Losing our Religion

Facing down institutional deracination and disbelief

Most of you will be familiar with the story of the little boy who cried wolf, which is one of Aesop’s Fables. Its provenance is unknown, although its classical roots are visible thanks to its grimness. The structurally similar account of George Washington and the cherry tree has a much happier outcome. Stories from the Greek and Roman worlds often have a harder edge, likely due to the polytheistic sensibility underlying them.

By Francis Barlow, 1687

The situation currently facing the universities, medical establishment, and bureaucracy is closer to Aesop’s shepherd-boy than the fictional George Washington, in large part because the latter owns up. Various establishments are not owning up on all sorts of things: if anything, they’re doubling down.

There’s a serious case to be made that the worst current instance of this globally concerns the covid lab-leak hypothesis, discussed at length in this piece (by

Greg Lukianoff

and

Angel Eduardo

, both from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression). That said, the University of Sussex is refusing to resile from “men are women” despite a half-a-million + quid fine for harassing a sex realist academic out of her job.

I get that covid fuckery was very bad, killed a lot of people, ruined a lot of kids’ educations, and covered the Chinese Communist Party’s blushes—but there is something beyond bonkers about the idea that people can change sex.

The key insight here is that individuals or organisations which have either lied directly or been grievously mistaken are then disbelieved when they do tell the truth. And on this point, the people who fouled up covid origins and then suppressed dissenting voices using what has come to be known across the pond as “the censorship industrial complex” are far from alone.

Lorenzo’s last two longreads (part one here, and part two here) concern the extent to which the academic discipline of economics has either been egregiously mistaken or actively mendacious (probably a mixture of the two) about the economic benefits of immigration. This is particularly serious, because economics was one social science both conservatives and classical liberals used to bracket off from the rest of the humanities and social sciences, arguing it was more rigorous and so worth protecting.

No longer. It’s now at risk of going into the woodchipper along with sociology (which “fell into the tar-pit of Marxism,” as

Arnold Kling

often points out), anything to do with gender studies (which gave us blank-slatism on steroids, viz “men are women”), and English literature (which is little more than ill-written theoretical brainrot and has nothing to do with, ahem, literature).

To that end, in our next Chatham House Zoom conversation for paid subscribers, we’ll be discussing this problem and what—if anything—can be done about it. If there’s time, we’ll also discuss this piece of mine on “YooKay plc” for the University of Texas at Austin’s Civitas Institute.

This will take place at 10 am GMT on Sunday, March 30th. Both Lorenzo and I will send out links to our paid subscribers a couple of hours before the stream starts. Below, you can take out a paid subscription and get a 20 per cent discount if you’re keen to join us. This offer expires on March 30th, the day of the Zoom call.

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