Keeping The Main Thing The Main Thing

In my previous post about the movie The Odyssey, I made the claim that it wasn't a movie at all, it was a recapitulation of the progressive creed. I'm going to see if I can make the case that Harvard and Cambridge as well as the Catholic hierarchy is doing the same thing in their domains.

First off, let's recall that Christopher Nolan chose to cast Ellen Page as a Greek warrior and Lupita Nyongo as Helen of Troy.

The face that launched a thousand ships.

Now I'd like to introduce my new podcast heartthrob, Peter Boghossian. Boghossian is a former professor who was hounded out of his school because he wouldn't say things he thought were wrong. I'm not completely familiar with his history, but I think the controversy had something to do with trans. His new focus is "street epistemology" where he interviews normal people on what they believe and what it would take to change their minds. He has also spent a lot of time analyzing the denial of the Europeans wrt migrants, the trans insanity and the descent of higher education into insanity.

Here's his take on Jason Arday and Claudine Gay and why he thought Jason should not have been removed from Cambridge and why Claudine should still be president of Harvard. I recommend watching the whole thing, but you probably don't need to do that.

What They Have In Common

Imagine being on a professional casting team made up of experienced, talented Hollywood veterans. You are casting a high-budget, high-profile movie which depicts one of the greatest adventure stories of all time, Homer's Odyssey. There is simply no way on Earth that the tiny, effeminate  Ellen Page and the in-your-face ugly, black woman Lupita Nyongo would have made it through the first cuts. It would have been a miracle had they even been given screen tests.

Casting a movie is all about finding just the right talent to further the story. Anything that detracts from the story is an excrescence and gets removed whether that's dialog, action scenes or cast members.

Christopher Nolan and his crew did not do that because they weren't making a movie, they were signaling their allegiance to the rest of Hollywood. The Odyssey was a recitation of the creed first and entertainment second.

Similarly, if you were on a selection committee at either Harvard or Cambridge, your sole purpose would be to find people to fill important positions that cemented your university's reputation as honest, bold and truth-focused. In no alternate reality would you have chosen plagiarists whose work was low-quality even when it wasn't being stolen from other academics. You certainly wouldn't have hired a man who was clearly mentally ill.

Harvard and Cambridge did just that and then stood by their choices until it was impossible to keep up the charade because they are not running universities in any real sense. Their primary job is to pledge their allegiance to the progressive causes of the day by chanting the creed as loud as they can. Of distant import is research and honesty. If there is a collision between the tenets of the creed and academic performance, academic pursuits lose every single time.

Catholicism Today

In a not-so-surprising poll that I can't track down right now, pastors and priests were surveyed about whether or not they thought it was important that a person believed in their faith. Of all Christian denominations, coming in last place were Catholic priests at something like 33%.

There are benign explanations to that, but it dovetails well with my own recent crises of faith. If you take in what the pope, our bishop and our local clergy say and put it all together, I can't figure out why I shouldn't convert to Islam. They all want unity, peace and non-judgmental inclusion. They never talk about sin or damnation even when the Sunday gospel reading is shouting about it. They all imply that God loves everyone and everyone is saved.

Since the Muslims are adamant about the superiority of their faith, I don't see why joining them doesn't accomplish all of the goals my ordained leaders are proposing. In fact, I can't see any other way to do it. So long as we insist that Catholicism should persist, we are setting ourselves in opposition to Islam and, by our own preaching, embracing divisive and implicitly judgmental positions.

Like Hollywood and Harvard, the Catholic Church is obsessing on things that are secondary to its mission at best.

Summary

Others have written about the death of expertise and on the right there have been significant numbers of brain cells recruited in the service of explaining how and why this has happened. What if it's just been a loss of focus? What if the cause is that our institutions forgot to make the main thing the main thing?