The All Importance Of Good Will - Someone Asks Me About The Academic Racist Amy Wax

Just the other day I had reason to remember how shocked I was when, as a teenager in the early 60s,  in rural Maine,  I read Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus,* shocked at only one thing.  It wasn't the mention of birth control, a diaphragm, it wasn't premarital sex or the vulgar materialism of the hero's girlfriend's assimilated family, it wasn't his allowing the pubescent Black kid to look at, if I recall, a book of Cezanne's nude paintings much to the objections of his boss at the library.  No, it wasn't even her brother's jock strap casually hung in the family bathroom (I was an Irish kid),  it was the depiction of casual racism in Yiddish coming from, if I recall correctly, Brenda Patimkin's father at his warehouse.  I'd never met a Jewish person who used racist language, I'd never met one who was not an obvious liberal, none of whom would ever say such things.  Perhaps with the exception of dear old, much missed,  Mr. Hirsh whose department store was one of the most important cultural features of the small town next to mine.  I have no idea what his politics were.  I will point out that at that time I found the news that there were not only Catholics but Irish Catholics who were Republicans to be astonishing, too.   I remember when my oldest sister got married to her college boyfriend, his family being Republicans was more troubling to me than anything else about him.   She remained a Democrat as all my family have.

Anyway, the occasion to remember those long ago times was a conversation I had with someone about that vesicle of Donald Trump's diseased brain that is Stephen Miller of whom his honorable uncle, Dr. David S. Glosser, has said:  

"I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country."

The issue was, how someone with his family history, immigrants who had to flee the country of their origin for the United States at a time when racism, from its lowest to its highest in the guise of science was aimed at not only their exclusion but their very existence could be doing the very same thing today.  

"How could someone" who was "an educated man who is well aware of his heritage" willingly be exactly the thing that could well have destroyed his own family, the woman I was talking with wanted to know.  

The answer to that is as good an illustration of something I've been pointing out here more and more, when someone makes the choice to be immoral all an education does is make them more effective at being evil, of doing evil.  An education for an evil person just makes them better and more able at being evil, their credentials get them jobs where their evil can be amplified with power.  That is a universal truth that covers everyone of every ethnicity, of every nationality, of every religious group, of every identity.  

Education is not a cure for immorality, it, like science, like an education in the law, LIKE UNIVERSITY GRANTED CREDENTIALS,  facilitates the commission of evil, any expectation that "education is the answer" if it's a secular education or, in many cases, even if it has a component of moral theology, is a popular delusion of those with such credentials.  Their own non-predilection to do evil is no more dispositive in this area than those who consume snuff porn who don't kill, themselves is.  It's the ones who choose to be evil who matter. 

And so we come to the latest in the career of the very accomplished racist, Amy Wax and her colleague in elite racism, Lawrence A. Alexander, who deny that their work, blaming a whole host of evils on "non-whites," when the catalogue of those evils is endemic to "whites" especially those of the underclass in huge numbers is racist.  But, which, in the sociologically superstitious use of mathematics which has become ubiquitous, its presence among "whites" made to disappear into not only insignificance but effective non-existence by claiming those exist in a higher number as percentage of the population among "blacks", oh, right, "non-whites" make those percentages all-important in determining social policy and the law, who gets to come here, etc.   

I will point out that students of previous scientific racism would know that exactly everything attributed by Wax and Lawrence to "blacks" or, more conveinent to their racist spewing "non-whites" was attributed to many whites, especially to Jews form Eastern and Southern Europe.  I've written at length on one such paper written by a previous pair of scientific racists,  Karl Pearson and Margaret Moul, whose  The Problem of Alien Immigration Into Great Britain, Illustrated By An Examination of Russian and Polish Jewish Children, written in the years the Nazis were consulting such science in developing their policy, could be the grandfather of their articles.

From what I see, on the basis of reading their claims and as reported in magazine articles on their racism and the reaction to it, that is the substance of it.  

I have seen some remarks made about the Jewish identity of Wax and, it would seem, Lawrence, but, as I said, evil is a human condition that is universal.  Its presence has nothing to do with race or ethnicity, it certainly has nothing to do with intelligence or educational credentials** it is a personal choice to do evil.  I would point out that the refusal of the schools that hire such faculty to fire their lying, racist asses as if their publication didn't disqualify them from intellectual respectability is symptomatic of what I've also been talking about. 

I will certainly have more to say on this, soon.  I'm hoping to get back to Hans Kung's book I'm commenting on early next week. 

* Wish I could find my, no doubt, decaying copy.  I should read more Philip Roth to see if he stands up better than the other famous writers of his generation who haven't.  I suspect some of his would whereas lots of them, some of them with reputations bigger than his, are already has-beens.   I would bet that some of the most praised books of the 1950s, 60s are read by fewer than 100 people a year, not counting those assigned as classroom reading.   Does anyone have a reason to read John Updike?  I realized in the 1970s that he didn't write about anything I needed to read about, anymore. 

** It is amazing that anyone would harbor the irrational superstition that an education will cure someone of bigotry or evil.   In most cases, in every way under the very "modernism" that one of the less well reasoned condemnation of Wax and Lawrence name as their ultimate target,  universities, colleges, etc. have eschewed any notion of a responsibility to address morality, the morals of their curricula, the morals of their faculties, the morals of their certified product.   That is a direct effect of the hegemonic effect of adopting the methods of science as the required, universal model of what they do.   Science, from its inception, exempted itself from considerations of morality, even of honest fairness.  

It is sheer madness that, after the examples of the university graduates and intellectuals who comprised the Nazi genocidalists, the Marxist genocidalists that academia still maintains an even-handed, hands-off policy in addressing academic babblage spewing racism and other such evil from its employees.  I think in this, the "scientific" effect of modernism is closely related with the uses of orthodoxy were when such evils could be attributed to "religion".  But that's a longer conversation and I'd have to think about people like Augustine more than I have recently.