Heather Mac Donald is not one of the refugees from leftish durance. She seems to have been otherwise inclined from early on. So while of course we always consider the source when evaluating information or opinion, I again urge readers to look further, to the arguments themselves. It’s an unfortunate fact that when we come to our own sector of the arts and humanities, or the vitally related ones of journalism and education, we don’t find much in our accustomed liberal sources by way of enlightened self-criticism or critical rigor about the sociopolitical debates that so affect us. I’ve found Mac Donald’s occasional City Journal posts on the arts (like the Beethoven piece linked above) to be well taken, and The Diversity Delusion is, like Bad News, strongly argued—she makes no assertions without providing evidence. Her subject here is higher education, often the nastiest venue for the conflicts over race, gender and sexuality, and (above all!) the very idea of what “culture” is—and the most consequential one, for the formative influence it exerts. Beginning with her personal involvement in two of the many campus incidents of invited speakers finding themselves barred from their scheduled venues (and often physically endangered) by student protesters, she wades into such fraught areas as whether or not Affirmative Action actually helps those it is intended to help; the evidential validity, or absence thereof, of the widely accepted theory of implicit bias; ditto for the claimed prevalence of a campus rape epidemic; the audacious proposition that women might bear partial responsibility for the hookup culture; the absurd and infantilizing ways that colleges and universities sometimes go about trying to tame and train students in matters of gender and sexuality; and the debilitating effects that the efforts to meet the demands of diversity and multiculturalist activism are often having on any meaningful definition of the educational mission. Her arguments are surely debatable—that is, subject to alternate reasoning and counter-evidence—but they are not dismissable out of hand. I find most of those presented here convincing.

John McWhorter has for some years been a welcome presence for those of us in more or less constant search for a writer of prominence, not definably on the political right, who manages to maintain intellectual and ethical equilibrium amid the diversity quarrels. He does so—and this cannot be easy—from the twin bases of Columbia University and The New York Times, where he maintains an online column that sometimes crosses over into print. His home field is linguistics, and he writes entertainingly on language usage. But he has also engaged vigorously with the self-righteous pronunciamentos on race from the “progressive” left, and since he is, like Thomas Chatterton Williams (co-author of the “Harper’s Letter” alluded to in my Racial Moment post), “of color,” for his pains he at least escapes the tag of “white supremacist.” In Woke Racism, he defines the True Believers of “Third-Wave Antiracism” (he calls them The Elect) as adherents of a new religion, complete with clergy, sermonizing, evangelizing, and its own Original Sin as grounds for the expulsion of heretics. He deplores not only this religion’s self-hallowing appeal to those who follow it, but its victimizing effect on the black sense of self, condescended to as requiring Special Needs assistance to get on in the world—not to mention its denial of the reality that while there’s plenty left to accomplish in terms of leveling the playing field, significant progress has been made on that front since the mid-Twentieth Century. McWhorter is also informed and alert to the erosive implications of the zeal of The Elect for the values of the classical arts and humanities. Woke Racism is written with literary grace and a generosity of spirit.

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For all the qualities of the foregoing volumes, the pièce de résistance (in all possible senses of that phrase) of my spring, 2022 reading has been Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, recently reissued by New York Review Books in a translation by Walter D. Morris, with an introduction by Mark Lilla. I read a fair amount of Mann in my adolescence and young manhood (the books were in the house), but a rather odd selection of the oeuvre, embracing early Mann (Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and a faintly remembered Tonio Kröger), some late or unfinished Mann (The Holy Sinner; The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man), but not the Mature Masterworks Mann except for some of the essays (the two on Wagner, naturally, and the ones on Freud and Goethe’s career as a man of letters), and abortive starts on Dr. Faustus and the Joseph and His Brothers quartet, all these in the long-exclusive translations of H. T. Lowe-Porter. A few years ago, I’d made a beginning (to p. 103, according to the bookmark) on John E. Woods’ new translation of The Magic Mountain, and was quite absorbed in it till the finishing and publishing of Opera as Opera (and the launching my blog) forced me to lay it aside. But when I saw that the Reflections, which I’d known only by its very conflicted reputation, had been republished, I decided to face up to it.