05 Jan Claudine Gay and the Crisis of Reality
Claudine Gay has resigned as the president of Harvard. She did not resign because she made a fool of herself and her university in her testimony before the House Education Committee on December 5th. She did not resign because she was shown to be a serial plagiarist and a mediocre intellectual (at best). Rather, she resigned because of racism. Or so she tells us:
For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count….
Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument. They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.
It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism. Someone who has advocated a modern curriculum that spans from the frontier of quantum science to the long-neglected history of Asian Americans. Someone who believes that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation’s oldest university.
One of two things must be true about this statement: either Gay knows that it is false, that she was forced out for reasons other than her race, but she is nevertheless playing the race card intentionally to disparage her opponents; or she believes that it is true, that systemic racism continues to be a colossal problem in this country, and she is the just latest victim of it.
Even though she is the second Ivy League president to be forced to resign over her December 5th testimony and even though the other one was a white woman who didn’t have a plagiarism problem, we think that it is far more likely that Claudine Gay believes what she wrote about racism and her job than not. And to be honest, that bothers us a helluva lot more than it would if it were the other way around.
Claudine Gay is not stupid, but she is delusional. And she’s delusional in a specific, non-mentally-ill kinda way. She’s delusional in an intellectual sense, we suppose. She believes things that are simply untrue because she’s been conditioned her entire life to believe them – despite the fact that they are untrue. To reiterate, Liz Magill was forced out at Penn, even though she is white and doesn’t stand credibly accused of plagiarism. Likewise, those who went after Gay have already said that they are also going to go after Sally Kornbluth, the president of MIT, who is also white and also doesn’t stand credibly accused of plagiarism. There is no evidence whatsoever that Claudine Gay was targeted because of her race. None. Yet she believes that she was, and so, for that matter, do countless of her intellectual, political, and ideological supporters. They know it was racism because…well…they just do.
For the last decade-plus, we have expended considerable effort and spilled considerable metaphorical ink in these pages (and in the pages of its predecessor publication) describing and lamenting the risks posed to civilization by the anti-realist philosophies that have come to dominate the Western intellectual environment. We didn’t do this because we think that these philosophies are interesting or because we are annoyed by them – although both are true. We did so because these are not mere philosophical concepts that are quarantined to the realms of philosophy and academia. Rather, they are epistemological matters that, for a variety of reasons, have come to dominate much of our educational, social, and political realms. Or to put it more bluntly: they are everywhere, in everything, and have real-world consequences.
For more than a century, the West and its institutions have been overwhelmed by anti-realism, the primary premise of which is that “truth” and “reality” are mere constructs that can and should be manipulated to serve broader ends. Whether it’s the Pragmatists and their insistence that objective truth is a myth and that the good in the world is defined by what “works;” the Marxist revisionists and their belief that the masses are dissociated from their true consciousness by the culture and its institutions; the Critical Theorists and their fetishization of Freud and his belief that civilization suppresses the id; the post-modernists and their determination that truth and reality are linguistic concepts created and manipulated by power relationship; or any of the countless offshoots of these epistemologies, the West in the 20th and 21st centuries has been defined by an unwillingness or inability to see, much less accept reality.
Vivek Ramaswamy has stirred up quite a bit of controversy on the campaign trail this year by insisting that transgenderism is, in nearly all cases, a form of mental illness. He has a point, of course, but it goes deeper than that. We live in a society that denies reality – in this case, biological reality – and insists that gender is a “social construct” falsely imposed upon humanity by oppressive and self-interested religious fanatics. We, as a society, actually teach our young to deny the authenticity of biological sex. Still, we wonder why so many of them are confused and depressed and even suicidal.
Several times since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas on October 7, relevant agencies within the federal government have been overwhelmed by bureaucratic insubordination resulting from frustration with American policy on the war. The State Department and the White House, to name two, have seen repeated “insurrections” by younger employees who resent the administration’s support for Israel. Like their campus colleagues, these officials have been inculcated with the tenets of anti-colonialism and the belief that Israel simply cannot be in the right, regardless of circumstances, because it is an orientalist oppressor entity. Hamas may have started the war. It may have murdered civilians, burned babies, and mass-raped women. It may be using its own people as human shields and the Red Cross and hospitals as command centers. It may be violating all the rules of war that the Left generally insists are inviolable. But at least it’s not part of the Western tradition and, therefore, intrinsically evil. To the Biden administration dissidents, Hamas is the morally righteous party here simply by virtue of the fact that it is not Israel.
The simple truth of the matter is that we have created a crisis in this country, a crisis of reality. The political Left insists that the Right is dangerous, paranoid, and conspiracy-addled. Yet the entire weltanschauung of the Left today is based on the idea that some nefarious force – whether that’s White supremacy, or Western supremacy, or religious supremacy, or whatever – has been and continues covering up the true nature of reality in order to protect entrenched interests.
We’re tempted to say that the whole thing is bat-guano crazy, but we know better. Sure, it’s nuts, but it’s purposefully cultivated nuttiness. And it’s doing its best to do its worst in American society.
Claudine Gay is delusional, but then, so are countless millions of other Americans.
