Word of the day

Perigraph – an instrument for measuring a person’s ability to flex the neck and limbs; the white lines or fibrous impressions on the straight muscle of the abdomen; a careless or inaccurate delineation of anything.

Milne muses

“My ambition for mankind is that wherever we go we do not totally destroy ourselves on the way. If we fail in this, it will be on account of our strength. Man today is too powerful: he can inflict too much damage.” ~C.R.Milne #SundayMorning pic.twitter.com/93wqM8NLHi

— A.A.Milne (@A_AMilne) May 12, 2024

Beautifying the blogosphere

To say I am blown away is an understatement, What a night! Glastonbury Tor and the Aurora…incredible. pic.twitter.com/lnAXInVzC8

— Michelle Cowbourne (@Glastomichelle) May 10, 2024

Woman of the day

Woman of the Day suffragette and social worker Rosa May Billinghurst, known as May, born OTD 1875 in Lewisham. Crippled by polio, she painted her modified tricycle in the suffragette colours and recruited more women to the cause while she was on the exercise yard at HMP Holloway.… pic.twitter.com/2rhndcmQxO

— The Attagirls (@TheAttagirls) May 31, 2024

“…culture in crisis …because of the cowardice of people that know better. ”

Do you ever wonder how brave you’d be when faced with a life and death choice?

Would you have the courage to stand up for your beliefs when you might lose your job if you did?

Could you show the strength required to speak out when you knew doing so carried the risk of being cancelled?

Few of us who live in democracies, free from war, will ever have our lives in danger because of our views.

But too many people in what is supposed to be the free world think their jobs would be at risk and they could be cancelled if they not just expressed opinions, but stated facts and too many, albeit understandably, don’t speak out because of that.

Courage isn’t one of the seven heavenly virtues, but Bari Weiss says it is the most important one :

Let me begin with some confessions. I voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. And I voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, which is shocking, I know. I’m pro-choice, and I think the European laws are sensible ones. I’m a very proud supporter of Israel, even though I’m a critic of its current government. I think terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah are evil, and there is a bright line between groups that aim to kill innocents and those that try to avoid doing so at all costs. I think that girls in Afghanistan shouldn’t be sold into child marriages, and that women in Iran should be free to show their hair in public without fear of imprisonment or worse. And that women in Somalia should not endure genital mutilation. I believe that all people are created equal and created in the image of God, but that all cultures are not equal. I believe in gay marriage, so much so that I’m actually in one myself.

I believe that adults should make pretty much any decision they want about their bodies, but that children should not. I think the SAT is an imperfect but useful tool. I think defunding the police is a very bad idea. And that living in a safe neighborhood is among the truest forms of privilege. I think COVID probably came from a lab, and that, in retrospect, locking kids out of school for two years was a big mistake. I think we should hire people based on their merit, but cast as wide a net as possible. I don’t want to eat bugs, nor do I want to drink water full of microplastics, and I don’t think there’s anything coded right or left about either of those things. I believe that equality of opportunity and not equality of outcome is the true measure of fairness. I am repelled by ideologies that insist that our immutable characteristics are more important than our character. I don’t like riots, I don’t like mobs, and I hate lies. And I love America for all of its flaws. I believe, in part because Americans are free to debate those flaws and to strive for a more perfect union, that it really is the last best hope on Earth.

The point in all of this is that I am really boring. Or at least I thought I was. I am, or at least until a few seconds ago in historical time, I used to be considered a standard-issue liberal. And yet somehow, in our most intellectual and prestigious spaces, many of the ideas I just outlined and others like them, have become provocative or controversial, which is really a polite way of saying unwelcome, beyond the pale. Even bigoted or racist.

How? How did these relatively boring views come to be seen as off-limits? And how did that happen, at least it seems to me, in the span of under a few years? Now the convenient answer, of course, is the power of extreme activists. People who burn down businesses and police stations, people who shut down bridges and highways, people who harass their fellow students and shout down their professors. People who vandalize, who desecrate or tear down monuments of national heroes. But do a handful of extreme activists really have the power to dismantle the moral guardrails of a whole society, to radically shift the Overton window of what is politically and socially acceptable? I don’t think so.

There has always been and always will be a fringe. The difference right now is that the fringe seems to be calling the shots. If you want to know why things have been turned upside down, why so many people are asking themselves if they’ve gone crazy, or if the world has, as they hear feminist groups justify rape as a tool of resistance; as groups that call themselves anti-racist advocate for a new kind of segregation; as young, highly educated people chant the slogans of jihadi terrorist groups; well, I ultimately don’t think that’s because of a few maniacs that are throwing paint on masterpieces in our museums. It’s because they have been allowed to do so. And the question is why?

Perhaps, to give the most generous read, it’s because the people shutting things down claim to be doing so in the name of justice, not in the name of nihilism. And because we believe them. Or perhaps it’s because we told ourselves, “It’s just a few nuts, I don’t need to get involved.” Or maybe it’s because people looked at their portfolio and decided that they were doing great by the numbers. And those torched stores? Ah, they probably had insurance anyway. Or because it was a headache. Or because they’re just kids. Or because, why die on that hill?

Or maybe it was because we thought they had a point. That America and the West really were guilty of all of the terrible things that they said, or at least of some of them. And though we wouldn’t have torn down statues or shouted down speakers, we lacked the conviction or the ideas to stop the people doing it. Or because maybe in the end we prized comfort over complexity. I was going to say prized comfort over truth, but the thing is, truth isn’t something you pull out of the ground like gold or diamonds. It is a process sustained by a culture of questioning, including self-questioning. Which is why right now it can look like the absolutists are winning.

My theory is that the reason we have a culture in crisis is because of the cowardice of people that know better. It is because the weakness of the silent, or rather the self-silencing majority. So why have we been silent? Simple. Because it’s easier. Because speaking up is hard, it is embarrassing, it makes you vulnerable. It exposes you as someone who is not chill, as someone who cares a lot, as someone who makes judgments, as someone who discerns between right and wrong, between better and worse.

The reason Aristotle called courage the first virtue is because it is the one that makes all of the other virtues possible. Do you want to live in a world that values justice, wisdom, compassion, curiosity, rationality, equality and the pursuit of truth? I do. But fighting to make sure we live in such a world is going to take courage. That first virtue.

I think one of the lessons of the past decade is that cowardice is perhaps more contagious than COVID. But so is courage, and a singular example can serve as a powerful means of transmission.

So who are those examples? Each one of you, when I say the word courage, will have the ones that come to mind for you. But for me, for me, they are people like Salman Rushdie, sentenced to death by the Iranian ayatollahs in 1989 for the sin of writing a novel. He lived under the shadow of a fatwa until two years ago, on a stage like this one, he was viciously stabbed. But he survived and undaunted, this week, of course, he published a book about it.

Courage for me is someone like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who insists that there is nothing contradictory about his progressive values and his belief that Hamas is a band of murderers that must be defeated. Now suffice it to say, this has not made him popular, but he doesn’t seem to care. While a lot of other people have moved on out of political expediency, his office in DC is the one that remains papered with photos of all of the hostages.

Courage to me looks like Stanford medical professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Jay studies the health and well-being of vulnerable populations for a living, and he foresaw the social and mental health crisis that would follow the COVID lockdowns. He said so, he explained it calmly. But for doing so, Twitter blacklisted him. YouTube censored him. The medical establishment ostracized and slandered him. He wrote, “I could not believe this was happening in a country that I so love.” And yet he did not tremble. He said, “The healing of the world starts by one person saying loudly, so the whole world can hear,” an important, true thing, that he knows he’s not supposed to say and that he knows will get him in trouble for saying it.

I think about Roland Fryer, the economist who did just that. His colleagues at Harvard warned him against publishing research that he did into police violence. “You’ll ruin your career,” they told him. And that’s because his research found that while there was racial bias in low-level police force, there wasn’t when it came to police shootings. Now Roland himself was shocked by these findings. He knew it went against his own assumptions. He knew it would outrage people. But he published the research anyway. And it wasn’t simply that his reputation suffered. He had to hire an armed guard in Cambridge. His baby was seven days old, and he had to go to buy diapers with an armed guard. Where did he get the courage to do it? “Simple,” he told me. “I don’t covet what they covet.” He said, “Every day I have to look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘What are you here for?'”

Masih Alinejad knows what she is put on Earth for. With moxie and courage, she is leading the campaign for women’s rights in Iran. Her sister was forced to denounce her on state television. Her brother was thrown in jail for her dissent. And now Masih lives in exile in America but remains a hunted woman, moving from safe house to safe house. And yet she does not stop shouting for freedom. Nor does Jimmy Lai, the media mogul whose pro-democracy newspaper “Apple Daily” was shut down as China took over Hong Kong. Jimmy had more than the means to flee his country. He is a billionaire with a British passport. But he stayed. “Now is not the time for safety,” he said. “This is a time for sacrifice.” Today is his 1,204 day in prison. His son Sebastian said this of his father: “Dad staying in Hong Kong is really proof that this intangible thing we call liberty is a thing people yearn for. You can call it Western values, but it’s not really. In the sense that it’s not something that only people in the West want or deserve.”

Alexei Navalny was not born in the West, but he yearned for that kind of liberty. The opposition leader had refuge in Germany, but he flew back into Putin’s Russia, sacrificing his freedom and ultimately his life to oppose tyranny. He knew that his death would expose the truth about a totalitarian regime built on lies. Which it can, so long as we keep his memory alive. Navalny lived and died beneath the shadow of a tyranny that we are fighting to prevent in our still young but ever-darkening century.

Ask yourself right now, should it take courage in the West to denounce the hateful ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which pronounces death on individual writers and on entire countries, large and small? Should it take courage to oppose those chanting “death to America?” Should it take courage to say, “No, that’s wrong?” Should it take courage to say that those who praise the pristine subways of Russia are not journalists, but propagandists?

Should it take courage to just say in public, “I disagree?” Right now it does. My friend Coleman Hughes, who spoke on this stage last year and who advocates for the colorblind ideal championed by Martin Luther King Jr, rather than give in to the race essentialism that’s become chic these days, he’ll debate anyone. He’ll disagree with anyone. But why is it that his angriest opponents prefer to call him hateful names and to lobby for his exclusion?

The question, I think, is whether or not the people I’ve mentioned and those like them, whether their photos and their names and most importantly, their ideas will show up at conferences like this one. And that’s up to you. I’ve had enough people confess to me after lectures or in newsrooms or on college campuses or in corporations or cafes, really, everywhere I go, that they wish they could say what they believe. They tell me with some measure of shame that they’re closeted in our liberal democracies. It’s a really strange phenomenon. The freest people in the history of the world seem to have lost the hunger for liberty. Or maybe it’s really the will to defend it. 

And when they tell me this, it puts me in mind of my hero, Natan Sharansky, who spent a decade in the Soviet gulag before getting his freedom. He is the single bravest person that I have ever met in my life. And a few years ago, one afternoon in Jerusalem, I asked him a simple question. “Nathan,” I asked him, “is it possible to teach courage?” And he smiled in his impish way and said, “No. All you can do is show people how good it feels to be free.”

Hat tip: Why Evolution is True