THE
BURDEN OF BAD IDEAS BY HEATHER MAC DONALD
REVIEWED
BY MARK WEBSTER
If Heather Mac Donald’s new book The
Burden of Bad Ideas:
How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society were a work of
science fiction, I would have to say it is the most frightening book
I’ve ever read. But
it’s worse than that. It
really happened – here.
Most of the chapters in her book appeared as articles in the
quarterly magazine City Journal, a magazine about urban affairs.
With the eye of a Dickens or Zola, she takes the reader into the
belly of the beast of urban problems to show the outcomes need not have
happened or resulted in such dire circumstances had common sense
prevailed rather than politicized, intellectual nonsense.
Ms. MacDonald discusses twelve bad ideas and their consequences.
In each case she demonstrates how common sense is pushed aside in
favor of a political “solution” which only makes matters worse.
In the first chapter she shows how large, philanthropic
organizations, such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, created by
capitalists, turned against the system of thought that made their
creation possible toward a political activism which worked against
acceptable notions of social improvement.
In the past these organizations helped the deserving poor to get
back on their feet; now they try to change the “system.”
Likewise,
Ms. MacDonald shows how the New York Times in its “Neediest
Cases” charitable appeal
over the years has regressed from aiding the truly needy to becoming an
apologist for the welfare state, refusing to make judgments about the
self destructive behavior of the recipients of their aid.
The scariest chapter is entitled “Public Health Quackery.”
Here MacDonald shows how government health agencies stopped
fighting the physical causes of dangerous diseases but instead began
waging war on the alleged political causes of disease, such as racism
and sexism, injustice and bigotry.
Instead of fighting the disease, apologists offer fictitious
excuses, maintaining that members of designated victim groups are
“incapable of controlling such destructive behavior as promiscuous
unprotected sex and drug use.” A
CDC researcher actually says, “Virtually no behavior is under the
complete and voluntary control of individuals.”
The quacks refuse to admit the relevance of behavior to health.
As a result of this bad idea, real victims, such as children,
spouses, the elderly and the general population, suffer needlessly.
For example, public health authorities caved in to political
activists and abandoned the tried and true method of fighting disease by
reporting the names of diseased individuals to a central
registry. Even worse, the
CDC stopped testing newborns for HIV because it put the mother’s right
to confidentiality over the infant’s need for immediate treatment.
Likewise, law schools have been infected by a weird strain of
activism from both the right and the left,
which attacks the purported objectivity and neutrality
of legal reasoning as a sham.
As a result of this bad idea, students learn less law
and become inadequate practitioners.
The Education Departments of
the universities are just as bad and are gripped by a dogma that
MacDonald sums up in one pithy phrase: ”Anything But Knowledge.”
Besides, some educators believe what passes for knowledge is
political. As a result of this bad idea, teachers with no knowledge and
no teaching skills infect schools with their incompetence and harm
innocent students. She
devotes a chapter to “Hip-Hop 101” in which students at the El
Puente Academy for Peace and Justice in Brooklyn study graffiti as a
part of their curriculum. Mac
Donald shows that the teachers, although well meaning in their attempt
to get their students’ attention, have created a system that wastes
students’ time and retards their academic and moral formation.
Even museums, particularly the Smithsonian, have been gripped
with the bad idea of increasing the self-esteem of some minorities
through exhibits that expose the evils of the white man.
As a result, the museums show contempt for their public and the
taxpayers, the unwitting bankrollers of the high tech show.
MacDonald demonstrates that the homeless are not free spirited
urban campers, symbols of heroic alienation, or rebels without a casa.
They are either sick people who need treatment or immature
individuals who should be expected to behave responsibly.
In another chapter MacDonald describes how the Teenage Services
Act designed to help teen mothers on welfare actually rewards
dysfunctional behavior and subordinates the well being of children to
ideology. In this chapter
she actually traces the life cycle of a family moving through the social
service apparatus. She does
the same thing in her chapter on foster families,
where family members and non-family members alike play a shell
game into order to receive money for fostering children.
No one seems to care about the children, but they are very
concerned about the payments from the state.
The activities show they are rational and develop elaborate
schemes to get government money. Real
remunerative work almost seems easier
by comparison. Likewise
her chapter on the disabled shows how political empowerment of this
group has created another welfare “Vietnam.”
The closing chapter covers the Diallo murder in which a young,
black man was shot numerous times by the police.
Activists spawned the bad idea that the police were racist
gunslingers when the data showed the police were more cautious about the
use of force now than ever before and the Diallo tragedy was atypical.
In fact, citizens are more inclined to show disrespect to the
police than vice versa.
Policymakers are guilty of caring about poltical abstractions and
not about real people. By
creating victims in school, on the street, and in the home,
“intellectuals” have sought to erase responsibility for bad behavior.
Children, students, the homeless, the disabled, and the sick are
the ones who truly carry the burden of these bad ideas.
Mark
Webster
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