Compassion gone mad. - Review - book review

Public Interest, Spring, 2001 by Eric Cohen

IF a neoconservative is a liberal mugged by reality, then Heather Mac Donald may be the most neoconservative person alive, given the many muggings she has put herself through in the last five years. From inner-city schools to law schools, from foundations to museums, from public health centers to homeless shelters, Mac Donald has done her own one-woman run through the institutions. Her many essays in City Journal, now collected in The Burden of Bad Ideas, [ ] tell a story of "compassion gone mad," a parable of how the "destructive and blinding ideas" of intellectuals and activists have wreaked havoc on America's cities and culture and on the lives of the urban poor.

Take Edgar Miranda, one of the many orthodox radicals that Mac Donald meets on her travels. Miranda teaches "Hip Hop 101" at El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, a public high school in Brooklyn. The course includes sections on graffiti-making, rapping, dee-jaying, and break-dancing. The students watch movies on the "hip-hop revolution," take tests on "graffiti style," and are evaluated on their commitment to social and economic justice. When asked if his students take their graffiti lessons to the streets, Miranda replies, with a laugh: "I have no knowledge of it, nor do I care to find out." When asked if students are allowed to paint graffiti on El Puente Academy, he says: "How we look at it is, they don't tag their own home." (Just other people's homes.) When asked why students should be learning about "hip-hop culture" at all, Miranda gives a predictable triad of answers: Hip-hop is art; hip-hop is a "cry" for justice; and hip-hop simply reflects the "socioeconomic condition" of the community.

Mac Donald, taking stock of this example of "progressive idiocy" (she has seen many more like it in many other schools), is typically on point:

That a school could embrace a practice both illegal and destructive of the city's spirit is a troubling indication of how far the educational system has lost its bearings. Desperate to show "sensitivity" to minority students and to create subjects in which they can unequivocally excel, schools have cast aside responsibility for academic and moral education.

To begin to understand how this happened, consider another example: "Plain Talk," an Annie E. Casey Foundation initiative to reduce teen pregnancy by encouraging more open "dialogue" about sexuality and expanding teen access to birth control. The problem was that many of the communities the program targeted--especially immigrants--still lived (or tried to) by traditional moral codes, the very thing the progressive program rejected. "Stated simply," the program report laments, "the less assimilated, more traditional Latino and Southeast Asian cultures regard premarital sex among teenagers as unacceptable. They ... do not feel it is appropriate to discuss sex openly with their children." This is, the foundation executives reasoned, the wrong kind of moral diversity. So when kids took a "judgmental approach" to sex--i.e., when they spoke out in favor of abstinence--the program leaders sent them to "values clarification" workshops to become more "tolerant" of other life styles. When a young man made a sign that s aid "Plain Talk: Say No to Sex," the project manager pressured him to change it to "Plain Talk: Say No to AIDS."

Perhaps, as Mac Donald says, such initiatives would be more tolerable if there were any evidence that more dialogue and more condoms have actually reduced teen pregnancy. But there is not. And yet, as Mac Donald chronicles in institution after institution, it is not evidence that matters but myth; not fact but feeling; not real-life consequences but noble (though really ignoble) intentions. And so 35 years of misguided, often radically destructive programs and policies have devastated the lives and communities of the supposed beneficiaries, especially the urban poor. The "moral imperialists," as Mac Donald so aptly describes them, have won, and won big. And the very fact that these imperialists have not solved, but have worsened, many of the problems they claim to address--minority achievement, poverty, crime, teen pregnancy--means the passions are still hot and the quest for "social change" continues apace, its many myths still well-funded and intact.

WHAT are these myths, where do they take shape, and what are their consequences? The first great myth, according to Mac Donald, is that all economic and spiritual poverty, especially among blacks and Hispanics, is the result of oppression--the oppression of a racist and sexist society, the oppression of capitalism and privilege, the oppression of Western imperialism and scientific reason. To the intellectuals and advocates that adhere to this myth, there is no such thing as self-destructive individual behavior, just social and economic forces that victimize certain groups. Thus, incremental, partial reforms are unacceptable and undesirable; the goal, as former Carnegie Foundation president Alan Pifer put it in 1968, is to revolutionize American society in ways that "the comfortable stratum of American life would consider disturbing and perhaps even dangerous."