Carnal Reason

The best possible outcome from a policy of appeasement is to be eaten last. More likely is to be eaten slowly.

When Harvard regurgitated Larry Summers, its embattled president, last month, it was front-page news, and rightly so. Harvard’s action let us all know that the penalty for challenging the PC establishment was the oubliette. I’ve often had occasion to mention Mr. Summers before (see, for example, here and here). There was his laudable calling to task of the preposterous Cornel West, the political sermonizer and hip-hop artiste masquerading as a political philosopher, followed instantly by Summers’s abject apology when the black lobby at his university rose up to swat him for his impertinence in daring to criticize a brother. Then there was Summers’s girl trouble last year, when he had the temerity to suggest that one possible explanation for the relative paucity of women in the higher reaches of science might–might, mind you–have to do with biological differences between men and women. Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth that statement provoked! One MIT prof on the distaff side had to leave the room lest she faint, poor dear. And how Mr. Summers abased himself after his inadvertent utterance of that home truth! That was the story of Larry Summers: good instincts undergirded by a habit of capitulation and abasement.
The New Criterion

Posted on February 25th, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: General