“Equality Acts” from Easter to Pentecost and Beyond

Reflections on the occasion of Pentecost: A bill named “The Equality Act” has been debated in the U.S. Congress in recent years and recommended for passage by President Biden in a recent speech to a joint session of Congress.  Whether one believes that the main result of this “Equality Act” would be exciting athletic competition between biological women and transgender women; or, on the other hand, the exclusion from competition of whole groups of would-be athletes with lesser average muscle mass; one might at least agree that the term “Equality” in this bill’s name has been minted only very recently.  In contrast, if one were to seek the counsel of millennia of experience, one would find, for example, that men and women played equally dignified roles in the Biblical accounts of Easter and Pentecost: Women went to Jesus’ tomb to anoint his body on Easter morning; joined the apostles for prayer in the upper room; were among the group of believers who were filled with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost; and heard Peter’s first sermon quoting the prophet Joel, saying “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.”  

Some commentators raise the question, however, whether the Biblical accounts are mythical.  In response to this question, Robert Barron has recently cited C. S. Lewis in saying that “those who think that the New Testament is a myth just haven’t read many myths.”  Barron notes that myths are “once upon a time” stories with their own takes on eternal truths, but without any specific location in historical eras.  No one ever supposed that Heracles performed his labors during a specific historical time period.  In contrast, Barron notes, Biblical accounts in the New Testament are very specific in their historical references. 

The Biblical “everyone who calls” refers not only to birth gender, but also to race.  (Perhaps one should say “birth race,” for who would be so foolish as to doubt that a lucrative pigmentation technology could arise for altering skin color?)  Martin Luther King, Jr. famously looked forward to the day when everyone would be judged by the content of his character, not by the color of his skin.

In the opinion of Jason L. Riley, the day foreseen by Dr. King has already arrived: Race relations in America are better than ever.  Dr. King’s concept of equality is being achieved.  This improvement has occurred despite various well-publicized ideological agendas promoting theories of “systemic racism” and “unconscious bias” that swamp out good news.  For example, the approval of interracial marriage rose from 4% in 1958 to 84% in 2013.  Riley writes that “the political left has a stake in overstating both the existence and effects of racism so that it can advocate for more and bigger programs to combat it.”  

One such leftist group is named “Black Lives Matter” (BLM).  According to the New York Post article “Inside BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors’ million-dollar real estate buying binge” (April 10, 2021), a NYC version of BLM has called for a financial probe into the operations of the global version of BLM.  Cullors is a self-described Marxist whose standard of living seems greatly to surpass those of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao; and flagrantly to violate the spirit of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”  Presumably, this Marxist slogan has also undergone some recent linguistic engineering, but it is difficult to see just how the enjoyment of luxury housing in Topanga Canyon or the Bahamas can be construed as an “act of equality.”

The Twelfth Man - - in Wisconsin?

Regarding the United States Presidential Election of 2020, consider the state of Wisconsin and assume that the ballot count reported to Congress by the usual state electoral machinery was a perfect numerical statement of all legal ballots, and only legal ballots, that were cast.  As of December 27, 2020, a reasonably reliable Internet website reported those results as 1,630,866 for Biden and 1,610,184 for Trump.  For the purposes of the present analysis, we will neglect the Libertarian and other candidates and will assume that the total number of ballots cast was 3,241,050.  Biden won by 20,682 votes (0.638%).  

It is desired to develop a theoretical model of how the Wisconsin results might have come about.  Suppose that prior to the election, the participating 3,241,050 Wisconsinites, being incredibly civic-minded, had decided to divide themselves into discussion groups of 12 voters each for political discussion and debate before casting their ballots.  There would have been 270,087 discussion groups, with 6 hapless Wisconsinites left group-less, assumed to have split evenly between the two candidates, and excluded from further analysis. 

If all 270,087 discussion groups had split their votes evenly, then the two candidates would have tied at 1,620,522 each in Wisconsin - - and you thought that the actual voting controversies were a headache!  But not to worry, 10,341 Wisconsinites “flipped their votes” in order to give Biden his 20,682-vote margin.  We assume that exactly one vote was flipped in each of 10,341 discussion groups (i.e., that 3.8% of all discussion groups broke for Biden by 7 to 5), while the remaining 270,087 – 10,341 = 259,746 discussion groups (96.2%) were dead even (6 Biden votes to 6 Trump votes).

Prior to the election, a widely acclaimed, professional, scientific poll gave Biden a projected 17% margin of victory - - and who are we to suggest any analysis that does not “follow the science”?  (See the footnote at the end of this blog post.  There were other polls; but the ABC / Washington Post poll will be used here in order to make a clean distinction.)  The 17% projected Biden victory would be consistent with all 270,087 discussion groups breaking 7 to 5 for Biden (58.3% to 41.7%, i.e., a 16.6% net preference for Biden).  In contrast, the 0.6% actual Biden victory is consistent with nearly all (259,746, or 96.2%) of the discussion groups being dead even (6 to 6).  

Who was this “Twelfth Man,” the defector from the projected 7 – 5 Biden poll advantage to the actual 6 – 6 electoral result in 96.2% of the hypothesized discussion groups?  (We’re dealing here with Wisconsin, so we assume that this Twelfth Man is not a certain student-athlete at Texas A&M University!)  The Wisconsinite Twelfth Man stated to pollsters a preference for Biden, nevertheless supported Trump at the ballot box, and almost gave Trump the victory.  This Twelfth Man is proposed to be a Wisconsinite who, being badgered by acquaintances and public media to support a scientifically projected or socially acceptable winner, is inclined to tell a pollster one thing and then to vote differently.  This Twelfth Man hopes merely to show the pollster the door and to get about the rest of his life in peace.  If this analysis is right for Wisconsin and generalizable to the rest of the nation, then the U.S. electorate is portrayed as split into two nearly equal factions that seem to be largely beyond the reach of rational persuasion: One-twelfth of the electorate will not even answer pollsters accurately, presumably due to fear of some manner of reprisal. 

Of course, this analysis has assumed scientific and accurate polling and voting procedures, and has focused on the hypothesized badgered voters who will not publicly state what they think or intend.  What would the analysis look like if, heaven forfend, the 17% projected Biden advantage had been a fiction publicized precisely in order to badger voters into flipping their votes or in order to suppress their turn-out?  We will not pursue that line of inquiry here.

The Twelfth Man analyzed here would seem to be a modern-day version of Solzhenitsyn’s Colonel Georgi Vorotyntsev.  (See the October 13, 2020 blog post in this series.)  When Vorotyntsev ventured the slightest deviation from the Kadet party line (that of the intelligentsia), the drawing room fell eerily silent.  As if hypnotized, Vorotyntsev said no more, “not because he felt he was wrong, but out of fear of saying something reactionary.”  Subsequently, he was privately advised that “in educated Russian society … by no means every view may be expressed … [and] the more ‘liberated’ the company, the more heavily this tacit prohibition weighs on it.”  Such ingrained self-censorship, or Vorotyntsev effect, severely limited public speech on important issues in late-Tsarist Russia.  Today, if a Twelfth Man would venture, during polite conversation, the slightest deviation from some aspect of, say, progressive identity politics, then the ensuing, eerie silence would quickly bid him to say no more, lest he say something reactionary.  Today, “in educated American society … by no means every view may be expressed … [and] the more ‘progressive’ the company, the more heavily this tacit prohibition weighs on it.”  The modern-day Vorotyntsev effect continues to limit and to distort public speech on important political issues, including those expressed in Presidential polling and voting. 

(Footnote: The October 28, 2020 ABC News / Washington Post Poll [rated A+ by those who supposedly know] gave Biden a 17% lead in Wisconsin.  See https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/wisconsin/, accessed 12-30-20.)

Elitism, Nihilism, and Vorotyntsev-ism in Politics

This year, more so than most, the elections for high office in the United States highlight Benjamin Franklin’s post-constitutional-convention remark that you, the citizens of the erstwhile colonies, now have “a Republic, if you can keep it.”  Among the types of radicalism that would fundamentally alter the United States Constitution is one that found historical expression in the intelligentsia of late 19th and early 20th century Russia, where intelligentsia is a term of social and political art discussed below.  Right now, three weeks before Election Day 2020, voters may wish to incorporate the following analysis into their electoral deliberations.

      The Northwestern professor, Gary Saul Morson, has vividly portrayed pre-revolutionary Russia while reviewing the background of the word intelligentsia, which was coined about the year 1860 in order to refer to an elite class based on three criteria.  First, each member of the intelligentsia, referred to as an intelligent, agreed to identify himself with this progressive class in preference to any traditionally defined social, professional, ethnic, or religious class.  Second, each intelligent devoted himself or herself to a rigorous personal regimen of “puritanical dissoluteness” or “nihilistic moralism,” ignoring its implied irony and inventing a meaning of life independent of tradition.  Third, each intelligent accepted a set of destructive beliefs - - be they populist, Marxist, or anarchist - - that were taken to be scientifically underwritten, absolutely certain, and completely obligatory; thereby “checking the boxes” for some fashionable modern ideas while remaining oblivious to their many implied contradictions of history or logic: An intelligent accepted atheism on faith, became spiritually devoted to materialism, and chose to embrace determinism.  An intelligent committed himself or herself to “science,” construed as a metaphysical system in which the world worked by purposeless forces that nevertheless aimed at utopia; and detected a profound syllogism in the statement “Man is descended from apes; therefore, love one another.”

      With regard to nihilism, one must be aware of possible equivocation: Philosophical nihilism is an extreme skepticism maintaining that nothing in the world has a real existence and that “All is unreality or illusion.”  On the other hand, historical nihilism can refer to the extreme Russian political viewpoint, dating from the late 19th century, that disapproved of the entire established social order and sought to overthrow it.  Destruction of existing society was regarded as the first step towards the utopia that would quickly arise were it not for the baleful effect of current social arrangements.

      Morson reports that between 1900 and 1917 in late-Tsarist, pre-revolutionary Russia there were tens of thousands of acts of terrorism, arson, robbery, and murder.  How did educated liberal Russian society, in thrall as it was to the intelligentsia, respond to this scourge?  A Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadet Party) was set up in the Duma (legislature formed in 1905), but official Kadet publications never condemned political assassination or terrorism.  In the words of one liberal, “Condemn terror?  That would be the moral death of the party!”  Solzhenitsyn’s novel November 1916 portrays a gathering of Kadet liberals and the visiting Colonel Georgi Vorotyntsev.  When Vorotyntsev ventured the slightest deviation from the Kadet party line, the room fell eerily silent.  As if hypnotized, Vorotyntsev said no more, “not because he felt he was wrong, but out of fear of saying something reactionary.”  As a professor later explained to him, “In educated Russian society … by no means every view may be expressed … [and] the more ‘liberated’ the company, the more heavily this tacit prohibition weighs on it.”  Such ingrained self-censorship, or Vorotyntsev effect, severely limited public speech on important issues.

      Morson reveals the moral cowardice of pre-Revolutionary Russian liberals, who signed petitions they did not agree with; supported anarchists’ demands to abolish the police despite foreseeable, looming disaster; agreed that socialism would cure all societal ills with alacrity; and obeyed the maxim “Better to side with people a mile to one’s left than be associated with anyone one inch to one’s right.”

      Morson notes that the terror of the French Revolution was eventually stopped by the fall of Robespierre and the rise of Napoleon.  But in Russia, Stalin proclaimed an intensification of class struggle even after the Russian Revolution had ended, leading to innumerable executions and exiles to the Gulag, not to mention purges, show trials, and induced famine.  Giving in to illiberal forces ensures their longevity.

      Recently, more than a century after liberal opinion in late-Tsarist Russia fell over itself to support various socialist, Marxist, and anarchist initiatives, the Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield has well described the latest emanation of the Vorotyntsev effect in the United States: “We live in a society where racism is not, and cannot be, openly professed … [yet] ‘systemic racism’ supposedly persists … [in a] paradox of a racist society without racists.”  If a modern Vorotyntsev would venture, during polite conversation, the slightest deviation from the progressive view of “systemic racism,” then the ensuing, eerie silence would quickly bid him to say no more, lest he say something reactionary.  Adapting the Russian professor’s advice, “In educated American society … by no means every view may be expressed … [and] the more ‘progressive’ the company, the more heavily this tacit prohibition weighs on it.”

      Mansfield observes that systemic racism is taken to be unconscious, but that “it is strange to describe an unconscious effect as racism, for an ism is an opinion, a doctrine, not a mere condition.”  Systemic racism is said to be the bad result of behavior heretofore regarded as good, but now revealed to be illicit privilege rather than just reward.  On the other hand, why should anyone feel guilty about an accusation of “privilege” if a system beyond anyone’s intentions creates that privilege?  It seems that charges of “systemic racism” are meant as a way to avoid arguments over the nature and application of justice.  “More affirmative action and more subsidies - - what can they do that will now help instead of hurt?  Call them ‘reparations’ - - will that do any good?”  Mansfield concludes that “‘Systematic racism’ is a bogus description that issues in an accusation made in doubtful faith [and] that contradicts itself.”  Nevertheless, Mansfield finds that theories of “systematic racism” are so widely held as to require polite disputation.

      Combining the insights presented by Morson and Mansfield, one concludes that it is high time to uphold the original intentions of Colonel Georgi Vorotyntsev!

(Postscript #1: Exactly one week after the original Mansfield article, the WSJ published seven replies (“Replying to Mansfield on Systemic Racism”) expressing a spectrum of opinions that generally, but not always, agreed with Mansfield’s analysis.)

(Postscript #2: The next blog posting in this series is currently expected to appear on January 1 or February 1, 2021.)

Absolutism and Agitprop versus True Grit

Securely ensconced in his Alpine redoubt far removed from the recent rioting in the United States, the international college dean, Andrew A. Michta, has recently highlighted the political thought of the Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz.  (See the August 1-2, 2020 weekend print edition of the Wall Street Journal.)  Milosz, an anti-totalitarian and a future Nobel Prize winner, managed an escape from Poland during the Stalinist era; criticized Western intellectuals who saw communism as overcoming the “bourgeois forces” that had caused World War II; warned the West of the fate of the human mind and soul under totalitarianism; and published his book, The Captive Mind, in 1953.  In the Soviet type of absolutism, the main intellectual tool for reshaping individuals into “affirmative cogs” serving the state is the transformation of ordinary human language into ideologically sanctioned language.  Clear external referents are replaced by cloudy subjective preferences; formerly clear expressions may be forbidden at a moment’s notice; and no linguistic legerdemain is out of bounds while promoting the purposes of the political hegemon.

      It would be illustrative to specify a concrete example of such linguistic legerdemain in the United States today.  As background, recall that the acronym NAACP refers to a prestigious civil rights organization.  Now consider recent news reports regarding a radio announcer who, while congratulating an individual on nomination to candidacy for high federal office, referred to that individual as a “CP,” in the sense of the aforementioned acronym.  That radio announcer was promptly fired from his job.  So “CP” is fine for acronyms but not for individuals?  Who knew?  This linguistic convention, dating from some unknown time and promulgated by some unknown elitist authority, certainly chills free speech, detracts from ordinary civility, and increases the number of “Captive Minds.”

      Returning to Michta’s argument: If radicals can enforce the idea that race is the exclusive lens for viewing all U.S. history, then they may use that lens to identify and reward societal groups that are deemed meritorious.  This process may fairly be referred to as resegregation, because it is diametrically opposed to traditional civil rights.  Resegregation would demand massive re-education of the American public; inundating Marxist agitprop (a type of propaganda - see below); and, one surmises, the round-up of linguistic miscreants for Maoist-style self-criticism and confession.  One might have thought that current American elites would stand up for free speech; but, alas, these elites believe not that they have an obligation to serve the republic, but only that they have a right to rule it and to “cancel” all historical references that do not conform to today’s Zeitgeist.

      Michta contends that resegregation is fundamentally un-American; that focusing on individuals’ melanin content would lead to a caste system; that academic speech codes and safe spaces destroy democratic debate; that absolutism “cancels” political compromise; and that the current absolutism may be a harbinger of violence not seen since the Civil War.  The current ideological experiment in totalitarianism would have been seen by Milosz as the result of “an American mind bloated by a steady diet of identity politics and group grievance served up by ideologues in schools nationwide.”  On Friday, August 7, 2020 the WSJ published five letters to the editor regarding Michta’s article.  Four of the letters supported Michta’s viewpoint.

      Agitprop refers to the use of the arts, culture, and historical memory to promulgate the doctrines of ruling elites; if those elites are extreme-socialist or communist, then it may fairly be said that agitprop promotes Marxist doctrine.  (Soviet Russia had a Department of Agitation and Propaganda.)  Robert L. Woodson, Sr. has recently written about a taxpayer-funded museum display that meets the definition of agitprop (WSJ, 8/7/20).  In July, 2020 a branch of the Smithsonian Institution “posted a graphic on its website outlining the ‘Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States’ … From the sounds of it, these ‘assumptions’ … would be debilitating and deleterious to minorities.”  As it turned out, however, those supposedly menacing “assumptions” were fairly anodyne aphorisms such as “hard work is the key to success.”  In fact, Woodson continues, “the qualities attributed to ‘whiteness’ are the same principles and values that have empowered blacks in America to succeed despite lingering discrimination and bigotry.  The museum removed the graphic after a public outcry, saying ‘it’s not working in the way that we intended.’”  This museum fiasco of July, 2020 was just one instance of “the demeaning and disabling message of racial grievance merchants, who claim that any and all failures of black Americans are attributable to so-called systemic racism.”  (Jackie Robinson overcame real systemic racism in order to join the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, some 73 years ago.)  Woodson’s article gives two stories of black resilience and success, as follows:

      During World War II, blacks were initially prohibited from becoming officers in the U.S. Navy.  Eleanor Roosevelt insisted that 16 college-educated black cadets be chosen for a line-officer training class in 1944.  “Someone in the Navy” tried to sabotage their training, but the cadets in this all-black class covered the windows of their barracks, stayed up all night to study, and passed with higher marks than an all-white class.  An incredulous chain of command forced the black cadets to re-take the exam, but they all passed again.  The Navy offered commissions to 13 of these cadets (the “Golden 13”), who became naval officers because of their “true grit.”  (A person is said to have “true grit” if he or she sets goals and follows through to achieve them with enthusiasm and perseverance in the face of significant obstacles; the idea being that tiny, hard particulate matter can eventually wear down whatever opposes it.)

      A second example of true grit is seen in the case of the best-selling book and award-winning movie Hidden Figures.  Three black female employees of a NASA research facility, Katherine Johnson (mathematics and computation), Mary Jackson (engineering), and Dorothy Vaughan (mathematical supervisor), played critical roles in John Glenn’s 1962 mission to orbit the earth.  Each of these employees overcame obstacles too numerous to recount in this review, but which are vividly portrayed in the excellent movie.  Hidden Figures, Woodson observes, “is but one of thousands of black American stories demonstrating that the most powerful antidote to disrespect isn’t protest but performance and [that] the most potent answer to repression is resilience.”

Theological Review (2): Seeking the Wrong Certainty

The Meaning of Protestant Theology, a book written by Professor Phillip Cary and published by Baker Academic in 2019, is recommended for anyone looking for a perspicacious and concise account of Protestant Christian theology.  Last month we wrote about Cary’s analysis of spiritual ascent and descent.  Now, we will inquire into the question, whether Christian theology has been looking for the wrong kind of certainty in recent centuries (p. 9).  Faith should be based on the certainty that God will be true to his word, not on a purported certainty of one’s own theological tradition; if for no other reason than that some academic theological traditions have arisen with no evident connection to building the assurance of faith.  One thinks of “historical Jesus” research that attempts to create a biography out of a thin ancient historical record that would be more appropriate for a noncommittal study of Homer and Troy.  Cary writes that “belief in the wrong kind of certainty has not only left Protestant theology particularly unprepared for new developments in biblical scholarship in the nineteenth century; it resulted in a stunning lack of charity in Luther’s own writing” (p. 209).

      Speaking of the “wrong kind of certainty” suggests that an equivocation is lurking.  If two or more kinds of certainty simply and always bore distinct names, then life would be much easier.  Certainty is demanded in mathematics; it is not clear that Christian faith demands the same state of mind.  In mathematical proofs, if the premises are understood, then the conclusion is seen, via mental vision, to be necessary without reference to persons.  In Christian doctrine, if God’s promises and message are understood, then the conclusion (salvation) is seen, via mental vision, to be reliable, based on God’s character.

      What type of certainty attaches to faith, and should a different word be substituted for “certainty”?  Around 400 C.E. an official Biblical canon was recognized, and it included the book of Hebrews, whose 11th chapter (ESV) begins with “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  The original Greek words for “assurance” and “conviction” are (transliterated as) “hypostasis” and “elenchos,” respectively; the translation seems appropriate, recalling that hypostasis refers to the assurance of abstract things and to the essence of concrete things.  For both assurance and conviction, it would seem that one is dealing with a probability sufficiently high for action or belief (a moral certainty) but not necessarily as high as for mathematical proof (absolute certainty).  Text and notes in a German translation (Schlachter 2000) link hypostasis to confidence, realization, and holding fast (Zuversicht, Verwicklichung, and Beharren), but not to certainty (Gewissheit).  There is a famous hymn titled “Blessed Assurance, Jesus is Mine,” but nowhere has the writer of this blog encountered a hymn titled “Certain Inference, Jesus is Mine.”  Only long-standing habit and inertia lead one to say of faith that it must be certain rather than divinely assured.  If only a context-sensitive equivocation-alarm would sound whenever a Christian believer said “certain,” not stopping until the speaker substituted “divinely assured”; then much confusion could be avoided.

      Another wrong kind of certainty lurks in the interpretation of Christian texts: “Reformers like Luther and Calvin accepted a version of the traditional gradation of authorities, with Scripture alone as the source of certainty [assurance] and the church fathers as indispensable but not infallible guides to sound interpretation of Scripture” (p. 212).  “Protestant theologians were convinced that … the most up-to-date historical scholarship supported their interpretation of both Scripture and tradition” (p. 213).  However, nineteenth century historical-critical scholarship treated sacred Scripture like any other ancient document, produced unorthodox analyses, and reminded orthodox believers that all interpretations take place within some tradition.

      Wandering into a hostile interpretive environment for the sake of a wrong kind of probability also produces results hostile to traditional Christianity.  For example, Hume’s gambit posits that the probability that any miracle is true is less than the probability that some medieval monk corrupted the text and fabricated the miracle; that all of our beliefs are adopted by weighing probabilities; and hence, that all alleged miracles must be disbelieved de jure without the necessity of constructing a factual record.  Consistent with this approach, some commentators downplay Constantine’s apparent conversion to Christianity before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, not wishing to delve into the existence of fascinating commemorative coins that Constantine later struck, showing the Christian Chi-Rho sign on the Roman labarum.  However, Hume’s gambit fails, because the thesis that all of our beliefs are adopted by weighing probabilities is false: If we believe that there are other minds and that the sun will rise again tomorrow, then we do so on other grounds.

      Cary provides insightful discussions of modernism and post-modernism in Chapter 9.  “To the post-modernist, modernity appears ironically as a tradition that cannot admit that it is a tradition, because it is ideologically opposed to all traditions” (p. 222).  Left-wing postmodernism maintains that all traditions are indeed irrational and inescapable.  Right-wing post-modernism maintains that some instances of rationality exist in some traditions, although none of those traditions is a pure expression of universal reason.  Cary concludes on page 224 that it is the critical Socratic spirit, rather than any foundation of certainty, that turns traditions of interpretation into vectors of rationality.