Slouching Towards Gomorrah (70 page)

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Some of what is happening is merely funny, or maybe it is pathetic. A few-years ago some students at a major university gave a 1950s nostalgia party, using the music and dress of that decade. The next day the dean in charge of sensitivity delivered a reprimand, because the 1950s were not a good time for minorities.

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The Supreme Court ruled against a federal set aside program but only by a five-to-four vote,
Adarand Constructors, Inc.
v.
Pena,
115 S. Ct. 2097 (1995), and some members of the majority are shaky on the question. Seven of the Justices, moreover, say that racial preferences may be used to remedy past discrimination, which merely means that the existence of past discrimination, perhaps only numerical imbalance, will be the new focus of litigation. We have already seen that past discrimination involving different people is no justification for present discrimination.

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The phenomenon may be common in the West and on the increase. The French have experienced increased demand for clairvoyants, numerologists, those who seek underground water with dowsing rods, heal the sick by telephone, read stones and runes. Irrationality is so widespread and accepted that the practitioners of such arts gather annually at the Paris Fair for Parapsychology. A disheartening sign of the change in Western culture is that men, who rarely patronized clairvoyants a few years back, now come openly, and, according to one adept, “What’s more, the men cry. They didn’t 10 years ago.”
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The increasing manifestation of superstition in the West is bad enough. The fact that men, who did not cry ten years ago, now do so indicates that something has gone high and soft in the culture.