The bonfire of charities
Udolpho has already explained why he donated money to Steve Sailer's fundraising drive
so eloquently that I don't really need to add anything to it. The
unique voice and value that Sailer provides to blogosphere is immense,
so it would be appropriate for me to donate. I never otherwise donate
to charity, but in this case, the cheque is in the mail, as the famous
expression goes. (I don't have, nor do I intend to have, a PayPal
account, so it wasn't possible to donate that way, and for some reason,
my credit card donation was not accepted by the system, which should
explain my sudden return to the low-tech world of paper cheques.)
I can't even begin to imagine how many heads would explode if Sailer's ideas and articles were ever published in a book form. Perhaps it would be something like a nonfiction version of my all-time favourite fictional novel, Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons". Heck, at least that would make an interesting episode of the Jon Stewart show.
For those readers who are not familiar with Charlotte, I really cannot recommend this this excellent book too much. The story is about four college students, but the book is really about various hierarchies whose existence and effects everybody is perfectly aware of and behaves accordingly, but these hierarchies can never be mentioned in polite speech. Class, money, race, intelligence, education, looks, sexual attractiveness, power: we are mercilessly divided into strata according to these criteria, determining our place and proper behaviour.
Conflicts between the strata of these hierarchies and their typical ways of thinking cause many kinds of absurd and almost whimsical situations that the characters of this novel try to sidestep and handle the best that they can. Every character is perfectly aware of his position in each hierarchy (in some one might be high, while at the same time one might be low in others) and acts according to his position in a given situation. The funniest situations therefore emerge from collisions between different hierarchies which rank the characters differently, so that the characters are unsure of how they ought to act and who is on top. And more importantly, what would be the correct level of sarcasm to demonstrate that they don't really care --- but just don't try to hard!
The title character of the novel is an intelligent but good religious girl from a God-fearing small town far away from the sinful world, who then experiences a total culture shock when she escapes her small-town life to enter the famous (though fictional) Dupont university with a full scholarship, since she is so smart. In addition to Charlotte, the book features three other main characters: a selfish fratboy Hoyt, muscular JoJo who is the only white player in the school basketball team, and last and most certainly least, the unattractive low-status male intellectual nerd Adam.
Of course, not only do all these three men want Charlotte, but their lives also collide in other ways. Since the basketball player student athletes are... well, practical learners who make lots of money for the university, the university organizes totally ridiculous special clown college courses just for them. Even so, the poor and hence humble Adams of this world get paid to write their essays and do their homework. Adam makes the mistake of using difficult words whose meaning JoJo doesn't know when called for them, which then leads to increasing troubles when the leftist professor teaching the course is unsympathethic towards student athletes in general.
In the very beginning of the book, Charlotte has to meet for the last time her "cool" classmates whose future will consist of pumping gas and precariously random factory jobs. All those years in high school that they were above Charlotte, and now they are vastly below her. This obvious conflict is never stated explicitly, but the very best thing about this book is that it never has to: the book merely describes the characters and situations that they are in, and it is always obvious for the reader what is going on and what the real internal motivations of the characters are. Pointing out anything explicitly for the sake of the duller readers would just ruin the whole thing: the whole point of the book is that we all know perfectly well what is really going on, but are just too polite to ever say it.
After this encounter, Charlotte's parents drive her to the university, where she gets to meet her roommate Beverly who comes from a rich East Coast family. Charlotte's wooden-spoon parents naturally make the friendly gesture of inviting Beverly's parents for a dinner in a chain restaurant that serves enormous greasy portions of food for the lower middle class families, with completely predictable results. And the famous and expensive school in which Charlotte very quickly learns that the most important thing is to be cool and drink and party hard while carefully avoiding actually learning anything, hasn't even started yet. (Speaking of which, I can't recommend the essay "Student Anti-Intellectualism and the Dumbing Down of the University" by Paul Trout enough, which is part of the site "Society for A Return to Academic Standards".)
The book is careful to never go over the top or try to be too funny. All events depicted in it are perfectly believable and even predictable for anybody with a bit of common sense. The phenomena are not oversimplified nor carefully explained with underlining and fingerpointing so that every reader would understand them. This book simply doesn't have to. It just explains the externally observable behaviour of each character, and no further explanations are needed in addition to these deeds and words, because every reader will immediately understand what the real inner motivations were.
It is easy to imagine the immense ire and hatred that this book will raise in politically conscious leftists, whose behaviour and especially the true motives behind it this book mercilessly reveals by placing a mirror in front of them and then allowing them to be the way they are. It is one thing to pretend in words that everybody is the same, but it is quite another thing to actually behave as if it were so.
So very true, so god damn true, I thought in almost every page whenever I wasn't laughing out loud, for example, when Adam is physically threatened by some lacrosse players who accidentally overheard his bitter analysis about athletes and eventually realized that they didn't like it, because it contained long and difficult words. The socially aware and politically correct female nerd comrade Camille, who sees racism and sexism in every act and word, steps in between the men and starts mocking the athletes that they can't even touch her, because if they do so, she will run to the administration and tell them that the racist athletes harassed her sexually. This threat silences and disperses the athletes instantly, since that would be a crime worse than murder, and thus end their athletic careers before it even started.
In another humorous scene, a professor knows how to play the same game so that when he shows pictures of bullfighting and some female student complains that it's bad, the professor tells her that bullfighting is part of their culture and then asks her if she believes that some cultures are worse than hers. This, of course, silences the student immediately. Should she argue that cultures are different and some are actually worse than others, somebody might even think that she is religious or something. Tolerance is the key!
Wolfe's cleaver strikes everyone to cut off the hypocrisy and acting, even the naive Charlotte herself, even though she perhaps gets most of the sympathy. For example, the vivid depictions of how Charlotte reads Cosmopolitan or hears rap music for the first time (the small library in Charlotte's hometown doesn't subscribe to Cosmo, and certainly nobody would ever actually buy a magazine that costs $3.95) were very effective in making me understand how coarse the modern mainstream culture really has become and what it must look like for somebody who has grown up the way that Charlotte did.
The most politically incorrect parts of the book were certainly those that were about the varsity basketball team. I probably don't need to explain why. It should be noted, though, that the text wouldn't have to be changed much if it was about an all-white hockey team. I know this because, as a personal side note, I remember when we once had a sauna evening of the university go boardgame club, and some hockey player students who were drinking in the adjacent area decided to come in after one of them had punched another one to the nose and it was bleeding. I shall perhaps describe the rest of the evening simply by saying that the whole thing was basically a short story by Tom Wolfe. A truly eye-opening experience. I shuddered to think for a long time that these guys were university students, that is, high-flying intellectuals compared to the average person.
It certainly isn't difficult to mock athletes and their fans, but Wolfe also successfully skewers the intellectual crowd of "Millennial Mutants" and their deep conversations about what African country would be best for volunteer work so that it wouldn't be too dangerous and uncomfortable but would still look good in the resume and the eyes of Rhodes and other scholarship committees. The intellectual attempts of Adam and the other low-status nerd males of this club to analyze why the alpha males get to lead a life of constant sex orgy while the gammas are totally invisible to women also seemed familiar. (Adam's analysis is doomed to fail for the simple reason that certain aspects of reality that would be its necessary building blocks are taboos and cannot be mentioned.) Among the female students, the cliques offer constant amusement with their backstabbing and gossipping, even though the girls must present a public facade of being good people.
After this circus of individual events, it's time to wrap up the story into some kind of conclusion. It starts conveniently at a gay pride parade that Adam participates in so that he would look all progressive and brave (after all, most profeminism and other similar activism of men pretty much has only one motivation behind it), and at this march he realizes that all male professors who were invited to give a speech there tend to for some reason casually point out or imply somewhere in their speeches that they have a wife and kids. Realizing this, the annoyed Adam would like to make A few changes to the sign that he is carrying. Meanwhile, Hoyt decides to arrange a small counterdemonstration with his frat buddies. I probably don't have to go any further into how that thing ends: once again, everyone can see it coming.
I can't even begin to imagine how many heads would explode if Sailer's ideas and articles were ever published in a book form. Perhaps it would be something like a nonfiction version of my all-time favourite fictional novel, Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons". Heck, at least that would make an interesting episode of the Jon Stewart show.
For those readers who are not familiar with Charlotte, I really cannot recommend this this excellent book too much. The story is about four college students, but the book is really about various hierarchies whose existence and effects everybody is perfectly aware of and behaves accordingly, but these hierarchies can never be mentioned in polite speech. Class, money, race, intelligence, education, looks, sexual attractiveness, power: we are mercilessly divided into strata according to these criteria, determining our place and proper behaviour.
Conflicts between the strata of these hierarchies and their typical ways of thinking cause many kinds of absurd and almost whimsical situations that the characters of this novel try to sidestep and handle the best that they can. Every character is perfectly aware of his position in each hierarchy (in some one might be high, while at the same time one might be low in others) and acts according to his position in a given situation. The funniest situations therefore emerge from collisions between different hierarchies which rank the characters differently, so that the characters are unsure of how they ought to act and who is on top. And more importantly, what would be the correct level of sarcasm to demonstrate that they don't really care --- but just don't try to hard!
The title character of the novel is an intelligent but good religious girl from a God-fearing small town far away from the sinful world, who then experiences a total culture shock when she escapes her small-town life to enter the famous (though fictional) Dupont university with a full scholarship, since she is so smart. In addition to Charlotte, the book features three other main characters: a selfish fratboy Hoyt, muscular JoJo who is the only white player in the school basketball team, and last and most certainly least, the unattractive low-status male intellectual nerd Adam.
Of course, not only do all these three men want Charlotte, but their lives also collide in other ways. Since the basketball player student athletes are... well, practical learners who make lots of money for the university, the university organizes totally ridiculous special clown college courses just for them. Even so, the poor and hence humble Adams of this world get paid to write their essays and do their homework. Adam makes the mistake of using difficult words whose meaning JoJo doesn't know when called for them, which then leads to increasing troubles when the leftist professor teaching the course is unsympathethic towards student athletes in general.
In the very beginning of the book, Charlotte has to meet for the last time her "cool" classmates whose future will consist of pumping gas and precariously random factory jobs. All those years in high school that they were above Charlotte, and now they are vastly below her. This obvious conflict is never stated explicitly, but the very best thing about this book is that it never has to: the book merely describes the characters and situations that they are in, and it is always obvious for the reader what is going on and what the real internal motivations of the characters are. Pointing out anything explicitly for the sake of the duller readers would just ruin the whole thing: the whole point of the book is that we all know perfectly well what is really going on, but are just too polite to ever say it.
After this encounter, Charlotte's parents drive her to the university, where she gets to meet her roommate Beverly who comes from a rich East Coast family. Charlotte's wooden-spoon parents naturally make the friendly gesture of inviting Beverly's parents for a dinner in a chain restaurant that serves enormous greasy portions of food for the lower middle class families, with completely predictable results. And the famous and expensive school in which Charlotte very quickly learns that the most important thing is to be cool and drink and party hard while carefully avoiding actually learning anything, hasn't even started yet. (Speaking of which, I can't recommend the essay "Student Anti-Intellectualism and the Dumbing Down of the University" by Paul Trout enough, which is part of the site "Society for A Return to Academic Standards".)
The book is careful to never go over the top or try to be too funny. All events depicted in it are perfectly believable and even predictable for anybody with a bit of common sense. The phenomena are not oversimplified nor carefully explained with underlining and fingerpointing so that every reader would understand them. This book simply doesn't have to. It just explains the externally observable behaviour of each character, and no further explanations are needed in addition to these deeds and words, because every reader will immediately understand what the real inner motivations were.
It is easy to imagine the immense ire and hatred that this book will raise in politically conscious leftists, whose behaviour and especially the true motives behind it this book mercilessly reveals by placing a mirror in front of them and then allowing them to be the way they are. It is one thing to pretend in words that everybody is the same, but it is quite another thing to actually behave as if it were so.
So very true, so god damn true, I thought in almost every page whenever I wasn't laughing out loud, for example, when Adam is physically threatened by some lacrosse players who accidentally overheard his bitter analysis about athletes and eventually realized that they didn't like it, because it contained long and difficult words. The socially aware and politically correct female nerd comrade Camille, who sees racism and sexism in every act and word, steps in between the men and starts mocking the athletes that they can't even touch her, because if they do so, she will run to the administration and tell them that the racist athletes harassed her sexually. This threat silences and disperses the athletes instantly, since that would be a crime worse than murder, and thus end their athletic careers before it even started.
In another humorous scene, a professor knows how to play the same game so that when he shows pictures of bullfighting and some female student complains that it's bad, the professor tells her that bullfighting is part of their culture and then asks her if she believes that some cultures are worse than hers. This, of course, silences the student immediately. Should she argue that cultures are different and some are actually worse than others, somebody might even think that she is religious or something. Tolerance is the key!
Wolfe's cleaver strikes everyone to cut off the hypocrisy and acting, even the naive Charlotte herself, even though she perhaps gets most of the sympathy. For example, the vivid depictions of how Charlotte reads Cosmopolitan or hears rap music for the first time (the small library in Charlotte's hometown doesn't subscribe to Cosmo, and certainly nobody would ever actually buy a magazine that costs $3.95) were very effective in making me understand how coarse the modern mainstream culture really has become and what it must look like for somebody who has grown up the way that Charlotte did.
The most politically incorrect parts of the book were certainly those that were about the varsity basketball team. I probably don't need to explain why. It should be noted, though, that the text wouldn't have to be changed much if it was about an all-white hockey team. I know this because, as a personal side note, I remember when we once had a sauna evening of the university go boardgame club, and some hockey player students who were drinking in the adjacent area decided to come in after one of them had punched another one to the nose and it was bleeding. I shall perhaps describe the rest of the evening simply by saying that the whole thing was basically a short story by Tom Wolfe. A truly eye-opening experience. I shuddered to think for a long time that these guys were university students, that is, high-flying intellectuals compared to the average person.
It certainly isn't difficult to mock athletes and their fans, but Wolfe also successfully skewers the intellectual crowd of "Millennial Mutants" and their deep conversations about what African country would be best for volunteer work so that it wouldn't be too dangerous and uncomfortable but would still look good in the resume and the eyes of Rhodes and other scholarship committees. The intellectual attempts of Adam and the other low-status nerd males of this club to analyze why the alpha males get to lead a life of constant sex orgy while the gammas are totally invisible to women also seemed familiar. (Adam's analysis is doomed to fail for the simple reason that certain aspects of reality that would be its necessary building blocks are taboos and cannot be mentioned.) Among the female students, the cliques offer constant amusement with their backstabbing and gossipping, even though the girls must present a public facade of being good people.
After this circus of individual events, it's time to wrap up the story into some kind of conclusion. It starts conveniently at a gay pride parade that Adam participates in so that he would look all progressive and brave (after all, most profeminism and other similar activism of men pretty much has only one motivation behind it), and at this march he realizes that all male professors who were invited to give a speech there tend to for some reason casually point out or imply somewhere in their speeches that they have a wife and kids. Realizing this, the annoyed Adam would like to make A few changes to the sign that he is carrying. Meanwhile, Hoyt decides to arrange a small counterdemonstration with his frat buddies. I probably don't have to go any further into how that thing ends: once again, everyone can see it coming.
IACS was a superb book, one of the few I've read in recent years that I found difficult to put down. Wolfe's extreme eye for detail and his extreme lack of syrupy sentimentality is a very rare mixture in contemporary writers. I had a few nits to pick with it - none of the students ever seemed to do much actual school work, and Charlotte's parents were backwards to an exaggerated extent - but all in all it seemed much more true-to-life than most fiction.
Besides, I suspect most men who read it were constantly asking themselves whether they really had too much in common with Adam.
Peter
Iron Rails & Iron Weights
Posted by Anonymous | 1:15 PM
So this Steve Sailer fellow is some sort of radical intellectual who is kept down by the Man, because he challenges certain postulates. If middle class America ever got to see his stuff, their heads would explode. But despite his brilliance, he is finding it hard to make money with his writing, so he has to resort to charity. For some strange reason (Liberal media conspiracy?), and against all their economic principles, publishers are unwilling to make huge amounts of money with him. OK, sounds plausible.
Posted by Kalle | 11:40 AM