rules. (In her next role, as trade secretary, Truss would even appoint Hannan to the Board of Trade.)

It was around this time that she became engrossed in books by the American historian Rick Perlstein on the making of the Reagan revolution. These tell of how the Gipper adopted advice given to Richard Nixon by, of all people, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev: If the people believe theres an imaginary river out there, you dont tell them theres no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river. In Perlsteins telling of Reagans rise, that meant a cocktail of infectious optimism and cynical exploitation of social grievances.

By the time Truss became foreign secretary in 2021 and the prospect of a leadership election and the prize of 10 Downing Street came into view her ideology, rooted in the school of thought founded at Mont Pelerin, was long-established. Her ideological disposition is towards the likes of Robert Mundell, Alan Reynolds and Arthur Laffer, says Bourne, the original supply-side thinkers in the US who influenced the underpinnings of the Reagan administration. The basic idea is that monetary policy deals with inflation and that fiscal and especially tax policy has to deliver incentives for long-run growth.

Another inspiration is Rogernomics in 1980s New Zealand, when the Labour governments finance minister Roger Douglas slashed trade tariffs and non-tariff barriers and pioneered monetary policy targeting. (The legacy of that neoliberal experiment remains deeply divisive on the New Zealand left.)

So total is Trusss faith in free-market ideas and the networks that produced them that, now she is Prime Minister, the supposed free-market outriders are finding themselves being outridden by the sitting government. Littlewood of the IEA marvels at the scope of the unofficial Budget. I have long tried to fine-tune out criticism of Conservative governments for not being radical enough; now theyre being more radical than even we are requesting. He cites the governments commitment to scrap all remaining EU law as an example. Even when the IEA and Truss disagreed, the closeness was evident; its criticism of her energy price cap promptly elicited an explanatory call from No 10.

Old Tuftonians hold many of the senior jobs in her government. Matt Sinclair is the standout example, says Littlewood of Trusss chief economic adviser, formerly of the TPA. He is steeped in this world. Ruth Porter, deputy chief of staff, is an IEA alumna. Sophie Jarvis, No 10s political secretary, was formerly at the ASI. She will have hired and appointed people who are on board with her ideologically, agrees Bourne. With Kwarteng as Chancellor, as well as James Cleverly as Foreign Secretary and Jacob Rees-Mogg as Business Secretary, the major cabinet roles are held by true believers.

Free-market think tanks, like the IEA, that have long considered themselves to be outside the broad British consensus have used provocation and controversy to catch attention, shake things up and try to shift debates. Truss, observes Marc Stears of his former student, is now bringing that approach into government. She loves this idea that the action is in the reaction, prodding and provoking people. The unofficial Budget was like going to a slightly mad libertarian think-tank report launch.

He draws a contrast between Cameron, who took risks such as the Brexit referendum because he believed things were fundamentally stable, and Truss, who actually wants to destabilise things. She thinks the prevailing order is wrong and there is a need to break things to rebuild.

In Tuftonland, and in its US equivalent, the announcements of 23 September are seen as just the beginning, despite the reaction from the markets. Next up, it is hoped and anticipated: spending cuts to balance out the tax cuts.

But where and what to cut? In 2015 Bourne and Kwarteng co-authored a book, A Time for Choosing, that proposed halving the number of Whitehall departments. During her leadership campaign, Truss floated the possibility of regionalising public sector pay (this idea was quickly dropped). In his statement, Kwarteng hinted at coming welfare cuts.

There is also an expectation of more deregulation. Kwasis advisers talk of unveiling a whole series of supply-side reforms in the next six weeks, says Littlewood, hopefully: a permanent state of dramatic policy announcements.

Bourne cites childcare, infrastructure, energy and housing (street votes on city planning decisions, for example) as possible focuses, as well as farming (where there might be a quid pro quo where they scale back government support but relax regulations). And I expect this philosophy to apply to lifestyle freedoms, too, adds Littlewood. Deregulating ads for sugary drinks, McDonalds advertising on the London Underground, that sort of thing.

Think tanks, of course, do not need to worry about elections. But the Truss-Tufton mentality is that results trump politics. Her broad view is We have to show, not tell, says Bourne. We have to get on with free-market reforms and when they create results they create a baseline, and that wins hearts and minds. There are echoes of the Prime Ministers vision of market millennials here: that young people will come to recognise their small-state instincts when they feel the benefit of such politics put into action.

Littlewood acknowledges Trusss uphill electoral battle, but says it is time to start asking: What sort of reforms might be considered for the event that she wins the next election and has five more years of power?

Given the audacity of the Prime Ministers first moves in office and the dramatic market response, the mind boggles. The IEAs director is looking forward to Octobers annual conference of the Mont Pelerin Society in Oslo, and Randian discussions on big-picture libertarian topics such as whether cryptocurrencies will make state fiat currency obsolete over the coming decades.

[See also: Liz Trusss free-market experiment is a threat to economic stability]

Some on the left will read this article, note the apocalyptic market numbers and economic forecasts, and wonder whether it gives Truss too much credit to ponder the ideas, thinkers and institutions influencing her policies. But it is precisely the radicalism in a reckless, negative sense of the term that makes understanding this world-view so important. Arguably, the influence of institutions such as the IEA and the TPA, and their American cousins, has been too little scrutinised. So too has the intellectual assumptions they have popularised. In one televised debate during the summers Conservative leadership contest, Rishi Sunak took direct aim at Trusss unfunded tax cuts, saying they would drive up inflation; she replied, with total conviction, that responding to inflation was simply a matter of being tough enough on the monetary supply. Yet the discussion that ensued was concerned not with the underlying world-view that this revealed, but whether or not Sunak had mansplained to her. Substance in politics matters, for better or for worse. It demands engagement and sceptical analysis.

Moreover, for opponents of the Conservatives, studying the heritage of the ideas now being enacted by the most ideologically driven cabinet since the 1980s is key to understanding their political weaknesses. It would be foolish blithely to assume that Truss and her government will self-combust. Bad governments demand more opposition, not less. And opposition requires understanding.

The Mont Pelerin network and the institutions it manifested in London and Washington has long contained certain tensions that can be exploited by opponents of the Truss project. One tension is that between a Thatcherite insistence on sound money and a Reaganite debt-funded dash for growth. Why did the Mont Pelerin vision express itself as the former in Britain and the latter in America? Asking that question reveals fundamental differences between the two economies: the American dollar is more formidable than the British pound and the US has more expansionary demographics (a younger population with a higher birth rate), making the politics of debt, and how the market views it, different in the two countries.

Related to this are the manifold differences between the Chicago and Austrian schools of free-market economics. The former is associated with Milton Friedman and tends to assert the perfect rationalism of markets and the value of printing money; the latter is associated with Ludwig von Mises and asserts that limited knowledge can lead to market failure, is sceptical about money printing and generally places less faith in achieving mastery over market conditions through data.

Another tension within small-state philosophy concerns what should fill the gap thats left when the state retreats. For some, like Truss, omniscient market forces are the answer, and the goal is a society of empowered individuals market millennials and the like freed from limitations.

For others, the answer is non-market, but also non-state, forms of communal endeavour, like cooperatives. Think of localist Tory MPs like Neil OBrien, Michael Gove, Jesse Norman, urges Stears. Theyre not big state, or big market either, but more believers in bottom-up power. It is from this Tory cooperative tradition that he reckons some of the most forceful opposition to Trusss free-market experiment could come.

Finally, there is the tension between the libertarian claim to be on the side of the little guy and the dissenter, and the reality that Tuftonland and the Massachusetts Avenue small-state set are extremely close to big-business insiders. When Ronald Reagan came to power with his Heritage-approved plan in 1980, the consumer-rights advocate Ralph Nader called it right: Reagan really is much more of a corporatist than a conservative.

Over the course of his presidency corporate welfare, with subsidies benefiting large market insiders, flourished and the national debt tripled. Margaret Thatcher, though more averse to debt, provided established British firms with a similar boon in the UK, in the form of the privatisation of nationalised utilities and other state-owned assets.

Truss may wax poetic to rooms of supposedly Hayekian Washingtonians about market forces allowing the young to flower and the anti-establishment to flourish, but her actions and policies are recipes to lock in the market and societal power of the already powerful.

On the visit to Washington in 2018, in which she gave that speech, Liz Truss tellingly met not with small firms of entrepreneurs but the American Legislative Exchange Council (a lobbying body that has been accused of giving big firms influence in American politics). So far, her environment policies seem designed to serve the interests of big polluters rather than market insurgents in the green-energy sector; her deregulation push appears tailored to the interests of existing market insiders with big lobbying budgets; and her proposed tax cuts will certainly benefit the already rich, rather than the worst off. None of this is a hymn to individuality and non-conformity. It is corporatism.

The challenge now for Liz Trusss opponents, both inside the Conservative family and on the left, is to engage with these tensions and use them to expose the contradictions of the great unruly experiment being rolled out from Downing Street. Because to do so is to contest what is really driving it; to have a chance of changing the public debate and building a solid foundation for a different and better national project. Bad ideas make a much more obvious and persuasive target than bad intentions.

[See also: The making and meaning of Giorgia Meloni]

Read more:

Liz Truss and the rise of the libertarian right - The New Statesman

The Aligarh Muslim University Islamic Studies departments decision to remove courses offered on two Islamist thinkers the Indian-Pakistani founder of the Jamaat Islami, Maulana Syed Abul Ala Maududi ( 1903- 1979), and the chief ideologue of Egypts Muslim Brotherhood movement Sayyid Qutb (1906- 1966) has been slowly simmering on Muslim social media since last month.

AMUs decision has also been criticised in these columns by Irfan Ahmed, an Indian professor of sociology who teaches in Turkey.

Its a truism to say that a university is a place of higher studies where free thinking and contestation of ideas should be the norm. Therefore, at first sight, the removal of a course on any thinker seems rather un-university like. But if one were to look deeper, and examine the ideology and politics behind designing such courses, one cannot help wondering whether these thinkers were made a part of the curriculum in order to develop their critical faculty by exposing them to different strands of thoughts or to indoctrinate students. If the aim was the former, it is worth asking how come AMU buries the religious thoughts and writings of its founder, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, while Maududis thought and ideology is deemed worthy of such academic recognition that an entire course is devoted to him?

Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the reason behind the different attitudes towards these thinkers, even though calling Maududi a thinker is a bit of a stretch despite the fact that he has been the most important ideologue of Islamism or political Islam. Delineating these differences is also necessary because Sir Syed and Maududi are personifications of the ongoing struggle within Islam between reform and revival, between rationality and dogmatism, between humanism and jihadism a struggle in which Sir Syed has been losing to Maududi everywhere, including in the very institution that he founded.

Also read: Shun the Hate Letter Signed by 25 Academics Not Books by Maududi

Nothing illustrates the difference between the two more clearly than the never ending saga of Salman Rushdie and the recent attempt to assassinate him, and how most of those who have vented at the removal of Maududis course from AMU have kept a discreet silence at the murderous assault on Rushdie. But more of it later.

Both Sir Syed and Maududi remained preoccupied with the political fortunes of Muslims in India. Sir Syed was a realist, a rationalist and a cold pragmatist. His focus was limited to preserving and promoting the interests of his class the ashrf the old Muslim ruling class of foreign origin. He knew that their days were over, and therefore, he would be content with such share in power, with some weightage, as they thought themselves entitled to a pension for having once been the rulers. It was with this purpose that he founded the Mohammedan Anglo Oriental College in 1877, which became Aligarh Muslim University in 1920.

Sir Syeds realism and pragmatism put him on the path of rationalism, which he applied to reforming religious thought in Islam. Being a staunch believer, he saw a perfect harmony between the revealed truth of the scripture and the natural world. As he elegantly put it, there could be no contradiction between the word of God and the work of God the former being the Quran and the latter being the natural world. Being a man of reason he wasnt a religious supremacist, and tried to inculcate a spirit of tolerance and respect for other religions. He wrote the first ever Muslim commentary on the Bible, and repeatedly pleaded with fellow Muslims to stop cow slaughter. Sir Syeds scientific rationalism in religion had the potential to foster the secular growth of society, and humanise religious thought.

Sir Syed in Punjab. Photo: Wikipedia/Public Domain

However, nowhere has this attempt failed more miserably than at the institution which he founded. The aborted reformation gave birth to revivalism. Failed modernity led to fake modernisation as the Muslim educated class took to its superficial aspects, just as the 18th century Indian princes had taken to European military technology, without understanding the science behind it.

Whatever Sir Syeds politics, his Islam was not political. He stood against Jamaluddin Afghanis Pan-Islamism as he understood that ideological politicisation of Islam would make it more intolerant and violent than ever, and bring it into conflict with the British empire, which would doom the interest of the class he was committed to protect.

As for Maududi, he has been the prophet of political Islam. He is to Islamism what Karl Marx is to Communism. He not only wanted the restoration of Islamic rule in India, but wanted the entire world to be under it. Since reconquest was no longer possible, recourse was taken to dawat or proselytisation. Seeing some decolonial aspects in Maududis agenda as Irfan Ahmed does is either analytical navet or a wilful misreading of his literature.

Nile Green, in his book, Global Islam: A Very Short Introduction, clearly traces the continuity of idea from Maududi to Qutb to Khomeini and the Afghan Mujahideen. Both Osama bin Laden and Al Zawahiri have been deeply influenced by Syed Qutb who, in fact, was a channel of dissemination of Maududis ideas in the Arab world in particular and the Muslim world at large. Maududis followers might feel embarrassed at the excesses of ISIS, Al Qaida or Taliban, but couldnt point to any fundamental ideological differences with them. If there are any differences in specifics and details between these organisations and Maududian thoughts, they do not amount to anything more than the ones between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

In the last few decades, across regions and sects, every extremist Islamic movement whether Islamic State or Al Qaida or Taliban has drawn direct ideological inspiration from him. He coined the terminology Islamic State, and posited the inseparability of religion and politics. For him the establishment of the Islamic state was a religious obligation, like ritual prayers and fasting, without which Islam couldnt be practiced in its totality.

Abul Ala Maududi. Photo: Facebook/Abul Ala Maududi

Maududi was less a scholar and more an ideologue. His scholarship was limited to transforming Islam into an ideology that is, into an explanatory program towards a defined political goal. He picked some generic words from the Quran and turned them into specific terminologies to systematise the ideology of political Islam. The novel meanings with which these words were invested had little semantic justification, and no precedence in Islamic scholarship. That he could forge a powerful ideology with no more than a dozen words and phrases redounds to his mental acuity and persuasive ability.

In one of the foundational books wherein Maududi worked out the fundamental concepts and theoretical basis of political Islam, Quran Ki Chaar Buniyadi Istalahen (Four Basic Terminologies of Quran), he imbued commonly understood words such as ilah (the worshipped), rab (the sustainer), deen (religion) and ibadat (worship) with political connotations wherein ilah is the sovereign, rab is the political lord, deen is the political system, and ibadat is conformity to the Islamic political order. He coined the term hukumat-e-Iilahiya, the divine sovereignty, and so contrasted it with popular sovereignty as to delegitimise secular democracy. There are no greater abominations in the Maududian corpus than democracy, secularism and socialism. No wonder the Islamists remain implacably hostile to liberals and leftists.

Every political and economic system that was not based on Maududis conception of the Quranic model of state was regarded as taghut (idolatrous profanity) and jahiliyya (ignorance). The latter has a specific meaning in Islamic history. It connotes the dark age in Arabia which preceded Islam. Muslim scholars never ever used it for any other non-Islamic entity, epoch, practice or polity. Maududi, however, deployed it for every system which didnt correspond to his utopian vision of the Medina state under Prophet Muhammad and the Rashidun caliphs. Since nothing could resemble Medina of the Prophets times, the entire world was cast in the typology of jahiliyya most of all, socialist, secular, democratic nationalism.

Sayyid Qutb. Photo: Public domain.

Sayyid Qutb, the ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood movement of Egypt, has been Maududis most influential ideological successor. It was through Qutb and the Brotherhood that Maududis ideas spread to the Arab world, and came to be adopted as the ideology of the petrodollar-induced Salafi-Wahabi surge.

Qutb expanded the meaning of jahiliyya to include the Muslim states which had taken to secular nationalism. More crucially, he broadened the concept of takfeer (apostasy) to include those Muslims who didnt share his vision of the Islamic state. Once declared kafir, they could legitimately be killed. Jihad became an inescapable imperative for the revolutionary establishment of Sharia based government.

Maududi and Qutbs concepts had their greatest success in Shia Iran, where, in 1979, Khomeini would lead an Islamic revolution of the kind Maududi had first theorized. Earlier, Khomeini had written a book Hukumat-e Islami (Islamic Rule), reprising Maududis ideas.

It was Khomeini who, in 1989, issued the fatwa sentencing Salman Rushdie to death. If it was about religion alone, the fatwa should have come, most of all, from Saudi Arabia. The fatwa was a political and ideological act, and we have traced the lineage of this ideology.

That ideology could not be most dissimilar to what Sir Syed Ahmad Khan espoused. William Muir, an Orientalist and colonial administrator, had written a book, The Life of Mahomet, in which, on the basis of information culled from the source books of Islamic history, he made snide remarks about Prophet Muhammad. Sir Syeds way of responding to him was reasoned, rational and academic. After painstaking research, he produced a voluminous book which set at rest all the issues raised by Muir.

Nothing illustrates better the difference between Islam the religion and Islam the politics than how Sir Syed and Khomeini responded to the discourse of insult and hurt sentiment.

It is right to question and criticise AMU for removing a course on Maududi and Qutb. Universities should not be censoring thought. But surely we also need to be worried about the de facto censorship of Sir Syeds thoughts and his approach to Islam in the institution he founded.

Ibn Khaldun Bharati is the pseudonym of a writer whose employers policies on publications do not allow him to use his real name. He tweets at @IbnKhaldunIndic.

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Debate: Theres Anger at AMU Dropping Maududi, Qutb. But Why is Sir Syeds Islam Not Taught? - The Wire

The causes and consequences of corruption, maladministration and ethical lapses are complex, but not less deleterious for the way that they undermine cohesion and stability, erode trust in the state and society and retard economic expansion. At the base of these problems is the permissibility of corruption, which is arguably worse than corruption itself. This permissibility is usually driven by emulation, and the manipulation of identity politics for personal or in-group gain.

Strict economistic explanations of rent-seeking or market distortion are all well and good if one considers the economy as something disembedded from society, and if economic rationalism was the only way to understand or explain the world. There is a whole body of work by economists on the topic. The one example that readily comes to mind is Gary Beckers argument that the economic approach can provide a unified framework for understanding all human behaviour.

Beckers postulate is philosophically, theoretically and methodologically problematic never mind the challenges of public policymaking in dynamic and diverse societies Thats a discussion for another time.

Orthodox economics can only imagine explaining the totality of human endeavour, an imaginary construct shaped by a belief that economics is a science, like physics. This physics envy is influenced by a cognate belief that it is possible to build models that are as predictive as those in physics and has, in turn, created a false sense of mathematical precision in the field. The beauty of models cannot be mistaken for truth, as Paul Krugman wrote after the most recent crisis of global capitalism in 2008. But lets set orthodox economics aside.

The problem of corruption is fundamentally social in the sense that it originates in society, and is rendered permissible by social relations, emboldened as it is by an often deep-seated sense of entitlement, exceptionalism, of insider-outsider politics as much as it is by greed, avarice and egregious lapses in ethical behaviour. Under such conditions, corruption becomes culturally assimilated and considered as normal, and part of widespread behaviour.

I always come back to my visits to southern Italy, especially Sicily, and the refrain, tutti colpevoli, nessuno colpevole (when everyone is guilty, then no one is guilty). Put another way: if you arrest one person for doing something wrong, you might as well arrest the entire village. This has to do with permissibility as much as it has to do with emulation which will be discussed below. Parenthetically, we should be clear that there is nothing intrinsically corrupt about Sicilians or any racial, ethnic or religious group for that matter.

Speaking of Italy, the city state of Mediaeval Venice, which 500 years ago was the most powerful entity in the Mediterranean, was run by an oligarchy of aristocrats who were at the time fairly open to new ideas and people. Openness and competition made possible innovation, expanded economic and financial exchange, raised wealth and prosperity and expanded justice in La Serenissima (the serene). To understand the fall of Venice, if I may be so bold, we may want to look at the time when the elite became dominated by family ties, and shut out newcomers or outsiders from economic opportunities at the beginning of the 14th century.

The lesson here is that this type of enclosure of opportunities, access and limitation of competition effectively emboldens families and groups of people (in-groups based on ethnic, linguistic, tribal or any number of affiliations and solidarities) who imagine themselves entitled. This sense of entitlement has the power to render corruption of the in-group permissible.

One unintended consequence of in-group politics and enclosure is a type of emulative effect that ripples up and down and across families, communities and society. For instance, this emulation starts when children see what their parents do and then emulate them. If parents can get away with unethical behaviour, it becomes easy for children to test the boundaries of permissibility. When community leaders, prelates or educators act in shameful ways, their followers and students may believe that such conduct is permissible and they, too, push the boundaries of good or ethical behaviour a little further. The same may be said about business people, politicians, elected leaders and public servants who pursue material gains unethically. They set examples for ordinary folk to emulate.

The basis of this permissibility of corruption and of emulation lies precisely in notions of exceptionalism, exclusivity or in tribal, racial, ethnic or religious solidarities. These solidarities have been on display in places like South Africa (the place where I was born and raised) where corruption led to a circling of wagons among those implicated in graft, and the indefensible becomes permissible and everyone (in the in-group) wants a piece of the action, so to speak.

This permissibility, at least in South Africa, has its origins in the crude belief propagated by members of the ruling alliance (the African National Congress, South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions) that the struggle against apartheid was not a struggle to be poor, and that it was, now, our turn to eat. In fairness, this attitude gained momentum after the retirement of Nelson Mandela and is associated mainly with the rise of Jacob Zuma, when he was deputy president under Thabo Mbeki (Mandelas successor). The hollowing out of the state began when Zuma became head of the ANC in December 2007, and eventually president of the country in 2009.

That was when the floodgates of corruption, maladministration, expanding patronage and nepotism were opened wide. The state had become hollowed out by what we came to know as State Capture; when a loose affiliation of friends of the ruling alliance, in some cases linked directly to Zuma, raided the countrys coffers and left the country on its knees.

By the time he left office, in February 2018, Zuma faced a range of charges; from bribery to fraud, racketeering and money laundering, and stood accused of turning the state into his personal piggy bank. Since his departure from the presidency, Zuma has managed to avoid imprisonment. In June 2021, he was sentenced to jail for 15 months for contempt of court after he ignored instructions to be part of a corruption inquiry. After he handed himself over to the authorities on July 7, his supporters, family and members of this ethnic group allegedly prompted what became the worst violence of the democratic era. He finagled his way out of spending time in jail on spurious claims of ill health. He remains free.

One way to understand the solid support Zuma enjoys is to recognise the way that identity politics is manipulated, how in-group members are considered to be inherently and eternally innocent, and how they deflect blame and responsibility by (among others) blaming politicisation of the judiciary or raising conspiracy theories. At the worst end of a spectrum of manipulation of identity politics is the scapegoating of outsiders. We should be clear, there is no harm in celebrating ones heritage, religion, ethnicity or culture with the caveat that culture is dynamic and changes over time but when identity is used as a weapon, or as a fig leaf for misdeeds, it becomes a danger to society. Anyone who considers their own identity as superior, or inherently innocent, renders any wrongdoing (corruption) by in-group members as permissible. It is difficult for orthodox economics to explain the social and cultural permissibility of corruption.

Anyway, as the classical economist Alfred Marshall said late in the 19th century, after he moved away from mathematical formalism and became more interested in moral philosophy and ethics (I paraphrase): People in every era and every age should address their problems in their own ways and based on their own unique conditions.

I assume he meant that societies differ across time and place, and that analyses of sometimes discrete social phenomena and practices (like corruption) may not always fit bog-standard economic models.

What we cannot escape is the deleterious effects of corruption across state, society and the political economy.

Dr Ismail Lagardien is a visiting professor in the Faculty of Management at Multimedia University. He was executive dean of Business and Economics Sciences at Nelson Mandela University, and worked in the Office of the Chief Economist of the World Bank.

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My Say: Allowing corruption is a greater danger than corruption itself - The Edge Markets MY

Olsson didnt really promote her Date Me doc, but Chana Messinger, a teacher and blogger, tweeted it out in March 2021, saying, I love this genre of thing: people putting themselves out there, saying clearly and publicly that they want a partner, and knowing who they are and what they're looking for. Messinger went on to share a thread of some of her favorite Date Me docs, a celebration of the subculture. Its fascinating to browse through them, and a little voyeuristic. They also require a much longer attention span than Tinder.

I reached out to Olsson to ask her what inspired her to put out a Date Me doc. The pandemic is part of this story, because of course it is. For obvious reasons, I was not going to house parties, group events, or meeting friends-of-friends very often, Catherine Olsson told me over Twitter DM. I wanted something to enable friend-of-friend intros in the pandemic world.

Mostly, though, Olsson just wanted to filter out people who arent into this style of dating, and stop relying on happenstance to find the right match. If spontaneity hasnt worked yet, why not help it along? she wrote to me.

All of this is deeply rational. You might also say practical, except the distinction between practical and rational is an important one to make in Silicon Valley these days, because rationalism is now its own influential subculture. Almost all the people cited in this story identify as rationalists or, as Olah put it, hold values associated with effective altruism. Olsson said she doesnt think the dating doc is a widely adopted format outside of these circles: This was always(?) meant as something to pass around within our subcultural communities. Its a by nerds, for nerds format!

But of course, dating, and love, arent always optimizable. We think we know what we want, but were actually quite crappy at assessing what will make us happy. Or, as WIRED previously explained, Good romantic partners are difficult to predict with data. Desired romantic partners are easy to predict with data. And that suggests that many of us are dating all wrong.

Like a lot of people, Ive used dating apps on and off, and my most profound realization, which is not very profound, is that the people I find myself completely drawn to in real-life conversations are often people I might have passed on in an app. Also, Ive never done a Date Me doc, because it sounds mortifying, but I did once publish a 5,000-word feature that practically shouted my singleness, so same difference.

Date Me docs do seem to be a natural next step in the evolution of online dating, not because the outcomes are necessarily better, but because the docs themselves feel at least like an effective form of self-expression. They are the anti-app, in that they embrace the vastness of the open web and shirk the ideals, dodgy algorithms, and templates of containerized dating apps. Apps and web, web and apps, and on and on we go. In a way, this is the natural ebb and flow of dating, too. We alternately broaden our dating pools and shrink them, depending on our needs and desires. Or, we verticalizenarrowing our options because of religion or culture or ageand when that doesnt work, we go horizontal again. (And I dont mean that as a euphemism, although, sure, why not.)

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'Date Me' Google Docs and the Hyper-Optimized Quest for Love - WIRED

Very recently I had to suffer a management seminar trying what seems to be the new fad amongst the management Gurus, i.e., linking (and whereby insulting) the Indian scriptures and philosophical ideas with wealth creation.

Initially, I was a bit sympathetic to this development as I felt that it introduced the young Indian citizens to what their education system has tried hard to keep them away from, but lately I am developing my doubt, for a simple reason.

Most of the key Indian philosophical ideas are untranslatable in English purely because Sanskrit and English are languages of different cultures that had very little in common.

One is/was a language of Advaita and other has evolved to deal with the needs of a culture based on the virtue of selfishness, so English never had the need to imbibe the ideas that Indian philosophies had evolved forcing Sanskrit to deal with them and forge equivalent words to communicate them.

I wont describe this as a lacuna of either, but I see that now we have a problem looming ahead, and that is people trying to translate Indic words like Karma, Moksha, Maya and also Advaita, the word that has pinched my writing nerve today.

The Guru that I was listening to translated Advaita as monotheism, and I understand that it is a well-accepted translation that is now used to describe a concept that, for me, is everything but monotheism.

As we all are now very busy discussing religions, especially on social media, the monotheism and its presumed counterpart, polytheism are used to distinguish between some of the major religions. i.e., Islam and even Christianity are referred to being monotheist or One-God religions, while Hinduism is insulted on multiple counts by referring to it as a religion and that too polytheist or having-many-Gods.

As it is not safe to discuss any religion other than Hinduism, I will skirt the monotheists, as these religions are not exactly mono (one) in nature. They divide the humanity into two parts, i.e., the believers and non-believers, so they actually recognise and also forge a duality of us and them, with them, the outsiders not really qualifying for anything.

If I return to the safer pastures of discussing Hinduism, erroneously referred to as a polytheist religion, the two words that hold the centre-stage are Advaita and its counter or corollary as per your choice, Dvaita.

What is broadly described as Hinduism are various ways of life built around on the Advaita or Dvaita based description of the universe. As it is impossible to tackle a debate that had once lasted for more than a thousand years in Bharat, I will not take up differentiating Advaita and Dvaita here, but instead ponder over an idea that is probably the most counterintuitive one ever explored by a human mind.

To translate Advaita as monotheism is a travesty for me, as it insults one of the most incredible hypotheses ever proposed by humanity to describe the true nature of reality/existence.

The problem with monotheism is that it recognises existence of a God, that Advaita completely and totally rejects. In fact, Advaita actually rejects everything along with accepting everything, making it impossible to behold for any (unprepared) human brain.

The closest we can get to Advaita in terms of theism-translation can be null-theism, but that too only for the sake of saving the word from distortion that is harming it today.

Advaita stands alone.

If you can grasp its meaning, everything dissolves, you and the reality.

It is not a word comprehensible for the western or rational mind that is trained to consider knowledge as a way of differentiating between things. The Gyana that helps one to understand Advaita is exactly opposite to the idea of knowledge as described by the rationalism of west.

The post-renaissance notion of knowledge that classifies everything, separates reality into parts and then tries to study the cause-and-effect relationships between these parts is actually Agyana when looked through the lens of Advaita.

Advaita is a recognition of the ultimate truth that this differentiation that human mind conjures up is caused by Maya (another untranslatable word that will need more than a thousand words to touch upon).

Be it Advaita or many such words found in Indian philosophies, there is a dire need to NOT force-fit them into English, as if they get distorted (as they already are getting), it will lead to destruction of an amazing school of thought explored by humanity.

These words are a cultural heritage not just for Hindus, they belong to the humanity at large. The best way to preserve them is to leave them alone or discuss them within the context of the schools of thoughts that explored them.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

END OF ARTICLE

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Advaita: Beyond monotheism and polytheism - Times of India

Pakistan is going through the most toxic times of its history and many say that the current situation is much more dangerous than the 1971 crisis which led to the division of Pakistan. RAW and other intelligence agencies inimical to Pakistan are using the tool of sabotage and subversion relentlessly.

After successfully poisoning the minds of the Bengalis, they have now poisoned the minds of the big segments of Balochis, Sindhis, Muhajirs, Pakhtuns, and Gilgitis, and have created a split among the Punjabis through subversion.The youth is their favorite target whose raw minds can be easily subverted. Their whole focus is now riveted on the army which they feel is the only obstacle in their way of accomplishing their sinister objective of undoing Pakistan.

Read more: Pakistan Politics: Race to the bottom

This silent and invisible war has cloned the minds of the majority of the younger generation. This threat has become more dangerous than the Indian threat or the threat posed by terrorism.

Building a strong defense against subversive war through effective counter Psy Ops is the need of the hour and must be undertaken by the educated elders, teachers, professors and parents in every house and educational institution. The target of our enemies is the trunk of the army, where lies the center of gravity and security of Pakistan. Unfortunately, the ones who are required to provide guidance have become a party and are misleading the youth under misplaced beliefs.

The mostly unemployed younger generation, disillusioned with the corrupt systems and fed up with leaders deficient in morality and leadership qualities, have got misled and distracted by the political slogans of Imran Khan (IK) that were anti-status quo. They have become obsessed with the fanciful idea of gaining true freedom and building a new Pakistan free of corruption and other vices and practicing Hazrat Umars model of governance.

While the idea floated by IK a few years ago was brilliant, he could make no headway during his unfinished tenure, since he and his team were unprepared and not qualified to fulfill their delusional promises.

After his premature ouster last April, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise for IK, whose popularity was on the decline, the high wave of popularity has convinced him and his party leaders that victory with the two-thirds majority is within their grasping reach and all other parties would be washed out.

Read more: Senate Elections Welcome to Pakistan Politics!

He now wants to fulfill his rosy promises by returning to power at the earliest and is least bothered about the state of the economy which is at the edge of bankruptcy and is wholly controlled by the IMF, and all the state institutions are compromised and corrupted.

The unprecedented devastations caused by torrential rains and heavy flash floods have ruined the lives of millions and immediate relief and rehabilitation are required.

For IK, early elections are the remedy to all the ailments, but he doesnt trust the military, the judiciary, the ECP, and FIA and refuses to talk with any political leader or the government which he describes as the band of thieves.

With such a mindset, who will ensure free, fair, and transparent elections from within Pakistan? Would he like law enforcement agencies from abroad to maintain law and order in the polling booths, and a foreign team to come and conduct the idealistic elections? The foreigners would also fail due to hundreds of inherent flaws in the electoral system.

Having created an environment of lawlessness, defiance, distrust and extreme polarization, elections and not reforms are his priority.

He has successfully galvanized the middle class, particularly urban youth and women, veterans, and a large segment of serving officers, but he has yet to explain how he intends to do the impossible in his next rule and what changes he has made to his previous plan, which failed to deliver. Will he now be able to ensure financial discipline and how?

So far, its only rhetoric and promises, and no road map has been given on how he would pull out of the country deeply stuck in the 75 years old mess, and how he would remove the misgivings of the IMF, USA, EU, China and the Arab States?

The PTI is mending fences with Washington, but has the latter forgiven IK? The IMF turned down the request made by the KP govt at the behest of Shaukat Tareen and delivered the installment.

The pendulum of power has once again shifted towards the courts which are deeply involved in sorting out political issues since the parliament is almost dysfunctional.

Read more: Declining standard of Pakistani politics

The top four political leaders, NS, SS, Zardari and IK as well as large numbers of political leaders, are in the grip of the judiciary, which continues to remain selected and prejudiced. Its verdicts are mostly governed by the direction of the wind and not on merit.

As against the desire of the PTI to hold early elections, the PML N wants a level playing field for the elections. In their view, the field will be leveled once NS returns home and cases of corruption against him and others are quashed. Both sides have their arguments and counterarguments and the debate is acrimonious and never-ending.

The military which used to play the role of a referee is finding itself in a weak position for the first time since both the camps feel that they have been victims of military meddlesome roles. The army under Gen Bajwa has, however, reasserted its credibility in the eyes of the public in the ongoing flood relief operations.

The fight between the political parties and between the PTI and the military has been exacerbated and sensationalized by electronic and social media. All limits of ethics are crossed by the latter which is boosted by traditional anti-Pakistan and anti-army brigades, now joined by the veterans and the Pakistani ex-pats.

The effects of media war are so pungent that families have been divided and fissures created in the unassailable tree of the army.

The youth are fully charged up and are waiting for the call of their Messiah to clash with the law enforcement agencies with full force and irrespective of the grave consequences.

The PTI leaders are also eagerly waiting for the change in military command in late November this year, and are very hopeful that things would swing in its favor under the new COAS, not realizing that the military has its set procedures, doctrines and systems, which do not change with the change of top leadership.

One reason for his impatience and growing signs of frustration is the dozens of cases framed against him and his party leaders. He is haunted by the specter of his disqualification, and his party getting disbanded.

The beleaguered government under SS fighting for survival has so far failed on all fronts and its reputation is being smeared viciously by the PTI and its fans. The inflation has crossed the figures of 27% which was experienced only once before in 1975. Prices of daily commodities are rising and people are crying in agony. Floods have worsened the situation. It will be another miracle if Pakistan sails out of the choppy waters and reaches the shores of safety unscathed.

Read more: Pakistans politics: A game or serious business?

The only achievement made by the incumbent govt is that it has ensured its legal protection from the NAB by clipping its wings, and is now busy cutting down the powers of the apex courts. It is also claiming that it saved Pakistan from default, and is making efforts to put the country back on the rails. For that, it wants to complete its tenure by next September.

Read more: Growing menace of polarized politics in Pakistan

Under the prevailing grim political and security dynamics, there is no scope for dirty politics and greedy power struggles. The only way out of the ongoing multi-dimensional crises is lowering tempers, replacing emotions and pigheadedness with rationalism and accommodation, and sitting together to work out a political settlement that suits Pakistan and its national interests.

The political polarization is so deep-rooted and the society so sharply divided, that no party can subdue all others and have its way. The concept of an inclusive government seems to be gaining ground over one-party rule. There will have to be a give and take under the policy of reconciliation to break the political logjam which is shaking the foundations of the federation.

Emphasis should be on reforming the judiciary, decentralization of the political edifice, making more provinces, and reforming and strengthening local governments. This course adopted the fascist and autocratic tendencies of the rulers of three mainstream parties and would block the Bonapartist tendencies of the military.

The writer is a retired Brig, war veteran, defense, political and security analyst, international columnist, and author of five books with his sixth book under publication.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Global Village Space.

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Looming threats to Pakistans integrity - Global Village space

For some filmmakers, winning an Oscar marks the start of a new chapter. For Sebastin Lelio, it was the end of one.

In 2018, when the Chilean filmmaker won the Best International Feature award for his beloved trans character study A Fantastic Woman, he was emerging from a whirlwind of projects: He had already shot his first English-language feature, the British lesbian romance Disobedience, and was nearly finished with production on Gloria Bell, the English-language adaptation of his own 2013 midlife crisis crowdpleaser Gloria. With four movies in five years, Lelio had established himself as one of the most celebrated Latin American filmmakers working today and successfully brought his penchant for engaging, female-focused character studies to English-language audiences.

It was this big episode of my life where a lot of things happened, Lelio said in an interview with IndieWire over Zoom from his apartment in Chile. The pandemic times were an interesting moment to pull back from the hyper-demanding period of my life and think about what I wanted to do for the next few years.

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That opportunity came with The Wonder, a Netflix-produced drama starring Florence Pugh, which adapts Emma Donoghues 2018 novel about an English nurse in the Irish midlands assigned to look after an 11-year-old fasting girl in the 1860s. The movie attempts many layers at once: Its an elegant period piece akin to The Crucible about the corrosive impact of religious fervor, a fourth-wall-breaking interrogation attuned to the era of disinformation, and a winning showcase for Pugh that proves her current Marvel shenanigans havent eclipsed her penchant for tricky material. In a certain way, this is my first film after the Oscar, and there are a lot of reasons why it could have gone wrong, Lelio said. But I found cinematic pleasure in that challenge.

In Lelios sensitive, enigmatic treatment of the material, Pugh plays Lib, the nurse in question, as she comes to grips with her unusual assignment: Rather than caring for the girl (Kla Lord Cassidy), Lib must simply watch her as her condition slowly deteriorates to determine the cause of the ailment. While much of the small-town Catholic community insists the girls survival is a miracle, Lib wrestles with the medical urgency of the situation as she attempts to solve the mystery of the young womans condition before she dies. Shot on the outskirts of Dublin with The Power of the Dog cinematographer Ari Wegner bringing a rich tapestry of greens to the rural landscape, The Wonder unfolds as a kind of spiritual mystery with Pughs nurse as the detective at its center.

AFP via Getty Images

The Wonder went into production last fall, and Lelios recent credits helped him secure Pugh in the immediate aftermath of Black Widow and Hawkeye, not to mention the reportedly troubled production of Dont Worry Darling earlier in the year. The Wonder was the ultimate palette cleanser. I knew of Sebastians work before meeting him, Pugh explained via email from the Dune 2 set in Europe. Its always a thrill when you know how intriguing and beautiful a directors eye is before working with them.

It also helped that, while Donoghue adapted the initial script from her own novel, the latest version that went to Pugh was co-written by Lelio and Alice Birch, who also wrote the dark drama Lady Macbeth that gave Pugh her breakout role in 2016. Alice was very happy when Florence signed on, Lelio said. She is an actress who brings a great level of interpretation to her roles. She makes you want to be on her side. You feel invited into a film because of her magnetism and strength. The screenwriters did another pass when Pugh signed on. We had to rethink the script in a way, Lelio said. The energy of the scenes were redefined by her presence.

Lelio himself first encountered the story of The Wonder when British producer Ed Guiney (Room) passed it along after they worked together on Disobedience. At the time, Guiney was already developing the project with co-producer Tessa Ross. Lelio said he was able to related to the central premise in unexpected ways. I really connected with the experiences of Lib as an unwanted foreigner arriving to a place where she has to face all these people, he said. She thinks the journey has to do with her work, but its much stronger, more intense, more life-changing than that.

As he turned over the premise in his head, he thought about how the Irish town, which is recovering from years of famine, suddenly becomes obsessed with the plight of a girl who can live without food. Its a really poetic idea, he said, and it requires a level of precision that I was willing to try.

AIDAN MONAGHAN/NETFLIX

He chipped away at Donoghuesdraft to craft a greater subjectivity around Libs mindset as she works through the situation. While attempting to befriend the girl and keep the towns intrusive councilmen at bay, Lib also forms an unusual relationship with an investigative journalist (Tom Burke) who shares her skepticism about the situation. The script evolved to better convey Libs sense of responsibility as she realizes the danger facing her young patient.

There is a lot of thinking going on, so I really wanted the viewer to feel like her thoughts were palpable, Lelio said. Pugh said she found it challenging to dial back Libs discomfort with the religious standards around her, recognizing that the character couldnt always express her contempt for her surroundings. Lib was an incredibly realistic and open-minded character to play, she wrote. While that was easy morally to understand, it was also tricky to find that balance. The instinct for her to push back had to be tame and discreet, which is always tricky for me. She was pleased to find that Lelio encouraged her to keep searching for a subtle middle ground. We felt very connected the moment we met, she wrote. I felt very safe and heard instantly.

Lelio was additionally compelled to heighten the sense of worlds colliding in the movie the idea that every perspective can be informed by ingrained biases and chose a risky device to bookend the film. The Wonder opens with an obvious film set as a voiceover explains that the movie is about to begin. The filmmaker said he was inspired by everything from The Woman Next Door to Jean-Luc Godards Contempt in his effort to establish a meta component to the movie. The suggestion is that this is artifice, and you will believe in this artifice, and you will forget that its there, he said. For me, thats a key element for this film, because its about the collision between systems of belief the Catholic system and the scientific system, rationalism crashing against religion or magical thinking. The girl is somehow trapped at the center of this story, and Lib is trying to free her from it.

The world-building was aided by Wegner, who had just finished production The Power of the Dog, another small-scale period piece in which people maintain secrets about their true feelings due to the restrictions of their time. I consider her a co-creator, Lelio said. We created this provisional rock band where Ari was one of the main players. Shes a great artist. I had been moving towards more designed approaches to filmmaking, more controlled. This script has elements of psychological drama, suspense, and it really required a defined cinematic language. I was hoping to make an elegant film, but was in awe of how far Ari could take that visually.

Lelio said the production pushed him to think in broader terms than the aesthetic limits of his previous works, most of which are more straightforward. Theres something dreamlike about this whole thing, he said. That excited me as an artistic problem.

Now, hes back to considering a few different projects, including one that would bring him back to Chile. (Bride, a genre-bending feature hes attached to direct for A24 with Scarlett Johansson set to star, hasnt even gone into pre-production yet.) I want to keep exploring different challenges, new territories, he said. I think this new film shows that hunger.

The Wonder premieres at the 2022 Telluride Film Festival. It opens theatrically in November and streams on Netflix in December.

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Florence Pugh and Sebastin Lelio on the Battle Between Religion and Science in The Wonder - IndieWire

Most observers of the Supreme Court expect that it will declare affirmative action unconstitutional next year in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. The plaintiffs case isnt strong. Asian American students are admitted in lower numbers than their grades and standardized-test scores alone would predict, but most of the statistical disparity is attributable not to affirmative action but to admissions considerations such as regional diversity, athletic talent, alumni and donor preferences, and subjective evaluation all of which favor white applicants at the expense of Asian Americans. None of that is likely to change the outcome: Its enough to count the justices nominated by Republican presidents to predict the courts decision. Legal analysis is beside the point.

Still, legal analysis matters, even when its a fig leaf for politics. Americans look to the courts not only to resolve specific disputes, but also for more broadly applicable ideas about justice. The rationales offered by the courts can shape, expand, or limit our ideals. Indeed, as the apparently imminent demise of affirmative action nears, the legal basis for the policy, diversity, has come to define the national and even the global discussion of racial justice. And while the ideal of diversity has encouraged modest efforts to promote racial integration, the term diversity has also become a lazy stand-in for any discussion of the generations of race-based exclusion and exploitation that make race-conscious hiring and college admissions necessary. In this way, diversity has encouraged us to ignore and minimize past injustices and distorted our understanding of what justice requires today.

In the early 1970s, when an American talked about racial justice, she would use terms like civil rights, integration, or maybe even Black Power. Today she will speak of diversity. Everyone to the left of Marjorie Taylor Greene claims to value diversity: diverse neighborhoods, diverse workplaces, diverse police forces, diverse political parties, and, of course, diverse classrooms and campuses. Fortune 500 corporations, the Chamber of Commerce, and exclusive private social clubs all pledge to promote diversity.

That represents a certain type of progress. But diversity is not the same as justice. It is a substitute for justice. Like saccharine instead of sugar in diet soda, diversity serves some of the functions of justice, and also takes its place. Diversity has made justice seem redundant. Because it has become a regular part of our diet, its easy to forget what the real thing tastes like.

As we anticipate the end of the affirmative-action era, it might help to look back at how we arrived at our tense consensus about diversity, and why.

In the 1970s an aspiring medical student named Allan Bakke was denied admission to the University of California at Davis medical school. Black applicants with lower grades and test scores than his were admitted under an affirmative-action program. Bakke sued the university and took his case to the Supreme Court, which issued a split opinion.

Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., the author of what is, by jurisprudential convention, considered to be the controlling opinion (the court splintered 4-1-4, and Powells opinion provided the narrowest basis for the holding), opined that to be legally permissible, an affirmative-action plan would have to serve a compelling governmental interest and be narrowly tailored to further that interest. Crucially, he stipulated that an interest in remedying what he called the amorphous harm of societal discrimination was insufficient to justify race-based affirmative action. In other words, affirmative action would be unlawful if the reason a university adopted it was to correct the racial injustices of society. But, he added, affirmative action could be permissible if it was designed to achieve the pedagogical benefits that come with a diverse student body. That was the birth of the modern idea of diversity.

Although most progressives today avidly defend his logic in Bakke, Powell was not an advocate of racial equality. To the contrary, he was an unapologetic reactionary. Before his ascent to the bench, Powell wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce calling on big business to use its money and political influence to reverse what he saw as a rising tide of political activism coming not only from extremists of the far left but also from the college campus and intellectual and literary journals. Indeed, higher education was a major focus of Powells call to arms: He complained that leftists, such as the consumer advocate Ralph Nader and the criminal-defense lawyer William Kunstler, were warmly welcomed on college campuses and had indoctrinated students to criticize the free-enterprise system. He approvingly cited a commentator who bemoaned that colleges such as Yale were graduating scores of bright young men who are practitioners of the politics of despair and despise the American political and economic system. Powell in a barely veiled attack on the value of academic freedom also noted that colleges benefited from tax exemptions and from the largess of successful business people, and suggested that those ties could and should be exploited to shift the conversation on Americas campuses in a more conservative, business-friendly direction.

Given the tone and focus of the Powell Memo, its not surprising that Powell seized the controversy over affirmative action as an opportunity to influence the ideological tenor of higher education. His 1978 opinion in Bakke effectively requires that affirmative action be justified not only by a compelling interest but also in a manner that defers to the political and economic status quo and is unlikely to feed the politics of despair. The vague idea of diversity fits the bill, whereas a more specific rationale focused on the need to account and correct for generations of racial exploitation and hierarchy does not. For Powell (and, alas, for us all) any justification of affirmative action that cites the long, ugly history of American racism is likely to be legally unacceptable despite being both a more compelling and more specific reason than diversity.

In effect, Bakke functioned as a gag order on college administrators when it came to discussing race in higher education. Before Bakke, affirmative action was widely understood to be a response to the legacy of Jim Crow segregation and, by extension, slavery. It was an outgrowth of the civil-rights initiatives of the 1960s that were designed to complete the long-thwarted project of Reconstruction. Affirmative action was a small part of a much larger reckoning with Americas racial history. Diversity was part of the conversation, but it was only one of many reasons selective colleges employed affirmative action.

A special report on the imperiled future of race-conscious admissions.

For instance, a 1969 publication of the Stanford Medical School cited the need to remedy societal discrimination: The Medical College Admission Test may be inaccurate in indicating the basic ability and motivation of a minority student who has been subjected to social barriers. The chairman of the medical schools minority-search committee reported that the school sought to increase minority enrollment in order to better support underserved minority communities (also an unacceptable reason for affirmative action under Bakke): The health problems of the ghetto have become serious. We know from past experience that the [typical white] medical student has failed to meet the challenge . [We need minority enrollment] to increase the number of black and brown physicians, not [just] to integrate Stanford with the most qualified minority students in the country.

Bakke repudiated those sensible reasons for considering the race of applicants. Instead, the diversity rationale of the Bakke opinion treated race and ethnicity synonymously. Both the amici curiae brief submitted by Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania (the Harvard brief) on which Powell relied and the Powell opinion itself use the term racial and ethnic almost interchangeably. But racial minorities particularly African Americans had very different histories in the United States than did white ethnic groups. The collapse of racial and ethnic difference meant that diversity would tend to focus only on cultural difference and would ignore or play down the history of racism and the relevance of status hierarchy.

Consistent with Powells longstanding project of reshaping intellectual life on campus, deterring an honest discussion of racism seems to be much of the point of diversity talk. Diversity has required colleges to finesse, if not obscure, the salience of racial injustice. It encourages us to focus on something pleasant multicultural enrichment rather than on racism; it is a topic fit for corporate retreats and alumni cocktail parties, where etiquette demands one avoid controversial topics. Diversity transforms what should be an indictment of social practices of exclusion into a plea for tolerance, as if the issue were how to manage uncouth upstarts rather than how to correct centuries of deliberate subordination and violent exploitation. This mangles the historical record and softens the diagnosis of social injustice.

Affirmative action is hard to understand and harder to defend without reference to racism. The mandate that diversity and only diversity can justify affirmative action has given us some stilted and unconvincing arguments for why its needed. Consider, for example, this sentence from the Supreme Courts opinion in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, in which Sandra Day OConnor reaffirmed the diversity rationale for affirmative action and also reinforced Bakkes repudiation of the use of affirmative action to remedy amorphous societal discrimination:

Note how even as skilled a wordsmith as OConnor, aided by a team of the most ambitious recent law-school graduates in the nation, could not avoid indirectly referring to racial injustice. So we are told that some students are likely to have unspecified experiences relevant to the law schools mission and that they are less likely to be admitted if those experiences are ignored. Couldnt we name those experiences? If we cant, it will be very hard to explain why they are important enough to justify what the court has insisted would otherwise be a violation of equal protection of the law. And so it is that affirmative action so modest an antiracist effort that it was pioneered by the Nixon administration has remained embattled. Diversity has kept affirmative action on life support but deprived it of the opportunity to thrive.

The Bakke decision was hardly celebrated as an unequivocal victory for civil rights. But it didnt take long for the civil-rights community to embrace the diversity rationale like a life preserver. Ever since, race-conscious progressive thought has been increasingly committed to the idea that members of racial-minority groups have distinctive norms, perspectives, voices, and cultural practices that contribute to a pedagogically or epistemologically grounded diversity.

Of course, the idea that race entails a distinctive worldview or outlook has a long history. W.E.B. Du Bois advanced it most convincingly in his masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and it became a staple of a certain type of Black nationalism that focused on Afrocentric aesthetics, fashions, and norms. But before Bakke, this somewhat peculiar idea of racial difference as a kind of cultural difference was one of many theories about the salience of race; one could accept it or not with little practical consequence for law, policy, or ones commitment to racial justice. After Bakke, it became a mandatory point of reference for anyone interested in racial equity, acquiring a centrality that it had never had before and does not merit.

Diversity is only one of many reasons a selective college might care about the racial composition of its student body. But, for all practical purposes, Bakke enshrined diversity as the only reason a college could consider race. As a consequence, colleges had to highlight differences in racial perspectives, norms, and experiences to justify affirmative action. The diversity rationale effectively required them to incorporate a substantive theory of racial difference into their admission processes. Colleges needed not only to assert that minority students would bring distinctive ideas and perspectives to the seminar table; practically speaking, they also needed some account of the distinctive perspectives that such students would bring (but one that did not emphasize racism!). And so a subtle and pernicious implication hovered over post-Bakke college life: Minority students needed to justify their presence on campus by highlighting their own cultural distinctiveness.

Quickly enough, the diversity message filtered down from the lofty chambers of the Supreme Court to more quotidian domains. For instance, in the early 2000s, Kaplans Graduate School Admission Advisor nudged the applicant who may not have thought of it herself: Does your ethnic or cultural perspective give you a different take on the world? Kaplans guide Get Into Law School: A Strategic Approach promised on its cover insider advice from top admissions officers and included a chapter directed at Minority Students that instructed:

The message got through. Consider the number of references to cultural difference in a small sample of personal statements written by successful applicants to Harvard Law School in the 1990s and early 2000s: My primary motivation for receiving a law degree surfaces from my personal experiences with the struggles of the Latin American immigrant. My experience with other cultures give me sensitivity to the voices of todays international America. As the child of Paraguayan immigrants, I too occupy a borderland. By the time I entered college, I had mastered the language of three communities: the Spanish spoken by my mother at home; the profanity-laden slang of our poor, all-Black Washington D.C. neighborhood; and the textbook English enforced in the private schools I attended. As an expatriate I developed a keen awareness of cultural diversity by actually being a part of different cultures. If accepted, I will bring to Harvard Law School a very rich and diverse background.

No doubt some of those narratives are sincere, though surely some are designed to improve the applicants chance of admission. Many are probably an inextricable combination of the two: the work of ambitious students who have internalized the now-expected equation of racial difference with inherited cultural difference and incorporated it into their self-conceptions.

Bakke and its progeny shaped how selective colleges discussed and treated race generally, and this in turn affected the narratives available to think about race and altered the incentives surrounding the expression of racial identity. Because those affected were disproportionately wealthy, socially elite, and culturally influential (the applicants, students, and faculty of selective colleges), they in turn profoundly influenced the understanding of racial identity in American society as whole.

Not only did Bakke play down or exclude a host of ideas about the salience of race; the idea of diversity itself had troubling implications that were magnified as it gained prominence. At best, diversity involves the laudable cosmopolitan quest for multiple perspectives in scholarship and the expansion of limited college curricula. Bakkes emphasis on diversity reinforced an idea of cultural difference developed in ethnic studies and the arts and humanities faculties an idea that had cultural and symbolic concerns at its core. They included the emergence of multiculturalism in the academy in the 1980s and later in popular conversation, particularly the canon debates in the humanities. Those debates emphasized cultural difference and the existence of autonomous cultural practices as a challenge to the dominance of the culture, ideas, and values of the United States and Western Europe. They foregrounded the recognition demands of distinct groups, insisting that liberal societies accommodate cultural difference and acknowledge non-Western peoples. The debates naturally began to focus on the aesthetic and social merit of various distinctive cultural groups.

Multiculturalism provided invaluable insights into American race relations. But it has also contributed to an obsession with insular identity categories. As Todd Gitlin noted in the 1990s:

This emphasis on identity could lead to an exaggeration of racial difference, a denial of transracial commonality, and a subsequent inattention to the kinds of economic inequality and political marginalization that dont track racial divisions. The predominance of diversity rhetoric has elevated the idea of racial difference as a type of cultural difference once the fringe position of an Afrocentric counterculture to the default understanding of race in America. At its worst, this tendency denies the cosmopolitan character of American society to an almost pathological extent. Consider these two examples, divided by decades but united in spirit and substance. In the 1970s, Janice E. Hale-Benson, then a professor of education at Wayne State University, wrote a book called Black Children: Their Roots, Culture, and Learning Styles. In it she posits principles such as that Black children tend to prefer inferential reasoning to deductive or inductive reasoning. More:

Were this not the work of an African American scholar, one might consider it that of a white supremacist, full of the most demeaning and hurtful stereotypes. Would anyone who accepted those ideas bother to train Black people to be scientists, accountants, or lawyers? How does a theory that asserts that Black people are not word dependent explain the great Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance or the eloquence of Black political activists, poets, and novelists? And what employer would want to hire someone alleged to be culturally incapable of punctuality?

Such ideas should have died a well-deserved death long ago. Indeed, the insights of ethnic studies and multiculturalism at their best, which brought the profound intellectual and professional achievements of African Americans into the center of liberal education, should have nailed the coffin closed. But in 2020 the National Museum of African American History and Culture published a document, entitled Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture, that was the photo-negative image of Hale-Bensons account of Black culture. The document claims that individualism, the scientific method, rationalism, the work ethic, and the written tradition are all elements of white culture that have been imposed on (or internalized by) people of color. Thankfully, the museum acknowledged its mistake and removed the document from its website. But its presence, even for a short time, in a museum dedicated to African American history speaks to the ascendancy of the idea that racial identity is primarily a type of cultural difference. Bakke and the diversity rationale helped to promote this idea to its central place in the popular understanding of race.

Ironically, Powells effort to undermine the politics of despair that so troubled conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s may have fueled the politics of identity that enrages conservatives today. Bakke didnt eliminate the politics of despair but only gave it a new focus. The difference is that the despair Powell attacked arose from a critique of social and political institutions and practices institutions and practices that can be changed through collective political activism whereas the despair generated by identity politics is more personal and more fatalistic.

None of this had anything to do with fairness to white or Asian American applicants to selective colleges. The Supreme Court could have tempered the cruder forms of affirmative action invalidating racial quotas, for example without limiting higher ed to the diversity rationale. We cant know what the racial landscape at Americas selective colleges, to say nothing of the nation as a whole, would look like had Powell not imposed diversity on our conversations about race. But without Bakkes requirement that affirmative action be justified in terms of diversity, other ideas about the value of racial inclusion would have been available. Its a good bet that the moral imperative to correct societal discrimination, for example, would have proved at least as compelling as diversity. For the past 40 years we might have had as much attention devoted to identifying and correcting institutionalized bias as we have had to promoting diversity. Perhaps, in a nation where racial inclusion was not justified exclusively in terms of diversity, it would not have taken until 2020 for a significant number of Americans of all races to embrace the simple conviction that Black Lives Matter and to be horrified that this needs to be insisted upon.

With affirmative action once again before the Supreme Court, its understandable that many are nostalgic for the jurisprudence of Lewis Powell. The best one can hope for from the current court, and its a slender hope, is that the justices leave well enough alone.

But the Supreme Court isnt in charge of our sense of justice, whatever some of its members pretend. It long ago squandered the moral authority it acquired during its proudest moments, in the 1950s and 1960s, when it taught much of the nation something about justice. We will all have to obey the letter of whatever law the five or six members of this court decide to concoct. But we can and should refuse the casual dishonesty and moral cowardice that will certainly accompany it.

No doubt, the courts originalists will say that the logic of the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment demands the end of affirmative action, ignoring the origins of that amendment as part of the project of post-Civil War Reconstruction. Perhaps they will again distort to the point of parody the convictions of civil-rights advocates to support their diktat, as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. did in 2007s Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, when he cited the arguments advanced against state-sponsored racial segregation in Brown v. Board of Education to support the proposition that a public school could not consider race to integrate its student body. Hiding behind those rationalizations, they will claim that a law written to secure equal treatment for former slaves compels them to forbid a modest gesture in the direction of racial justice. The transparent dishonesty of such contentions wont stop them from imposing their will on the rest of us. But the reactionary faction currently in control of the Supreme Court does not have the power to control the meaning of our constitutional traditions unless we cede it to them.

We cannot look to the justices of the Supreme Court for justice. For that, we need to look to the judgment of history and to the court of popular opinion, where there is at least a chance of a fair hearing and an honest discussion. The recent outpouring of support for demonstrations against racially targeted police violence suggests that many perhaps even most Americans have begun to acknowledge the depth and breadth of racial injustice in our society and the moral imperative of resolving it. Those of us who want a more durable approach to racial inclusiveness both at selective colleges and elsewhere must refuse another gag order passing for constitutional jurisprudence and take the discussion of racial justice away from the courts. In higher education this would require an unflinching acknowledgment of the nations long history of white supremacy and how its colleges and universities perpetuated and benefited from it. And it would suggest a broad rethinking of the admissions criteria that disfavor people of color and make race-based affirmative action necessary in the first place. Let old men and women in black robes peddle in substitute justice. We must demand the real thing.

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How Affirmative Action Was Derailed by Diversity - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Dont throw the baby out with the bathwater is a saying that seems to go back to1512. We use the saying to warn a friend against a syndrome of erring: In jettisoning something bad, first separate out the things that are good.

The hazard is especially great in the higher or deeper levels of thought and sentiment. All is fuzzy, and emotions impel us in ways little understood. When we feel in our heart something to be bad, we often have trouble delimiting that something. In our ire, we are vulnerable to summary expressions and caricatures. The pile is gathered imprecisely, too broadly. Sometimes we start down a road that leads to profound error. Precious things are forsaken.

Here we take up dual syndromes of bathwater-erring. Our words are addressed to friends on either side of the duality. One of us, Dan Klein, writes as a classical liberal open to conservative wisdom; the other, Dan Mahoney, writes as a conservative who appreciates that today the best of conservatism and classical liberalism stand or fall together.

On the one side, we have a portion of classical liberalsa term here used so as to subsume libertarianswho are unduly anti-religion, in the sense of being hostile to organized religions, to theism per se, or both. We speak of them as the anti-religionists, meaning specifically this non-left sort of anti-religion. They seem insufficiently mindful of the intimate connection between politicized atheism and the totalitarian negation of human beings.

On the other side, we have such figures as thepostliberal gang of four, all Catholics and all associated with Catholic integralism, Patrick Deneen, Gladden Pappin, Chad Pecknold, and Adrian Vermeule, as well as others such as Yoram Hazony, who position themselves against something they call liberalism. We speak of them as the anti-liberals, meaning specifically this non-left, religiously oriented sort of anti-liberalism.

In each case, the group is beset by overgeneralizations and simplistic representations of that which it rejects. In each case, a baby is thrown out with the bathwater. But if the anti-religionists stopped throwing out the baby, the other group would be friendlier to the best currents of classical liberalism. And if the anti-liberals stopped throwing out the baby, the other group would be friendlier to religion. If one erred less, the impulse toward erring by the other would be less. They could better coalesce to common purpose and something truer.

In each case, there is foul bathwater to be disposed of. Organized religions, religious practice, and religious fervor have sometimes led to what Machiavelli inThe Princecalled pious cruelty. Religious groups can be fanatical or superstitious. But is religion necessarily so? Adam Smith spoke of certain sources as almost the only causes which can occasion any very gross perversion of our natural sentiments. Those sourceswere[f]alse notions of religion.

As for classical liberals, they can be dogmatic and rationalistic, with a self-defeating subjectivism, an aversion to the supremacy of the good of the whole, a lack of appreciation for custom, tradition, and authority, a defective anthropology, and a thin understanding of virtue. But is classical liberalism necessarily or automatically so? What of Josiah Tucker, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Lord Acton, C.S. Lewis, Michael Polanyi, Friedrich Hayek, and many others? Do they evince those sorry features? Are they not generally favorable to liberalization in public policy, with a posture against big government? And do they not reject scientism, radical subjectivism, and a philosophical materialism that leaves little place for the wellsprings of the human spirit? There is a conservative spirit in each of these thinkers, though they may embody it to differing degrees.

The Anti-Religionist Syndrome among Classical Liberals

Libertarians of the 1970s and 1980s, influenced especially by Murray Rothbard, were aware of the three As: Austrianism (as in Austrian economics), anarchism, and atheism. We are concerned with the last A, atheism. The late libertarian thinker George H. Smith wrote Atheism: The Case Against God(1974). The libertarian network was also influenced by Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand, both of whom may be deemed anti-religionists. Other influential figures, such Milton Friedman and Robert Nozick, and earlier figures such as Albert Jay Nock, Henry Hazlitt, and Frank Chodorov, were not vocally anti-religionist, but did little to counteract the errors of anti-religionism. H.L. Mencken lampooned most of what his fellow Americans believed in, including religion (e.g.,Treatise on the Gods, 1930). Perhaps a majority of those in libertarian circles were irreligious, but many were not. At Liberty Fund and the Foundation of Economic Education (FEE), for example, many leaders were strongly motivated by religious inclinations or interests, at least originally. And some of the heroes of libertarianism, such as Frdric Bastiat, mixed their theism with their liberal teachings.

But, then and since, religiosity has tended to be low-profile and has generally been taken to be separable from the ideas advanced. One cause of separation between libertarians and conservatives is their different postures toward religion. Conservatives are much more sensitive to the nature of totalitarian collectivism, in particular, its fanatical atheism, the jealous program to murder God in Eric Voegelins provocative phrase. Conservatives better understand that nature abhors a vacuum.

But anti-religionism among classical liberals goes back much further. In the 1770s, Adam Smith and otherschristenedtheir political outlook liberal, but we might extend liberalism backward somewhat before 1770. Thus, we might also count the following as classical liberals who tended to have an animus against religion: Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill. Some would add John Locke to the list.

Throughout the western world, including Latin America, political parties associated with liberalism were often at odds with their countrys religious institutions, particularly the Catholic Church, even asPopes like Leo XIII acceptedcentral liberal ideas in the fight against socialist and statist incursions. There is a cultish strain among some of the doyens of classical liberalism, as though liberalism vies with religion by offering a competing philosophy of life.

But the affirmation of freedom in and of itself says little about what human beings ought to do with their freedom. The philosophy of Burke and Tocqueville sees the human will, political and personal liberty, virtue, and the search for truth as essential parts of a whole. Classical liberalism, rightly enough, seeks a politics that vastly underdetermines things in human societies. But that policy outlook too often slips into what C.S. Lewis calledthe poison of subjectivismin a 1943 essay by that name. We suggest that an undue focus on freedom has given rise to an undue moral subjectivism (and modern indifference) on wider moral attitudes.

The same cannot be said for a liberalism open to traditional wisdom, or a conservatism that understands virtues connection to freedom. One example is the twentieth-century French political thinker Raymond Aron, a liberal open to conservative insights. In a posthumously published booklet, written in 1978, entitledLibert et egalit, Aron suggested that every individual should be free, within broad limits, to choose his path in life. But, he explained, that ample place for free choice should not be confused with the false idea that each of us is relieved of pervasive moral duties and is free to choose his own conception of good and evil. A thin concern for virtue leads to the destruction of the framework of a political order of free and responsible human beings. It risks turning free men and women into god-lings of a delusive sect or racket of one kind or another. Burke, Constant, and Tocqueville all learned from the French Revolution that bad morals are the seedbed of bad politics.

Whats Wrong with Anti-Religionism?

Libertarians are not all Robespierres but among classical liberals there has been an anti-religionist strain. In what respects does this throw a baby out with the bathwater?

First of all, theism lays a foundation for healthy patterns of thought. We believe that ethical philosophizing is generally patterned after benevolent monotheism. Adam Smiths ethical approach, if not theistic, is at least patterned after benevolent monotheism. The impartial spectator, in the highest sense of the term, is like God in important respects (if not all respects). Smith is explicit that the conscience, the man within the breast, is a representative of that universal beholder. Smith also endorses thinking along the lines of Imago Dei. When anti-religionists throw out theistic convictions about the origins of the universe and the afterlife, they sometimes also throw out certain patterns of sense-making associated with religion, like vital elements piled too carelessly with debris.

Many modern tenets have prompted the discarding of thinking with religious overtones, tenets like the positive-normative distinction, methodological individualism, and various demarcations which flatten science unduly, and sometimes even identify it with reductive scientism. The beholding of the spectacle of the whole is an aesthetic experience, and it is an experience that humans are not party to; our precision and accuracy are not only often phony, but they concern things that are merely particular aspects of that supreme experience.

Anti-anti-theism helps to protect liberalism from jejune invocations of utilitarianism and from an anti-spiritualism that can hardly uphold the dignity of the human person, the glory of Imago Dei.

Smith alerted us to an unhealthy tendency: The salutary doctrine of a life to come where justice would be rendered, he said, has often been exposed to the derision of the scoffer because the teachings of some of that doctrines most zealous assertors about the distributions of rewards and punishments... in that world to come [have] been too frequently in direct opposition to all our moral sentiments (TMS 132.33). After quoting some nonsensical assertions about rewards and punishments in the world to come, Smith says: Can we wonder that so strange an application of this most respectable doctrine should sometimes have exposed it to contempt and derision; with those at least who had themselves, perhaps, no great taste or turn for the devout and contemplative virtues?(134.35). Smith, in fact, never quite says that the doctrine is true. He says it is respectable and venerable. Indeed, we believe that, even for one who is not a theist, some notion of a timeless moral judging of ones action, a ringing in eternity, is crucial to ethics. One who discards it stunts his devout and contemplative virtues.

Compared to non-theists, religious believers generally have a deeper appreciation of the depths of the soul, of the drama of good and evil in every human heart. They do so because they have become better naturalized to patterns of ethical thought that foster those virtues. Openness to religion can give greater depth of soul to liberalism. If they are not religious themselves, liberals should be anti-anti-theism. Anti-anti-theism helps to protect liberalism from jejune invocations of utilitarianism and from an anti-spiritualism that can hardly uphold the dignity of the human person, the glory of Imago Dei.

The anti-religious posture also undercuts human thriving in more direct ways. Anti-religionists do not appreciate the extent to which human beings are religious creatures, or, at least, quasi-religious. Their dismissiveness toward religion reinforces that lack of appreciation.

We, in the modern world, are in many respects fish out of water. Some have said we live in a world after virtue, because we lack strong social cohesion with a common outlook about what serves the good of the whole and corresponds to virtue. But we must adapt virtue to modern circumstances. Lacking strong social cohesion, we must, each of us, seek coherence by finding meaning in higher things in lifethings personally sacralized, things we take a just pride in and identify with, and ideas we not only believe butbelieve in.

Here, classical liberalism provides only rudimentary assistance. In the space of higher things, it merely cordons offas off-limitscertain areas of that space. It says: Dont sacralize the governmentalization of social affairs; dont embrace a quasi-religion that spells anti-liberal politics. That is crucial, but it only wards one away from bad things; it does not point to things to sacralize. Professional classical liberals might have trouble appreciating this, because, as professionals, they sacralize liberal discourse, philosophizing, and social activities, and take pride in their own participation in them. Theybelieve inthat. A quasi-religion can offer meaningto its clericseven if it is thin. But to the laity, a thin quasi-religion is, well, thin. Religious traditions provide thicker resources and more practical guidance, while also emphasizing contact with the sacred, with the sublime, and with limits rooted in the nature of things.

People who learn religious patterns of thought often have less hubris about outsmarting the complexities of life. I maintain my habit of speaking plainly, frankly, and openly, because that is how I must speak to God. Children raised with religion become accustomed to habits of thought and sentiment as though there were a universal benevolent beholder who makes timeless judgments (though those judgments consider timely conditions).

In human instinct, there is a pull toward temporal-centric power as something to follow and believe in. Burke knew it, and Tocqueville knew it. Religion competes with such fatal quasi-religion. If classical liberals wish to combat it, they had best coordinate with others arrayed against that evil. In hisReflections on the Revolution in France,Burke warned modern rationalists that man is by his constitution a religious animal. And despite significant mistakes and deformations, the Christian religion has been one great source of religion amongst us. But to war on the Wests religious inheritance is to invite new forms of quasi-religion that are nothing but uncouth, pernicious, and degrading superstition(s). Our experience of totalitarian despotism and of those in Western societies who would, willy-nilly, pave the way for the same bears out Burkes deep forebodings.

That is why the conservative liberal Tocqueville, who seemed to understand that man is now a fish out of water, could state with the firmest confidence inDemocracy in America, Despotism can do without faith, but freedom cannot... How could society fail to perish if, while the political bond is relaxed, the moral bond were not tightened? And what makes a people master of itself if it has not submitted to God? But the moral bond is mainly about voluntary self-limitation informed by religion, not the coercive confessional state sometimes recommended by the integralists.

Before moving to the postliberal integralists, it should be noted that anti-religionism impoverishes ones conceptual understanding of liberalism.Larry Siedentop writes of the moral intuitions established by Christianity, explaining that liberals should show due gratitude for the role of Christianity in making liberalism possible.Siedentops story starts in the ancient world, before Christianity. But jump to the so-called Renaissance and thereafter:

For centuries a privileged, monolithic church which was almost inseparable from an aristocratic society, confronted Europeans. So the church became associated in the popular mind with social hierarchy and deference, even at times with coercion, rather than with the moral equality and role of conscience.

Siedentop argues that Christendom was so immersed in the ontological intuitions of Christianity that people lost sight of their origins. They misunderstood the ancient world, in particular by not seeing the cult-like nature of the ancient family. Looking at but recent centuries, exulting vainly in their own worldview, figures often admired by classical liberals threw the Church, Christianity, or sometimes religion generally under the bus. Such erring is seen, perhaps, in Machiavelli, Montaigne, Voltaire, Diderot, Helvtius, dHolbach, Condorcet, and Thomas Paine.

Siedentop says that Christianity was necessary but not sufficient for liberalism. Eastern Christianity did not produce liberalism, partly because the church was so submerged within or entangled with the temporal powers. Classical liberals could apply their healthy criticisms of governmentalization to see how liberal potentialities within the Christian revolution were realized in the West to a degree that elsewhere scarcely approached.

Abusing the Liberal Little Angel

Now we turn to the other baby abused. Compared to the great benevolent monotheisms, which started in the ancient world, the baby we turn to now is, like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, classical only within the modern period, asConstant said. This little angel is younger than Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.

If liberalism means what the integralists say it means, then one must be sympathetic to large parts of their critique. Yoram Hazonys characterization of the liberal tradition is not entirely satisfactory, yet he remains a stalwart of constitutionalism in his recent bookConservatism: A Rediscovery. We sympathize with his criticisms of abstract rationalism but much prefer the mix of principle and prudence to be found in the conservative liberal traditions. And as Richard Reinsch has noted inhis review of Hazonys book, Hazonys historical empiricism seems to depend on a sort of biblical positivism to do the work of practical reason. Hazony also rejects any appeal to natural rights, rather than tying them in a salutary way to older moral understandings that give the exercise of rights heft and balance. To be sure, Hazonys conservative democracy provides some guidance for addressing our crisis. But conservative democracy is hardly conservative, prudent, or sober if it positions itself aggressively against the classical liberal tradition.

By denying the possibility of a conservatism that includes the best liberal theory and practice, the integralists have largely left behind the conservatism that Americans rightly associate with Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, George Will, and Thomas Sowell.

The integralists tend to create a liberalism strawman. Sometimes they bundle, when they should separate, Smithian liberalism and the leftism that for more than a century has in certain quarters of the world passed itself off as liberal. Contrary to various representations of the integralists, Hazony, and others, Smithian liberalism:

Understanding the distinction between voluntary and coercive behavior, a distinction rooted in our very constitution as organisms distinct from one another, Smithian liberalism understands that the governmentalization of social affairs is, by and large, destructive of cultural integrity and human vitality. Government itself is a reality to be coped with, and Smithwrotewithout irony of the greatest and noblest of all characters, that of the reformer and legislator of a great state. Smiths liberal principles are presumptive only, and they would contour our best approach to sustaining virtue in modern circumstances. Those principles seek to sustain some basic social grammars, to keep the wild, spontaneous grove of social poetry relatively peaceful. Thomas Sowell always asks: Compared to what? Whatever it is that the integralists are proposing, how could it not give a central place to Smithian-liberal principles?

Those of us who try to preserve the best of classical liberalism are sometimes derided as right liberals, indifferent to the good and complicit in a subjectivist erosion of civilized liberty. But Burke, Tocqueville, Aron, and the co-authors of this article reject radical subjectivism and affirm a God is watching duty to the good of the whole, just as much as the integralists do. Truth, goodness, and virtue are indeed correspondent. But in policy and politics, the integralists tussle with strawmen, and not, say, Burkes orientation toward practical liberty.

Sohrab Ahmari is right toreaffirmthe common good as a meaningful category of human and political life. But as Pope John Paul II reiterated, authentic religion aims to persuade, not coerce. It is striking how ambivalent the integralists are about religious liberty, a liberty defended as the first of our freedoms by the contemporary Catholic Church. Common good constitutionalism is by no means a contradiction in terms. The integralist version of the concept is vague and often evasive. It often seems more coercive than constitutionalist and forgets that in decisive respects virtue must be freely chosen. The integralist version of the concept lacks sufficient confidence in people, in their private affairs, to conduct themselves responsibly, or to learn to do so. By denying the possibility of a conservatism that includes the best liberal theory and practice, the integralists have largely left behind the conservatism that Americans rightly associate with Burke, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, George Will, and Thomas Sowell. Are Ahmari and the others post-conservative as well as post-liberal? They give us ample reasons to think so.

The Spirit of Liberty and the Spirit of Religion

The integralists scorn fusionism. Our view, in linewith Dan McLaughlin, is that a coherent fusionism will indeed be suitable to many conservative liberals, and more vital still is coalitionism.

There is an imprudence in forgetting that liberal principles, suitably cherished, area check on power, the levers of which are, one day to the next, to be controlled by the goods worst enemies. Subverting the liberal backbone of Western civilization invites Tocquevilles dystopias.

Humans are imperfect, and each of us is bound to produce some dirty bathwater. Dirt is to be thrown out, but it must be separated from the health and wholeness that we love. Tocqueville proposed that the spirit of liberty (lesprit de libert) and the spirit of religion stand or fall together. In throwing out the dirt in a babys bathtub, take care not to throw out the baby itself. Tocqueville was right: When either baby is thrown out, the other perishes as well.

Bereft of the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion, the organic core of society is hollowed out. The void is filled with what Tocqueville tried to warn us against: tutelary despotism followed by massive degradation of the human spirit and slavery to lawless government. Mordor prevails if its adversaries do not coalesce.

***

This piece was originally featured on Law & Liberty under the title The Baby and the Bathwater.

The rest is here:

What's the Issue with Classical Liberalism and Religion? - Independent Institute

The fact is that all Americans citizens who test are still at risk of their own personal lockdown.

So Biden is overly jabbed. Yet he had COVID-19. Again. Or did he? Testing for COVID-19 is a rats nest, as Ive said since April 2020. The first error is equating a positive test result with the presence of the virus. [Stay focused: This is not that hopeless the virus does not exist fools errand that has been repeatedly addressed by me and others].

The second error is equating the presence of the virus with COVID-19.

The first error is made whenever someone who does not have active viral replication tests positive using any of the tests. Accordingly, to this flailing attempt by CNN to repair the Biden administrations reputation (theres even going to be a Rose Garden Ceremony!), Biden swiped his own nose and 15 minutes later, the test came back positive.

That is almost certainly an antigen test. Which is not free from false positive results. Due to the non-specificity of the antigen detection, some COVID-19 antigen tests can light up positive if the patient is infected with other respiratory pathogens. Read the package inserts for details.

The self-inflicted wound that the Biden administration is suffering is inherent in the CNN article, right in the title itself:

According to the article, because Uncle Sniffy tested positive, who the article starts off describing as a fatigued, runny-nosed Joe Biden reports that

The brutal months that came before had lent the Biden presidency a sense of gloom, fueled by high prices, abysmal approval numbers and swirling questions about the President's ability to lead. Many problems -- like a growing outbreak of monkeypox, the war in Ukraine and shortages of baby formula -- still persist, and a new crisis is emerging with China. Democrats running for office this year are still putting distance between themselves and the President.

There are so many layers here to unpack. Ill leave the political questions to the politicos. But a growing outbreak of monkeypox? So many layers.

This article is about testing, so back to the testing:

At 9:12 a.m. ET, Biden swiped his nose with a cotton swab and hoped for the best. It was officially his sixth day isolating with Covid-19. His symptoms had disappeared. He'd started working out again in the White House gym.

Someone needs to tell Joe how surgeons don and doff masks. Hint: No repeat use.

Biden then tested positive again, after Paxlovid, an outcome that Joe evidently was always in the now was a possibility because his doctors told him so.

From the Pfizer website:

The FDA has authorized the emergency use of PAXLOVID, an investigational medicine, for the treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19 in adults and children (12 years of age and older weighing at least 88 pounds [40 kg]) with a positive test for the virus that causes COVID-19, and who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death, under an EUA.

PAXLOVID is investigational because it is still being studied. There is limited information about the safety and effectiveness of using PAXLOVID to treat people with mild-to-moderate COVID19.

The fact sheet itself starts:

You are being given this Fact Sheet because your healthcare provider believes it is necessary to provide you with PAXLOVID for the treatment of mild-to-moderate coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This Fact Sheet contains information to help you understand the risks and benefits of taking the PAXLOVID you have received or may receive.Pardon? Didnt the website warning say There is limited information about the safety and effectiveness of using PAXLOVID to treat people with mild-to-moderate COVID19?

So how can an HCP believe it is necessary" for the treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19?

Anyway, back to testing - Joes first test could have been a false positive, and it was self-administered. The article does not say whether the Presidents sample was sent out for sequencing to confirm it was not a false positive. Or that his second positive test also could have been a false positive.

Some would still have you believe that PCR testing never had ANY false positives: my experience in clinical biomarker development and my reading of the published scientific literature tells me the best estimate of the PCR False Positive Rate is around 40%. This includes the Marine study that failed to find sequenceable viral DNA in about 40% of the Marines who initially tested positive.

In my written testimony on a restaurant case in Pennsylvania, I provided all of the studies showing PCR false positive rates. I sent my testimony in before I saw the Commonwealths expert testimony from the state epidemiologist. The state epidemiologist, in her written testimony, had misinformed the court that there were no - zero - clinical false positive results. The judge, for some reason, decided to decline the written testimony from both experts and insisted only on oral testimony, which devolved into an ad hominem attack, leaving the issue of false positives underappreciated by the judge, who ruled the restaurant had to follow state procedures. For my efforts there and as an expert witness in the NVICP, I earned a Wikipedia page that, like the Commonwealths lawyer and the Special Master of the NVICP, ignores my 20 years of biomedical research experience, including intensive research in biomarker development while faculty in the Department of Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh.

The CNN article attempts to portray Bidens self-isolation as the cause for his administrations month from hell, spinning the administrations tailspin into a turn-around because after Joe tested negative, the White House sent a missile into a house in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Joe asked some questions about the ready-made operation.

The only mention of sequencing was whether they had confirmed the death of the intended target by DNA sequencing.

The fact is that all American citizens who test are still at risk of their own personal lockdown, and Joe Biden and every other American are not being told about the risk - and cost - of the false positive result.

To be clear - Im not saying people should not test. Some doctors I know think no one should test, just treat yourself if you have symptoms.

I think people should test if they want to - once they know the full risks. You cant take a PCR test result seriously unless you know the cycle threshold cut-off being used to call a positive. And you cant know that risk and make your own personal assessment of the risk/benefit ratio unless you know the FP rate associated with the kit youre considering, and the threshold they will apply to your sample.

I am once again, pointing out that the #costofthefalsepositives can be truly made zero by sequencing the virus from clinical samples from patients who test positive either by PCR or by antigen test.

How many more times will America suffer a month from hell because a President tests positive for COVID-19 without any assurance against the 40% false positive rate of the PCR test or a false positive due to non-specificity of an antigen test?

Additional information and resources on the false positive catastrophe from Covid-19 testing can be found on Tam Hunts MEDIUM.COM page.

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Evidently, Biden Does Not Know About the False Positive Risk ... - Substack