The Tyranny of the Weak
Will campus Diversity, Equality and Inclusion politics win the culture wars? It's time to take The Sniff Test.
The Expansion of English
One typically sticky night during my two years in Kuala Lumpur, I was dining with a senior executive from Credit Agricole, the French bank that had bought the brokerage I worked for. We retreated inside from the humidity while he bemoaned that English rather than French was the world’s business language. He advised me to negotiate with a Frenchman late at night, when his mind was tired from speaking English all day.
This was the signal to stop talking shop and he told me of his teenage son returning to France to finish his studies. Without proper instruction the boy would not master the nuances of written French that distinguish insiders from the rest. English as a second language is good enough for business, but high society French has rules.
The Académie Française is the oldest of the five academies of the Institut de France and traces its lineage to 1635, with a brief interruption for the revolution. The 40 immortals preside over the Academy and are the guardians of the French language. Meanwhile, the Oxford English dictionary added over 20 Korean words this year as English continues to expand through absorption.
The Pursuit of Happiness
Utilitarianism is the pursuit of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. It has two flavours, Act and Rule. The rule version is a practical guide for how to live without having to make a calculation every time we face a choice. It is the moral equivalent of the heuristics that humans use to facilitate most of the 35,000 decisions we make each day.
Heuristics are unconscious and emotional rules-of-thumb but we do face decisions requiring more careful and logical thought. Similarly, rules while helpful most of the time may be breached. When there is a building on fire the requirement to not walk on the grass in front of it may be ignored.
Understanding that rules remain open to interpretation, we have referees to supervise our games. In low-scoring sports such as football they have outsized influence on the result.
Leave the Comedy to the Comedians
Earlier this year a Yale university study of college students showed that 63% supported Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) statements as a condition of employment with their university. A slim majority favoured speech codes to regulate what students and faculty may say. This goes beyond choosing appropriate words to regulating the sentiment behind them.
If I’m offended by a comedian or bored by a play I can leave the theatre. I’m denied that entertainment but there are other things I could be doing. There are fewer alternatives to a university education hence the argument that the institution should adjust its content to accommodate the greatest number of people.
A comedy show that tempers its edge alienates core fans in an attempt for mass appeal. A play rewritten by the audience, or a section of it whose primary intention is to rewrite the play rather than be entertained, loses its meaning. Language separates us from all other life forms and its flexibility is an essential part of learning and progress. Creativity is a product of individual or small team efforts that benefit the rest of us. Committees create nothing.
Shackle the language and you shackle the learning. Humanity craves understanding, which is delivered by those who push the boundaries and flex the rules. Â
I don’t argue that we must accept what we are told and much of The Sniff Test does the precise opposite. But if we restrict the way that information is presented, then we have progressively less chance of understanding what is being said.
A Minimal Risk of Civil War
Two big and persistent debates that divide Americans are over abortion rights and gun control. Europeans are amazed at the radicalisation of people around these arguments that are non-issues over here. Whether the radicalisation leads to conflict depends on how it is expressed.
The most recent constitutional amendment was in 1992 on the arcane topic of congressional remuneration and it’s over fifty years since the voting age was dropped from 21 to 18. Yet the constitution remains alive and evolving through judicial interpretation.
Since the 1970s pro-abortionists target the Supreme Court to enforce their views. The gun lobby copied this tactic and the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms has gained meaning, going beyond the original intent of supplying a militia in the days before federal monopoly of armed forces. This puts huge focus on who is appointed to the Court.
Around a quarter of the US population is Catholic while only an eighth of the 116 justices throughout history shared that faith. Republicans are often tarred with the WASP (white Anglo-Saxon protestant) label, but Trump ensured a majority of the Court is Catholic for the first time. The longevity of judicial appointments has led to much hand-wringing about the consequences of these appointments.
Whether or not the judges vote based on their religious beliefs, their appointment was a signal to activists. 13 states have enacted near total abortion bans, although enforcement awaits interpretation in the highest court of the land.
Over the summer I wrote about the CIA taskforce set up to determine the cause of civil wars and how one member, Barbara F Walter, applies the results to the US during a TED talk. If people are battling over issues through constitutional courts we are a long way from civil war.
Equally, however passionate about principles today’s students may be, they are not prepared to die for their cause. Demanding the state intervene to enforce your opinions is about as far from preparing for civil war as you can get.
The Tyranny of the Weak
Growing up we had a couple of amusing books of graffiti. A few pithy statements stay with me, including that the meek shall inherit the earth, but how long will they hold onto it for. The university campus tyranny of the weak is likely to be short-lived.
My daughter tells of a lecturer who spends her time opining on the evils of the middle class to a group of students who are mostly attending to improve their life chances. Those who use paid public service to forward political views are often the same who want to use public institutions to limit the free speech of opponents.
The World Bank reports 2.2 billion people will join the ranks of the middle class by 2030, making it comfortably the largest strata of society with over 5 billion members. Marx argued the progression of history is scientifically knowable and gave birth to the idea that you can be on the wrong side of history. Many university lecturers are.
University Animal Farm
Education and healthcare are beneficiaries of monopoly and government spending. When the government increases the amount that students may borrow, university fees rise accordingly, along with the cost of student accommodation and the price of books and equipment. When more money flows to the National Heath Service, the bigger budget requires more administrators, while the price of medicines and machines rises in tandem. Education and healthcare, until very recently, have been the most inflationary products we consume.
An adviser to a former Labour leader told me that attempts to boost state education to rival private had failed and the only alternative was to drag down the standard of English public schools. Equality is more important than national achievement.
Since then the tactics have shifted to using government funding as a weapon to force universities to change their admissions policies. This year saw private school applications to Oxford at a 20-year low and success rates have fallen from 29% to 20% since 2017. While the private school share of UK undergraduates has fallen 10 percentage points over the same period, at 32% it remains five times the number of private school students so expect the campaign to continue.
DEI is about reparation, as the only way to level up is to drag down. The resulting behaviours are racist and sexist. Anti-white, anti-male and anti-middle class policies prevail in the name of addressing pro-white, pro-male and pro-middle class history. George Orwell’s pigs rename Manor Farm as Animal Farm, but by the end they live in the farmhouse and walk on two legs.
Speech codes in the name of DEI make universities about conforming rather than learning. This divides society. While those supporting the policies increase inside universities, the numbers in opposition grow outside of them.
The worst element of DEI is that it makes victims out of those it claims to support. These people need help to compete, whether they know or want it. And in case they don’t know it, there is a committee of self-appointed guardians of righteousness to ensure they get it anyway. The pigs on hind legs.
Why English Rules the World
Political persecution has produced some of history’s most gruesome crimes but few long-term winners. Protestants and Catholics co-exist today despite state-sponsored attempts to wipe each other out over the past five centuries. Oppression creates sympathy in the broader population that allows a movement to survive. Hamas provokes an Israeli backlash to motivate both its passive domestic constituency and international opinion.
Language has always been an expression of power. Latin in the Church reserved the understanding of the scriptures for an educated elite. The book burning that followed the advent of the printing press was the suppression of a popular uprising. Yet English survived and thrived, just as it did when the Vikings and the Normans invaded.
The English court spoke French to determine who was in and out. Centuries of social climbers sneered at the English vernacular, but when the masses were roused monarchs used the common tongue. Richard II addressed Wat Tyler’s Peasants Revolt in English and Henry V sent home personal accounts of great deeds from France, to be read to the people in their language. Elizabeth I’s rhetoric ahead of the defeat of the Armada was in English, even though she could speak six languages.
When the Pilgrim Fathers set out for the New World they were escaping persecution, desiring a new home and the freedom to worship as they wished. This privilege did not extend to the native population who would be taught English to learn the word of God. This desire to settle marked the English and their language out from the Spanish looters and French trappers and traders.
There is no better example than the 1804 Louisiana Purchase. The nascent American state more than doubled its territory by buying land stretching north from New Orleans to the Canadian border and the Rockies, for three cents an acre from the French. English would be the language of the continent and eventually the world.
But this was not the strict English of the Eastern seaboard, where guardians of correct pronunciation dreamed of educating English aristocracy in how to speak. Jefferson dispatched Lewis and Clark to explore the new lands and insisted on a daily journal, much as Henry wrote from Agincourt. Overwhelmed with unimaginable landscapes, flora and fauna, the two added hundreds of words to the English vocabulary borrowed from local dialects, Spanish and French, or derived from existing words.
French is a language of rules with an elite academy to oversee its usage. English has its grammar police, but is the language of adaption and expansion nonetheless. The campus campaigners who restrict language for political ends are doomed to failure. My former colleague could not see that the desire to sustain purity in language is why French is not the global tongue.
The Turning Tide
Companies with DEI policies are being sued for bias. Investors with ESG mandates are being sued for letting down pensioners. The tactics on one side are turned against them by the other.
69% of students in the Buckley Institute survey said that free speech was important, meaning a majority support both restrictive speech codes and freedom of expression. This shows you can get almost any answer you want with the appropriately worded question. Language is a powerful tool in the hands of the wordsmith and hence bitterly fought over.
The survey also shows that the students are confused about what free speech is, even though it is enshrined in the constitution. No wonder the Supreme Court must interpret. But legal rulings change with the times. Enforced conformity may win the occasional battle, but never the war.
Seems to me the next major investment opportunity in the UK and Europe is precisely to 'Hanson Trust' all and any company which is wasting shareholder value on DEI and ESG. Surely they have set themselves up to be taken out.