More Bullying from the ‘Anti-bullying’ ‘Liberal’ Culture

Jonah Goldberg has an interesting discussion in the Corner about Niall Ferguson and John Maynard Keynes.  Apparently the trend toward more and more militant “acceptance” of homosexuality has made at least one previously mainstream academic discussion now a potentially career-ending third rail.

Incidentally, did you know that Keynes was homosexual?

. . . [Keynes] himself described the Bloomsbury mindset as a rejection of all standards:

We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists. The consequences of being found out had, of course, to be considered for what they were worth. But we recognised no moral obligation on us, or inner sanction, to conform or to obey. Before heaven we claimed to be our own judge in our own case.

Intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb draws quite a few lessons from that mindset. She writes:

. . . There is a discernible affinity between the Bloomsbury ethos, which put a premium on immediate and present satisfactions, and Keynesian economics, which is based entirely on the short run and precludes any long-term judgments. (Keynes’s famous remark. “In the long run we are all dead,” also has an obvious connection with his homosexuality — what Schumpeter delicately referred to as his “childless vision.”)

Mark Steyn weighs in.

But I wasn’t just talking about the economics. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren, which means the country’s lenders are betting that 42 people will pay off the debts run up by 100. The Keynesian social-democratic state is also increasingly childless. In Europe, some of the oldest nations on earth have death-bed demographics from which no society has ever recovered. They are Keynesian, and they are barren . . . .

As for Professor Ferguson’s abject apology, that’s a grim surrender. No functioning society can tiptoe around on eggshells this thin.