The Trick of Elimination

Sarah discovers her route forward in life

Dear Reader, I have been thinking quite a lot about various topics that confuse you and on which you need my guidance. My lantern illuminates all things! We have all been thinking at some length about virtues and vices, and about whether there are distinctly modern vices or distinctly modern virtues. Until very recently we were certain that there were such things as virtues and vices, and then all at once we determined that this was medieval idiocy and that it was much more technological and urbane to talk of no such thing at all. But! Virtue and vice have certainly reasserted themselves, have they not? What else would it be that we are urbane other than a modern virtue, and what else would it be that we are medieval than a modern vice?

Among the least obvious virtues and vices are tolerance and discrimination—the prior of which is now treated as an unalloyed virtue and the latter of which as an undiluted vice. Both of them are much more ambiguous than this—let us start with the virtue of tolerance, as it is by far more difficult to understand and is discussed much more frequently.

The most obvious meaning of tolerance would be forbearance—no man is trustworthy who lays too heavy of a yoke on those beneath him. Even-handedness is also a virtue, not one commonly discussed today in these terms, and if an elite man is both forbearing and also even-handed then is he not going to be tolerant towards people and their beliefs in various ways?

The answer is absolutely no! Of course not, you idiot! Let us take Sarah as an example, beautiful but not too much so, quite clever, raised by bourgeois parents in the picturesque wooded suburbs of some city, sent in time to reasonably fancy schools, leading a reasonably sheltered life. She is taught over the course of her formative years that unlike the backwards racists who live elsewhere, her parents are tolerant—and they are! They are forbearing and magnanimous members of the bourgeoisie—they are educated and wealthy because they deserve to be wealthy—they are prosperous—but they have a bad conscience about their excellence—could it be superiority?—and they are additionally proud and have a bad conscience about this too. How could they not be proud when they are lawyers and they are professionally successful and went to the best schools, and they did this all after having been activists against their own self-interest when they were younger? Their identity is built on the sense that they have a relatively more enlightened attitude without which their social world would no longer be meaningful… and yet good people would have no such attitude. These sorts of views constitute the background of Sarah’s upbringing. Sarah like her parents needs to feel like she is better than someone else and has a bad conscience about it, and in addition to this she needs a struggle in which she can overcome herself—which is not at all unusual—and she, being a naïf, does not understand the consequence of her next fateful decision; she decides that as a crusader for tolerance she will devote herself to being an educator whose great and difficult responsibility is to reform society. What is entailed in this decision, why does she make this decision her parents did not make, and what are its ultimate consequences?

Sarah discovers the trick of elimination, an extraordinarily powerful tool that most of our contemporaries have not afforded appropriate respect given its frequent and destructive use. Stanislav Lem tells us that “the trick of elimination is every expert’s well-tuned defensive reflex,” and Sarah learns about this as follows: She is in school, she does not want to know Latin, and she wants a greater status than her peers, and perhaps even a greater status than her parents, and so when a professor demonstrates the trick of elimination in class one day, she cannot help but be drawn in.

“Latin was part of the elitist and eurocentric educational standards of the humanities until recently, and a bunch of old white men are still clutching their pearls about how they can’t use knowledge of ancient languages as the basis for being exclusionary,” the professor tells the class.

“Just because you don’t know some dead language because your parents couldn’t afford tutors for you doesn’t mean that you are any less of a humanist or a scholar, or that you should be barred from education by a bunch of racists,” she says.

“That’s a great point.”

And it is in this way that she learns. Her parents, despite their bad conscience and their identity with enlightened superiority, are actually impressive people, and so it will be difficult for her to be more impressive than they, and so the obvious first move is to make an educational program of eliminating Latin entirely. It is Eurocentric and elitist and backwards, and so by extension it is harmful towards the students that they be stifled by such an intellectual standard as the knowledge of ancient Mediterranean languages. It follows from this that only someone ignorant of current trends in educational progress would still commend the study of Latin. Might we not just say that it is a sign of ignorance to know Latin? Sarah is now the expert here. She has a struggle: against her own elitism and the backwardness of society. What more does she need?

By accepting stupidity one can make one’s life much easier—which I personally can relate to in many ways—but the great disembraining cudgel that now appears like Excalibur from of the inky abyss is too dangerous to be treated with ambivalence or flippant good humor.  Sarah has accepted stupidity and redefined enlightenment so that she can be better than other people and overcome herself through her struggle to accept the mediocre—or the absurd! This move is very common. It is currently very common amongst self-described educators, the most loathsome and despicable of the shrill minions gumming up discourse today with their constant interruptions. Educational reform means the lowering of standards and the introduction of the absurd so as to make the struggle for overcoming into the easiest and most accessible possible enterprise. By all means, educational experts did not invent the trick of elimination. One can become a gourmand eating fast food if one is clever in the right way. The cruelty of the educator and their anti-intellectualism is that they practice the trick of elimination in one of its most pure and ironic forms, in that they attack the very faculty of knowledge and learning itself in broad daylight.

What differentiates Sarah from her parents? Is it some quality of character? Is it the weakness of her peers who have enabled her? A frightening mystery, and somebody should get to the bottom of it. All evidence seems to point towards the fact that her parents were raised in a different age of the world than her, and so the lessons and opportunities that they received were different with it. It may have been harder on them and given them more sense. It may also have been more allowing, more plentiful.

And how does Sarah ultimately sleep in the bed of her own making? She takes for herself some small measure of the status that her parents earned. She does this through acquiring status at all educational institutions of society through being the most radical of all entrants about lowering the barrier of entry, a process that literally any one can advance, that is, until all living humans have status and are better than someone else, at which point the only route forward is extremely difficult, eg getting animals to talk and allowing them to be more enlightened than someone else, getting diversity quotas for literal corpses, and at that point suddenly Sarah must practice necromancy in order to keep up. We have not yet quite achieved this point, and so it is still fairly easy to beat Sarah by playing her own game and just becoming an ever-more-radical supporter of the struggle against all struggle. At some point we will arrive at a hard limit, and a lump of non-sentient flesh will be the object of cooing worship.

We have already passed the point that Sarah has started to be beaten at her own game. Her naiveté is such a problem for her—how could she have known?! People are brutes, they are not at all like how she expects them to be, they are screaming at her and calling her an elitist. They are not forbearing, they are not even-handed, they tolerate nothing. If she does not let them into the educational institutions she has conquered then the tools that she used to advance herself were illegitimate, and this means her defeat has begun, and yet if she lets them in then she is overrun, and she is defeated on the spot. Is this what people are like? Her parents were not this way. She cannot give up the status she has, and so she cannot admit to the terrible use of the trick of elimination that she personally used to build her career. She has no grounds to object when the barbarians who come after her utilize it, too.

Sarah’s problem is enormous; the door is open to the barbarians, and then at the precise point in time at which the problem is critical enough that Sarah admits it is a problem, it is already too late for her to fight with her diminished skills and naïve worldview, and once reality is comprehended she discovers that the allies she has cultivated are buffoons and the institutions corpulent beyond the point of any efficacy for mounting a defense. None of them can provide her with any respite. Her only choice is to hurdle onward towards the inevitable terminus of her project: to dig up corpses and include them in the educational process. Perhaps it is possible, with will and imagination, for her to invent a student of the future so incapable that no current educator could possibly be prepared. This student will be unlike any that we have seen, he will be obstinate like a mountain and precious like a pearl, and educating him will be a challenge unimagined by any teacher from any age of the world that has yet transpired. Perhaps she will determine that the only way out is through, and so she will jump headlong into the project of the conquering barbarians. This was common in the Middle Ages: You have been conquered and been forced to kneel in front of a God that defies all reason, and now that you have done so you must make everyone else comply, lest you have been weak when you succumbed. Perhaps she will just shuffle along under a shroud of cynicism, wither away, and then die. Welcome to the present; its true history is here revealed to you.