Brown vs. Gown

How did the good people of Cambridge, Mass, home of Harvard the world's most celebrated university (whose motto is veritas) vote in yesterday's Senatorial election? According to this site, 84% went with the state-wide loser, Democrat Martha Coakley, over Scott Brown who won 53% state-wide.

It seems to me here is objective proof that either the Harvard elite know so much better than the ordinary townspeople the truth what's good for all; or it's proof that academe is led by a Gnostic elite who reject worldly realities in favour of a special vision in hopes of a world redeemed by an expert elect, the counterpart to which is a deep resentment of ordinary folk:

You voted for hatred, you voted for ignorance, you voted for Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the vomit producing Republican Party...

But as today the blogs are full of invites to Brownmania, of one kind or another, I think Wretchard of Belmont Club (a blog named for the neighboring town to Cambridge, where Wretchard lived in his Harvard student days - Belmont went 59% for Coakley) provides a healthy warning of the dangers evidenced by a nation run by an elite who, in one way or another, have not the power to control events that I think the Harvard elect likes to imagine they have, or at least should have:

the events of the last few weeks in Massachusetts are a perfect example of an “emergent event”. When the conditions favor it something just happens out of the blue. In a complex system the interactions between things become so complicated that a wholly new phenomenon may just pop up.

Only a little while ago, the SS Coakley was sailing along on a calm ocean, without a cloud in sight. She was as good as docked in Washington DC when all of a sudden this rogue wave comes out of nowhere and turns the ship over. Except it didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out the underlying conditions that sooner or later, through some stochastic process was going to kick up a mega wave. Scott Brown happened to be it.

What really terrifies me about the gradually weakening of the West’s margin of strength by those who assume they still have a wide degree of safety is that the complex system is out there — the financial, economic and security universe — and we just assume from vanity that we can handle it. But it is not linearly predictable, especially when the number of variables beyond the control of the West increases. The last 20 years have created a dangerous world, full of failed states, chock a block with politicians with less sense than an ass, led on by jesters, addled academics and confidence men. And the assumption is that tomorrow will be just like yesterday because it always has.

No. Obama seemed to have everything. By every measure he was ahead. But if you looked at the fundamentals you could see he was building a sand castle in the face of a running tide. His measures showed him safe. But his measures were the wrong ones. And what happened is there for all to see. “You can’t win them all”. Ha.

We live in a world that has far more volatility than before. We ought to be increasing the design margin the way a general, with no knowledge of the future, increases his reserves. Instead we’ve gone from money in the bank to living from paycheck to paycheck. Now we’re borrowing our way out of debt. We ought to be shortening our OODA loop, empowering people rather than making them more dependent on tottering hierarchical structures which bleat out “the system worked” whenever you press a button. It won’t go on, because it can’t.

Who knows what the next emergent event will be? The only thing one can be fairly sure of is that Robert Gibbs would not have foreseen it.

Harvard ethics

First, as this blog's contribution to keeping up the internet's record of notable events, let's have a look at two recent statements from Harvard University clerics. There is this much noted (in certain blog quarters) passage from a sermon of Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, head of the Episcopal Divinity School:

And when a woman becomes pregnant within a loving, supportive, respectful relationship; has every option open to her; decides she does not wish to bear a child; and has access to a safe, affordable abortion – there is not a tragedy in sight — only blessing. The ability to enjoy God’s good gift of sexuality without compromising one’s education, life’s work, or ability to put to use God’s gifts and call is simply blessing.

These are the two things I want you, please, to remember – abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Let me hear you say it: abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done.

I want to thank all of you who protect this blessing – who do this work every day: the health care providers, doctors, nurses, technicians, receptionists, who put your lives on the line to care for others (you are heroes — in my eyes, you are saints); the escorts and the activists; the lobbyists and the clinic defenders; all of you. You’re engaged in holy work.

And then there is this little brouhaha about Harvard's Muslim chaplain sticking to Islamic orthodoxy:

Harvard Islamic chaplain Taha Abdul-Basser ’96 has recently come under fire for controversial statements in which he allegedly endorsed death as a punishment for Islamic apostates.

In a private e-mail to a student last week, Abdul-Basser wrote that there was “great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment [for apostates]) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand.”

The e-mail was forwarded over Muslim student e-mail lists and later picked up by the blogosphere, sparking debate and, in many cases, criticism of Abdul-Basser from those who have interpreted his statement as supporting the execution of those who leave the Islamic religion.

Next, let's look at what they don't teach at Harvard. Here's the Rene Girard-inspired anthropology of Gil Bailie:

We are religious beings with religious hungers. Cultures which allow religious pluralism to degenerate into ideological secularism cease to foster sanctifying and civilizing forms of religious experience. In the absence of more edifying expressions, the hunger for transcendence grows desperate and eventually takes crude and primitive forms.

Since death is the one thing that cannot be fully secularized, those desperate for religious meaning eventually turn to death, as fallen humanity always has, siding with death against death, turning death into a cure for death, eluding death by exploiting its mystique and becoming its pious accomplices. In a post-religious world, both those who are desperate for meaning and those who have despaired of it will find in death an unspoken organizing principle. Whether fleeing from it or flirting with it, whether bound to it by fear or fascination, death eventually becomes the default preoccupation, the chief obsession, of those who come to regard it as the final, incontrovertible fact.

At the Resurrection, ‘the power of death’ was broken. Only by living in the light of that victory can we keep from slipping back into the old religious swamp out of which we were dredged at Easter. Post-Christian culture, bereft of religious vigor, is becoming such a swamp, a ‘culture of death.’ Threatened from without by a resurgence of pre-modern forms of sacred violence, it is inwardly imperiled by postmodern forms of nihilistic resignation, dickering with death – in a world ‘distracted from distraction by distraction,’ death being the only distraction weighty enough to distract. Naïve irreligious secularism is powerless to meet this challenge. Christianity is not.

One of the many fascinating things about our times is that we will get to see how once revered institutions of learning move on from their present dead ends. Will they try to mover further downhill and prove Bailie right, falling deeper into a death worship and thus, one assumes, eventually losing what's left of their ability to maintain public credibility (at least among those who are capable of maintaining our civilization) in the contests over truth and finance? Will Cambridge crumble? Will the schools turn back to respect for Christianity? Or will it be possible for them to embrace an anthropology (inspired by but not identical to Christian faith) and simulate the Judeo-Christian embrace of life, in an intellectual culture that remains secular, i.e. not dependent for its sacred charge on belief in God?

No doubt the answer to such questions depends on us. In the meantime, Catholic Georgetown University, or President B.H.Obama, cannot allow Obama's presence at Georgetown to be shared with, or subsumed by, a sign of the name of Jesus Christ.