01m22s Mortalism in the news07m04s Regretful mortalism13m52s A clumsy Commencement20m18s A joyful Commencement26m11s Hesperophobia (cont.)36m47s That pesky semicolon38m53s Romania’s new President41m32s Rotherham’s new Mayor43m40s Signoff with cultural appropriationDirect Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed
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01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! That was of course Franz Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your indigenously genial host John Derbyshire. What does it mean to be “indigenously genial”? I’m not sure, but give me a break here, I’m running out of adverbs.
I’ll open today with a segment on a peculiar way of thinking which I shall call “mortalism,” although I’m not at all sure that’s the correct descriptor.
Mortalism isn’t crazy in itself; it’s actually quite logical, although in my opinion misguided. Like so many other ways of thinking, though, it has a lunatic fringe. This week we encountered that lunatic fringe. Here we go.
02 — Mortalism in the news. A story that particularly snagged my attention in this week’s news was the one about the attempt last Saturday to destroy an IVF clinic in Palm Springs, California.
This was a one-man operation, or attempted operation. The actual one man was 25-year-old Guy Bartkus. His plan was to blow up the clinic with a car bomb. However, he screwed up somehow. The bomb went off before he could get the vehicle properly positioned, the explosion wiping out himself and the car but leaving the clinic, which was closed at the time, damaged but by no means destroyed.
IVF, if you’re not up-to-date on your reproductive abbreviations, stands for “in vitro fertilization.” In vitro is Latin for “in glass.” A human female egg is fertilized by a human male sperm in a glass apparatus — there you go — instead of in the more conventional way. The fertilized egg is then closely watched until it has definitely become an embryo, at which point it is transferred to a human womb for gestation to birth.
So the zone of lunacy we’re in here is something to do with reproduction. Most of the cultural warfare waged in this zone is pro-abortionists versus anti-abortionists. Since an IVF clinic exists to produce viable embryos, it sounds as though Guy Bartkus was some particularly crazy kind of pro-abortionist.
I bet he was pro-abortion, but his lunacy went way deeper than that. From quoted remarks of his, together with an online manifesto he posted, it appears that Bartkus was a mortalist, the opposite of a natalist.
Natalists believe in encouraging human procreation — urging people to have more children to keep the human stock replenished. Elon Musk is a natalist. I am another one, at least so far as civilized nations are concerned.
Mortalists go the opposite way. They believe human life is a big negative and want to do what they can to shut it down.
There are different schools of thought within mortalism. The most common and longstanding one is driven by concern for the environment.
Here’s an edited extract from the mission statement of VHEMT, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, one of the oldest mortalist associations — it was founded in 1991. Quote:
The Movement presents an encouraging alternative to the callous exploitation and wholesale destruction of Earth’s ecology.
As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens … us.
Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom.
Weird? For sure; but dedicated to persuasion, not violence. To the best of my knowledge, no-one belonging to VHEMT has ever, in the movement’s 34 years of existence, tried to car-bomb a natalist clinic, or any other establishment.
These are sober, thoughtful citizens who just believe that Mother Earth would be a better place without human beings — a defensible position on strictly logical grounds.
There’s another school of mortalist thinking that’s more personal and introspective. I’ll do a segment on that, if you don’t mind.
03 — Regretful mortalism. Here’s that other school of mortalist thinking. There doesn’t seem to be a name for it, but it sometimes crops up in literature and biographies. I’m going to call it regretful mortalism.
Whether they care about ecological issues or not, regretful mortalists believe that since human life is more pain than pleasure, procreation is unethical and unjustifiable because, by increasing the quantity of human life in the world, it can’t help but increase the quantity of suffering.
Regretful mortalism is, from a strictly logical point of view, just as valid philosophically as ecological mortalism.
Guy Bartkus seems to have belonged to the regretful mortalist school of thought — or more precisely, to have been out on the lunatic fringe of that school. Most people who take that rather negative view of life don’t go in for car-bombing.
Regretful mortalism in fact has a long and respectable pedigree. The ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles, in one of his plays, has the chorus tell us that the greatest blessing of all is to not have been born.
A milder version of this line of thinking is to look back across one’s life to some earlier spell of happiness or fulfillment and wish one could have died right after it.
The other day I was reading a review of Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain. Chernow, according to the reviewer, tells us that Mark Twain, who of course invented the boys Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, had no interest in exploring them as adults, as if he couldn’t bear to imagine them stripped of their youthful appeal. Twain once wrote the following thing, quote: “I should greatly like to relive my youth. And then get drowned.” End quote.
Another case that I recall from my own reading is the late British politician and classicist Enoch Powell. Powell’s classicism went very deep indeed. In his high school years, to win a Divinity prize Powell memorized the whole of St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians in the original Greek. He must surely have been well-acquainted with Sophocles.
Powell, who was born in 1912, had a distinguished military career in World War Two. He advanced from Private First Class to Brigadier in five years, although without ever being in combat.
Much later, giving a radio interview at age 73, Powell was asked how he would like to be remembered. He answered, quote: “I should like to have been killed in the war.” End quote.
That answer considerably upset his wife and daughters. However … and here I’ll quote from Simon Heffer’s biography of Powell, page 901, quote:
After broadcasting that remark, he [inner quote] “received dozens of letters from people saying I’m glad you said that because I felt the same and I’ve never known it before. There’s a secret guilt about those who served and were not killed that they too … were not killed.” [End inner quote.]
I think the pro- and anti-abortion activists have drowned out a whole lot of other views about life — both one’s own life and human life at large — that are worth pondering.
I’ll add my two-pennyworth here. I’m not a mortalist. I’m a natalist, at any rate where the civilized part of the world is concerned. Nor am I in that box with Mark Twain and Enoch Powell, looking back at some golden spell in my life and regretting having gone on living after it.
My childhood was happy, with playmates and books and loving parents. My adolescence, however, was a bit of a disaster, best forgotten. My young-adult years were nothing to write home about, either, although I did write home about them.
What, looking back over my life, I think of as the meaningful part started when I got married at age 41, and continues down to the present day, and I hope will continue for many more days.
Not only do I hope that I myself will continue to exist, I also hope the same for Western Civilization, with which I strongly identify. History shows us that a slide back down into barbarism, either by outside assault or internal rot, is always possible. Today, even here in the United States, there are some disturbing signs.
04 — A clumsy Commencement. The most dependable source for those disturbing signs is our institutions of higher education — our universities and colleges.
In my May 9th podcast I took a swipe at Columbia University in New York City. Quote from that:
I don’t know how Columbia has fared in Trump’s campaign to cut back on federal funding for well-endowed Ivy League universities, but if the stinking place is getting any of my tax money, I strongly resent every damn penny.
I see that in fact Columbia was stripped of $400 million in federal funding back in March, in response to last year’s campus riots. The Trump administration might be contemplating further penalties, it’s not clear.
A leading foreign activist in those riots, Algerian Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested, also in March, and is awaiting deportation at a detention center in Louisiana.
Those campus riots last year were so bad, Columbia canceled its main graduation ceremony, scheduled for May 15th. In the year since, and especially after that federal funding cutback, administrators at the university have made some grudging concessions to the feds, in hope of getting their funding restored of course. I was interested to see how they’d manage this year’s graduation ceremony.
Answer: clumsily. The ceremony was held Wednesday this week. Claire Shipman, Acting President of the university, gave the Commencement Speech. It wasn’t very long, less than twelve hundred words. One quarter of the way in the speech included this, quote:
More than 6,800 of you represent 141 countries outside the United States. And let me say — we are glad you chose to be here. We need you. We draw strength from our identity as a global institution. And we firmly believe that our international students have the same rights to freedom of speech as everyone else, and should not be targeted by the government for exercising that right. And let me also say that I know many in our community today are mourning the absence of our graduate, Mahmoud Khalil.
A couple of things struck me about that. First, 6,800 foreign students? There were nearly sixteen thousand students graduating on Wednesday. Six thousand eight hundred is more than 42 percent of that. I’ve said it before — many, many times — and I’ll say it again: higher education is a precious, finite national resource. American citizens should have first dibs on it.
A few foreign students, sure; but forty-two percent? Of course they are paying full tuition, to Columbia’s great financial advantage. End of explanation.
And then, “freedom of speech”? So if student groups at Columbia invite Jared Taylor to address them on white advocacy, or Peter Brimelow on immigration patriotism, or Charles Murray on race realism, or J.K. Rowling on sex realism, or Douglas Murray on the Israel-Hamas War, students who try to shut down those speakers will be disciplined, right? Ri-i-ight … Sure.
And then, mourning Mahmoud Khalil’s absence? The guy’s not dead. He’s awaiting deportation for making an almighty nuisance of himself in our country. The detention center he’s in is a humane facility, giving him three hots and a cot while lefty judges allow his case to be lawyered to death.
Acting President Shipman’s speech wasn’t altogether well-received by the graduating students. There was loud booing and chanting of Mahmoud Khalil’s name and “Free Palestine!” all through the speech. Meanwhile, outside the ceremony, a cluster of graduates gathered to burn their diplomas.
That was Commencement Day at Columbia University, where a four-year course for a bachelor’s degree will set you back about $360,000.
05 — A joyful Commencement. Turning from barbarism to civilization, I’m glad to report that not all of this week’s Commencement ceremonies cast such dark shadows.
Also on Wednesday, as it happens, was the graduation ceremony at the Jane F. Shearer School of Nursing in Suffolk County — my own county, here on Long Island.
Why do I care? Because my beloved daughter Nellie was among those graduating into the nursing profession there, and the rest of us Derbyshires were in the audience: myself, my wife, our son Danny, and Nellie’s three-year-old boy Michael.
The ceremony is actually known as a “pinning.” As the school website explains, quote:
A nursing pin is worn in order to identify the school from which a nurse has graduated. Pins often have a symbolic meaning, illustrating the history of the nursing program.
There is a picture of the actual Shearer pin at that website, with an explanation of all its symbols.
This was, I should say, a historic ceremony for the school. The nursing program started up in 1963 and the first graduation ceremony was in 1965 — exactly sixty years ago. Thanks to the Jane F. Shearer School for generating so many trained nurses over so many years!
The Derbs — well, the three adult Derbs — of course shouted with joy as Nellie stepped up for her pin. For me there was also a surge of deep sentiment almost bringing me to tears.
My own dear mother was a professional nurse all her adult life. She loved her work, and would have swooned with happiness to see her grand-daughter take up the torch.
To add to all the happiness, there was nothing at all political in the pinning ceremony to subtract from it. On a civilizational level, with Columbia University scoring about three out of ten, the Jane F. Shearer School hit a clean ten.
There were a lot of speeches from the platform — a lot: administrators, alumni, local notables, and of course representatives of the graduates themselves. All were plainly congratulatory, full of good-natured optimism.
None of the speakers mourned the absence of alien troublemakers or congratulated the school on having excluded Americans from forty-two percent of the graduating class. Nobody in the audience shrieked out “Free Palestine!” I’m pretty sure, although I didn’t do a thorough check, that no graduates of the school gathered outside to burn their diplomas.
Nellie’s classmates there on Wednesday gathered to get their nursing pins were not scowling, shrieking misfits graduating from courses in Critical Race Theory and Gender studies, their heads swathed in Arabic kitchen towels, looking forward to careers as Community Organizers or Establishment mouthpieces in media or the academy, or to government jobs handed to them by their uncles in corrupt Third World kleptocracies.
No: The graduates getting pinned at our graduation ceremony were happy, cheerful young Americans, already smart in their nursing uniforms, ready to embark on necessary, useful, often difficult work to improve the lives of their fellow citizens. God bless them all!
Here’s a modest suggestion from me to the authorities at Columbia University.
Get in touch with your counterparts at the Jane F. Shearer School of Nursing in Suffolk County Community College. Have them explain to you the right way to assemble a student body, and to supervise student affairs in such a way that the graduation ceremony is an occasion of joy and pride, not embarrassment.
You can find the Jane F. Shearer School’s address, email address, and phone number right there on the school website. No need to thank me; I’m glad to be of help.
06 — Hesperophobia (cont.). Atrocity of the week, not altogether unconnected to the foregoing, was the Wednesday night murder of two young Jews in Washington, D.C.
This happened just outside the Capital Jewish Museum in central D.C. The victims were a young man, 28-year-old Yaron Lischinsky, and a young woman, 26-year-old Sarah Milgrim. They were in fact a loving couple, just about to get formally engaged.
Lischinsky was Israeli, born to a Jewish father and a Christian mother. He himself was a devout Christian. He’d moved to the U.S.A. in 2022 to work in the Israeli Embassy there in D.C.
Sarah Milgrim was American. She grew up in Kansas City. She was Jewish, had spent summer vacations in Israel. She was also employed at Israel’s D.C. Embassy.
The couple had a trip planned this weekend to Jerusalem, for Sarah to meet Yaron’s family for the first time, and for Yaron to formally propose to her. He’d just this week bought the engagement ring.
So on Wednesday they attended a reception given by the American Jewish Committee at the museum. The purpose of the reception was to discuss how more aid could be brought into the Gaza Strip. Sarah and Yaron were both keen activists for peace between Israel and her neighbors.
As they came out of the reception to the street outside they were shot by 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez, an American from Chicago wielding a 9mm handgun. Police tell us he fired 21 rounds, reloading twice. The second reload was to finish off Sarah, who — already mortally wounded — was trying to crawl away along the sidewalk.
I would not have been the least bit surprised to read that the killer, Elias Rodriguez, is a graduate of Columbia University. In fact his bachelor’s degree, in English, was from the University of Illinois. He works writing content for the American Osteopathic Information Association.
After killing the two lovers, Rodriguez ran into the Museum. People in there had heard the shots and assumed he was seeking refuge from the shooter. He was agitated. They tried to calm him, sat him down and brought him a glass of water.
When the cops arrived to arrest him, Rodriguez cheered up. He took the Arabic kitchen rag from his bag and declared, quote:
I did this. I did this for Gaza. Free, free Palestine! From the river to the sea and there’s only one solution, intifada revolution.
Those are of course the cant slogans of far-left anti-Zionists. Far-right anti-Zionists have different slogans, but I forget the details …
Rodriguez, it has turned out, is far-left from way back, with connections somehow to an outfit called the Party for Socialism and Liberation. He’s been well-known to Chicago law enforcement for at least ten years as a prominent figure in every kind of lefty street demonstration.
Now of course he’s a hero to the anti-Zionist mob. Their commentary has been captured by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute. Random sample: This is from a media outlet called Gaza Now, quote:
In a moment of courage, he [that is, Rodriguez] decided to make his voice heard and boldly confront the killers. He opened fire, killing an Israeli employee, and stood defiantly, handcuffed, to raise the banner of justice in the face of injustice as he shouted free Palestine.
I guess we should brace ourselves for a new outbreak of hybristophilia, with ditzy females all over sending love letters to Rodriguez in his jail cell. You have to feel sorry for Luigi Mangione; now the hybristophiliac fangirls will forget all about him.
In an editorial on the shooting of Lischinsky and Milgrim, this morning’s New York Post concluded thus, quote:
Old-school right-wing antisemitism is still real and periodically deadly, but it’s astonishing how far the global left has interpenetrated with Islamist antisemitism: Hamas, after all, imposes sharia law in Gaza.
It’s not just the lust for violence that unites them, but a hatred for Western civilization.
That jogged my memory. Way, way back, just three days after the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center towers, I wrote a column for National Review Online under the title “Hesperophobia.” I explained that title thus, edited quote:
This word was coined by the political scientist Robert Conquest. Its roots are the Greek words έσπερος (hesperos), which means “the west” and φόβος (phobos), which means “fear,” but which when used as an English suffix can also carry the meaning “hate.” Hesperophobia is fear or hatred of the West.
Here is the news: a lot of people out there hate us … In China, in India, in Pakistan, in Indonesia and Malaysia, in Africa and in the Arab countries, European civilization — the West — is widely hated. Matter of fact, quite a lot of Europeans and Americans hate it, too, as you will know if you spend much time on college campuses.
If anything much has changed in the 24 years since I wrote that, it’s been the quantity of hesperophobia here in the U.S.A. This week’s poster boy: Elias Rodriguez.
[A footnote to that. Five and a half years later I had another try at floating the word “hesperophobia” in the title of a column. Here are the concluding sentences of that 2006 column. quote:
The Hun is at the gate. In the case of most European countries, in fact, the Hun, the hesperophobe, is inside the gate. We can dream on for a while, dream that our cultural superiority, our technological superiority, our political superiority, will preserve us against all assaults. Perhaps we should remember that the Huns were cultural illiterates, technological ignoramuses, and political incompetents. It doesn’t take much in the way of culture, technology, or statecraft to deliver a crippling blow to a weary, sybaritic, over-governed civilization that is near the end of its allotted span and has lost all faith in its own founding values. Time is short.
Today, nineteen years on, time is shorter.
That 2006 column, by the way, was spiked by National Review for being too race-realist — a portent of things to come. It survives in my archives.]
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: From the London Daily Mail, May 18th, quote:
The age-old semicolon is dying out as Britons admit to never or rarely using the punctuation mark, a study has found.
Interesting. However, the story fails to note that George Orwell disliked the semicolon. He so disliked it that he wrote his second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter, without using a single semicolon.
He then recanted, though, and put semicolons in his later novels. Or perhaps his publishers just nagged him. Publishers generally get their way in such matters.
Back in my wasted youth — this was the early 1980s — while living in London I dated a German girl. It didn’t last long before I broke it off. She was a nice girl: pretty, honest, plain-spoken. She was, however, very very German.
In a conversation about writing once I mentioned that I felt insecure with the semicolon, never quite sure if I was using it properly. “Ach!” she responded. “In Cherman zere are exactly tventy-seven vays to use ze semicolon correctly.”
I wouldn’t swear that the number was twenty-seven; but it was some exact, and remarkably large, number.
As I said, the relationship didn’t last long.
Item: Romania has a new President: elected in a two-round election earlier in May, he will take the oath of office on May 26th. Name: Nicuşor Dan, 55 years old.
No, I don’t know diddley-squat about Romanian politics. What got my attention about Mr Dan was his mathematical talent.
I commented frequently on VDARE about the International Math Olympiad for high-schoolers, held annually in a different location each year. The point of my comments was to make race-realist observations about the personnel in the U.S. team. This year’s Olympiad will take place July 10th to 20th in Sunshine Coast, a district of Australia.
Romania has an utterly disproportionate share of the world’s mathematical talent. If you have a college library near you, go in there and pull down one of the math journals: AMM Monthly, The College Mathematics Journal, Mathematics Magazine, … there’s any number of them. Open it at the “Problems” page — they all have one — and scan down the pages looking at the names and locations of the puzzle posers and solvers. You won’t get very far before you see a Romanian name.
So I wasn’t terrifically surprised to see that President-to-be Nicuşor Dan won gold medals for himself at the 1987 Finland Olympiad and then again at the 1988 Olympiad in Cuba. He would have been aged 15 and 16 respectively at those events.
That’s quite an achievement. Those Olympiad problems are tough. It’ll be interesting to see how well such a capable mathematician does at running a country.
Item: The news from the Mother Country just keeps getting worse. Here’s the latest.
I’m sure you’ve heard of the so-called “grooming gangs” in Britain. The expression “grooming gangs” is elite media sugar-coating. They are actually rape gangs: groups of Pakistani Muslim men kidnapping and raping young — sometimes pre-pubescent — English girls for sex.
There have been these rape gangs all over England, but the authorities there have gone to great lengths to hide the truth about them, terrified of legacy English people reacting violently if the facts came out.
The best-known case, and the one most feverishly covered-up, was in the town of Rotherham, in the North of England. The gangs there operated from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s, with police, social-welfare agencies, and of course politicians all looking the other way.
Well, guess what: Rotherham just got itself a new Mayor. It’s actually a Mayoress, name of Rukhsana Ismail. She is — can you guess? — a Pakistani Muslim. She gave her opening address to the Rotherham townsfolk in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan.
Poor England! Poor, dear old England. She’s gone — gone into the long, sad register of dead nations.
08 — Signoff. That’s it, listeners and readers. Thank you as always for your time and attention.
Please allow me my usual reminder that you can support the VDARE Foundation by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check to the Foundation at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759; and you can support me personally by earmarking that check with my name, or by any of the other options listed at my personal website. You can also support me indirectly by subscribing to Chronicles magazine … which you should anyway, it’s an excellent magazine. Thank you!
For signoff music, a little Cultural Appropriation.
A friend sent me a link to a YouTube clip that caught my fancy. The clip shows two young Chinese ladies playing instrumental music in a large public square. The passers-by in the square who stop to listen don’t look very Chinese, so I think this is in a European city. Someone in the comment thread says it’s Munich, but I can’t confirm that.
One of the ladies is playing the èrhú, a two-stringed instrument played with a violin bow. The other’s playing the pípa, a sort of chinese lute played by plucking with the fingers. They play two tunes, both the work of present-day composer Guān Dàzhōu.
To see us out I’ll give you the first of those two tunes, title Shuĭ Lóng Yín, “Song of the Water Dragon.”
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
