Stephen Davis, now co-“head-of-College” for Pierson College at Yale. Davis has chosen to share the title with his frau. After all, a husband being Master (or “head”) of a college and not including wifie would be unequal. (Thousands of Yale men are spinning in their graves.)

Anybody doubt that Eliot and Vargas LLosa are right? Just read this, a piece demonstrating what kind of blithering, wimpy creeps have replaced the men who used to teach at Yale and serve as college masters. John Hersey, Master of Pierson in my day, must be laughing in Hell. And just look at that miserable wretch in the above photo: No jacket, no appropriate shirt, no necktie. He’s married, of course, to a priestess, and she appears for her photograph as co-“Head of Pierson” in a t-shirt!

The Yale Alumni Mag offers a now-go-out-an-throw-up-in-the-street item to brighten alumni’s lives today.

The sign on the door says “Pierson College Master’s House,” but the person who currently holds that title would rather you call him something else. Religious studies professor Stephen Davis ’98PhD, who was named master of Pierson in 2013, recently wrote to members of the college to ask that they “refrain from calling [him] ‘Master’ Davis.” He explained that “I have found the title of the office I hold deeply problematic given the racial and gendered weight it carries. . . . I think there should be no context in our society or in our university in which an African-American student, professor, or staff member—or any person, for that matter—should be asked to call anyone ‘master.’” He suggested that students could call him “Dr. Davis” or “Professor D.” Davis’s biography on the Pierson College website now refers to him as the “head of college.

If the old Lithuanian greenhorn Pans I knew growing up in Shenandoah had heard this one, they would not have called this wanker “master” (“Pan” in Polish and Lithuanian). They’d have snorted and called him: “chÅ‚op” (“peasant”, “serf”, “slave”).

The doorway to the Master’s House in Pierson College.

Eric Fischl, The Old Man’s Boat and the Old Man’s Dog, 1982. –Our time’s version of The Raft of the Medusa.

John D. Davidson reviews Mario Vargas Llosa’s just-released
Notes on the Death of Culture, a must-read pessimistic essay discussing the West’s rate of decline since 1948 (the year of my birth) and our civilization’s gloomy prospects for the future.

In his 1948 essay, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot argued that the highest levels of culture are only attainable by relatively small groups of people, and that in order for a civilization to sustain high culture a class system of some kind is necessary. Because culture is transmitted primarily through the family and religion—not schools—and because it relies to a large extent on these particular loyalties for its perpetuation, when these institutions fail, “we must expect our culture to deteriorate.”

At the risk of over-simplifying Eliot’s argument, one of his basic contentions sounds rather old-fashioned, perhaps even bigoted by today’s standards, that “we can distinguish between higher and lower cultures; we can distinguish between advance and retrogression.” This notion flies in the face of multiculturalism, not to say the notion of equality. Yet it’s a necessary premise for his assessment of the state of contemporary culture:

“We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity. I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even anticipate a period, of some duration, of which it is possible to say that it will have no culture.”

According to Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, the culture-less period foreseen 67 years ago by Eliot is the one in which we are all now living.

Matt Walsh responds to the liberaltarian contention that we should just accept Gay Marriage because it doesn’t really affect us.

The “it doesn’t affect us” mantra has become one of the more common, and absolutely the most damaging, idea circulating through the ranks of the defeatists. It’s a gross and ridiculous lie, one which accomplishes the impressive feat of being wrong in two different ways. It’s wrong when it says we should only care about things that have an impact on our lives, and it’s wrong when it says gay marriage will have no impact on our lives.

First, since when are we only supposed to care about things that will physically or financially affect us? Don’t we normally condemn a person who fails to act or think or speak simply because he, himself, individually, isn’t yet feeling the effect of it? Don’t we criticize a person who doesn’t care until he’s getting punched in the nose by the problem?

When we’re dealing with moral quandaries — questions of right and wrong, truth and lies — it is not a legitimate argument to say “it doesn’t affect me.” It’s effect on you is irrelevant to the issue. What kind of moral idiot measures the impact of a certain evil on his own life and calibrates his concern accordingly? We might all do this sometimes, but it’s a weakness. It’s shameful. It’s cowardice and self-interest. It’s not good. You shouldn’t be proud of it.

Second, as a member of society, State-imposed falsehoods do affect you. Marriage is a certain thing with a certain nature and definition. When the State mandates that the thing is something other than what it is, and has a purpose other than its actual purpose, you are now living under a tyranny of confusion. The severity of that confusion depends on the degree of the falsehood. So if the government announced tomorrow that we must all pretend penguins are elephants and cats are squirrels, I expect I wouldn’t be seriously harmed. I might be helped because I could finally get rid of my wife’s annoying cat on the grounds that I don’t want squirrels in my house.

But I would still oppose this redefinition because it’s not true, and I prefer Truth. How does it negatively affect my life that people are all confused about penguins and cats and elephants? I guess it doesn’t, except that it would make my trips to the zoo pretty disorienting, and more importantly, I want our culture to have a proper understanding of reality. Moreover, I don’t want our government to impose an improper understanding.

An improper understanding of a squirrel is one thing, though. An improper understanding of marriage, on the other hand, will destroy us. Marriage is the bedrock upon which all of human civilization rests. To expand its definition into oblivion is to weaken and destabilize it.

Hurt? Of course. You’re hurt. Everyone is hurt. This is our foundation, and we all depend on it, no matter if we’re separated from the issue by a few degrees. If your house is falling into a sinkhole, would you say it doesn’t hurt you because you happen to be standing on the top floor?

Why do you think liberals care so much about this? If it doesn’t matter, why have they dedicated years to bringing about this past Friday? Because they want gay people to love each other? Nonsense. There was never any law preventing any gay person from loving anyone or anything. The State never had any interest in encouraging, preventing, or otherwise regulating love. The State does have an interest in the foundation of civilization, which is the family. That’s why, up until recently, it recognized True Marriage.

Gay marriage is not an essential or true institution, nor does it serve any real purpose in society. There’s no practical or moral reason for the romantic lives of homosexuals to be recognized or elevated or protected in any way. Even most homosexual activist know this, despite pushing for gay marriage. Gay couples in many cases aren’t monogamous, and gay activists like Dan Savage have been very enthusiastic in extoling the virtues of open relationships and fornication.

This whole gay marriage debate is about opening up the lifelong monogamous bond of matrimony to a community that often doesn’t desire a lifelong monogamous bond. Do you understand what’s going on here? They don’t want marriage as it currently is; they want to change it into something else.

Read the whole thing.

There is this month, in First Things, a must-read essay on the transformation of the modern university by Roger Scruton, who (as usual) brilliantly identifies exactly what the Left’s long march through the culture has wrought.

[T]he university extolled by Newman was designed to protect the privileges of an existing upper class and to place obstacles before the advance of its competitors. It imparted futile skills, which were esteemed precisely for their futility, since this made them into a badge of membership that only a few could afford. And far from advancing the fund of knowledge, it existed to safeguard the sacred myths: It placed a protective wall of enchantment around the religion, the social values, and the high culture of the past, and pretended that the recondite skills required to enjoy this enchantment—Latin and Greek, for example—were the highest forms of knowledge. In short, the ­Newmanite university was an instrument for the perpetuation of a leisure class. The culture that it passed on was not the property of the whole community but merely an ideological tool, through which the powers and privileges of the existing order were endowed with their aura of legitimacy.

Now, by contrast, we have universities dedicated to the growth of knowledge, which are not merely non-elitist but anti-elitist in their social structure. …

[H]owever, a visitor to the American university today is more likely to be struck by the indigenous varieties of censorship than by any atmosphere of free inquiry. It is true that Americans live in a tolerant society. But they also breed vigilant guardians, keen to detect and extirpate the first signs of “prejudice” among the young. And these guardians have an innate tendency to gravitate to the universities, where the very freedom of the curriculum, and its openness to innovation, provide them with an opportunity to exercise their censorious passions. Books are put on or struck off the syllabus on grounds of their political correctness; speech codes and counseling services police the language and thought of both students and teachers; courses are designed to impart ideological conformity, and students are often penalized for having drawn some heretical conclusion about the leading issues of the day. In sensitive areas, such as race, sex, and the mysterious thing called “gender,” censorship is overtly directed not only at students but also at any teacher, however impartial and scrupulous, who comes up with the wrong conclusions.

Of course, the culture of the West remains the primary object of study in humanities departments. However, the purpose is not to instill that culture but to repudiate it—to examine it for all the ways in which it sins against the egalitarian worldview. The Marxist theory of ideology, or some feminist, poststructuralist, or Foucauldian descendent of it, will be summoned in proof of the view that the precious achievements of our culture owe their status to the power that speaks through them, and that they are therefore of no intrinsic worth. …

Moral relativism clears the ground for a new kind of absolutism. The emerging curriculum in the humanities is in fact far more censorious, in crucial matters, than the one that it strives to replace. It is no longer permitted to believe that there are real and inherent distinctions between people. All distinctions are “culturally constructed” and therefore changeable. And the business of the curriculum is to deconstruct them, to replace distinction with equality in every sphere where distinction has been part of the inherited culture. Students must believe that in crucial respects, in particular in those matters that touch on race, sex, class, role, and cultural refinement, Western civilization is just an arbitrary ideological device, and certainly not (as its self-image suggests) a repository of real moral knowledge. Moreover, they must accept that the purpose of their education is not to inherit that culture but to question it and, if possible, to replace it with a new “multicultural” approach that makes no distinctions between the many forms of life by which the students find themselves surrounded.

To doubt those doctrines is to commit deepest heresy, and to pose a threat to the community that the modern university needs. For the modern university tries to cater to students regardless of religion, sex, race, or cultural background, even regardless of ability. It is to a great extent a creation of the state and is fully signed up to the statist idea of what a society should be—namely, a society without distinction. It is therefore as dependent on the belief in equality as Cardinal Newman’s university was dependent on the belief in God.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

io9 describes a 1972 experiment which demonstrated that urbanization, increased population density, led to dystopian decadence and inequality featuring exactly the same kind of urban community of fashion elite we have ruining America today.

In 1972, animal behaviorist John Calhoun built a rat paradise with beautiful buildings and limitless food. He introduced eight mice to the population. Two years later, the mice had created their own apocalypse. Here’s why.

Universe 25 was a giant box designed to be a rodent utopia. The trouble was, this utopia did not have a benevolent creator. John B. Calhoun had designed quite a few mouse environments before he got to the 25th one, and didn’t expect to be watching a happy story. Divided into “main squares” and then subdivided into levels, with ramps going up to “apartments,” the place looked great, and was always kept stocked with food, but its inhabitants were doomed from the get-go.

Universe 25 started out with eight mice, four males and four females. By day 560, the mouse population reached 2,200, and then steadily declined back down to unrecoverable extinction. At the peak population, most mice spent every living second in the company of hundreds of other mice. They gathered in the main squares, waiting to be fed and occasionally attacking each other. Few females carried pregnancies to term, and the ones that did seemed to simply forget about their babies. They’d move half their litter away from danger and forget the rest. Sometimes they’d drop and abandon a baby while they were carrying it.

The few secluded spaces housed a population Calhoun called, “the beautiful ones.” Generally guarded by one male, the females—- and few males — inside the space didn’t breed or fight or do anything but eat and groom and sleep. When the population started declining the beautiful ones were spared from violence and death, but had completely lost touch with social behaviors, including having sex or caring for their young.

In 1972, with the baby boomers coming of age in a ever-more-crowded world and reports of riots in the cities, Universe 25 looked like a Malthusian nightmare. It even acquired its own catchy name, “The Behavioral Sink.” If starvation didn’t kill everyone, people would destroy themselves. The best option was to flee to the country or the suburbs, where people had space and life was peaceful and natural.

The Daily Express notes one more significant milestone in Britain’s retreat from greatness.

She was the backbone of the taskforce that took back the Falklands from Argentina and once boasted Prince Andrew among her crew.

Now HMS Invincible is about to meet a sad end, sold for scrap on an auction website.

Her seller, the Ministry of Defence, is better described as “cash-strapped” rather than as “one careful owner”.

Launched barely 30 years ago, the 10,000 ton aircraft carrier is now just a hulk, her engines decommissioned and her pumps and generators broken.

But as one of Britain’s two flattops in 1982, the ship helped turn the tide after General Galtieri invaded the Falklands.

At the time of the invasion HMS Invincible had been earmarked for sale to Australia for £175million,

Critics claim it was that sale which emboldened Argentina to attack. It was hastily called off after the invasion.

Last month’s decision to scrap Britain’s only remaining aircraft carrier, Ark Royal, nine years before its replacement comes on line, has been criticised by admirals as having the potential to encourage Buenos Aires to again raise a claim over the islands.

HMS Invincible’s decline began in 2005 when MoD chiefs mothballed her 14 months after an extensive refit which was meant to extend her life by 10 years.

Michael Auslin says Admiral Nelson is spinning in his grave.

Imagine if someone had predicted in 1910 the loss of Britain’s position of economic leadership, the abandonment of the Empire, the complete triumph of socialism, surrender of the Royal Navy’s command of the seas, massive immigration of hostile and unproductive non-Europeans encouraged by a Labour government deliberately seeking to change the ethnic character of the British nation, and even a ban on hunting. How thoroughly and utterly destructive the impact of leftism would be could not possibly have ever been imagined.

If someone were able to travel through time and display to the population of 1910 Britain exactly what would become of the British Empire, British institutions, British liberty, and the British way of life in a century, I suspect the population would have risen en masse and slaughtered out of hand every pacifist, every socialist, every trade unionist, every Bloomsbury, and every reformer in the country.