Last month The New Criterion honored Heather Mac Donald with the twelfth Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society. In its June 2025 issue TNC has published an edited version of her remarks — “The clash within civilizations” — accepting the award. Her remarks remind me of Jeffrey Hart’s 1970 National Review essay “Secession of the intellectuals.” Here is an excerpt lifted from the opening of Mac Donald’s remarks, which I want to emphasize are required reading in their entirety:
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[T]he transfer of presidential power in January 2025 was not just an ordinary replacement of one administration with another, or one set of policy preferences with another. Instead, a worldview is being uprooted before our eyes, one that had seemed unshakably entrenched across mainstream society. This challenge to orthodoxy has unleashed ferocious opposition. Every daily assault on the political and cultural status quo triggers a furious counterassault.
Before assessing the likely outcome, let us recall what that prior worldview looked like. Consider a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show featured the Met’s extraordinary collection of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, that explosion of creativity that produced Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, Gerard ter Borch, and other masters. Were we to see beauty in those cloud-laden horizons, those serene compositions of domestic order, those haunting portraits of age and vulnerability? No, we were to see what was not there: “colonialism, slavery, and war,” which, the Met curators reminded us, were major themes in seventeenth-century Dutch history, but which were “barely visible” in the Met’s Dutch collections. Or take the still lifes, a new genre that marked Northern Europe’s epoch-changing attention to empirical detail. What was a viewer to make of the dragonfly iridescence of ripe grapes, the delicate play of light on cut glass, the puckered skin of a lemon peel? Do not be taken in! the Met advised us. Dutch still-life paintings omitted the “human cost of colonial warfare and slavery” that underlay the bounty these canvases documented, the wall labels warned. Of course, by definition, a still life features inanimate objects, not human subjects, so any still life would be hard-pressed to portray colonial warfare and slavery. But never mind. The artists should have anticipated twenty-first-century concerns about racial justice and revised their subject matter accordingly.
Here is another manifestation of that prior worldview: the Metropolitan Opera’s new staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida, currently running at the Met (see the May 2025 issue of The New Criterion). Aida tells the story of a doomed love between an ancient Egyptian warrior and an Ethiopian princess. The opera’s director has added a frame around the work: a group of archaeologists who troop across the stage at random moments taking stock of the pharaonic tombs. During the famous triumphal march, that glorious brass-filled explosion of military hubris, the archaeologists cart away Egyptian sculptures and other trophies for their European collections. The inspiration for these gratuitous images of plunder is Edward Said, the father of postcolonial theory and a key source of the anti-Western hate that animates today’s universities. Said viewed Egyptology as an act of theft and Aida itself as an act of imperial domination. Never mind that it was the Khedive of Egypt who commissioned Verdi in 1870 to compose an opera for the opening of Cairo’s opera house. Never mind that the construction of that opera house was itself an Egyptian, not a European, initiative. The magazine Opera (the successor to the Met’s house organ, Opera News) gushed over Edward Said’s interpretation of Aida in anticipation of the new staging, lest anyone miss the subtext. Said, by the way, taught at Columbia University for four decades before his death in 2003, which tells us much about the anti-Israel animus among some university members….
