While We’re At It

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♦ Erin Piacenti, a thirty-two-year-old wife and mother, was killed in Times Square on August 31. Her killer was a deranged, knife-wielding woman. Heather Mac Donald provides exactly the right assessment:

That stabbing, like every other such enormity, was a statistical certainty, given the condition of New York’s public spaces. The only question is where and on what specific day the next innocent victim will fall to the delusions of progressive ideology. And in light of that statistical certainty, every public figure who is not fighting the homeless-industrial complex with every ounce of his strength has blood on his hands.

New York City has laws prohibiting disorderly conduct. But they are not enforced because of the ideological influence and power of the homeless–industrial complex, which lobbies and litigates to impede the restoration of older and more sensible (and less life-threatening) methods for ensuring order and decency in the public square.

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♦ “Two dangers never cease threatening the world: order and disorder.” With this formulation, Paul Valéry meant to evoke the poles of static, claustrophobic order—an iron cage, a suffocating straitjacket—and its opposite, which is anarchy—a limitless, unbounded fluidity, life with no principles, no structure, no repose or safety.

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♦ One of the best arguments of Kathleen Stock, as recounted by Audrey Pollnow in last month’s issue (“Spending Down Solidarity”), was made very concisely nearly thirty years ago by Ezekiel Emanuel:

Broad legalization of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia would have the paradoxical effect of making patients seem to be responsible for their own suffering. Rather than being seen primarily as the victims of pain and suffering caused by disease, patients would be seen as having the power to end their suffering by agreeing to an injection or taking some pills; refusing would mean that living through the pain was the patient’s decision, the patient’s responsibility. Placing the blame on the patient would reduce the motivation of caregivers to provide the extra care that might be required, and would ease [their] guilt if the care fell short.

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♦ Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and issued a dire warning that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade.” The commentariat erupted with earnest concern. CEO Dario Amodei chimed in, underscoring the existential risks that might emerge as AI advances. In my view, these statements are distractions and, in the case of Amodei, perhaps a shrewdly calculated diversion. Instead of fixing on hypothetical dangers in the distant and unknowable future, we should focus on today’s dangers. Legislation should be written to impose criminal and financial liabilities on companies whose AI agents are employed by third parties to perpetrate crimes, fraud, and other harms. The specter of legal liability, far more than overheated talk about a hypothetical AI apocalypse, will motivate AI companies to build in reliable safeguards.

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♦ Best known for her role in conceiving the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones was back in the news last month. A decade ago, she decided to send her daughter to a bad public school, seeing that decision as a principled one: From a privileged background, her daughter would contribute to uplifting the quality of education for the poor black children who made up the majority of students at her school. In a New York Times Magazine essay (“In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”), Hannah-Jones reports on the outcome of her parental decision: a profoundly miseducated and bitter daughter.

Coleman Hughes identifies the lessons we can learn from Hannah-Jones’s confession that it was a mistake to use her daughter as pawn in her race-conscious activism (“Lessons from Nikole Hannah-Jones’ School Experiment,” The Free Press). The first lesson: “It’s not racist or classist or any other ‘-ist’ to pick the best school for your child”; rather, it’s good parenting. Second lesson: “The teachers unions, by making bad teachers unfireable, are the primary obstacle to improving schools.” Third lesson: There’s a self-serving ethic among progressive elites that sanitizes privilege. “In the progressive prestige economy, you’re supposed to feel squeamish about sending your kid to the mostly white and Asian public school [which is almost always the best one, Hughes notes], but not about sending the same kid to Harvard at 18.” The fourth lesson is a corollary of the third: “In the progressive worldview, whoever is behaving the worst is by definition the person we’re most obliged to coddle, to understand, to excuse.” This mentality makes it impossible to discipline, punish, or expel the students who make bad public schools dysfunctional. 

I would add a fifth lesson: Things are very bad in many public schools, and millions of children are being shortchanged. I’ll give Hughes the final word: “Hannah-Jones had the means to pull her daughter out. Most parents in those schools don’t. The least the rest of us can do is stop calling what those kids are getting an education, and start giving them one.”

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♦ The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) surveyed more than 62,000 college students on more than 250 campuses. Data concerning sexual orientation are interesting. Eighty-four percent of respondents at the formerly all-female Mount Holyoke College identify as LGBTQ. (I say “formerly,” because Mount Holyoke presently admits males who identify as females, fostering “a gender diverse women’s college,” as the institution’s propaganda puts it.) At nearby Smith College, 77 percent identify as LGBTQ. It’s interesting to note that only 3 percent of respondents at Wake Forest University in North Carolina identify as LGBTQ. Perhaps this low percentage, characteristic of other schools in Wake Forest’s region, contributes to the much commented-upon popularity of big Southern universities. When it comes to choosing a college, are normie kids self-sorting?

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♦ Last month, in my lead item in the Public Square (“The Stench of Corruption”), I drew attention to academic fraud in research overseen by former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. I made a parenthetical claim: “It remains an open question whether the fraud was perpetrated by Tessier-Lavigne or by research teams under his oversight.” After the piece was published, an associate of Tessier-Lavigne got in touch with me, directing my attention to conclusions drawn by an official investigation and statements made by Theo Baker, the student journalist who broke the story about the manipulation of data. In the interests of accuracy, I asked my staff to change the online version of the article, replacing the original parenthetical with the following: “A special committee of Stanford’s board of trustees concluded that Tessier-Lavigne did not personally engage in research misconduct and could not reasonably have been expected to detect the data manipulation. Since the publication of his book, Theo Baker has made similar statements.”

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♦ The conclusion drawn by the Stanford committee spotlights a reality in Big Science in the twenty-first century: Important scientific papers often feature a long list of authors. One can think of these papers as reflecting a group mind rather than the thinking of a single person. Is the outcome different from AI-generated research, which aggregates and sifts but does not “think”?

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♦ The Heritage Foundation is launching a new initiative, the Forum, to address the fractures among those promoting a conservative vision of America’s future. The Forum will invite participants from a broad spectrum of the American right to identify the most significant problems facing the nation. The hope is to find common ground to forge solutions. I commend Heritage. We need debate and discussion that transcends the limitations of online mud wrestling.

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♦ I was delighted to learn that Notre Dame professor John Cavadini was awarded the Vatican’s Ratzinger Prize in late September. John was already a legend when I began my graduate studies at Yale. He was at that time completing his doctoral work in early Christian thought under the direction of Jaroslav Pelikan, while working full time as a New Haven garbage collector to support his young family. Since joining the theology faculty at Notre Dame in 1990, John has been a pillar of Catholic theology in the service of the Church. I’m honored to have him on the roster of those who have been published in our pages. Congratulations!

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♦ And congratulations to another First Things writer, Sherif Girgis, whose appointment as professor of law at Harvard University was announced in September. It’s a remarkable appointment of someone who took a clear public stand on one of the most important issue of our time, having co-authored with Ryan Anderson and Robert George a well-reasoned and courageous argument against gay marriage, What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense.