Politics

Sociology is an academic discipline that I generally steer clear of. It seems as full of trendy guff as Education. But there is a minority report, a subculture that questions progressive orthodoxies. A new book co-written by Jennie Bristow and Ellie Lee called Growing Up in the Culture Wars, out in the US in January, is in this frail tradition. They offer some excellent insights into what has gone wrong. One insight is that mainstream sociologists have become confused about the idea of normality; it has become seen as an oppressive threat. They acknowledge that there is a healthy sociological tradition of criticizing “normativity,” meaning the way in which societies reinforce the status quo by presenting it as natural.

The Trump administration has proposed a fee of more than $100,000 for most H-1B visas. The usual suspects have come out with the usual reactions. Doug Brand, a senior immigration official in the Biden administration, called the move “catastrophic,” and the libertarian Cato Institute has warned of “devastating” consequences.  In lieu of abolishing the program altogether – my preference, but something only Congress can do – such a fee is long overdue. It’s chump change compared to the added value a truly exceptional foreign worker could generate, and at the same time would make the program less attractive as a means of importing cheap white-collar labor to undercut Americans.

The Russian word pravda is often translated as “truth”, but it can also mean “justice”. The proto-Slavic prav had that latter meaning, pravo refers to a legal right, and the first law code in Kievan Rus’ was called the Russkaya Pravda. Over time the word has come to mean “truth”, but with strong connotations of “moral or spiritual truth”, or a just way to order human relations. Sometimes it is translated into English as “social justice”, whereas istina is the term for objective truth. In other Slavic languages, such as Serbo-Croatian, pravda has retained its meaning of “justice” or “fairness”.

Scarcely had the last warmth drained from Charlie Kirk’s body than the theories began to take shape. It wasn’t a leftist killing, as common sense and all the recent evidence would tell us: it was something else entirely. In the 11 months since, an entire Charlie Kirk-truth industry has sprung up; a whole ecosystem of podcasters, armchair theorists, exaggerators, suspicious and conspiratorial fantasists, all trading in tendentious, half-baked, outlandish fairy tales about how and why the most important young conservative in America was murdered in cold blood. With freedom and the march of progress, anger and resentment don’t diminish.