Author: Justin DaMetz

Father of Julian and Evelyn, Husband of Tabitha, Christian theologian, writer, 5th grade teacher, book addict, displaced Middle-Earth resident

“All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham”

On a subject related to yesterday’s obituary for affirmative action, I want to think about this quote from Wendell Berry, who in turn is quoting and commenting on George Orwell:

George Orwell

In his essay on Kipling, George Orwell wrote: “All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment,’ demands that the robbery shall continue.”

This statement of Orwell’s is clearly applicable to our situation now: all we need to do it change a few nouns. The religion and environmentalism of the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something they do not really wish to destroy. We all live by robbing nature, but our standard of living demands that the robbery shall continue.

Wendell Berry, “Word and Flesh” in What Are People For?

This relates as well to my post a couple of weeks ago about how the left needs to get serious about politics, and I guess is becoming a bit of a running theme for me. There are real serious issues for the left to tackle – around inequality, wealth, economic justice, corporations, capitalism, and more – that would have fantastic downstream effects on marginalized communities. But, tackling them would mean back-benching identity issues and the easy clicks and fundraising pitches they generate, not too mention the dopamine hits that a good Twitter rant conjures up. Orwell saw it nearly a century ago, Berry saw it fifty years ago, and here we are today. The left hasn’t really changed; most liberals seem to enjoy the fight more than they do results, and the people who are hurt by that decision are the ones we claim to care the most about. We’ve got to get serious. We’ve got to.

Goodbye to affirmative action

I don’t really have any original thoughts on the decision by the Supreme Court to end affirmative actions at America’s most elite colleges, other than to say that this isn’t really a surprise ruling, and I’m not all too worried about it being struck down. Both Freddie DeBoer and Matt Yglesias articulate rationales that I general agree with. First, here is Freddie:

  • This framing enrages people, but this is very much a first-world problem: elite colleges are a tiny part of the overall college landscape, by number of institutions and especially by number of students; a majority of Americans still don’t have a college degree; the students of color who get into elite colleges are a tiny sliver of the overall population of people of color and are not remotely representative of that population.
  • I am much, much more worried for the vast number of Black people who don’t even apply to college than I am about a theoretical Black student who would get into Harvard with a racial preference but wouldn’t without. The former is in worse shape by absolutely any metric. This whole conversation rests on weird priorities.
Freddie DeBoer

And Matt:

I think professors at top universities face a conceptual problem in that they want to affirm values like “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” but the whole point of top universities is to be elitist, hierarchical, and exclusionary. I’m not 100 percent sure what to tell people in this situation. But if you want to be equitable and inclusive, go teach in a community college or a public high school. If you want to cultivate excellence among a social elite, then own up to that as a mission in life. I don’t think there’s one right thing to do, but it’s deeply confusing to try to do both of them simultaneously.

Matt Yglesias

My take is basically this: my priority as a leftist (as I’ve stated before) is around economics and class-based issues, and spending time and energy and political capital worrying about the admissions practices of America’s most elite colleges and the miniscule number of people who attend them is pretty pointless. Like Freddie says, if you are worried (as I am) about the generational, systemic poverty in African American communities, then there are a lot better things to worry about (and, again, to use our precious political capital to defend) then affirmative action. It’s a program that only ever benefitted a vanishingly small number of minorities and did so in a way that probably was more damaging to racial equity efforts than beneficial, in terms of narratives and the oxygen it sucked away from real policies aimed at alleviating systematic racism and discrimination in America. Goodbye and good riddance.

Excerpt #28: keeping up with the times

Do I wish to keep up with the times? No.

My wish simply is to live as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.

Wendell Berry, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” in What Are People For?