Universities As Political Actors: The Case Of UBC

You would think that with all the looting, the statistics showing blacks are 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, the billions of dollars white taxpayers have paid to create the best possible schools for blacks, the decades of affirmative action, the endless celebration of black culture in the media, the presence of blacks in almost every advertisement, the rap music on Sunday mornings in CBC radio — you would think that universities might reflect critically, for once, about black and white relations in the West in light of the destructive George Floyd riots.

But instead universities are already announcing they will intensify their celebrations of the black race and their condemnation of “institutional white racism.” Just like Porn Hub and every major corporation from Bank of America to Nickelodeon, university presidents across Canada are announcing they will increase their commitment “for the recruitment, retention and support of Black students, staff, and faculty”, including the allocation of “Excellence Chairs to Black Studies.”

Let’s examine one case from which these cited words are taken: The University of British Columbia, the third biggest university in Canada. It started with a rather odd tweet sent on May 31 by president Santa Ono to the UBC community of himself playing a “song” in his cello dedicated “to George Floyd & everyone who is suffering today from racial injustice.”

The next day he released an open Letter to the UBC Community, “Together against Racism and Injustice” announcing that his office plans “to diversify our community at every level through defined programs.” What could Santa Ono mean by the words “at every level” considering that white students are currently a minority at UBC, every member in the Faculty of Arts is a leftist, there are numerous institutes and programs dedicated to diversity, and there is a massive “Equity and Inclusion Office” with an army of 23 professional race-hustlers working every day to “assessing, planning, developing, and monitoring” efforts to make UBC “diverse and inclusive”?

We are not joking, whites are already a minority at UBC. In 2015, the Vancouver Sun reported that only 35% of the student population was white, with white males accounting “for only about one in six students.” The proportion of Chinese students alone was 39 percent. We can safely assume there are less white students in 2020. Will a lower percentage of white student applicants be admitted to make space for foreign students who pay significantly higher tuition fees? It is well known that university administrator lust after the much higher fees of international students to finance their hyper-inflated salaries and bloated diversity offices. For the record: international students at UBC numbered 16,322(!) for the 2017/18 calendar year, of which the majority were Chinese.

Ono says he wants to “ensure adequate resources to implement the goals and actions of the Inclusion Action Plan.” This plan was implemented by UBC’s Executive in December 2019. Its basic goal is to attract and retain “the best and brightest students, staff, and faculty from around the world.” Never mind the immorality of a program dedicated to enticing the “best and brightest” from the Third World, we know that this program is inherently anti-white. Contrariwise, why does Ono write in his Letter to the UBC Community that he wants to meet with “Black Caucus and the Asian Canadian Community Engagement Group”, as well as the Indigenous community, without a word about meeting an European ethnic group?

Massive Diversity Infrastructure At UBC

“We will be organizing a series of public engagements focused on anti-racism”, says Ono. What could this possibly entail if not an all out war against white students? The Equity and Inclusion Office, as I said, is already engaged every day in “institution-wide efforts to create a supportive environment for working, learning and living where respect, diversity, opportunity and inclusion are valued.”

And this office is the tip of a massive iceberg. Here is a list of some of the academic programs and institutes dedicated to “principles of equity and social justice,” “ethnicity and immigration”, “equitable outcomes”, “transformative knowledge”, etc:

This is not all. “UBC has academic programs and concentrations specifically addressing Aboriginal topics and many courses with significant Aboriginal or Indigenous content.” All the courses in the Department of Sociology are dedicated to cultural Marxism with a long list of courses on “Culture and Power; Race, Ethnicity and Immigration.”

The Department of History has a few courses on European history, which consist mostly in condemnations of white imperialism, whereas the descriptions of courses on Asia and non-whites generally are positively about their achievements, backed by multiple courses on “Ethnicity, Race and Nationalism; Gender, Sexuality, and the Body; Migration, Borderlands, and Transnational History; Culture/Power/History; First Nations, Aboriginal, and Indigenous History.”

The School of Social Work is all about “critical transformative knowledge” against “white racism.” There is a little Institute of European Studies which is distinctly preoccupied with immigration and the threat of “right wing populism” in Europe. You don’t believe me? Take a look at their “Speaker Series” for the calendar year 2019/20, you will find titles such as “Radical Diversity: Postmigrant Perspectives on Art, Culture and Politics.” Here is one of their Talks: “Right-wing Populism and Climate Change in Europe.”

Most of the student clubs at UBC are non-political in orientation, but the political ones are into radical leftist politics and diversity, and quite a few are dedicated to the promotion of the race of Asians, Blacks, Indigenous peoples, and other ethnic groups. A few clubs are about the culture of ethnic Europeans but these are apolitical, folksy like, very subdued.

The incredible bias that exists at UBC against white male students was well documented by the prolific student activist in Canada, Franz Kurtzke, as we reported at CEC a few months ago. Kurtzke, a philosophy student at UBC, has filed 11 anti-male and anti-white discrimination claims against UBC.

Ono and Yip

There is no point going over the rest of Ono’s points, which consist in nothing more than robotic statements we read all day from dull academic administrators about “diversity and inclusion.” It is really irresponsible for someone whose expertise revolves around the rather trivial subject of “eye inflammation” without any background in the Social Sciences and the history of Canada to talk about the “deeply rooted racism in Canada.” How can this charlatan insist that “UBC itself is not immune to racism and injustice” given the overwhelmingly obsessive dedication of UBC to diversity? One cannot but conclude that Santa Ono is seeking to wipe out every remaining feature of UBC’s Euro-Canadian character.

When he put together this contrived tribute “to George Floyd” did he even do some research about this case? Had he done so he would have found out that Floyd was a meth addict, cocaine addict, beat and robbed a pregnant woman, a porn star, served 5 years in prison, tested positive for Covid-19, and resisted arrest. This is not to justify his death. I just find it beyond comprehension that UBC is planning to intensify the ethnocide of whites in honor of this character. Does he not know that a university is an institution created by whites for the purpose of advancing to the next generation highest achievements of humans?

His Chinese wife, Wendy Yip, who is a public figure, hired as “UBC Ambassador”, actually tweeted the other day a link to an Asian group claiming “that the fact that so many people are avoiding Asian food it’s just a sneaky new form of racism.” She has been regularly implying in tweets that White Canadians are “racist” because they are eating less Asian food since Covid-19 was unleashed upon the West by the Chinese Communist Party. Neither one of them has ever objected to the Chinese demographic replacement and mass imprisonment and torture of the Uighur minority in China. How about one talk about the incredibly inhuman and barbaric practice of dog eating by the Chinese? 10 million dogs and 10 million cats are devoured by the Chinese per year, with thousands boiled alive.

One cannot but conclude that the goal of Santa Ono is to bring to completion the ethnocide of Euro-Canadians at UBC at the same time that he promotes stronger research partnerships with the Communist Party of China.

Email Santa Ono: presidents.[email protected]

Here are some suggested questions to ask this university president who claims his office is open to the public:

  • Why do you think that UBC needs to build even more its massive infrastructure againast “white racism”?
  • What evidence do you have that Canada remains “deeply rooted in racism”?
  • Why do thousands of international students from Asia and Africa come to study in racist UBC?
  • Why hundreds of thousands of immigrants crave to inhabit white created countries if they will suffer from white supremacists?
  • Why does he never say a word about promoting diversity in Asia?

This article appears courtesy of the Council of European Canadians.

Ricardo Duchesne has been interviewed in the Postil. He the author of The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age, Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians.

The image shows a poster by He Kongde, dated September 1965. The caption reads: “The struggle of all the people in the world against American imperialism will be victorious!”

The Life And Death Of Money

Inflation, like most society-wide monetary happenings, is always complex and often incompletely grasped. At least this is true of its causes; of its effects, most of all its social effects, there is now little doubt.

We learned much about inflation during the twentieth century, when the advent of permanent fiat money made hyperinflation possible for the first time. But as this book shows, the infamous German hyperinflation of 1923 was poorly understood by those who lived through it. And whatever we understand now, the past several years, and in particular the past few months, have demonstrated that we still often ignore what we know. When Money Dies shows what happens when reality reasserts itself. It’s not pretty.

This classic study by Adam Fergusson, first published in 1975, thus has new resonance. Whether and to what extent we face the same fate as the Germany of 1923 we will discuss later. One key to understanding Fergusson’s history is that a society, or at least some societies, can absorb a lot of punishment and keep functioning. The author points out that for half a decade after 1918, looking at German diaries, newspapers, and diplomatic dispatches, a common theme was that things could not go on “like this” any longer. Yet they did, and they got worse, month after month, year after year. Many Germans, Fergusson says, became convinced “that because conditions had been getting worse for four years they could go on getting worse forever.” The lesson is that things that once seemed impossible can easily become the new normal, and there is rarely any obvious fix.

As with most modern inflations, the process began some time before it spun out of control. It started during World War I, when the German government decided that borrowing, not taxation, would finance the war. Borrowing in the form of war loans from the populace constituted sixty percent of German spending on the war, at a time when a gold mark was, by iron definition, equal to a paper mark, and any variation was inconceivable.

The Bank Law of 1875 had required currency to be backed one-third by gold and two-thirds by loans to adequately-capitalized borrowers (i.e., if I understand this correctly, fiat money was limited to being sent into circulation by borrowing by those who could repay).

During the First World War, gold redemption was suspended, but more important for inflation, newly-created loan banks were allowed to simply create money by first printing it, then lending it to practically anyone who asked. Moreover, and most important, limitless fiat money was created by having the Reichsbank accept government securities as security for loans to the government and others—in essence, bootstrapping the money supply (an early form of quantitative easing).

Today, of course, United States government securities are regarded as risk-free, and presumably German government bills were so regarded as well, though that’s not the way it turned out. But this system removes any limit to the amount of money that can be created by government mandate.

The effect of this increase in paper marks in circulation was inflation. This seems obvious to us today. But it wasn’t to the Germans—not to the average person, and not to banking experts or the government, either. Hard as it is to believe, almost nobody, and nobody in charge, recognized at the time that what created inflation was increasing the money supply. Today we cite Milton Friedman, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” But that Friedman said it, and we remember it, implies that truth was not always recognized.

In postwar Germany, all those responsible for the government’s responses, politicians and bankers, believed that the problem was not that the mark was losing value through increased supply, rather that it was depreciating against foreign currencies due to Germany’s postwar economic struggles, most of all crushing reparations demanded by the French. People thought that goods were becoming objectively more dear, not just subjectively, so their prices were rising.

This belief held at the highest levels of government, where Rudolf Havenstein, the president of the Reichsbank, held that his most important duty was printing more money, since, after all, the people clearly needed it to make purchases, and that could only be done, in those days, with physical money. Naturally, this only made the problem worse.

But since stock exchanges were closed, foreign exchange rates were not published, and shortages and chaos also raised prices, the real source of inflation was opaque. In a vicious circle, monetary velocity sped ever higher, further increasing inflation, since nobody wanted to hold cash that would quickly devalue, instead spending it as quickly as possible, preferably on something that would hold value. And the law permitted what were, in effect, private currencies, further exacerbating the increase in the money supply.

Fergusson narrates the gradual descent to hyperinflation, through 1922 and 1923, month-by-month, blow-by-blow. He extracts the flavor of the time through German diarists, who grasped what was happening, but not why. Tellingly, Germans first assumed the value of their war loans, still owed by the government, was secure, and were aghast when it became obvious that what was formerly a small fortune was not enough to live on anymore. But that was merely a small element of the pain and confusion.

To some observers, Germany’s economy seemed in great shape, because its heavy industry, geared to exporting, boomed immediately after the war, in part because of the mark’s weakness. As a result, and because of their tight organization, wage workers suffered little initially, since employment was high and wages kept pace with inflation, due to the threat of work stoppages. By the end, though, wage workers suffered too.

For different reasons, the rural populace also did not suffer much at all—yes, their war loans might have become worthless, but they had food and shelter, both rich and poor. (The rural populace appears very little in this book, except as the object of distrust from city dwellers for refusing to sell food for worthless paper; I am sure there are detailed studies of the country dwellers, which perhaps give a more nuanced picture.) It was the traditionally silent middle and upper-middle classes, the backbone of the society, who suffered.

The people did what they could to secure their positions, even as those positions eroded daily. The stock market rose as money was dumped into anything that seemed it might have tangible value. The purchase of foreign currency allowed hedging, since the mark depreciated continuously against all foreign currencies.

Soon enough, average Germans thronged all the shops, buying anything for sale that might hold its value. And as things fell apart, city dwellers had to sell anything they had in exchange for food—profiting those who had food to sell. Often these were speculators sharp enough to profit by, for example, borrowing huge sums from the government, immediately converting it into foreign currency, then, after a few weeks or months, re-converting into a vastly greater quantity of marks, repaying the government loan, and using the profits to buy and resell goods.

The inevitable impact of this was social corrosion, as every man looked to himself. The great industrialists, best able to both move large amounts of capital and engage in cross-border transactions, lined their pockets. (The now-forgotten Hugo Stinnes, once the greatest magnate of Germany, gets a lot of play in these pages. He’s forgotten mostly because he died, young and unexpectedly, in 1924, so he played no role in later German history).

Those with dollars or other foreign currency to spend lived like kings, eating and drinking at fine restaurants while thin and hungry men, not long before the social elite, passed bitterly by. Middle-class apartments emptied as books, pianos, and furniture were exchanged for food. Petty crime soared and political stability plunged. Fergusson does not discuss the political turmoil in detail, other than to note that the left-wing and right-wing parties both benefited from the chaos and dissatisfaction, leading, among other events, to the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923. But there was plenty of political turmoil, and let’s not forget, putting down Communist revolts by force had been necessary only a few years before, so the political fabric was still fragile.

Much else was happening in 1922 and 1923—for a time, Germany pulled together during the occupation by the French of the Ruhr. But the general path, financially and socially, was clearly downwards, and rapidly. The government tried to plug the ever-increasing gaps in its budget, and meet French reparations demands, by taxation—leading first to tax evasion, and then to failure to collect any but a fraction of the value taxed, as inflation eroded tax receipts to nothing between the passing of a law and the collection of the tax.

But the government, perfectly aware of the problem, though not of its roots, refused to take any real action. They did not stop printing money, nor did they stop various forms of subsidies that the government could no longer afford. Politicians and bankers were caught between two stones: aware that reversing inflation, if they could, would cripple German industry, resulting in massive labor unrest and likely chaos, but also aware of the deleterious effects of the inflation on the rest of the German populace.

In essence, to the extent there was any coherent policy, the government tried to steer a non-existent middle path, hoping to muddle through, while looking for foreign help to stabilize the currency through loans, which were not forthcoming. As with most middle paths, this accomplished nothing.

By September 1923, though, with inflation accelerating to inconceivable speed, the desperate government took measures to suspend the constitution and passed laws to confiscate foreign currency, gold and other precious metals, and increase the penalties for evasion. Warrantless house searches were authorized and “incitement to disobedience” led to prison. City dwellers began organizing expeditions to loot the countryside.

The government tried halfhearted schemes to issue money backed by agricultural goods such as rye or mortgages on agricultural land. None of this had any effect at all on the core problem, which is that everyone did what he saw that he had to do. Whatever respect for the government was left disappeared when its resistance to the French in the Ruhr crumpled and “[c]ontempt for the Republic and its servants became almost universal.”

So, what solved the problem, given that something that can’t go on forever, won’t? In essence, an agreement by everyone to accept their losses and pretend that things were normal again, through the device of a new currency, the Rentenmark, brainchild of Hjalmar Schacht, the new Commissioner for National Currency. One Rentenmark, put into circulation in October 1923, was again equal to one gold mark, and Rentenmarks were put into circulation at the point where one gold mark precisely equaled a trillion paper marks, for easy figuring of conversion.

The Rentenmark was backed not by gold, which had all disappeared from government coffers (most of it gone to the French), but by mortgages on landed property and bonds on German industry. (I don’t really understand this. It appears that money was put into circulation by those with property borrowing money using their property as a guarantee, such that the amount of currency was limited by the value of those properties, and the value of those properties acted as a type of fixed index against which the currency could be valued, though not exchanged).

The effect of this conversion was, however, to eliminate all assets denominated in paper marks, which mean that savings were now completely gone, with no hope of return, as were all debts based on paper marks—whether the debtor was the government, as with war loans, or a business, or a private individual.

The Rentenmark was a collective delusion, however. It is not clear how much this was understood at the time; as with inflation being a monetary phenomenon, they understood less than we do. The mortgage “guarantees” were essentially illusory, yet the Rentenmark’s value held steady, because the populace either willed it to be so, or did not really understand. In fact, the Rentenmark was not precisely legal tender, and not convertible into any hard asset. Paper marks and private currencies continued to circulate and be printed, on a reduced scale, though.

On the positive side, Schacht ensured some degree of confidence in the new currency by forbidding government borrowing through central bank discounting of government bills, which had been the major initial cause of the hyperinflation. Regardless of the precise mechanism, things began to return to normal, because of the Rentenmark.

The new normal was not like the old normal, though. Social ruptures are hard to cure, and when they are cured, the new society is much different. Trust was in short supply. No surprise, there was a lot of irrational thought and scapegoat-seeking, and again no surprise, much of this was directed against the Jews, whom most people viewed as in some uncertain way responsible. Some Jews did profit, of course, having liquid assets and cross-border connections, but so did many non-Jews, yet blame attached to Jews in general, not specific Jews. (The peasantry, unwilling to take paper marks for food, called them “Jew confetti”).

Many people to whom poverty had been a mere abstract concept were now desperately poor with no path to get back their social status. Of course, not all societies are equal, and Germans are, or were, much better at recovering than nearly any other society in history. Various laws were passed to try to offer a few pfennigs to those with worthless mortgages and bank accounts, and to adjust taxes, all of limited real benefit to the populace.

It was a hard road, made harder by many businesses shuttering and unemployment soaring, since businesses had artificially expanded during times of distorted credit and foreign sales based on the weak mark. Nonetheless, the economy strengthened, and continued strengthening for a few years—until the Great Depression. But that is another story.

So, could this happen here? Probably not, no matter how much money we borrow or print to cover our government’s sins, as long as all currencies are fiat currencies and the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. As with the Rentenmark, though, continued faith in fiat currency is in large part a collective delusion.

If that ever fails, probably from some collapse in faith in both the government and the future, perhaps combined with a new reserve currency, all bets are off. In the modern world, too, it’s not necessary to run physical printing presses (thousands of which worked around the clock for the Reichsbank in 1923); infinite money can be created by pushing a button, and velocity accelerated to hyperspeed by the internet and credit cards. What a hyperinflation would look like in a modern, advanced society, I don’t know. That Zimbabwe has experienced a recent hyperinflation is unlikely to lend us much of a clue. But I do know that we’re not Germans, and our social cohesion is already on the ropes, so our society would likely fracture permanently, and not weld itself back together like the Germans.

In fact, such a scenario is the backdrop for Lionel Shriver’s excellent dystopian The Mandibles, where a new global currency backed by commodities, similar to John Maynard Keynes’s proposed bancor, underwrites a new Chinese hegemony. In that book, the United States can do nothing, since it has become a stupid stew of irrational and hate-filled identity politics where the ruling classes reject any attempt at objective excellence and achievement and insist that their failures are due to racism and wreckers. A silly fantasy, though, of course, since we know that such a thing could never happen here. We know that only an idiot could read history and conclude that an unstable, unaccomplished society run on an extractive, tribal basis is the natural state of humanity, and only a very bad person would let himself see that lately quite a few people in America seem very eager to turn America into such a society.

Perhaps the key lesson to take away from this book is that in any society experiencing massive economic trouble, those tasked with fixing it, no matter how earnest and hardworking, are almost always incapable not just of fixing the problems, but understanding them.

That’s true not just in economics, but in every area of life in a complex modern society, even one cohesive and competent, even more so one fragmented and anti-reality. Thus, in every crisis, every man must look to himself and his family, not hope for safety and stability from above. If he relies on those in charge, sooner or later, he’s going to be disappointed, perhaps fatally so. Maybe it won’t be hyperinflation here, but it’ll be something.

Charles is a business owner and operator, in manufacturing, and a recovering big firm M&A lawyer. He runs the blog, The Worthy House.

The image shows a caricature by the illustrator, Erich Schilling, from the satirical magazine, Simplicissimus, 1922. The caption above reads, “Gutenberg and the Billions Printing Press.” The caption below, spoken by Gutenberg, reads: “Not what I wanted.”

Destruction And Beauty

Scenes of statues toppling and pictures of defaced public spaces can be disturbing. Sometimes, they can be exhilarating. I recall watching statues of Lenin and Stalin fall during the collapse of the various Communist states. It felt like freedom. I also recall my dismay during my first trip to Greece where nearly every public wall and monument (Church and otherwise) is covered in graffiti.

There is an instinct at work surrounding images (both their making and their destruction) – one that is profoundly religious in nature. As such, it has the capacity to save us or to destroy us. But make no mistake – it is filled with power.

Not all Christians care for icons. Some positively despise them. But none of them can deny the power of the image (icon) itself. “Image” is the word used to describe the very act of human creation. We are created according to the “image and likeness” of God. No other statement enshrines the dignity and true worth of human beings in such an inarguable manner. It puts a stamp of ultimacy on our very existence. Not only are we described as having been created in the image of God, but our salvation itself is portrayed as a return to the fullness of that image as we behold the face of Christ.

But we are also “smashers” (iconoclasts). When Rome defeated Carthage in 146 BC, it leveled the city. Some say that they even plowed the ground and sowed it with salt, consigning the space to oblivion. In 70 A.D. Rome destroyed Jerusalem, along with its temple. Today, in order to reach the streets of Jerusalem upon which Jesus walked, you have to dig deep underground – what stands on top represents much later construction.

Such actions seem to have a role of “catharsis” or “cleansing,” in which an enemy is not only defeated but erased. Who hasn’t wanted to do such a thing to the memory of a hurt that haunts? We hear it echoed in St. Paul’s prayer that “God will speedily crush down Satan under your feet” (Romans 16:20). We not only want Satan to be defeated – we want him erased.

We have to recognize both impulses within us (the love of icons and their smashing) to come to grips with the whole of who we are meant to be. At its deepest level, we do not understand icons until we understand beauty and its crucial role in our existence.

The love of beauty and our desire for it are the most fundamental parts of our being. This is particularly true if we use the word “beauty” in the fullest sense of its meaning. Beauty encompasses being and truth as well. It is God’s word for His creation (usually translated as “good,” the word in Scriptures also means “beautiful”). That which is beautiful and good is reflective (iconic) of the God who created it. All of creation longs for union with this Beauty and groans for it to be made manifest.

In the life of the Church, the making of icons begins early, possibly in its very beginning. Israel already made a careful use of images (some are prescribed for use in the Temple itself). St. Paul, and others following him, elevated a “theology of the image” into a central place in Christology and the doctrine of salvation. There were already hints of this theology in some of the writings of the Second Temple period. The fulfillment of the image of God in Christ allowed the veil to be torn away from that mystery and its clear form to be discerned.

Nevertheless, the drive towards iconoclasm has remained rooted in our hearts. Every sin against another human being is a form of iconoclasm. Violence is probably its most dangerous form, although every sin against another carries an element of violence within it (Matt. 5:21-22). We are experiencing an unprecedented display of public anger and iconoclasm in our cities and news cycles. Of course, the quiet iconoclasm of injustice has far deeper and long-lasting effects. The one does not justify the other. Injustice added to injustice only adds up to injustice. That we might understand it does not change its nature.

The Church’s witness to icons and their veneration is, ultimately, a witness to beauty. It is also a witness to the only path of salvation, both for individuals and the world as a whole. St. Augustine described the work of salvation as the “City of God.” And though we idealize the natural setting of a home in the wilderness, it is the image of a city that the Scriptures use to describe salvation. St. Paul writes: “But our citizenship [“politeuma” πολίτευμα] is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Philippians 3:20–21).

The word “politeuma,” translated as “citizenship,” is formed from the word, “polis,” or “city.” Citizenship is the “place where we have our “city-ness”). It is the New Jerusalem that we await (Rev. 22:2), a “city whose builder and maker is God” (Heb. 11:10). Cities require human relationships and exist well when the beauty and health of those relationships is foremost in its planning and execution. Cities whose inner being exists only for economic profit serve as images of a god, Mammon, and its people begin to resemble slaves.

The building of cities, in this highest sense of the word, is a construction of “city-ness,” an icon of the city that is to come. This is not a call for utopianism, but a recognition that there are holy patterns given to us that make for a greater wholeness in our lives. This is hard work. Iconoclasm and destruction are the work of a moment, driven by passion and the darkest places in our hearts. Anybody can smash. To make something beautiful takes care, love, and attention to detail. It is a work of holy living.

In the great wash of news stories of the past weeks, an image of beauty came across my desk that was encouraging. In Atlanta, scene of many racial tensions through the years, also the site of an egregious racial killing in recent days, there was a march on Juneteenth (a date marking the end of slavery). It was sponsored by One Race, an organization founded by black and white pastors in the Atlanta area back in 2017. They have been doing a slow work of common prayer, common discussions, and common understanding towards the healing of racial sins and the union of the faithful. They profess that only in Christ can such sins be overcome.

On that day, some 15,000 faithful gathered for a peaceful march to lift up Christ and to profess their common faith and love for one another. It was encouraging because it was not simply a passion of the moment, but the fruit of three years of patient work, something that will likely continue for some time to come. When the news cycle easily leads toward despair, it is good to see so many knees that bow to Christ walking together and professing faith in the city whose builder and maker is God.

The opposite of iconoclasm is “iconodulia” (the honoring of icons). At its heart, iconodulia is the love of true beauty. This love is quite the opposite of the drive towards iconoclasm. Iconoclasm need love nothing: the will to destruction is entirely sufficient to provide motivation and energy. In the end, it might yield nothing more than nothing-at-all, an emptiness of fruitless effort that collapses back on itself. It is not life-giving.

Iconodulia requires inward attention as well as outward responsibility. It is slow and requires patience. Some efforts of beauty can be so great that they survive for millennia and more. The beauty of Hagia Sophia (for example) continues not only in that single, striking building, but in the thousands of echoes that have shaped so many Orthodox temples since. It’s power lies in the fact that its beauty reaches beyond itself towards a greater Beauty that only God can build. As such, it is echoed in every element of beauty that we find in nature as well.

Such beauty requires people who live beautiful lives. They need neither wealth nor power, only the living icon of the Logos to be manifest in their being. It is the secret to Christian “civilization” – not an empire maintained by force of arms or economic power. Rather Christian civilization is the politeuma of the heavenly city that is continually reborn in the heart of every Baptism. That city is built in the heart. It is there that we repent and there that we forgive. It is there that we find within us the image of the city that God has already prepared for us.

Father Stephen Freeman is a priest of the Orthodox Church in America, serving as Rector of St. Anne Orthodox Church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He is also author of Everywhere Present and the Glory to God podcast series.

The image shows the crucifixion, with Christ being offered a drink of vinegar on a sponge; in the foreground, the iconoclasts, John Grammaticus and Bishop Anthony of Pamphylia, efface the image of Christ with a sponge. The Chludov Psalter, Byzantine, 9th-century.

The Case Against The SAT And The ACT

The pro bono law from Public Counsel, based in Los Angeles, plans to file a lawsuit against the University of California system for its mandated use of SAT and Act scores for purposes of admission.

California Governor Newsom acknowledged the SAT and ACT “exacerbates the inequities for underrepresented students, given that performance on these tests is highly correlated with race and parental income, and is not the best predictor for college success.”

Stated UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ said of these test scores that they “really contribute to the inequities of our system.”

According to Mark Rosenbaum, Directing Attorney at Public Counsel, “Use of the SAT/ACT is not merely bad policy; it violates the California Constitution and anti-discrimination statutes, and is therefore legally and morally impermissible. Students should not have to endure the stress and expense of preparing for and taking the SAT, and the admissions process should no longer be contaminated by this discriminatory metric.”

I see these plaintiffs, and their supporters, and I raise them one. These scores ought to be prohibited outright, at least for public institutions of higher learning, and those in the private sector subsidized by the government. Our friends on the left might favor this extreme view on the ground that these tests discriminate against the poor and racial minorities (not Asians though). My argument is that they vitiate against the stupid and ignorant, and government has no business doing any such thing. Low information folk pay taxes, just like anyone else. Public libraries, museums, roadways, parks, recreation centers do not discriminate against those with low IQs. Why should colleges and universities engage in such a dastardly act?

What will be the effect on the incoming freshman class if these exams are not made optional but actually prohibited by law? They will at the outset be admitting students who not only “look like America” but, apart from their ages, roughly constitute the average American: some geniuses, others of mediocre intellectual talents, and some who occupy the left tail of the normal distribution in this regard. Boobus americanus, as Mencken would characterize them.

But will not the latter tend to fail out? No. the present intellectual atmosphere on college campuses vitiates against any such result. It would be discriminatory, that is, patently offensive to the wokesters now in charge of higher education. I go further. They should not be allowed to be given failing grades for, wait for it, they pay taxes just like anyone else. They ought to be allowed to partake in this educational benefit on a par with all other taxpayers. After all, we do not first allow Boobus to enter a public bus, train or trolley, a library, museum or playground, give them an exam while he is there, and then expel him for not answering questions correctly. Why should public university be any different?

This will of course spell the intellectual ruination of not only prestigious state universities such as UCLA, Berkeley, Indiana University, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, University of Virginia, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, University of California–Santa Barbara, University of Florida. It will also do precisely that for high-status “private” schools such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, etc., since they too are heavily subsidized courtesy of the long-suffering taxpayer. With the intellectually gifted forced to sit cheek-by-jowl next to those who can barely read, the level of instruction, if it is to be “inclusive” will be bound to plummet. This goes in spades for subsequent reputation.

But this is precisely the goal that ought to be embraced. There should be no such thing as public education in the first place. Anything that moves us in the direction of obliterating this evil institution, such as more intellectual “diversity” must be considered an asset not a debit.

What is the case against public education? The financing of it is coercive. People are compelled to pay for it, against their will. A synonym for coercive levies, not to be mentioned in polite society, of course, is downright theft.

The charge will be launched that without public or quasi public education, our country will be consigned to mediocrity at best, and outright illiteracy at worst. Not at all. There was no such institution until the early 1800s, and our nation did just fine in that regard.

The critics of the present modest proposal will cry out: external economies. These are spill over benefits from college. These will be radically reduces without the subsidies that only taxation makes possible.

But there are flaws in this criticism. Rothbard’s (1997, 178) reductio absurdum of public goods is as follows: “A and B often benefit, it is held, if they can force C into doing something. . . . [A]ny argument proclaiming the right and goodness of, say, three neighbors, who yearn to form a string quartet, forcing a fourth neighbor at bayonet point to learn and play the viola, is hardly deserving of sober comment.”

Another reductio ad absurdum of against this stance is that the government should subsidize soap, smiles, Bach, since all of them give off benefits to third parties. (The difficulty here is that this phenomenon is very subjective. The Walgreen Pharmacy in New Orleans plays Bach, loudly, in an attempt to discourage street people from camping out on its sidewalks and interfering with customer flow. This music thus constitutes a negative externality, or external diseconomy, to these people. Come to think of it, not everyone likes smiles or other people using soap either. The point is, we are at sea without a rudder here. Anyone can make any claim he wishes, and no one can say him nay.)

Then there is the argument that public education is not at all a positive externality, but rather a negative one. It is a very strong one. What with political correctness rampant on the campus, the preserve of wokesterism, it is perhaps no accident that Marxism (cultural and economic), socialism, communism are riding high in these environs. If this is not a negative for civilization and the preservation of the human race, then nothing is. These tendencies are fueled by feminist “studies,” black “studies,” queer “studies” and other grievance “studies. Using the “logic” of main stream market failure economics, higher education should be taxed, as a public menace, and heavily so, not subsidized to the ornate level which now prevails.

A basic difficulty with this externality market failure argument is that it is too much akin to nailing jelly to the proverbial tree. It can’t be done. How do we know, in the absence of voluntary market exchange, that expenditures of this sort are beneficial? When someone purchases a pair of shoes, we are entitled to deduce mutual benefit, at least in the ex ante sense. No such conclusion is possible to demonstrate in this field.

Early in his career, Milton Friedman supported public education on positive external economy grounds (neighborhood effects). He thought there were important spill over benefits enriching the overall society, that private educators would not incorporate into their decision-making. Hence, the need for educational subsidies, or public education. But as he grew older and wiser and more radical, he changed his mind on this matter. If even this moderate free enterpriser, this luke-warm supporter of economic freedom, can come out in favor of a separation between government and education, akin to separation of church and state, then those of us who take laissez-faire capitalism seriously, e.g., market fundamentalists, can certainly do so too.

The image shows, “Free Rural School,” by Alexander Ivanovich Morosov, painted in 1865.