here is no greater gift that a human being can give to herself or himself than self-love.  I hold that self-love is to the self what parental love at its best is to each child.  Parental love at its best transcends the ways in which a child may not be the most beautiful or the most intellectually gifted.  Parental love at its best never allows these contingent features of a child’s humanity to be an impediment to love's majesty—to the irreplaceable affirmation that only comes in the wake of parental love.  Parental love at its best bestows upon the child a sense of being uniquely valued, as I have argued in Chapter 1 of The Family and the Political Self.

Self-love is the wherewithal to value oneself in a like manner.  On the one hand, self-love is not arrogant or brazen.  It does not belittle or take delight in meaning others.  On the other hand, self-love does not systematically berate the self, which is not to be confused with denying whatever foibles or shortcomings the self might have.  Self-love does not deny these things.  For these foibles are not an obstacle to one’s being a morally upright person or to making a significant contribution to society.  Nor do these foibles impede one’s loyalty as a friend or one’s devotion as a spouse or one's ability to be a marvelous parent. 

What an extraordinary gift to the self that self-love is.  It serves as an internal gyroscope in a world that seems so meaningless, often enabling the one who possesses it to see a moral beauty that others overlook.  Self-love provides that inner sense of good and bad that enables us to decipher in spit-seconds a wealth of behavior, both verbal and non-verbal. 

Because self-love is inexorable in its demand to take the self seriously without in any being prone to harming the self, it is also the case that self-love stands as a most marvelous measure of the behavior of others that is witnessed.  We all get angry; we all get annoyed.  But none of that is an excuse for excess bitterness.  Nor of that is an excuse for excoriating or belittle another.  Just as a person with self-love takes no delight in such behavior being directed at her or him, such an individual eschews such behavior on the part of others. 

This last point is most instructive.  Nowadays, self-love is taken as doing whatever makes one feel good.  But if there is one lesson to be learnt from history, to say nothing of what goes on around us, it is that merely feeling good is no measure of what is good for us, either now or in the future. 

Self-love sets its sight upon excellence.  This is what must be the case if self-love is the parallel to parental love that I take to be.  For parental love that does not aspire towards excellence for the child does not deserve the name parental love.  Just as it is false that a parent can do anything she or he pleases and still love her or his child, it is also false that a person can do anything that she or he pleases and still possess self-love.

Self-love is one thing.  Self-indulgence is not another.  Modernity often takes the latter to be an instance of the former.  Nothing could be farther from the truth, as parental love makes abundantly clear.  No child will ever come close to realizing her or his promise in life if the child’s parents do nothing but indulge the child’s wants.  If parenting at its best requires that parents help their children to distinguish between bad and good wants, why would anyone think that self-love amounts to more than self-indulgence. 

Systematic self-indulgence is a way of unraveling the good of parental love.

Having self-love entails exercising foresight.  Again, this has to be true if self-love is the parallel to parental love that I take to be.  Quite simply, no parent could be a good parent who ignored the future of her or his child?  Likewise, it is not possible for a person to have self-love and be indifferent to how things will impact her or him.  Every good parent acts with the hope that her or his child will have a bright tomorrow.  The same holds for self-love. 

What follows from what has just been said is that persons with self-love make few if any excuses for themselves.  How good could a parent be if time and time again the person failed to do the right thing for her or his child?  It is most interesting that there are very few excuses for failing to be there for one’s child.  Although a good parent may not be able to provide her or his child with lots of material things, she or he will rarely, if ever, fail to provide her child with the most basic goods in life, starting with parental love itself.

In a like manner, a person with self-love makes very few excuses for herself or himself.  Nay, a person with self-love takes pride in not doing so.  “Getting over” is not a part of the vocabulary of the person with self-love, where “getting over” is understood as misleading others. 

We all make mistake, as that is part of being human.  But a person with self-love engages in self-correction with considerable mastery.  Thus, it is exceedingly rare for a person with self-love to make the same mistake twice.  They say that insanity consists in doing the same thing over and over and over again all the while expecting different results each time.  By this measure, people with self-love are far removed from the shackles of insanity. 

Once more, self-love is incompatible with self-indulgence.  Putting oneself in a euphoric state is one thing.  Having self-love is quite another.  Systematically focusing upon the former invariably precludes the latter. 

Finally, and most profoundly, self-love is about right and wrong, which is yet another reason why it is incompatible with self-indulgence.  And once more parental love is most illuminating in this regard.  There a thousand-and-one ways to show parental love.  Yet, it is not possible to show parental love and willfully harm or neglect the child.  Parental love would be an utterly useless concept if there were no boundaries to it—if there were not any forms of behavior that were unquestionably out of bounds.  Right and wrong is an ineliminable feature of parental love at its best. 

So it is with self-love.  It understands in a most profound and immutable way that there are rights to be pursued and wrongs to be avoided.  It is understands that there are good things to be embraced and bad things to be eschewed.  This is why self-command flows naturally from self-love.  For self-command is the wherewithal to bring to bear of one’s own accord the resources that are necessary to do what is right, and to do so in the right way.  No one else needs to be watching.  Self-command is also the wherewithal to bring it about that one says “No” to what is wrong when no else is watching.  Self-love is an embodiment of this kind of moral fortitude. 

ike most people, I believe that various wrongs have been committed down through the centuries and years.  And like most people, I that we should make an effort not to commit those wrongs again.  Or, in the event that we are still committing those wrongs in some form or the other, then we must find the moral strength to refrain from doing so.  So far so good.   But there is something odd about what is happening nowadays with regard to matters of social injustice.  There is something akin to a paradox that we find. 

An unvarnished truth is that there is power to be had and money to be made in making charges of social injustice.  There is clout and influence to be had in making charges of social injustice.  Jesse Jackson, for instance, has done quite well for himself in seeing racism where none obviously exists. 

There is in fact an immunity that comes with making charges of racism or sexism.  One can get away with being mean or vindictive if one does it in the name of social injustice, especially sexism or racism.  Indeed, one can at times actually get away with being unjust.  After all, racism and sexism has produced a Hobbesean world which warrants unjust behavior as a mode of self-defense, if you will.

In an editorial entitled “Common Currency: A Hurricane of Fraud?,” (17 June 2006), the Los Angeles Times advanced precisely this argument.  The victims of Katrina, the newspaper asserted, should not be blamed for their abuse of FEMA funds.  The percentage of improper expenditures hovered around 16%, which the Los Angeles Times acknowledges to be high.  But hey, they were victims of racism.

Where am I going with this?  Where is that seeming paradox? 

Well, the paradox is that acknowledging that things are significantly better along any dimension of social injustice is against the self-interest of those who profit enormously from making such charges.  It is in the self-interest of those who insist that they are opposed to racism and sexism to see such wrongs as entrenched in society as they have been.  More significantly, it is in their self-interest not to acknowledge that progress is being made in matters of social justice. 

Self-interest moves people to oppose social injustice; self-interest moves some of these very same people to be committed to claiming that there is social injustice.  This is the insight of the book by Juan Williams entitled Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure that are Undermining Black American—and What We Can Do About It.  The book is a scathing critique of blacks in this regard.

I have a very simple test for sincerity of motives when it comes to those who claim to be opposing social injustice.  Let me see a significant sacrifice on your part. 

At least once in awhile, let me see you give until it hurts.  Let me see you do something other than strengthen your power base.  Don’t just show up for a photo-opportunity.  Let me see you use that photo-opportunity as an occasion to make a significant commitment to helping someone.  Catch me off guard with a spontaneous act of self-sacrifice—something that occurs to you right while you are lambasting others for not stepping up to the moral place.  Just think of how well this would serve your image. 

My test is a very simple test.  But it a very good indicator.  Can you imagine the impact that critics would have had upon their audience if, in the midst of lambasting Bush about Katrina, they all give something.  Oh my, what a moral victory that would have been. 

To be sure, there is something to be said for not being ostentatious in one’s giving.  But there is also something to be said for setting an example.  Besides, I did not say that the only thing that these folks should give is that which they give publicly.  They are perfectly free to make contributions privately and even anonymously.  A public example of giving hardly precludes an anonymous act of giving.  On the other hand, it doing both require a level of commitment and righteousness that I find lacking among so many who go on and on about social injustice. 

It is no accident, I believe, that charges of social injustice increasingly have a hollow air to them.  The problem, surely, is not that anyone thinks that the world is perfect.  I have not met anyone who holds that view.  The problem is that the sincerity of those who make the claim is very much doubt. 

Again, I do not think that it is impossible to have it both ways.  That is, I think that it is possible to do things that serve our interest even as we are committed to helping others.  Acts of kindness and generosity and thoughtfulness can indeed result in enormous benefits being bestowed upon us.  Mother Theresa, for example, is a case in point. 

Just so, there is the issue of priority.  We suppose that Mother Theresa’s priority lied with helping the needy and not with obtaining a photo-opportunity.  By contrast, it is very difficult for me to believe that Jackson and Sharpton are interested in anything more than a photo-opportunity and strengthening their reins of power.  Indirect evidence of this is that I cannot recall anyone ever speaking about something marvelously wonderful that either of these two men did on behalf of anyone, where this was a private act of giving on the part of either.  There is not even a good rumor to that effect.  And in a world that is notorious for its rumors, the absence of one in this regard is revealing. 

These two fail my sincerity test.  Significantly, a great many people in the public eye insisting upon social injustice at every turn fail my sincerity test.  Most of those in Hollywood do. 

We want a world in which social injustice is either non-existent or so minimal that it has no chance of becoming prevalent again.  Many who now claim to be fighting against social injustice are a formidable impediment to our realizing that world.  This is precisely because their insincerity makes a mockery out of justice.

It is no accident that we do not seem to be making the progress that we once made.  For opportunism has replaced sincerity of heart.  This is why the Civil Rights Movement continues to be a watershed moment in the history of social progress in the United States.  People did not shout and scream about racial equality.  Many put their lives on the line in one way or the other. 

While there is nothing to be said for living in the past, there is much to be said for learning from the past.  Charges of social injustice shorn of sincerity and purity of heart will not be and cannot be a call to moral excellence precisely because it is so often the case nowadays that they issue from the lips of those who have made hypocrisy an art form. 

This essay was set to post automatically at 22h00

0 visit Auschwitz is to obtain a glimpse of raw evil.  It is to obtain a glimpse of a set of circumstances that rendered human beings as vulnerable as they could possibly be and still have control of their bodily functions.  The context of Auschwitz is that of having a human will but having virtually no say as to when one may exercise it.  Significantly, Auschwitz was a conduit for my understanding of child sexual abuse and some of the phenomena that come with it. 

In the face of extraordinary evil, disassociation is very much a coping mechanism.  One learns how to be present and not present all at once; for that is the only way not to let the evil entirely devour one.  Disassociation is a way of blunting psychic pain.  Children who are victims of systematic child sexual abuse typically learn to disassociate as a way of coping with the abuse. 

I spent 5 separate days visiting Auschwitz.  On one day I spent more than an hour standing in a cubicle not larger than 3 square feet in which 10 people were kept.  The only alternative is to become another self in order for the sane self to have any chance of survival.  This is why it is so often the case the victims of the Holocaust were so reluctant to talk about it.  For they often survived by making the experience an out-of-body experience.  And to talk about it would be to accord the experience a reality in their thoughts that they do not want to accord it.  I hint at another explanation at the end of this essay.

Next to Holocaust victims or victims of the Middle Passage during American Slavery or atrocities of this magnitude: victims of child sexual abuse are the most vulnerable victims on the face of this earth. 

There is nothing that a child wants more than affirmation from the adult figures who are a regular part of her or his life.  The child abuser takes that hope and devastates it by abusing the trust that issues from it.  The child sexual abuser preys upon the child’s need for affirmation.  The child sexual abuser masterfully exploits that need. 

Victims of the Holocaust were helpless.  Victims of child sexual abuse are helpless.  In first case, there was the crippling power of the Nazi regime.  In the second case, there is the moral authority and the physical power of the parent. 

Speaking to the moral authority: Victims of child sexual abuse insist that what they are doing to the child is all right.  The child is told that letting the adult touch his body in sexual ways is natural or an appropriate way to show the adult gratitude or an acceptable way to earn the adults approval.  But this comes at a price; for the child is told that he must not talk about event to anyone.

The demand for silence is what indicates to the child’s psyche that there is something wrong with the experience.  For since when is a child not permitted to talk about the things that he experience.  That is what children do incessantly and indiscriminately.  And with wholesome experiences, even appropriate forms of punishment, the chatter is just fine.

But the enforcement of silence that accompanies systematic child sexual abuse renders what is happening to the child unnatural.  So the child knows that what is taking place is wrong although he cannot give articulation to it.  This is quite profound when one considers the matter.  There is indeed a sense of justice, albeit ever so inchoate, in the development of the self of a child.  One cannot do anything that one pleases to a child and have the child believe that it is just.  It is one thing to not tell a person here and there.  It is quite another not to tell anyone, ever. 

It is striking that Nazi Germany also imposed a code of silence.  What was being done to Jews in the camps was not much talked about, which is precisely what made it so surrealistic.  How does one kill millions of people and not talk about it?  And so while Hitler claimed to be doing the work of the Lord, the code of silence that he imposed indicates that he knew otherwise. 

To visit Auschwitz is to grasp the profundity of this point.  With trains rolling in to the camps on a daily basis and the stench of burnt bodies regularly filling the air, the only way for ordinary citizens of Nazi Germany not to know is that they were either elsewhere in Europe or themselves dead. 

This brings us to the deep, deep anger that victims of systematic child sexual abuse typically feel.  Every adult who does such a thing knows that he is doing wrong.  And the code of silence that he imposes makes this unquestionably clear. 

The proof of an inchoate sense of justice is that no one has ever been the victim of systematic and vicious harm and somehow supposed that he or she were being treated appropriately.  Children are not the exception to this.  Having been the object of systematic wrongdoing at an early age, victims of child sexual abuse are typically teeming with utter rage. 

But the greatest harm lies in the lesson that they learn.  They learn the significance of raw power; and they learn that lesson while having their trust utterly destroyed.  Accordingly, they come to have a warped sense of intimacy.  Thus, it is no surprise that many victims of sustained child sexual abuse often become abusers themselves.  It is also no surprise that these individuals are often masters at dissimulating loving behavior.  This comes with the radical disassociation that is typically occasioned by the experience. 

The typical child abuser can exhibit loving behavior at one moment and cruel behavior the next.  This parallels a child’s being child-like in one home context (say the living room and kitchen) and a victim of sexual abuse in another home context (such as the bedroom).  Having been the victim of masterful manipulation as a child, what we often find that, as an adult, the very same individual is now capable of masterful manipulation and sees sexual intimacy in terms of abusive power.

In a published essay entitled “The Grip of Immorality: Child Abuse and Moral Failure” (1996), I argued that the victims of sustained child sexual abuse typically end up with a morally warped erotic emotional configuration.  And this, I think, gives us an insight into the deafening silence of Holocaust survivors.  To have survived Auschwitz is to have a most poignant sense of having waltzed with evil itself.  And that is too close for comfort to having run the risk, albeit not intentionally, of becoming an evil person. 

ne can go too far with just about anything.  The illustration that I have of this precept comes from two sanctimonious Christians in the state of Texas: Sabrina and Todd Farber, owners of Garden Guy, Inc.  “What did they do?”, you ask.  The answer is that they refused to do landscaping for a couple simply because the couple is gay.  “Why?”, you ask.  Well, because they believe in the sanctity of marriage and believe that the institution is under attack by those who are pushing for and advocating gay marriages.

Now, the truth of the matter is that one could be opposed to gay marriages and still think that the Farbers were just plain silly in their behavior, to put things charitably.  Or, one could think that they were acting like fools, to put things considerably less charitably.  In any case, they absolutely do not make good ambassadors for Christianity.  

There is all the difference in the world between supporting gay marriages and engaging in a perfectly respectable and moral business transaction that involves a gay person.  Whatever one might think about two members of the same sex living together as a married couple, there is nothing morally objectionable about landscaping.  Doing landscaping work for them no more constitutes an endorsement of their lifestyle than does driving them in a taxi from one location to another or giving them a haircut or selling them food in a restaurant or grocery store.

Their reasoning, insofar as that word can be properly attributed to them, is so absurd that it is mind-boggling.  Shall we give gay citizens less police protection?  Shall we not educate gay youth?  I mean if doing landscaping for two gay people is an endorsement of their life-style, then surely providing them with police protection is.  For one is thereby helping to keep them alive ! ! !

Now, insofar as these Farbers are worried about marriage, I wonder whether they concern themselves with unfaithful spouses.  If infidelity does not undermine marriage, then I do not know what does, to say nothing of all those unmarried people having sex.  So by their logic, and it pains me to use that word, the Farbers ought not to be doing business with all those sexual infidel out there.  I mean the sanctity of marriage is just that. 

For al, I know: It may very well be that gays are undermining the institution of marriage.  However, there is no evidence whatsoever that they have a monopoly on that.  Indeed, it is arguable that straight folks have so denigrated the institution of marriage, that there really isn’t much left for gay folks to undermine.  That is an overstatement, to be sure.  But it is one that has a certain poignancy to it.

Please do not misunderstand me.  In general, I certainly think that the Farbers have the right to choose with whom they want to do business and on what grounds they want to do so. 

But invoking the name of Christianity as a justification for their behavior is just so much nonsense.  It is pretentious.  It is sanctimonious.  It is manifestly self-righteous.  This is so even if we allow that Christianity condemns homosexuality.  And one does not need to invoke the “love-the-sinner-but-hate-the-sin” nonsense in order to see this.  And if that were not enough, they are also hypocritical.

As to the charge of hypocrisy, this follows from the fact that they have only singled out gays when it all too clear that insofar as the institution of marriage is being undermined, a great many straight folks are surely doing their part in this regard.  But it seems unlikely that the Farbers are not doing business with all these folks.  For if that were the case, then the landscaping business is surely not for them.  Or they could limit their landscaping to churches.  I was going to say “religious institutions”.  But then it occurred to me that Jews and Muslims would surely give the Farbers pause, since neither of these groups believes in the resurrection of Christ. 

Let’s see.  Those folks here do not respect the sanctity of marriage and those folks over there do not believe in the resurrection of Christ.  I have not a clue how one might weight the two.  Still, it seems to me that the latter must come in for some rather biting criticism from the Farbers.  Surely, they would not dare do business with those who do not believe in the resurrection of Christ.  How could they?  And I forgot to mention atheists. 

Self-righteous people are more interested in affirming themselves as individuals who do good than they are in doing good.  Why, they cannot so much as even tie a person’s shoes without managing to draw attention to their making the “sacrifice” to do so. 

Self-righteous individuals are those who are so busy doing good that they cannot even bring themselves to recognize the ways in which they are malicious and capricious in their dealings with others.  Self-righteous Christians or Jews or Muslims are rather like that except that they invoke their religious tradition even as they are harming others.

The Farbers probably got some enormous charge out of saying “No” to Mr. Lord by way of email after learning via a phone conversation that he is gay.  But to what end?  Did they present a good face for Christianity?  Absolutely not.  Firmness in beliefs and values is one thing.  Meanness is quite another.  And the former is no excuse for the latter.  Upon learning via phone that Mr. Lord is gay, Sabrina Farber sent him an email informing him that their appointment was cancelled because in her words “. . . we choose not to work for homosexuals”.  

Perhaps they have not heard of the “C’” word.  It is called courage.  And then there is the “D” word.  It is called decency.  She did not have either the courage or decency to tell over the phone.  Rather, she sent him an email surfeited with self-righteousness.  Perhaps she and I have different texts.  But I think that Jesus is portrayed in the New Testament as a pretty decent and courageous fellow.  He was straight up about where He stood.  He would most certainly not have hidden behind some email.  

Think about it.  I am nice and polite to you over the phone.  Then I send you an email that is odds with the very manner that I conveyed to you over the phone.  That constitutes rather malicious behavior.  That also constitutes cowardly behavior.  For a couple so committed to doing business with folks who support marriage, they could easily answer the phone in such a way as to ensure that they do business with people who fit just that mold: “Hello.  This is Sabrina of Garden Guy.  We are a Christian company that believes in the sanctity of marriage.  How may we help you?”  This could be said in a most polite and warm manner; and there would be clarity from the very start on the part of all, both the Farbers and all who called their company.  What is more, there would be no maliciousness.  Sounds awfully Christian-like to me.  

n the case of Cindy Sheehan, there is one thing more than any other that to my mind is abominable and utterly loathsome; and that is the characterization of her protest behavior against the Iraq war as being on a par with the noble behavior of individuals such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.  This elevation of her status is being done by people who should know better.  Political leaders and college professors.  The proof of this is that she was even a finalist for the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize. 

lato did not think much of democracy.  And it is my contention that Democracy is proving him to be quite right.  More than two millennia ago, he foresaw that corruption would become a defining feature of democracy.  And guess what: So it has.  And when one reflects upon what Plato thought about democracy and the way in which democracy is in the course of configuring itself, the coincidence is mind-boggling. 

The most striking thing is democracy’s break with the idea of objective truth.  Or more subtlety: Democracy maintains that the truth is merely what the majority proclaims it to be.  Conservatives are guilty of this; Liberals are guilty of this.  If more than 50% of the population is against abortion, then Conservatives tout that the majority shows that truth is on their side.  By contrast, if more than 50% of the population is against the war in Iraq, then Liberals tout that the majority shows that the truth is on their side. 

I am reminded of George Santayana’s observation that “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it”.

Barely 70 years ago, nearly all of Nazi Germany thought that Jews were a morally inferior people.  And while Nazi Germany epitomizes this sentiment, the sentiment was widespread throughout Europe.  Indeed, Hitler counted upon just that fact. 

And if we go back another 100 years or so, then we find that the intellectual inferiority of blacks was held to be obvious by most populations of societies that took themselves to be highly civilized. 

Then if we continue our journey back in time, we find that one civilization after another took women to be second-class citizens.

The struggle for gender and racial or ethnic equality has, in so many words, been a struggle against the tyranny of the majority.  All by itself, the majority tells us nothing at all about what is true or what is right.  And that is the fundamental lesson of history. 

Democracy has evolved for the worse.  It once understood itself to be a way of getting at the truth.  Now, however, democracy claims that we know the truth by what the majority thinks. 

Once upon a time, democracy was a way of getting at the truth when discussion and reflections served as a means of revealing the truth in the market place of ideas.  Arguments and reasons mattered.  Truth was not just about feelings.  Rather, it had to do with what arguments and reasons that could be brought to bear upon this or that issue. 

To be sure, people made mistakes.  But that, alas, proves to be a rather felicitous observation: Arguments and reasons could lay bare the mistakes that a person had made. 

But when truth is simply a matter of what most people believe, then the very idea of a mistake becomes meaningless. 

There is all the difference in the world between people having convictions that can withstand critical scrutiny, on the one hand, and people having mere beliefs, on the other.  What gave birth to democracy was the first.  Unfortunately, democracy has transmogrified into the second.  Thus, politics is now about persuading people to have beliefs—as opposed to providing good arguments and reasons for this or that point of view.  To this end, no form of psychic manipulation is out of bounds.  This, in turn, entails no lie is out of bands.  Or so it is, just so long as the lie can be made to masquerade as the truth—at least until after the votes have been cast. 

I have mentioned two conceptions of democracy: One takes arguments and reasons seriously.  This entails taking persons seriously.  The other is only interested in mere beliefs.  Accordingly, on this second view the person has no value except insofar as she or he displays the desired beliefs.  The first conception of democracy valorizes personhood.  The second conception of democracy devalorizes personhood. 

This last point is most seminal.  It strikes me as no accident that in recent years there is a sense of ennui that is becoming pervasive among citizens.  Conservatives accuse liberals.  Liberals accuse conservatives.  I suspect that neither is right about who is to blame.  Both are.

The sense of ennui is owing to the fact that democracy has transmogrified into something that no longer affirms personhood; for it accords a person value only insofar as she or he can be manipulated into having the desired opinion.  The individual who wants adequate arguments and reasons for why she or he should think a certain way is, nowadays, regarded as an impediment to the advancement of a political agenda.  Indeed, politics and politicians are counting on folks not demanding reasons and arguments.  If so, then what is the difference between citizens and automatons? 

One of the great ironies here is that universities and colleges are no less partisans of this new conception of democracy.  Increasingly, it is much more important to say the desired things and be on the desired side than to provide reasons and arguments.  Thus, some of my colleagues still cannot figure how it is that I, a black male, am opposed to affirmation.  They understand that I am.  But they see me as an enigma.  But this speaks to my very concern.

Affirmative action is an extraordinarily complex practice.  There have been first-rate minds on both sides of the issue.  So it is a mystery to me that anyone who claims to be a university faculty member could think that any right-minded individual would be in favor of affirmative action.  There has never been an argument to support that conclusion.  But you would never know that to hear most of my colleagues tell it.  And this students grasp all too well. 

So guess what?  Universities and colleges are part of the process of devalorizing rather than valorizing personhood.  But what should one expect when even in the university the idea of moral objectivity has been discarded like odiferous chunks of spoiled goods? 

There can be no question about it: a sense of ennui is spreading.  That should come as no surprise; for a defining feature of the transmogrified democracy is that personhood is devalorized rather than valorized. 

And there is this: What is to keep history from repeating itself?  Most poignantly, this haunting question is without a satisfactory answer.  The very character of this form of democracy, then, is that it does not leave us secure in the progress that we have made, which makes this form of democracy its own worse enemy.  Ennui, then, is precisely one might expect this form of democracy to produce.  An insight that Plato grasped about democracy some 2000 years ago.