The Cancellation of a Civilization

The Cancellation of a Civilization

Paul Craig Roberts

Few Americans understand that their society has been revolutionized.  America is no longer what it was.  Wherever you look everything has been overthrown.  I will illustrate it with three articles from the City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute.  Two are by Heather  Mac Donald and one is by John O. McGinnis.  Heather Mac Donald explains what has happened to museums (Winter 2022) and to the medical profession (Summer 2022).  John McGinnis (Spring 2022) explains what has happened to the legal profession.  Both writers are good at their task and have done their homework.  My account is a poor second to reading their articles.

Museums are custodians of a culture’s history and art.  As the United States was settled by white ethnicities from Great Britain, Ireland, and Europe, the history and art in museums reflect the culture of white people.  The problem is that a half century of nonwhite immigration has racially diversified and multiculturalized the US into a Tower of Babel, and the Eurocentric tradition did not take into account “racial equity.”  In short, the collections are white and white is racist. 

Heather Mac Donald’s example of what is happening to museums is the Art Institute of Chicago.  The institute’s director, James Rondeau, is embarrassed by the whiteness and is committed to turning the museum into an antiracist vehicle.  As only whites are racists, that means the museum is to be an anti-white vehicle.

Rondeau began by firing the 82 white docents, the volunteers who conducted tours and explained the art to school groups. The reasoning is that white voices can’t communicate to persons of color.  Heather Mac Donald notes that “no one would dare suggest that a black person can’t teach white students, but it is unobjectionable to say” the opposite. 

As the museum’s holdings are white art, which according to anti-racists perpetuates white power, what is their value to anti-racist museum directors?  Heather Mac Donald is concerned that “the final result, if unchecked, will be the cancellation of a civilization.”

John McGinnis writes that the law profession has been turned into a radical progressive force for change and that this “transformation of the legal profession marks a fundamental change in American democracy.”   The American Bar Association, once a defender against the “passions of the hour,” is today a leftwing powerhouse that uses “its influence in the accreditation process of law schools to make them even more monolithically left-wing than they already are.” No longer committed to supporting the established order but to undermining and transforming it, law schools have turned their backs to the Constitution’s requirement of equal treatment under the law.  Racial preferences for student admissions based on skin color are already institutionalized.  De facto, if not mandated, racial and gender  preferences in faculty hiring are essentially in place.  Ideological preferences in hiring seem clearly present as conservatives in law schools are becoming extinct.

New requirements for law schools amount to institutionalizing dogma and requiring instruction, such as critical race theory, on subjects that are unrelated to any distinctive legal skill.  So you will go to law school to learn how to be an anti-racist.  This suggests that the future of law will turn on sentiment or emotion. 

Heather Mac Donald explains that the American Medical Association is also an enforcer of racial preferences. She writes that “Medical education, medical research, and standards of competence have been upended by two related hypotheses: that systemic racism is responsible both for racial disparities in the demographics of the medical profession and for racial disparities in health outcomes.  Questioning those hypotheses is professionally suicidal. Vast sums of public and private research funding are being redirected from basic science to political projects aimed at dismantling white supremacy.  The result will be declining quality of medical care and a curtailment of scientific progress.”

As the assumption of the American Medical Association is that there are no differences in the capabilities and intelligence of the races, all differences in representation and performance are due to racism. Merit-based systems are tools of white oppression and stand in the way of racial equity and racial justice.  

In the repositories of our culture whiteness is under attack. In the legal profession whiteness is under attack. In the medical profession whiteness is under attack.  Where is whiteness not under attack?  Notice also that it is whites who are attacking whiteness.  Heather Mac Donald’s phrase, “the cancellation of a civilization” is well underway.

  

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