Articles

Thinking Less

Roger Berkowitz
In writing about one of the many recent efforts to de-platform a speaker because of that speaker’s political views, John McWhorter rightly emphasizes the anti-intellectual and simplistic arguments of those who justify such acts. 

 

On the Removal of Bright Sheng

Roger Berkowitz
Professor Bright Sheng showed a movie of Othello in his music composition class at the University of Michigan. Because Laurence Olivier appears in blackface in the movie, students called for his removal and colleagues denounced him.

Totalitarian Domination Today

Roger Berkowitz
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has issued a report “The Architecture of Repression: Unpacking Xinjiang's Governance.” What is going on in Xinjiang is the closest thing to a totalitarian movement in power that we see now in the world.

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 Meaning in Supporting Trump

Roger Berkowitz
Thomas B. Edsall looks at three in-depth voter surveys to ask why some people continue to support Donald Trump and still believe he won the last election.

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.

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.”

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.

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.