This e-mail came in this morning from a reader who is a speech pathologist. He asked me not to use his name. He’s talking about an online seminar I was part of at Notre Dame yesterday, about Carter Snead’s new book about law, anthropology, and the body. The reader writes:

I watched the seminar/conversation yesterday after seeing you mention it on your blog, and first of all I have to admit I haven’t read the book in question. However, I don’t understand the point at all. It is all very good to argue things stemming from natural law, and the concept of the body, but the opposition doesn’t care.

I think that with the left’s control of, and redefinition of language, that pretending that there will be a ‘correction’ is ridiculous. The main thing I walked away from is that Notre Dame is full of intellectuals who have no idea what is going on in the world. Your most recent work is full of accounts of either self-censorship or anonymity from people who fear for their professional credentials. As I’ve mentioned on your comments before, the British Stammering Association wouldn’t run my graduate survey because it was heteronormative.

I lived in China for seven years, and I do not find anything in Live Not By Lies pessimistic or exaggerated, at least from the excerpts you have posted. I felt that the attitude of optimism and the sophistry of the questions being asked made no sense in a world where medical associations are literally being asked to provide transgender treatments that are untested and have serious side effects to children. A world where a Pulitzer prize was awarded to a fake history project. A world where Disney literally thanked the political repression division of the Xinjiang government in the PRC.

Ideas matter, but the ideas that matter do not appear to be the ideas bouncing around Notre Dame’s ethics department. Honestly, do use the Russian history analogies you are so fond of, the staff of Notre Dame are the old liberals of the 1840s who are unaware that the battle is over, and their side already lost, compared to the absolutely destructive principles of the Nihilists.

Anyway I was going to raise that question, namely even if the SCOTUS is ‘conservative’ what does it matter when behavioral health and medicine are completely in the hands of the enemy?

Well, I think that’s a too-harsh judgment on Snead’s book, which is both good and important, but the reader really isn’t talking about the book itself. If I understand him, he’s claiming that the intellectual work is in vain, because the left, which controls biomedical and other institutions, doesn’t care about arguments.

I’d say he’s onto something, though I do think it’s important to do the intellectual work, even if it probably matters less today than it once did. It matters to speak the truth, even if few people are willing to hear it, at least in this time and place.

That said, the reader is stating bluntly a painful reality about our emotive culture. I can’t stress strongly enough how important that campus showdown at Yale in 2015 was, between Prof. Nicholas Christakis and a social justice student mob. Here’s a clip of it. You see Prof. Christakis trying to engage the students respectfully and rationally. They won’t have it. They shriek at him, they curse at him, they assert their supposed woundedness over his disagreeing with them, etc. And, as we know, Yale University as an institution ultimately backed the mob.

The Woke control the means of cultural production, and exercise that control in creepy ways sometimes. Yesterday in the Amy Coney Barrett hearings, Sen. Mazie Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii, was aggrieved because ACB used the word “sexual preference” to refer to homosexuality. That is offensive! said Our Mazie.

Is it? News to me. Lo, look what happened next:

As recently as last month, Webster’s Dictionary included a definition of “preference” as “orientation” or “sexual preference.” TODAY they changed it and added the word “offensive.”

Insane – I just checked through Wayback Machine and it’s real.

(via @ThorSvensonn & @chadfelixg) pic.twitter.com/oOq1SNtCP2

— Steve Krakauer (@SteveKrak) October 14, 2020

Yesterday in this blog’s comments, a Virginia reader from Poland pointed out that one of the things people who lived under communism are seeing now that unnerves them is the way the rules change, and language changes, seemingly overnight — with edicts handed down from invisible authorities, edicts that everyone has to obey, or else. Who decided that it was offensive to use the phrase “sexual preference”? Don’t ask, just obey, or stand accused of bigotry, of creating a hostile work environment, of making others feel unsafe, or whatever else they need to say to get rid of you.

The reader says that “the battle is over,” and that it’s a waste of time to have discussions like my colleagues and I had under Notre Dame’s auspices yesterday. Again, I don’t think it’s a waste of time at all, but I do think the battle is largely over, and now conservatives and old-fashioned liberals have to continue the fight through guerrilla actions, so to speak. I think it’s important to ask, though, how scholars, intellectuals, and (for lack of a better word) culture-producers are going to do their work in the face of massive institutional and cultural opposition. Snead’s new book examines bioethics and anthropology as they play out in law governing abortion, assisted reproduction, and end-of-life issues (e.g., euthanasia). It all centers around what it means to be a person, and the meaning of the body. Snead is a Catholic, but the word “God” doesn’t appear in his book; it’s more or less a natural law argument for treating the body in a non-instrumental way in the law.

Most of the philosophical questions he raises in the book could be applied to the issues surrounding transgenderism. If an academic writer did so, and wrote from a position of arguing that transgenderism is in any way not ideal, would he even be published? Would these conversations even be possible? If not, how can scholars carry on this work?

As I was working on this post, another letter came in, this from an academic. He gives me permission to post it, as long as I hide his name and details about his institutional affiliation:

Yesterday I finished reading Live Not By Lies. I am with those who say it is a very important book — the right book at the right time. Hopefully it serves as a wake-up call for some people. Its advice to cultivate small cells of trusted individuals comports with advice that is put out by the better survivalist and prepper literature. That parallel, like so many other things, should be illustrative of the reality of the threat we face. It seems that the book is doing very well, and I’m glad to hear that — you deserve for it to do well for the important work you’re doing, and hopefully that means it’s reaching more people.

Here’s my own brush with soft totalitarianism. To date, mine has been extremely mild:

I work in academia, in [a technical] department of probably one of the most conservative universities in the country. But even here, the signs of soft totalitarianism have been creeping in. Over the summer, our department’s university senate representative forwarded to us a senate resolution to pledge open support for Black Lives Matter and for racial demonstrations on campus, as well as having “conversations about race” in the classroom. Given that the college dean (who, along with most of the university administrators, has taken to signing her emails with her preferred pronouns) had just sent out an email telling people to read books about white guilt and white fragility, and to seek out another faculty member to be an “accountability buddy” (setting aside the racial insanity, that kind of third-grader language addressed to a group of university faculty is insulting) about race, it was pretty clear that “conversations about race” meant trashing white people and exalting everyone else — except, perhaps, the large number of Chinese students and faculty since Asians do well, so who cares about them. I ignored the email and never contacted anyone about being an “accountability buddy,” nor did anyone ever contact me.

In any case, when our senate representative forwarded that resolution to me, I decided right then and there that my integrity meant more to me than my job, and sent a reply saying, “Opposed. I don’t support disruptive demonstrations, and I’ll teach [science and engineering] in my classes, not political propaganda.” He never responded, and I’ve never heard anything more about it. I never even heard whether that senate resolution passed or not. It seems that for now taking a principled stand hasn’t cost me anything, but I doubt that will continue forever, because the trend of wokeness just keeps accelerating. But I remain committed to choosing my principles over my job whenever I’m forced to make that decision. Though if Biden wins, I suspect the next front that totalitarianism advances on will be political rather than from my job.

To that last point, I do want to raise a couple of disagreements I have with your positions. First, I agree with those who have said that you’ve “underplayed your hand” and may be naive in your confidence that the soft totalitarianism won’t turn hard. No one can predict the future, so you might be right, but I think you’re underestimating the probability that it could turn hard and the speed with which it could occur. Consider that this year, the left proved, through institutional, political, and media support of Antifa and BLM, that they are perfectly willing to destroy people’s property, livelihoods, and even to kill them (through surrogates of criminals and street thugs) if they think it will advance their political agendas. Prominent leftist voices have openly called for violence against their political enemies. No matter how that internal dynamic plays out — whether the institution succeeds in suppressing the violent dissidents, continues using them as shock troops, or gets devoured by them French Revolution-style — in every scenario, the case remains that those in power hate with a white-hot hate and are perfectly willing to employ violence to achieve their ends.

All of that considered, my second point of disagreement with your is your position with respect to the coming election. I speak as someone who is not a fan of Donald Trump, who wishes a thousand times over that we could have a president with Pence’s demeanor instead (Pence was superb in his debate with Harris) — when I say that  to hold your views and yet think it defensible that someone could cast a vote for Biden is bizarre and incomprehensible, possibly born out of an irrational animosity for Trump the man. A Biden administration (by which, let us be honest, we really mean a Harris administration) will do everything in its power to accelerate all the totalitarian trends you have identified.

You are correct to say that politics will not save us from our current situation, but you have also correctly said that engaging in politics is nonetheless an important rearguard action, if nothing else. Trump may not have the power to stop all the cultural trends destroying our civilization, but at least under his administration, the federal government’s ability to put its thumb on the scale in support of leftist conquest has been significantly curtailed, and we have won some important victories. To say that it could be principled to vote for an administration that is almost certain to initiate various kinds of crackdowns — whether hard or soft — on right-leaning dissidents, whereas its opposition will do at least something to slow leftist conquest — well, I can’t understand it, no matter how much of a vulgar loudmouth Trump is.