The ignorance of many Uni graduates.

Education system produces anti-capitalist millennials

TOM SWITZER,CHARLES JACOBSThe Australian12:00AM June 21, 2018

Anyone over the age of 45 will have clear memories of the ecstatic reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.The wall had been erected in 1961 because Germans living in the so-called German Democratic Republic were, at the rate then of more than 10,000 a day, walking from the Russian zone of Berlin to the British, American or French zones.

In the “democratic” republic, all but the most corrupt and stupid of East Germans wanted to leave for one overwhelming reason: that the socialism imposed on their society by the Soviet-backed German communists who ruled them had removed their personal liberty and impoverished them. In the end, it was an ideology that could be enforced only by turning their country into a prison and many of its citizens into a network of informers.

Sadly, many of those too young to recall a world damaged by doctrinaire leftism fail to understand the system of oppression and coercion that enforced it.

According to a Centre for Independent Studies/YouGov poll, 58 per cent of Australian millennials — those born between 1980 and 1996 — have a favourable view of socialism, with only 18 per cent having an unfavourable one. They believe government should have more control of the economy.

It is perhaps a sign of grace that the older these millennials are, the more sceptical they become about the socialist dream: 64 per cent of the youngest support socialism against only 51 per cent of the oldest. Perhaps there is a chance that they will, eventually, grow up. However, their support for socialism is only half the story. On, it seems, evidence as flimsy as that on which they base their enthusiasm for the left, millennials also revile capitalism. Almost 60 per cent believe it has failed.However — proving Cicero’s point that “to be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain a child” — only 21 per cent of those questioned said they knew well who Mao Zedong was and 51 per cent said they knew nothing of him at all. Just 26 per cent were familiar with Vladimir Lenin and 34 per cent with Joseph Stalin.

It is a regrettable comment on the quality of our university education system that almost as many who have been through it share this prejudice as though they have not experienced its benefits.

That 62 per cent of millennials believe Australian workers are worse off today than 40 years ago is in direct contradiction of all available economic evidence: from the mid-1980s to about 2012, the country experienced the biggest national income boom since the gold rushes; and our economy is in its 27th consecutive year of economic growth, surpassing The Netherlands for the gold medal for the longest economic expansion in the modern era.

Again, there is distressing evidence — distressing, that is, to all those who value freedom and personal liberty — that assumptions are made on the basis of wilful ignorance: 61 per cent of graduates among millennials share this wrongheaded idea.

Similarly, they believe — entirely wrongly — that the government is running down the public services: once these people buy into one aspect of the pro-socialist propaganda, they buy it all.

While the wickedness of Mao, Lenin and Stalin is unknown to these youthful idealists, they are well schooled about the wickedness of the extreme right: 73 per cent of them are well aware of Adolf Hitler and his iniquities. It is a problem the world over — not merely in Australia — that establishments never try to be objective about the enormities of all political extremes.

It remains entirely morally acceptable for political leaders on the left to claim an inheritance from Marx, Lenin or Fidel Castro. Were anyone on the right to express admiration even for a dictator such as Francisco Franco, whose crimes were comparatively mild by the standards of other fascists, and certainly by comparison with Stalin or Mao, they would be denounced.

For a politician or public figure to express any admiration for Hitler or his doctrines is, quite rightly, to invite the termination of a career. So it should for those who endorse the doctrines of Stalin or Mao, because of the incontrovertible evidence that those doctrines can, in the end, be imposed only by force, deprivation of liberty and murder.

The predominantly well-educated young people who romanticise socialism should be expected to have the intellectual training to look at the evidence, and thereby to understand the harm that the doctrines they find so attractive have done to economies, societies and, above all, individuals.

There is no economy in history that has benefited from socialism. All economies that have enjoyed sustained growth and have broadened prosperity have done so through free trade and free markets; regulation is the enemy of prosperity, and prosperity is the only means of providing the public services that socialists are so fond of claiming they prize. Socialists need to remember that you don’t tax a loss: you only tax a profit. Without profit — without capitalism — you cannot raise the revenue to provide public healthcare, education, law and order, or defence. That is the central hypocrisy of socialism, and one its adherents would do well to recall before they denounce capitalism again.

The other method socialists have tried to raise resources to provide for everyone is by expropriation of private property and collectivism. Anyone who wishes to see the results of that does not even have to look back to the impoverishment of the Soviet bloc or the misery of Mao’s China: recent events in Venezuela, and the way in which thousands of Cubans have risked their lives trying to escape on flimsy vessels to the US, give more immediate and startling evidence.

Much of the fault of this incomprehension among the young must lie with our education system: not just universities, with their acrid determination to teach leftist values above all others and to promote teachers who adhere to them, but in our schools, with the failure to teach basic general knowledge. This is no minor problem, because one day such people may exercise a vote to impose such appalling doctrines, and their collateral damage, on our society. To use a good old Soviet phrase, the re-education had better start here.

Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, where Charles Jacobs is a policy analyst.

Democracy's fragility?

There are four subtle stages on the road to autocracy

Millions of Turks are now terrified of their president. However, plenty admire him for protecting them from the Gulenists. Adem, an estate agent in Istanbul, congratulates President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for “cleaning away the enemies within” — echoing a government slogan. He says of the purge’s victims: “They’ve been arrested because they’ve done something wrong. In America if you steal state secrets they put you in the electric chair, don’t they?”

At an election on June 24, Erdogan is expected to consolidate his power. Despite double-digit inflation and a tottering currency, he is likely to win re-election (though his party may struggle). And his office will become much more powerful, thanks to a constitutional change he pushed through last year. As “executive” president, he will be able to issue decrees with the force of law and pack the judiciary with loyalists.

Turkey exemplifies a dismal trend. The world has grown more democratic since World War II. In 1941 there were only a dozen democracies; by 2000 only eight states had never held a serious election. But since the global financial crisis of 2008, democracy has regressed.

Most watchdogs concur. The latest survey by Freedom House, an American think tank, is called Democracy in Crisis. Last year, for the 12th consecutive year, countries that suffered democratic setbacks outnumbered those that registered gains, it says. According to the Democracy Index from The Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company of The Economist, 89 countries regressed last year; only 27 improved. The latest Transformation Index from the Bertelsmann Foundation, another think tank, which looks at emerging economies, finds that the “quality of democracy … has fallen to its lowest level in 12 years”. What these indices measure is not simply democracy (that is, rule by the people), but liberal democracy (that is, with a freely elected government that also respects individual and minority rights, the rule of law and independent institutions).

This distinction is important. In The People v Democracy, Yascha Mounk of Harvard University stresses that liberalism and democracy are separable. Voters often want things that are democratic but not liberal, in the most basic sense, which has nothing to do with left or right-wing policies. For example, they may elect a government that promises to censor speech they dislike, or back a referendum that would curtail the rights of an unpopular minority.

At the same time, plenty of liberal institutions are undemocratic. Unelected judges often can overrule elected politicians, for example. Liberals see this as an essential constraint on the government’s power. Even the people’s chosen representatives must be subject to the law. In a liberal democracy, power is dispersed. Politicians are not only accountable to voters but also kept in line by feisty courts, journalists and pressure groups. A loyal opposition recognises the government as legitimate but decries many of its actions and seeks to replace it at the next election. A clear boundary exists between the ruling party and the state.

This system is now under siege. In many countries, voters are picking leaders who do not respect it, and gradually undermine it, creating what Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban proudly calls “illiberal democracy”. Eventually, when enough checks and balances have been removed, a would-be autocrat finds it easier to neuter democracy itself, by shutting down opposition (as in Turkey) or neutering the legislature (as in Venezuela, where the government staged a sham election on May 20).

The mature democracies of the West are not yet in serious danger. Donald Trump may scorn liberal norms, but US checks and balances are strong, and will outlast him. The real threat is to less mature democracies, where institutions are weaker and democratic habits less ingrained. Nonetheless, what happens in the West affects these places. The US once inspired subjugated people and sought to promote democracy. It now has a president who openly admires Vladimir Putin and claims a “special bond” with Kim Jong-un.

Meanwhile, China supplies an alternative model. Having grown much less dictatorial after the death of Mao Zedong, it is reconcentrating power in one man, Xi Jinping, whose term limits as president have just been removed. Some would-be autocrats cite China as evidence that authoritarianism promotes economic growth — though what they often mean is that they too want to be presidents for life.

Globally, public support for democracy remains high. A Pew poll of 38 countries found a median of 78 per cent of people agreed that a system where elected representatives make laws was a good one. But hefty minorities approved of non-democratic alternatives. A worrying 24 per cent thought military rule would be fine, and 26 per cent liked the idea of “a strong leader” who “can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts”. In general, autocracy was more popular among the less educated.

With such large majorities favouring it, leaders cannot openly admit they plan to abolish democracy. However, many have grown adept at subverting its essence while maintaining its outward appearance. The details vary from country to country, but it is striking how much the new autocrats have in common and how attentively they learn from each other.

To oversimplify, a democracy typically declines like this. First, a crisis occurs and voters back a charismatic leader who promises to save them. Second, this leader finds enemies. His aim, in the words of 20th-century US wit HL Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Third, he nobbles independent institutions that may get in his way. Finally, he changes the rules to make it harder for voters to dislodge him. During the first three stages, his country is still a democracy. At some point in the final stage, it ceases to be one.

In Hungary, two shocks undermined faith in the old order. First came the financial crisis. Before it, many Hungarians took out absurdly risky foreign-currency mortgages. When the Hungarian forint crashed against the Swiss franc and they lost their homes, they were furious. Fidesz, a party that was once quite liberal but has become dramatically less so, won an election in 2010 by blaming the previous government and vowing to make borrowers whole.

The second shock was the Syrian refugee crisis of 2015-16. Hardly any Syrians settled in Hungary but thousands passed through on the way to Germany, so Hungarians saw them on television. They gave Fidesz’s leader, Orban, two handy enemies: the Muslim hordes and the liberal elite who wanted to let them in.

Orban built a fence that largely stopped the flow of refugees. But he continued to play up the threat. His government ordered a poll asking voters what they thought of a fictitious plan by George Soros, a Hungarian-American billionaire, to bring one million Middle Eastern and African migrants to Europe. A campaign poster showed Soros grinning evilly and embracing opposition leaders holding wire cutters. “They would remove the fence together” ran the slogan.

On April 8 Orban’s party was re-elected with a thumping majority. In May Soros’s foundation closed its office. “Hungary disproves the notion that when you reach an income per head of $US14,000 your democracy is safe,” Mounk says of a theory popular with political scientists.

Picking the right enemies is crucial. Migrants are good because they cannot vote. Soros is even better because he is rich, funds liberal causes and is, you know, Jewish. He can be painted as allpowerful; but because he is not, he cannot harm the demagogues who demonise him.

Stirring up ethnic hatred is dangerous. So rabble-rousers use dog-whistles. Former South African president Jacob Zuma denounced “white monopoly capital” rather than whites in general. Many leaders pick on small, commercially successful minorities. Former Zambian president Michael Sata won power after railing against Chinese bosses.

Criminals make ideal enemies, since no one likes them. Rodrigo Duterte won the presidency of The Philippines in 2016 on a promise to kill drug dealers. An estimated 12,000 extrajudicial slayings later, the country is no safer but his government has an approval rating of around 80 per cent.

Would-be autocrats need a positive agenda, too. Often they pose as defenders of an identity that voters hold dear, such as their nationality, culture or religion. Poland’s ruling party, for example, waxes lyrical about the country’s Catholic way of life and lavishes subsidies on big families, who are likely to be rural and religious.

Parties of the nationalist right have learned from the left how to exploit identity politics. Both sides tend to favour “group rights” over those of individuals. The “Hungarian nation is not a simple sum of individuals”, Orban said in 2014, “but a community that needs to be organised, strengthened and developed”.

To remain in power, autocrats need to nobble independent institutions. They do this gradually and quietly.

The first target is often the justice system. Poland’s ruling party passed a law in December forcing two-fifths of judges into retirement. On May 11 Duterte forced out the chief justice of The Philippines, who had objected to his abuse of martial law.

The media must be nobbled, too. First, an autocrat in waiting puts his pals in charge of the public broadcaster and accuses critical outlets of spreading lies. Rather than banning independent media, as despots might have done a generation ago, he slaps spurious fines or tax bills on their owners, forcing them to sell their businesses to loyal tycoons. This technique was perfected by Vladimir Putin in Russia, and is now widely copied. In Turkey, the last big independent media group was sold to a friend of Erdogan in March.

Getting the security forces on side is essential. Former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe took their loyalty for granted and was thrown out. Other strongmen are less complacent. To keep the men with guns happy, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro lets them loot the national food distribution system. Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who won 92 per cent of the vote in March, lets the police top up their salaries by robbing civilians.

With the courts, press and armed forces in his pocket, a strongman can set about neutering every other institution that counts. He can sideline parliament, redraw the electoral map and silence serious opponents.

Whatever ideology they profess, autocrats are often opportunistic. Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua started as a revolutionary Marxist, seizing power in 1979. He lost an election in 1990 partly because he was anti-Catholic. So he rebranded himself as a devout Catholic — pushing a ban on abortion even if the mother’s life is at risk — and was re-elected in 2006 against a divided opposition. Last year his wife, Rosario Murillo, became vice-president, thus establishing a dynasty resembling the dictatorship he once overthrew.

Ortega and his Sandinistas have commandeered the Supreme Court, which abolished presidential term limits, and created shell “opposition” parties to simulate choice while repressing genuine opponents. Critical media find themselves under new ownership, often that of Ortega’s family.

None of this chipping away at democracy sparked unrest. It was only when Ortega tried to grab Nicaraguans’ pensions that they rioted. The ruling Sandinistas’ mismanagement and graft has left the public pension pot all but empty. Ortega told workers to top it up. In response, tens of thousands took to the streets in April and tore down statues erected in honour of Murillo. The regime has clung to power by shooting people.

Autocrats who plan to stay in power forever need to indoctrinate children. “Most countries don’t have events from two years ago in their school history books. We do,” says a Turkish liberal, aghast that Turks as young as four are taught that their President saved the nation from the Gulenists. Venezuela’s Bolivarian University offers free tuition to students who submit to lectures blaming the US for food shortages.

Much has been said about the failures of liberal democracies. Although they are typically rich and peaceful, many of their citizens are disgruntled. Globalisation and technology have made them fear for their jobs. The culture wars ensure more or less everyone feels disrespected by someone. The rise of autocracy is in part a reaction to these big historical trends. But it is also because power-hungry leaders have learned how to exploit them. You cannot have autocracy without an autocrat.

Most authoritarian regimes are filthy. Of the countries and territories in the dirtiest third of Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index, not one is rated “free” by Freedom House. Of those in the cleanest 20, only Singapore and Hong Kong fail to qualify as free.

Autocracy and graft create a vicious circle. Power with few constraints enables those who wield it, or their friends, to get rich. The more they steal, the more incentive they have to rig the system to remain in charge. If they lose power, they risk prosecution, as Zuma is discovering in South Africa. Thus, whenever an autocrat makes a stirring speech about national pride, his real aim may be to deflect attention from his own skulduggery. Orban’s opponents would love to discuss why his friends are now among the richest people in Hungary, or why there is a huge football stadium in his tiny home town. But his friends control the media, and would rather talk about immigrants.

Democrats can fight back. Five recent examples stand out.

In Sri Lanka, the opposition united to beat a spendthrift, vicious autocrat. In the Gambia, the threat of an invasion by neighbouring countries forced a strongman to accept that he had lost an election. In South Africa, an elected leader who subverted institutions and let cronies loot with impunity was tossed out by his own party in January. In Armenia, an autocrat was ousted in April by mass protests.

And in Malaysia, former prime minister Najib Razak tried to steal an election in May but failed. Despite his gerrymandering, censorship and racist appeals to the Malay majority, voters dumped the ruling party of the past 61 years. Its sleaze had grown too blatant.

America’s justice department has accused Najib of receiving $US681 million from 1MDB, a state fund from which $US4.5 billion disappeared. He says the money was a gift from an unnamed Saudi royal. The opposition gleefully contrasted the vast sums Najib’s wife spends on jewellery with the difficulty ordinary folks have making ends meet. “Najib just makes up his own rules,” says a taxi driver who switched sides to back the new government.

That strongmen make up their own rules is why liberal democracy is worth defending. And in the long run, it seems to deliver better material results. A study by Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that switching from autocracy to democracy adds 20 per cent to income per head across 30 years, though some economists dispute these findings. Guillermo Vuletin of the World Bank argues that autocrats fall when economies slump, and the democrats who succeed them take credit for the inevitable recovery.

What is certain, however, is that freely elected governments bound by the rule of law have less power to abuse citizens. “Little by little they took away our rights,” says a journalist in Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey, who was recently arrested for five innocuous tweets. “Every day I check the news to see which of my friends has been detained.”

Welcome to our outrageous age of un-Enlightenment

JANET ALBRECHTSEN

Hunters Hill Barber Shop’s Sam Rahim, top, and Jordan Peterson, above

The virtues of Western civilisation crumble as the young get unmoored from their foundations
A friend of mine came to Australia from Czechoslovakia as a 14-yearold in 1970. Like others who have lived through another form of government, he views democracy differently from those of us lucky enough to know no other system. He treasures it more, understanding its intrinsic connection to freedom. And he sees more clearly the warning signs of a system that is being undermined from within.

My friend left his home country two years after the Prague Spring, that brief period in 1968 when reformists stood up to the communist yoke of the Soviet Union. Reform was extinguished when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in August that year. It wasn’t until 1989, and the Velvet Revolution, that the central European country was freed from communist rule.

My friend’s escape from communism turned on a dime. His mother sought authority to leave their closed country to visit her “dying” mother in Austria. It was tricky. It took years, so the “dying” mother was on her deathbed until the authorisation came through. They packed up their tiny car and headed for the Austrian border. A checkpoint officer asked the boy’s mother for her citizenship papers, then waved them on. Then the officer shouted: “Stop!” The family froze, thinking they had been caught trying to escape. The boy’s stepfather reversed the car back to the officer, who handed back the citizenship papers. “You’ll need these,” he said. In that moment, he was the white knight silently helping them escape.

After a few months in a refugee centre in Vienna, where the boy heard ABBA singing Fernando on the radio and drank Coca-Cola for the first time, the family left for Australia. At his local high school in Sydney’s Hunters Hill, he was the cool kid with a ghetto blaster. Except he wasn’t listening to music. He recorded his lessons so that, at home, he could slowly decipher the words in this strange new language. He recalls a terrific indigenous teacher who spent afternoons teaching him English.

Now in his early 60s, my Czech friend, a doctor and brilliant businessman who cares about boosting educational outcomes, is worried about the future of our democracy. He doesn’t pine for the patriotic indoctrination of Czech communists or their repression. But he tells me that he is worried by a different kind of indoctrination in the West.

Today, hurt feelings and being offended are enough to limit fundamental freedoms. And a swath of laws and bureaucracies are committed to those same repressive ends. It doesn’t matter that the intentions behind these laws were once good, it is enough that the outcomes are now rotten.

Consider the poor barber at the Hunters Hill Barber Shop just down the road from my friend’s old school. Late last year Sam Rahim turned away a woman who wanted him to cut her daughter’s hair. Sam the barber told her he was qualified only to cut boys’ hair, politely directing her to a salon up the road. She took to social media and ran to the Australian Human Rights Commission claiming he breached anti-discrimination laws. He offered an apology. And now he has been served with court papers for a claim that he breached the Sex Discrimination Act.

Sam and his wife, Ronda, have set up a GoFundMe page because, as he told the media, “The legal costs are more than we have ever anticipated.”

If his actions contravene the law, then the law stinks. But even being drawn into the morass is a travesty of common sense. Yet this is where we are today: common sense is on the decline.

That said, the Rahims have support from people who understand the end point of these doctrinaire laws. As Matthew Lesh, a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, wrote on the Rahims’ fundraising page: “Your treatment is absolutely reprehensible. An individual should not be forced to do a service that they do not provide, nor should they have to defend themselves in court. Good luck.”

Good luck to rest of us, too. We live in an age of hyper-reactions by givers and takers of offence. At Starbucks in the US a couple of employees in an organisation of 175,000 workers make a mistake, and now 8000 stores will be closed while all employees are sent to racial-bias training. A basic sense of proportion has been lost.

Today, words are being struck off as unacceptable by workplace language police. Schools and librarians are more fixated on the word “nigger” than the moral teaching in a text such as To Kill a Mockingbird, to the point that the whole book has been banished.

Our basic biology is under attack by an obsession with transgender identity when only a small fraction of people swing that way. Jobs are lost when a dissident employee says something even slightly nonconformist about a workplace diversity policy.

And worst of all, we’re not having a debates over ideas. We’re having a contest over whether there should be a contest of ideas. Increasingly, words and ideas are being censored for psychological reasons, where they are treated as a form of emotional violence, and those who utter such words are seen as not just wrong but evil.

As writer Lionel Shriver wrote in Prospect magazine earlier this year, “If words that cause umbrage are acts of violence, the state has every right to impound your dictionary.” We’re not there yet, but the empowering message that words will never hurt me is lost to a past era. And the whiff of a new kind of repression is unmistakeable to those who recognise the smell.

It’s worth asking whether the ideas of the Enlightenment are at risk of being forgotten. Is Western civilisation headed down a path of un-Enlightenment? Will it be too late before more of us understand what is being sacrificed on the altars of politically correct fashion and self-loathing?

My Czech friend raised some of these questions during a recent visit to Australia by Robert Tombs. The historian, who has taught history at the University of Cambridge for almost a half-century, spoke to sold-out audiences about Western civilisation. Maybe there is hope on the horizon. Jordan Peterson is a cultural rock star for retelling some common sense. And Tombs’s tremendous book from 2014, The English and Their History, was named book of the year by five publications: The Economist, The Daily Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, The Times and The Spectator. Even The Guardian lauded it as “a work of supreme intelligence”.

Speaking to audiences in Sydney and Melbourne at events organised by the IPA (of which I am a director), Tombs pointed out that a generation ago if he had told colleagues he was off to Australia to defend Western civilisation, they would have yawned and wondered why he needed to do the bleeding obvious. Today it’s provocative.

Tombs defies the self-loathing critics because he is no rah-rah cheerleader for Western civilisation. “The West,” he says, “ravaged continents, burnt heretics, invented the gas chamber and the atom bomb, and almost destroyed itself in two world wars.”

But Western civilisation, when seen in its full sweep, is also how we learned to end slavery, to defeat totalitarianism, to be ashamed of war and genocide and persecution. It is a story of innovation, one of unsettling change and impassioned debate. It is, he says, “an action-packed adventure story, not a philosophical treatise”. And that is how it should be taught at school and university.

Tombs recalls speaking to a class of senior secondary students in Britain. He asked the class whether they could see any parallels between Hitler and Mussolini. The teacher interrupted: “We don’t do Mussolini.”

Did the class understand the relationship between Hitler and Stalin then? “We don’t do Stalin, either,” said the teacher.

Tombs suggested they consider the connection between Hitler’s rise and World War I. You guessed it. “We don’t do that anything before the second world war,” said the teacher. Tombs reminded us we short-change students by teaching history as a series of ad hoc skirmishes.

Learning from history, understanding the full sweep of Western civilisation, depends on understanding perspective, throwing up parallels between events.

As we sit on the cusp of an era of un-Enlightenment, we should remember that this story of innovation, of ideas about equality, the rule of law, universal human rights, property rights and freedom, is not one preordained towards success.

Tombs suggests we view the story of Western civilisation as being ruled by something akin to the laws of cricket rather than, say, the laws of physics. “We don’t discover them, we make them up and agree to them.”

That was a few weeks before some Aussie cricketers in South Africa cheated, but you get his drift about ideas emanating from us and needing our commitment.

Tombs mentioned a young PhD student supervised by one of his colleagues at Cambridge. The young woman was a Mormon, she was home-schooled in Salt Lake City and studied at Brigham Young University, a Mormon university. She told her Cambridge supervisor that she felt freer at that Mormon University to express views outside the orthodoxy of the Mormon community — at least they believed in redemption. When she expressed ideas outside the confines of orthodox thought at Cambridge, she was seen as beyond the pale.

When freedom of expression is lost, we lose the ability to continue that story of innovation. Here are a few clues that suggest the story of Western civilisation is not being taught. An annual Lowy Institute poll tells us that only 52 per cent of Australians aged between 18 and 29 believe democracy is the preferable form of government.

Now brace yourself further. Polls in the US suggest that 50 per cent of American millennials say they wished they lived in a socialist country rather than a capitalist one. In Britain, 24 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds see big business as more dangerous to the world than communism.

And this: almost one-fifth of Americans aged between 21 and 29 see Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin as a hero (23 per cent). Even more consider Vladimir Lenin a hero (26 per cent), while Kim Jong-un is a hero for 23 per cent of them.

A third of millennials think George W. Bush killed more people than Stalin did.

And here’s the rub: 71 per cent of millennials can’t define communism and four-fifths don’t know how many people died under communist rule.

If the younger generation haven’t lived it or learned about the horrible consequences of repressing freedom, how can they value the freedom they have?

My Czech friend knows better than most that our challenge is to make sure they do learn, so they don’t live it. The alternative is us sliding further into an age of un-Enlightenment.

Words and ideas are being censored for psychological reasons, where they are treated as a form of emotional violence

Sexual Revolution Exposed

Why Private Sexual Vice is a Public Concern

ANTHONY ESOLEN

One of the Holy Week events at my old school, Providence College, was a march in favor of a wide variety of sexual inclinations, all of them disordered by biological nature, and considered to be so also by the Catholic Church, which takes its lead in this regard from Scripture and from the doctrine taught by Saint Paul. For the invisible God is known by the visible things he has created; and in the beginning he made the human race male and female, each for one another. That is what Jesus implies when he obliterates the permission that Moses granted to the Hebrews because of the hardness of their hearts. The Hebrews of old could divorce, but Jesus says that “it was not so from the beginning,” that is, before the fall of man. “Therefore,” he says, citing the words of Genesis, “a man leaves his mother and father and cleaves unto his wife, and they two become one flesh.”

Before I get to what Jesus concludes from this verse, I wish to assert that he is not being poetical. It is rather a succinct way to describe what is physically and biologically the case. The man and the woman together in the congress of the sexes as such—we are not talking about kissing and embracing, or about acts of sexual mimicry, such as sodomy—form a one-flesh union for a clear and indispensable biological and human purpose. It is just as if, for an imaginary organism, you needed a male and a female to come together to breathe or to cleanse the blood. What we now know about that union is far more extensive and far more subtle than what people knew in Jesus’ time. We are not talking about accidental or arbitrary contiguity of organs, and if it were not for our desire not to see it, every biology textbook in the land would be reveling in the complexity, the manifold consequences, and the sheer beauty of it all. Check out what a botany textbook says about the subtle and intricate pollination of fruit trees. That, by comparison with the union of male and female human beings, is as a stick-figure drawn by a child to Michelangelo’s painting of Adam and Eve on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

We must deny the bond between Creator and creation if we deny that marriage has a created essence observable in the very structure of human physiology. Now then, because of what marriage essentially is, Jesus does as he always does with moral questions. He raises the bar, we might inadequately say. Just as he condemns lewdness when he says that a man who but looks at a woman with lust in his heart has committed adultery with her, he now rules out all means or reasons for a man’s “putting away his woman,” taking care to note, in Matthew’s account of it, that by “his woman” he means a wife properly speaking, since neither Greek nor Hebrew distinguishes verbally between “woman” and “wife,” as also not between “man” and “husband.” If you divorce your wife and marry another, you commit adultery.

Notice that Jesus does not refer to what any famous rabbi has said about it. As usual, and the people are struck by it, he teaches “with authority,” and that authority is not presumptuousness or pride, since he himself is the new law. He does not refer to any social custom. He is sublimely uninterested in what any human being may think about what he says. His only referent is the Father, who “made them male and female” in the beginning. His teaching is in perfect concord with what Saint Paul will say about what happens to the imagination of man after the fall. Then we get not only hard hearts but perverse minds to boot, so that man reduces God to the form of beasts, and reduces himself as a necessary consequence. “Their women,” says Paul, “exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another.” It is a form of idolatry, just as the divorce that Jesus now condemns was at best a sign of recalcitrance and at worst a rebellion against the Creator God.

All of this fits together. Nor need we limit ourselves to matters regarding the commandment against adultery. Jesus raises and transforms all of the commandments. It is absurd on the face of it to suppose that Jesus would demand holiness as regards telling the truth, or loving your enemies, or restraining your anger against your brother, or severing yourself from undue attachments to your possessions, but shrug away the entire realm of the sexual. What is Genesis but a saga of passions gone awry, including especially the sexual passion, leading to enmity, violence, treachery, and bloodshed? Remember Lot’s wife. Remember also Lot’s daughters, remember Lot’s fellow citizens, remember Cain and Abel, Lamech the murderer, Potiphar’s wife, the rape of Dinah and the treacherous vengeance of Simeon and Levi, the bed-trick with Leah, the casting out of Hagar and Ishmael, the jealousy of Jacob’s sons against their half-brother Joseph, the sons of God and the daughters of men, the incest between Judah and Tamar, Onan the seed-spiller, Noah’s nakedness exposed, and so on. Nor will it do to say that Jesus reserves his most severe condemnation for people who turn religion itself into a banner of pride, and that therefore the sexual sins are hardly to be considered sins at all. The bite of a cobra is worse than pneumonia, but pneumonia can kill you too. Or, to look at it from the other end, if a man’s harboring lust for a woman is a form of adultery, we need not ask about Sodom.

We see that what Catholics call the natural law is affirmed by what Saint Paul teaches about sexual immorality, and is affirmed, purified, and exalted by what Jesus teaches about divorce and the movements of the heart. Now, we may trust what Jesus says about the Father’s will “from the beginning,” or not. But if Jesus is telling us the truth, that truth will not be altered by what we think about it, no more than will the law of gravity be suspended because we want to play at Superman. A law, if it exists, works with sublime independence of human opinion, though the latter can mitigate our guilt when we violate the law. Mitigate the guilt, not necessarily the consequences.

Public Celebration of Private SinSo I return to the march at Providence College, held with the strong support of the administration, and attended by the Vice President of Student Affairs. One of the young women I saw carried a sign that read, “Why do you care so much about my sex life?” I am embarrassed for her sake. Let me try to respond.

Young lady, I do not care at all about your “sex life,” a really ugly term, because I do not care about you, personally. I don’t know you. I’m not your confessor. I should care about you, though. If I were a better man, I would get in touch with you right away, because I would be concerned for your individual welfare. We really are dealing with matters of fact here. If what Jesus reveals about the Father’s will “from the beginning” is true, then to violate the Father’s intent would be like ingesting a poison, or cutting your hamstring with a knife. It has nothing to do with opinion. Those mushrooms will hurt you. Pretending otherwise does not alter the fact.

But you are doing far more than violating the sixth commandment. Everyone is a sinner. You are demanding that certain forms of violating that commandment be honored as rights to be protected, or even virtues to be celebrated. That then involves by necessity the whole community, and indeed it will, if you have your way, corrupt the community, just as would happen if the community accepted or celebrated any other principle that was utterly false and that involved a direct violation of the Creator’s will as expressed in his creation. We may think of the false principle that human beings may be owned as chattel, or that men may challenge one another to duels for the sake of honor, or that property does not belong to you if you cannot protect it, or that children may be slain for the convenience of the parents.

The principle that the young lady was advancing is inherently antisocial and absurd. It says that the act by which the human community regenerates itself is not any business of the human community. It says that the strongest passion in the human constitution, stronger than blood lust, may be indulged as a matter of moral indifference, so long as you remain on the lee side of rape. It says that the one arena of human behavior most constitutive of a culture, both as to its existence as a culture and as to its features, is strictly a private matter—as if the effects of this private matter, called “children,” were mere adventitious results, or private products, like tomatoes you grow in your garden for your own use.

What happens if you accept the principle? We see its results all around us. It was supposed to bring peace and harmony, once those “hang-ups” about sex were swept aside. Blessed Pope Paul VI predicted otherwise, and if he can be faulted for anything, as I’ve often said, it is for being insufficiently pessimistic. We live beside and in an open sewer. Half of our marriages end in divorce. We have fewer people getting married at all, yet biology calls nonetheless, and so forty percent of our children are born out of wedlock. The chaos batters against every family I know. We have a crisis of fatherlessness. Our mass entertainment is indescribably coarse. I do not want to know how many pornographic images will have passed before the eyes of the typical boy before he has ever given a girl a kiss. That is not to touch upon what happens to the girls because of it.

The result has not been harmony. It has been a Lonely Revolution. It is becoming a Revolution of Enmity: each sex blaming the other, “and of their fierce contest appeared no end.” We might also call it a Revolution of the Church for Sale. Why bother with Sunday Mass, when a roll in the hay with your partner is more fun—and when even the priests don’t seem really to believe in sin? But it is a miserable world, and this by the testimony of those who have defended it and promoted it. And so, young lady with the immoral sign, it is because we do not want to live near or in a sewer that we deny your principle.

I can say more. It isn’t just the sewer. It is the Great Thing you miss, because you have no idea that it can exist. That would be a world in which we sinners did acknowledge the moral law governing the relations between the sexes. Oh, it does not mean that everyone is a saint. It does mean that everyone has strong guard rails against going astray, and strong expectations that you can rely on to restrain the will of someone else who might tempt you. It means even more: it means that everyone has an ideal of purity and holiness to which to strive; and the very acknowledgment of the ideal will clear away plenty of space for mirth, innocent flirtation, and relations between the sexes that are characterized by gratitude, forbearance, forgiveness, and humility.

You cannot build a Catholic world upon a denial of the natural law. You cannot even have a half-decent pagan society if you build upon the principle of the Lonely Revolution. Providence College and other schools like it, Catholic and Protestant both, will have to decide more than whether they wish to be Christian. They will have to decide whether they wish to be sane.

Chilling fact is most climate change theories are wrong

• MAURICE NEWMAN
• The Australian
• 12:00AM March 8, 2018


• 
  

You have to hand it to Peter Hannam, The Sydney Morning Herald’s climate change alarmist-in-chief, for his report last month - “ ‘Really ­extreme’ global weather event leaves scientists aghast”.

Hannam is often the ­canary in the coalmine (er, wind farm) when there is a sense that public belief in man-made global warming is flagging. With Europe in the grip of a much colder winter than predicted and with the ­abnormal chill spreading even to Africa, he did his best to hold the line.

Earlier this year, Climate Council councillor Will Steffen also climbed on board — for The Sydney Morning Herald of course. Extreme cold in Britain, Switzerland and Japan, a record-breaking cold snap in Canada and the US and an expansion of the East Antarctic ice sheet coincided with a ­Bureau of Meteorology tweet (later retracted) that January 7 had set a heat record for the ­Sydney Basin. Steffen told us these seemingly unrelated events were in fact linked. “Climate ­disruption” explained both. Whether fire or ice, we’re to blame. No ifs, no buts.

Now a warming Arctic provides the perfect opportunity for Hannam to divert attention from the latest deep freeze. He ominously warns: “Climate scientists are used to seeing the range of weather extremes stretched by global warming, but few episodes appear as remarkable as this week’s unusual heat over the Arctic.”

It’s true, warm air has made its way up to the high Arctic, driving temperatures up to 20C above ­average. But Anthony Watts, who runs a climate change website, puts things into perspective. He observes: “Warm moist air from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans has warmed the Arctic above the 80th parallel. It should be noted, however, that the Arctic Circle actually starts at 66 degrees north, meaning the record heat is over a much narrower area.”

Cato Institute atmospheric scientist Ryan Maue reviewed high Arctic temperature data going back to 1958 and says: “Data before the satellite era … has some problems, so it’s hard to say the current spike is for sure a record.” He says that if the baseline is 1973, when the polar-­orbiting satellites began recording the data, there is not much difference between today’s ice extent and then.

Indeed, we now have satellite confirmation that global air temperatures are back to the same level they were before the 2014-16 super El Nino event and, this January and February, the decline accelerated. Since 2015 satellites also have detected a fall in sea surface temperatures.

Solar expert Piers Corbyn, of British forecasting group Wea­therAction and famous for his successful wagers against the British Met Office forecasts, predicts Earth faces another mini ice age with potentially devastating consequences. He notes: “The frequency of sunspots is expected to rapidly decline … reaching a minimum between the years 2019 and 2020.” Indeed, the present decline in solar activity is faster than at any time in the past 9300 years, suggesting an end to the grand solar maximum.

Critics say while “it might be safe to go with (Corbyn’s) forecast for rain next Tuesday, it would be foolish to gamble the world can just go on burning all the coal and oil we want”. That’s the nub of it. The world has bet the shop on CO2 warming and the “science” must be defended at all costs.

But while spinning unfalsi­fiable “climate disruption” slogans may sway readers of The Sydney Morning Herald and resonate with believers in their centrally heated halls, those in the real world, witnessing hundreds of people dying of the cold and thousands more receiving emergency treatment, will consider they’ve been duped.

Not feeling duped are successive Australian governments that have become committed members of a green-left global warming movement promoted by the UN. On dubious scientific grounds they have agreed to accept meaningless, anti-growth, CO2 emission targets that enrich elites and burden the masses.

And, true to label, a Green Climate Fund supported by Australia and 42 mostly developed countries will redistribute $US100 billion ($128bn) annually to poorer nations as reparation for the unspecified environmental harm the West has allegedly caused them.

Big emitters such as China, India and Russia are conspicuously absent.

Policing Australia’s targets and helping to spread confirmatory propaganda is a network of international and local bureaucracies. The world’s academies and meteorological organisations, frequently found to be unreliable and biased, keep the faith alive. They reject debate and starve nonconforming researchers of funds and information. Students are indoctrinated with unproven climate-change theories that an unquestioning media gladly ­reinforces. Meanwhile, the country ingenuously surrenders its competitive advantage by refusing to embrace its rich endowment of affordable baseload energy. This it happily exports while lining the pockets of renewable energy rent-seekers with generous taxpayer subsidies.

Should the world enter a per­iod of global cooling, we should ­expect concerted denial. Too many livelihoods, too many reputations and too much ideology ­depend on the CO2 narrative. Having ceded sovereignty over our economies’ commanding heights to unelected bureaucrats in Geneva, the West (Donald Trump excluded) repeatedly turns to expensive vanity projects to paper over this folly. If the iceman cometh, there can be no quick fix. Yet we know it takes twice as much energy to heat a home than to cool one. So pity the poor and infirm who respected medical journal The Lancet says are 20 times likelier to die from cold than heat.

While even to mention a mini ice age risks scorn and derision, recent research has shown a close correlation between solar activity and climate on Earth. That possibility alone should cause shivers. But it will take time and experience before we accept the global warming movement is really the triumph of ideology over science. Until then we will continue to commit life’s cardinal sin of putting too many eggs into one questionable basket.

Todays world

February 21, 2018

A Weak and Crumbling Foundation

By Deana Chadwell

What do humans do when they discover – albeit subconsciously – that everything they've believed in is wrong – is, in fact, evil?  Are folks likely to do a face-palm; shake their heads; and say, "Can't believe I bought into such stupidity!"?  Sometimes the truly honest among us will do that, but it doesn't happen often.  When the ground shakes under us, we are more likely to just mindlessly grab for the nearest support.

If we grew up certain:

• that God is just a convenient fairy tale;
• that the government's purpose is to take the place of indulgent parents;
• that sexual desires, all sexual desires should be fulfilled ASAP;
• that people are just the evolutionary top of the food chain;
• and are merely animals and therefore expendable;
• that drugs are enlightening;
• that truth is nonexistent;
• and that, most important of all, utopia is within our reach because we know better than God how to organize a nation,

...then what do we do when we see even our most important leaders functioning as if there is no moral code?  What do we think when the people we see as special turn out to be sexual predators?  How are we to understand our misery when our children OD on opioids, kill themselves over Facebook bullying, or kill others just because they are angry or want to be famous?  How do we handle it when we pray to the God we no longer believe in and get no response at all?

What do we do?  Most people look around desperately for someone else to blame, or even better, some inanimate object to hold accountable.  Ban guns!  It takes no moral courage to blame a thing, but it takes massive internal fortitude to look in the mirror and blame the unsustainable ideas we've held dear now for several generations.

It's hard to look at the slaughter of our children in a schoolyard, but we are still willing to kill them by the thousands in an abortion facility.  It's horrifying to see the damage wrought by social media, but we don't have the stomach to face down our spoiled children and deny them access.  It makes us sick to see the sexualization of our young children, but we're too spoiled ourselves to limit our own indulgence in nearly pornographic television.  We don't seem to have the national backbone to admit our part in the destruction of our offspring.

So we demand the banning of guns. We don't fall on our knees and confess our faithlessness to the God who made us free and prosperous.  We don't change our own behavior, vow to make a go of our marriages, and raise our children with both love and discipline.  We don't look with a more critical eye at the policies that contributed to our fractured families; our failing schools; our angry, drug-addled youths.  No.  We scream, "Ban guns!"  Maybe if we scream it loudly enough, the guilt will go away.

And the screamers don't follow up their hollering with careful thinking about what taking guns out of our society would look like.  There are over 300 million privately owned firearms in this country.  We understand – those of us who know anything about history – how important it is that we keep them.  We know that all our other rights rest on the right to defend ourselves against tyranny.  I'm not giving up mine without a fight, and I don't think I'm alone in that.  The confiscation of guns in America will be a bloodbath that makes Parkland look insignificant.

But the deep panic that the unwitting left feels at the blatant, obvious, horrifying evidence that all their most prideful beliefs are bogus is not going to allow any self-searching.  Will there be curriculum meetings sprouting up all over the country to determine if we're teaching only what's truly wholesome and productive?  I don't see that happening.  Will Congress take a fresh look at how welfare policies affect family structure?  Not likely, and if they did, where would we find the strong, stalwart men to step up and become great fathers?  We are training our young men to be women, so how is that going to work?  Are we likely, as an entire culture, to realize that law and a godless moral code can't protect us from evil?  It's easier to ban guns, or at least to vociferously demand that.  I'm not sure the reality really matters to the screamers.

I take heart in knowing that a society can be swayed by only a small percentage of us thinking clearly.  I am reassured when I remember Abraham bargaining with God over Sodom; God agreed to save it if only 10% were good, God-fearing people.  I take heart in our current administration; Trump seems to be thinking clearly and several steps ahead of his opponents.  His Cabinet appears to understand what is at stake here.

It was Jesus Christ who said, "And you will know the truth and the truth will set you free."  The truth isn't always comfortable, or flattering, and when ignored long enough, it can be excruciating when finally acknowledged.  Therefore, truth is under attack today, but it is still readily available; if we want truth, we can still get it, though it wouldn't be surprising to find that after they ban guns, the Bible will be next.

Not a day goes by anymore that we don't come face to face with the evidence that our progressive worldview stands on a weak and crumbling foundation.  Science is dealing blow after blow to godless evolutionary theories.  Our liberal educational ideas are proving counterproductive.  Our laissez-faire childrearing practices are evidently inadequate.  The way we care for our poor causes more problems than it solves.  We don't want to control our own behavior, but we resent the police who then have to do it for us.

The Parkland shooting proves that our culture is a disaster, not that our gun policies are.  We need to be able to face that fact, or there will be hell to pay.

The Gender Battle

Boys set up to fail by the system

JORDAN PETERSON

Boys like competition, and they don’t like to obey, particularly when they are adolescents; below left, a protest march against sexism, racism and bigotry in Sydney

The gender equity push has been a hollow success for educated women
Boys are suffering, in the modern world. They are more disobedient
— negatively — or more independent — positively — than girls, and they suffer for this, throughout their pre-university educational career.

They are less agreeable (agreeableness being a personality trait associated with compassion, empathy and avoidance of conflict) and less susceptible to anxiety and depression, at least after both sexes hit puberty. Boys’ interests tilt towards things; girls’ interests tilt towards people.

These differences, strongly influenced by biological factors, are most pronounced in the Scandinavian societies where gender equality has been pushed hardest: this is the opposite of what would be expected by those who insist, ever more loudly, that gender is a social construct. It isn’t. This isn’t a debate. The data is in.

Boys like competition, and they don’t like to obey, particularly when they are adolescents. During that time, they are driven to escape their families and establish their own existence. There is little difference between doing that and challenging authority. Schools, which were set up in the late 1800s to inculcate obedience, do not take kindly to provocative and daring behaviour, no matter how toughminded and competent it might show a boy (or a girl) to be.

Other factors play their role in the decline of boys. Girls will, for example, play boys’ games, but boys are much more reluctant to play girls’ games. This is in part because it is admirable for a girl to win when competing with a boy. It is also OK for her to lose to a boy.

For a boy to beat a girl, however, it is often not OK — and just as often, it is even less OK for him to lose. Imagine that a boy and a girl, aged nine, get into a fight. Just for engaging, the boy is highly suspect. If he wins, he’s pathetic. If he loses — well, his life might as well be over. Beat up by a girl.

Girls can win by winning in their own hierarchy — by being good at what girls value, as girls. They can add to this victory by winning in the boys’ hierarchy. Boys, however, can win only by winning in the male hierarchy. They will lose status, among girls and boys, by being good at what girls value.

It costs them in reputation among the boys, and in attractiveness among the girls.

Girls aren’t attracted to boys who are their friends, even though they might like them, whatever that means. They are attracted to boys who win status contests with other boys. If you’re male, however, you just can’t hammer a female as hard as you would a male. Boys can’t (won’t) play truly competitive games with girls. It isn’t clear how they can win. As the game turns into a girls’ game, therefore, the boys leave.

Are the universities — particularly the humanities — about to become a girls’ game? Is this what we want? The situation in the universities (and in educational institutions in general) is far more problematic than the basic statistics indicate. If you eliminate the science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs (excluding psychology), the femalemale ratio is even more skewed.

Almost 80 per cent of students majoring in the fields of healthcare, public administration, psychology and education, which comprise one-quarter of all degrees, are female. The disparity is still rapidly increasing. At this rate, there will be very few men in most university disciplines in 15 years.

This is not good news for men. It might even be catastrophic news for men. But it’s also not good news for women.

Career and marriage
The women at female-dominated institutes of higher education are finding it increasingly difficult to arrange a dating relationship of even moderate duration. In consequence, they must settle, if inclined, for a hook-up or sequential hook-ups.

Perhaps this is a move forward in terms of sexual liberation, but I doubt it. I think it’s terrible for the girls. A stable, loving relationship is highly desirable for men as well as women.

For women, however, it is often what is most wanted. From 1997 to 2012, according to the Pew Research Centre, the number of women aged 18 to 34 who said a successful marriage is one of the most important things in life rose from 28 to 37 per cent. The number of young men who said the same thing declined from 35 to 29 per cent. During that time, the proportion of married people over 18 continued to decline, down from three-quarters in 1960 to half now. Finally, among never-married adults aged 30 to 59, men are three times as likely as women to say they do not ever want to marry (27 v 8 per cent).

Who decided, anyway, that career is more important than love and family? Is working 80 hours a week at a high-end law firm truly worth the sacrifices required for that kind of success? And if it is worth it, why is it worth it? A minority of people (mostly men, who score low in the trait of agreeableness, again) are hyper-competitive, and want to win at any cost. A minority will find the work intrinsically fascinating. But most aren’t, and most won’t, and money doesn’t seem to improve people’s lives, once they have enough to avoid the bill collectors.

Furthermore, most high-performing and high-earning females have high-performing and highearning partners — and that matters more to women. The Pew data also indicates a spouse with a desirable job is a high priority for almost 80 per cent of never-married but marriage-seeking women (but for less than 50 per cent of men). When they hit their 30s, most of the top-rate female lawyers quit their high-pressure careers. Only 15 per cent of partners at the 200 biggest US law firms are women.

This figure hasn’t changed much in the past 15 years, even though female associates and staff attorneys are plentiful. It also isn’t because the law firms don’t want the women to stay around and succeed. There is a chronic shortage of excellent people, regardless of sex, and law firms are desperate to retain them.

The women who leave want a job — and a life — that allows them some time. After law school and articling and the few first years of work, they develop other interests. This is common knowledge in the big firms (although it is not something that people are comfortable articulating in public, men and women alike).

I recently watched a McGill University professor, female, lecture a room full of female law partners or near-partners about how lack of childcare facilities and “male definitions of success” impeded their career progress and caused women to leave. I knew most of the women in the room.

This is an edited extract from 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Dr Jordan Peterson, Allen Lane, out now, $35.
We had talked at great length. I knew they knew that none of this was at all the problem. They had nannies, and they could afford them. They had already outsourced all their domestic obligations and necessities.

They understood as well that it was the market that defined success, not the men they worked with. If you are earning $C650 an hour in Toronto as a top lawyer, and your client in Japan phones you at 4am on a Sunday, you answer. Now. You answer now even if you have just gone back to sleep after feeding the baby.

You answer because some hyper-ambitious legal associate in New York would be happy to answer if you don’t — and that’s why the market defines the work.

The increasingly short supply of university-educated men poses a problem of increasing severity for women who want to marry, as well as date. First, women have a strong proclivity to marry across or up the economic dominance hierarchy. They prefer a partner of equal or greater status. This holds true cross-culturally.

The same does not hold, by the way, for men, who are perfectly willing to marry across or down (as the Pew data indicates), although they show a preference for somewhat younger mates. The recent trend towards the hollowing-out of the middle class has also been increasing as resource-rich women tend more and more to partner with resource-rich men.

Because of this, and because of the decline in high-paying manufacturing jobs for men (one of six men of employable age is currently without work in the US), marriage is now something increasingly reserved for the rich. I can’t help finding that amusing in a blackly ironic manner.

The oppressive patriarchal institution of marriage has now become a luxury. Why would the rich tyrannise themselves? Why do women want an employed partner, and preferably one of higher status? In no small part it’s because women become more vulnerable when they have children. They need someone competent to support mother and child when that becomes necessary. It’s a perfectly rational compensatory act, although it may also have a biological basis.

Why would a woman who decides to take responsibility for one or more infants want an adult to look after as well? So, the unemployed working man is an undesirable specimen and single motherhood an undesirable alternative. Children in father-absent homes are four times as likely to be poor. That means their mothers are poor, too. Fatherless children are at much greater risk for drug and alcohol abuse. Children living with married biological parents are less anxious, depressed and delinquent than children living with one or more non-biological parents. Children in single-parent families are also twice as likely to commit suicide.

The strong turn towards political correctness in universities has exacerbated the problem. The voices shouting against oppression have become louder, it seems, in precise proportion to how equal — even now increasingly skewed against men — the schools have become.

There are whole disciplines in universities forthrightly hostile towards men. These are the areas of study dominated by the postmodern/neo-Marxist claim that Western culture, in particular, is an oppressive structure created by white men to dominate and exclude women (and other select groups); successful only because of that domination and exclusion.

The disparity is still rapidly increasing. At this rate, there will be very few men in most university disciplines in 15 years