Harvard's mind virus problem and the answer
Sometimes the insanity of one side exposes the insanity of the other
Today is going to be a short post, so you’ll get the remainder of your time back, gratis. No need to thank me. Let’s get started. There are many ways social insanity manifests, but mostly it’s due to massive category errors, when entire groups of people become caricatures of themselves, leading to secret handshakes, shibboleths, winks, and logical fallacies regarding “others” and themselves. Harvard University serves as an almost perfect petrie dish to observe these things. It might be the school’s most useful purpose these days.
Spurred on by the dual events of October 7, 2023 and the reification of President Donald Trump, Harvard engaged in some actual self-examination; and when the aforesaid Trump administration forced the issue so Harvard released its findings. The petrie dish is filled with creepy crawlies, as expected.
In short: Jews at Harvard have felt forced (and not just since 10/7) to take a position against the State of Israel and the Jewish people’s right to inhabit the land, known as Zionism; and Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims in general have felt ignored and dismissed by the school’s leadership. These infections, mind viruses to borrow a term from Elon Musk, are no surprise.
The anti-Jew history of Harvard is well documented. The entire concept of an “admissions department” had its genesis in the practice of keeping Jews out. Boston Brahmins, from the country club set, to the Southern gentlemen, have always kept the Jew at arm’s length, if not in outright disdain. Again, this is no surprise.
Arabs have always been held by that same crowd as somehow savage, swarthy, beneath the dignity of their own birthrights. But they’ve also enjoyed a sort of royal charm, a Lawrence of Arabia chic. Sultans, emirs, kings, and the like have enjoyed the clubby atmosphere of western education, but in the rarified circles that encompass the Ivy League and places like Harvard, they’ve always remained just outside the power core. Savagery, when it rears up, is tut-tutted, and so reinforces the caricature that paints Arabs and the like how the denizens of Harvard (and its money) want to see them.
Combine those elements in the petrie dish, with the Jews, who by law and modern culture now attend and permeate Harvard, and the Arabs, Palestinians, and Muslims, who are admitted under the liberal umbrella, and their mutual blood feuds and ancient misunderstandings, and you get all kinds of infection.
The latest version of these is progressive intersectional belief structures, which is another way of saying insanity. The elevation of “powerless” people and power structures, without regard to context, forces progressives to see Israel, which is small but powerful in its own land, as the aggressor, and Arabs, who outnumber Israel by at least a factor of 15 (the ratio of Muslims to Jews is about 143:1), as the oppressed. It doesn’t help that the Arabs have tried to extinguish Israel multiple times over the last 80 years—their failure seems to reinforce the stereotype of Israel being the aggressor.
So Jews are forced, if they wish to be accepted by the current progressive zeitgeist, to renounce their Jewishness and embrace the progressive anti-Zionist position. And Arabs, Palestinians, and Muslims are forced, by dint of their position as oppressed peoples, to accept no agency or self-determination, because they are perpetually powerless. Therefore all decisions must be made in the service of the mind virus and its attendant insanity.
However, many Jewish people send a lot of money to Harvard, and represent a decent sized chunk of its alumni. Also, some rich Arabs contribute. So money becomes the currency (funny, that) of progressive conflict—we want your money but not your ideals. Hence, the administration allows Arabs, Palestinians, Muslims, and the progressive intersectionalist army of the insane to paint American Jews as perpetrators of genocide, when the context of that is so clearly wrong and stupid in every possible way. But the administration plays semantic games and doesn’t adopt those beliefs as part of the university’s activities.
The mind virus thrives at Harvard, and in other public corners and the public square of progressive thought. The results of Harvard’s look inside itself is completely predictable, and it’s exactly what the mind virus growing in the Trump petrie dish expected to find.
In the headline, I promised you the answer. Of course, the answer to insanity is mental well-being. And the answer to social caricatures and stereotypes is to know people as they are in person. The way to know people personally, in person, is to eschew social media and meet them, personally. The way to do that is to accept people as they are, not as their caricature paints them. It takes a special kind of mental well-being to do that. The currency that allows it is called “love.” And not just any kind of love—I am not talking about romantic love or even brotherly love. The Greek word, used in the Bible is agape. It means loving people even when they appear to be your enemies.
I think most people expect that would be the answer. Love is the answer to Harvard’s problem, and in a larger sense, to the problem we are all having today. Love kills the mind virus. We should try it.
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Love, in the sense of seeking the other person's best interests, is a particularly difficult ideal to achieve. As mentioned, it requires a reasonably close acquaintance with an INDIVIDUAL person or persons. Next, a distinction must be made between your assessment of someone's best interests and their own. While it is clear that addicts' assessment of their needs should not be trusted, neither does your assessment have the right to rule someone else's life. It MAY aid your decision on what help that is in your power, you are obliged to give. But there is also the consideration of how temporary your aid is, and if it is generally repeated, if it makes the situation worse. The classic situation is welfare and the possibility that without the goad of hunger, people never look for the job that will support and eventually enrich them. And then there is the conundrum posed by Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" where a purely logical solution that violates all human values, is completely unacceptable. So deciding what to do is an almost unsurmountable problem, long before deciding who has the honest soul and good judgement to actually engage the problem, such that charity can be organized and supported by society in general. In further addition, the personal decision that I can only influence what suffering and injustice I personally notice among my fellow humans, is limited by the fact that people segregate themselves into like communities, such that the rich have almost no exposure to the conditions the poorer people are dealing with. We acknowledge that skin color and religion should not be criteria of discrimination, even as we struggle to overcome those types of discrimination, but wealth and education are the most effective people separators active today, and not just in the U S. So , yes, all we need is LOVE, and the good heart, intelligence and human values needed to decide how to apply it.
P.S. Now tell me how the above discussion can be applied to fix a situation where both sides believe that trying to extinguish the other side is their only chance for survival and that they owe a greater responsibility for people related to them than they do for other people, and given that survival is the most basic instinct of ALL life not just human.
Great reminder, Steve.