Amor Mundi

MIT Disinvites a Geophysicist

Roger Berkowitz
As Amor Mundi Readers know, I am a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance. This week the Alliance sent a letter to MIT protesting the disinvitation of University of Chicago Professor Dorian Abbot. Professor Abbot had been invited to give a prestigious lecture in his specialty field of climate and planetary science.

The Civil Courage Prize

Roger Berkowitz
Eric Ward has been awarded the 2021 Civil Courage Prize, given by the Train Foundation. Ward is the first U.S. Recipient of the Civil Courage Prize. You can watch Ward’s talk at the 2019 Arendt Center Conference here.

Experts and Citizen Governance

Roger Berkowitz
Recent years have not been kind to experts, technocrats, and specialists in government. Amidst our hyper-partisan politics, there is a desire for policy to be made by experts who are thought to be neutral, objective, and informed. But experts have continually proven mistaken in their response to Covid-19, leading to the politicization of expert-driven policies. The experts in the U.S. military bungled the pullout from Afghanistan.

The Insurrectionists 

Roger Berkowitz
A new study by the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) has some startling conclusions. Twenty One Million Americans or 8.1% of the population—more than one quarter of all adults—are “insurrectionists” who believe that the last election was stolen.  Sixty three percent of Americans believe that “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.”

Final Account

Jody Bolton-Fasman reviews Luke Holland’s new documentary “Final Account.”

Dangerous Neighbors

Roger Berkowitz
One feature of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes is their use of informants and every-day citizens to enforce ideological conformity. Unlike the police that must follow rules and regulations, neighbors can simply let their fantasies run wild and report on those they dislike, find suspicious, or want to discipline.

The End of Liberalism

Roger Berkowitz
Laura Ford writes that we may be witnessing a major epochal shift in which after nearly 300 years of supremacy, liberalism and the “gestalt of liberal compromise”  is being supplanted as the dominant philosophy of the age. The shattering of the liberal consensus is above all visible on college campuses in the United States where it is being challenged by social identity movements that Ford argues are analogous to pre-Christian forms of religiosity.

The Humanities Must Argue for Themselves

Len Gutkin interviews Bard College President Leon Botstein about liberal arts, political repression and the humanities. Here, Botstein responds to the crisis of the humanities.
 

Public Judgments Behind Closed Doors

Roger Berkowitz
Anne Applebaum turns to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter to gain perspective on the chasm between the complexity within social and political interactions and the “rapid conclusions, rigid ideological prisms, and arguments of 280 characters,” by which mobs of the elect try and convict ideological deviations in the public sphere.