The Little Red Blog

Wednesday with Pascal: Smarter than Most

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat eagerly leaps at the chance to expose Eric Voegelin’s haughty disdain for, well, pretty much everyone.}

“The appeal of the mass for the common man lies in the possibility of obtaining the benefits of mankind without incurring its obligations.” (Voegelin)  

Before turning to Voegelin’s critique of Enlightenment, let us consider his general view of his fellow man—or of, as he said, “the common man,” in which category he surely did not include himself. While fond of calling the ideologues he despised “elitarians” (his neologism; he meant “elitists,” but he liked coining words), Voegelin also made clear his own low opinion of the easily misled, duped, propagandized, and distracted masses; as he put it, “The idea of being a part of a ‘masse totale’ can only appeal to a man who has not much substance of his own. His personality must be sufficiently underdeveloped, that is, it must be deficient in spiritual organization and balance to such a degree, that the anxiety of existence cannot be controlled and absorbed by the normal processes of the mature, meditative life. As a consequence, he will be plagued by insecurities, frustrations, fears, aggressiveness, paranoiac obsessions, and uncontrollable hatreds.”

Voegelin was by no means misanthropic; “man” qua “man” was not the object of his diatribe, but the modern “collective man,” the member of the ‘masse totale’ who, having been deprived of his spiritual heritage, was fully committed to an “intramundane” existence and no desire for, or belief in, transcendence. Thus, modern man was at best half a man, and one afflicted with the symptoms of his “pneumapathology” (“spiritual sickness,” another Voegelin neologism).   

Given the widespread existence of such spiritually deficient individuals, they will inevitably be guided by a minority: either one with greater insight into reality, or one with greater ambition to change that reality. It was the latter to whom Voegelin objected. He believed in spiritual, intellectual, and philosophical elites; his quarrel with modern elites was that they were ideologues lacking the right qualifications, credentials, or “substance” to assume the role. Rather than being spiritually mature and steeped in tradition, they were self-promoting masters of propaganda and sophistry, self-appointed rousers of a pliable public rabble; rather than being wise contemplatives, they were “pneumapathological” activists.

A true elite, for Voegelin, should be composed of individuals who, having devoted themselves to “the mature, meditative life,” understand the nature of the human condition and the importance of accepting human limits, leading them to reject hubris, Promethean ambition, and utopian efforts to remake the world. They were the guardians, as it were, of the metaxy, the “in-between” condition of our existence. The new elitarians, on the other hand, wanting either to jettison transcendence completely or to bring it down to earth, were full of “blissful ignorance concerning the difficulties of their enterprise. They did not sense clearly that a renovation of society through a new elite would have to rest on deeper foundations than any of them were able to lay.” The modern, politically active, ideologically driven elitarian was, for Voegelin, “an intellectual parasite whose zeal to teach others is stronger than his willingness to submit to intellectual discipline, who thrives on the fallacy that truth is to be found in the solutions of problems rather than in their discovery, who believes that truth can be dispensed as a body of doctrine, who transfers the characteristics of revealed truth to the finite human search for knowledge; who consequently, through vulgarizing problematical knowledge into dogmatic results, can make the innocent believe that they enter into the truth if they accept faithfully as dogma a proposition which no conscientious thinker would accept without far-reaching qualifications, who create in their victims the belief that instruction is education, who destroy intellectual honesty through their separation of results from the critical processes which lead up to them, who build up in the masses the unshakable brutality of ignorant conviction and who, for their murderous work of destruction, want to be applauded.”

It seems that most of us just aren’t smart enough for Eric Voegelin, as his admirers are fond of pointing out:

“Voegelin’s work is rejected out of hand by most secularists and liberals, in part because of their own superficial education and lack of knowledge in comparison to Voegelin’s. During the height of the Cold War, his work was adopted simplistically by anti-communist conservatives, but they equally have a very superficial understanding of Voegelin. Voegelin is not embraced as one of their own by historians or theologians or political scientists or philosophers because they cannot encompass him within their specialized fields and must necessarily be multidisciplinary in their approach and knowledge as he was. As such, he remains an outsider—much like anyone who has developed his reflective consciousness in openness to the Divine Ground with a command of art, literature, history, political philosophy, science, and theology.” ¹

The Voegelin enthusiast Ellis Sandoz positively gushed over his hero’s world-historic philosophizing:

Eric Voegelin, by his exploration of the heights and depths of reality experienced in consciousness, secures the divine ground of being along with the In-Between of man’s participation in time-eternity, a moving present with eschatological direction. His significance philosophically lies in the unique acuteness and subtlety of the affirmation of being—in his affirming both the beyond of the beyond experienced-symbolized as the It-reality of divine appeal, as well as the process and structure of the hierarchy of reality experienced as limiting human existence symbolized as In-Between, even as man is drawn by the divine appeal toward superior reality and divine fulfillment. In other words, Voegelin reauthenticates and rearticulates the intellectual and spiritual tradition of our civilization, further differentiating it through a revolutionary philosophy of consciousness that is of a technically superior order as theory. But more than this, he validates the realm of divine presence for mankind and for history generally by reconciling reason and revelation as modes of theophany…

Be that as it may, Voegelin’s superior knowledge and wisdom led him to such inscrutable utterances as “There is no answer to the Question other than the Mystery as it becomes luminous in the acts of questioning,” and to such haughty declarations as “One cannot enter into rational discourse with a person whose disease consists in the denial of the order of the logos.” Like the Gnostics he denounced, Voegelin believed in a saving knowledge (“the order of the logos”), which, while in theory available to all, was in fact capable of being truly apprehended and appreciated only by an elect—of which Voegelin had no doubt he was a member and for which he knew he was writing.  

So, what did Voegelin find so wrong with the Enlightenment? We shall see.

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¹ The quote is from the biographical sketch offered at the Voegelin View; it is not credited to any author.

The working title for Eric Voegelin's unfinished autobiography?

Eric Voegelin Explains It All

{Both Pascal the existential Russian blue cat and I have been attempting for some time to grasp the complex ideas of the late Eric Voegelin. As we are both now exhausted by the effort, we have called in Professor Arguendo to see what he can make of ‘Anamnesis,’ a book in which Voegelin explored the nature of consciousness in somewhat the same manner as Augustine explored the nature of time.}

“The analysis of consciousness is a dead end.” (Eric Voegelin)

“Man’s conscious existence is an event within reality.” (Eric Voegelin)

Arguendo, it appears, from my cursory examination of 'Anamnesis,' that Eric Voegelin came to believe—after years of attempting to understand human existence through the study of history, politics, and philosophy—that he needed to focus instead on a basic theory of consciousness: what is “consciousness,” what does it mean to be “conscious,” how and why are we “conscious”?

And so Voegelin waded into the treacherous and largely unmapped terrain of human consciousness. Not unlike scholars who are said to gaze into the well of history and see their own reflection, Voegelin may have identified his consciousness, but not necessarily mine, or, for that matter, yours:

By virtue of their consciousness, human beings are aware of being parts of a comprehensive reality, of which they express their awareness by the symbols of birth and death, of a cosmic whole structured by realms of being, of a world of external objects and of the presence of divine reality in the cosmos, of mortality and immortality, of creation into the cosmic order and of salvation from its disorder, of descent into the depth of the psyche and meditative ascent toward its beyond. Within this rich field of reality-consciousness, there occur the processes of wondering, questing, and seeking, of being moved and drawn into the search by a consciousness of ignorance, which, in order to be sensed as ignorance, requires an apprehension of something worthy of being known; of an appeal to which man can lovingly respond or not so lovingly deny himself; of the joy of finding and the despair of having lost the direction; of the advance of truth from the compact to the differentiated experiences and symbols; and of the great breakthroughs of insight through visions of the prophetic, the philosophic, and the Christian-apostolic type. In brief, Man’s conscious existence is an event within reality, and Man’s consciousness is quite conscious of being constituted by the reality of which it is conscious. Intentionality is a substructure within the comprehensive consciousness of a reality that becomes luminous for its truth in the consciousness of Man.

With all due respect, count me among those who have never been aware of "divine reality in the cosmos" or of any "salvation" from the disorder of existence.

Arguendo, the problem with Voegelin’s search for a theory of consciousness is that it was undermined from the outset by his recognition that “Human consciousness is always the concrete consciousness of concrete persons,” a claim which, if true, means that each human consciousness is unique and that there can be, therefore, no such thing as a universal or generalized “human consciousness”. Voegelin certainly knew this, just as he knew (and said) that abstractions like “mankind” do not exist other than as a linguistic shorthand. Like such fanciful notions as “truth,” “justice,” and “the American way,” “human consciousness” is a concept, not an existent entity. Voegelin did what he could to resolve the seeming contradiction:

If abstract statements about the structure of consciousness were to be accepted as true, they had first to be recognized as true in the concrete. Their truth rested on the concrete experiences of reality by concrete human beings who were able to articulate their experience of reality and of their own role as participants in it, and thus engender the language of consciousness.

However, just as one can never step into the same river twice, “concrete experiences of reality” can never be identical for more than one subjective consciousness; in fact, you and I, given our different consciousnesses, cannot step into the same river at all. Moreover, the articulation of experience is not the same as the experience itself, not to mention (though Voegelin does mention it) that language itself is full of pitfalls, not the least of which is reification (mistaking words for things).

Arguendo, Voegelin wanted to have his cake and eat it too:

The truth of consciousness was both abstract and concrete. The process of verification had to penetrate, therefore, through the engendered symbols to the engendering experience; and the truth of the experience had to be ascertained by a responsive experience that could verify or falsify the engendering experience. Even worse, the process was further burdened with the impossibility of separating language and experience as independent entities. The truth of consciousness, its verification and advance, could not be identified with either the truth of statements or the truth of experience; it revealed itself through participation in reality and it was essentially historical.

Arguendo, and I may well be mistaken, Voegelin here seems to have been saying that the proof is in the pudding; experiences—let us say, theophanies, which Voegelin took very seriously—can only be verified/validated by incorporating them into the life of the recipient (Abraham, Moses, Jesus, etc.) and the life of anyone else who wishes in turn to verify for themselves their truth value. This leads Voegelin to admit that “Truth must be sought not in a theory of consciousness, but concretely in the constitution of the responding and verifying consciousness; and that concrete consciousness is always one’s own. A philosopher, then, must engage in an anamnetic exploration of his own consciousness to discover its constitution by his own experiences of reality.”

By “anamnetic exploration of consciousness,” Voegelin meant tracing one’s consciousness as far back as one could toward its origins, because each individual consciousness is shaped from birth by its experiences. Anamnetic exploration would require serious introspection:

This exploration could not stop short at more recent enrichments of one’s consciousness by learning or by the observation of events, because one’s manner of response to learning and events was precisely what needed to be clarified. The exploration had to go as far back as memory would allow, to reach the strata of reality-consciousness that had been the least overlaid by later accretions. Anamnesis had to capture the childhood experiences that let themselves be captured because they remained living forces in the present constitution of his consciousness.  

Arguendo, the child is father to the man; also, “Rosebud”. Having figured that much out, Voegelin then conducted his own “anamnetic experiments,” aka trips down memory lane:

My earliest recollection takes me back to Cologne. My mother took me along on her shopping trips. In a bakery, the saleslady expressed proper admiration for the little creature (me) who could hardly walk, and she asked about my age. My mother informed her: fourteen months. I recall a general feeling of pride about the attention paid to me and a feeling of special significance. This recollection is neither supported nor influenced by information on the part of my family. As far as I know, I first told it when I was more than twenty years old, evoking only the incredulity of my parents.

The memory, and the feelings Voegelin attached to them, is touching; but it does not seem to provide much basis for scientific investigation. Arguendo, it likely did not occur to Eric Voegelin that consciousness is the thing with feathers, or that developing a “theory of consciousness” is akin to trying to catch the wind.  

 

Saturday Lecture: All Truth Is Social

{Richard Bushman is a Mormon scholar and a respected historian of nineteenth-century America. In the following excerpt, he acknowledges the difficulty of pursuing ‘objective’ scholarship in the face of the myriad personal and social factors that influence everything from our choice of subjects to our selection, arrangement, and interpretation of facts.}

“We all have our tribes.” (Richard Bushman)

Richard Bushman (from “The Social Dimensions of Rationality”):  

We live at a moment in history when the Enlightenment dream of scientific scholarship has been eaten away by doubts about the possibility of scholarly objectivity. A host of thinkers (many of them French) have called into question the very possibility of dispassionate inquiry. They argue not merely that objectivity is an impossible achievement for human beings, who can never detach their minds from the rest of their being, but that the pretense of objectivity is an exercise in self-aggrandizement. Objectivity, they say, disguises a play for power by those who pretend to the authority of objective scholarship when they are every bit as self-interested in the outcome as any religious [or ideological] apologist. The scientific authorities of an era, according to this theory, claim to speak only for truth against error, when in reality they stand to benefit by promoting their particular truth and vanquishing all others. No truth, not even the most rigorously scientific, is objective. All truth is colored by personal interest of some sort.

I am loath to go all the way with such postmodern thinkers, or to relinquish faith in some measure of objective scholarship. We can recognize utterly biased and self-serving scholarship that we know would not hold up under scrutiny, or history writing that is filled with factual errors. We want to reserve the right to correct such corrupted work in the name of some kind of objective truth.

But if we cannot go all the way with critics of the Enlightenment, we can at least admit that no scholarship, no truth, exists in a social vacuum. Though it is rarely mentioned in the work itself, all scholarship is tied to a community of some kind and bears the marks of that community’s influence. Scholarship is the product of people who are located in institutions—universities, research institutes, or circles of like-minded thinkers. They publish their work and want to have it read by others. Their reputations, promotions, pay raises, and appointments depend on how that work is received. When they write, they use the language, the mannerisms, the forms of their scholarly community. In taking an intellectual position, they silently, but inevitably, associate themselves with people of a similar outlook. Scholars take pleasure in hearing references to their work at scholarly meetings or seeing it mentioned in publications. In the scholarly work itself, a conclusion is presented as the outcome of careful scrutiny and rigorous analysis of the facts; but the assumptions, the perspective, the fundamental attitude of the work come from some community, from a society with which the scholar is implicitly and probably quite hopefully associating.

Every form of scholarship is rooted in a society, an imagined community of scholars, in which the teachers or writers live and move and have their being. We cannot take a position on a scholarly issue without implicitly forming or breaking a social relationship. Everything we write and say links us to other people, with all the tangled consequences for our self-esteem, our personal identities, our hopes and aspirations. There is a social and personal dimension to every form of rational discourse, which means that all beliefs, not only religious beliefs, are both rational and irrational.

For example, we may be persuaded rationally that the Book of Mormon is a nineteenth-century production. There may be hundreds of facts we can invoke to sustain this position. But in making that assertion we are forming and breaking human relationships that unavoidably influence our thinking, just as the memories of a religious upbringing (or of a transforming conversion) coil around the work of Mormon apologists.  

I acknowledge my own subjectivity and the influence of a million personal associations. But this recognition of my own limitations makes me deeply skeptical of all who claim to escape their subjectivity, who think they have rid themselves of the prejudices of their tribe. We all have our tribes. The desire to form tribes, to join tribes, to triumph within our tribes, drives and shapes our scholarship. Every form of discourse, every rationality is rooted in a society and serves social purposes. Every truth is socially conditioned and socially motivated. All truth, religious and scientific, is of necessity social truth and is profoundly affected by human associations.

In what, then, can we put our trust? If truth always grows from a particular society, how do we choose among the perplexing confusions of multiple and confusing truths? If the Enlightenment quest has faltered, if the pursuit of knowledge seems mired in subjectivity, and if scholarship is entwined in the corrupting pursuit of power, what can we cling to? What can replace objective scientific truth as a foundation for culture and personal identity?

Where do we go, that is, when we are post-Enlightenment, postmodern, post-everything?

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 Richard Bushman - Wikipedia

If you have any interest in Mormon history, Richard Bushman should be one of your go-to sources, along with Fawn Brodie, author of No Man Knows My History, a biography of Joseph Smith.

Stuff, and Nonsense

At First Things, Mark Bauerlein writes about the current “sorry situation of Catholic schools” (spoiler: they aren’t Catholic enough). Bauerlein offers some tips for reform that could be applied even to non-papist Catholic educational institutions.

For instance, he advocates that “educators maintain a clear distinction between high culture and everything else. In arts and humanities classes, the masterpieces must dominate.” It would be fruitful, indeed, for educators to lead classroom discussions on such issues as the “distinction” between “high culture” and “low culture” (or “middlebrow culture”); who assigns these labels in the first place, and who decides what fits into which category? Similarly, “What makes a ‘masterpiece’?” is an excellent question to pose, as would be “What is a ‘masterpiece’?” Those are probably not questions Bauerlein wants to encourage, but I think students would find them of interest.

Another Bauerlein suggestion is: “In history classes, let no Whiggish or progressivist notions of time and change enter. They frame the past as inferior; [students should] rightly understand history as ever a mix of gains and losses.” Fair enough, and food for thought: does history ‘progress’? What does ‘progress’ even mean? What are the downsides to ‘progress,’ and what is lost as history moves on? Readings could include such authors as Robert Nisbet, Saint Augustine, Karl Marx, Lewis Mumford, et al. 

Bauerlein then offers this nonsensical caution: “Diversity” and “inclusion” are but soft names for identity politics, and sow resentment, not fellowship, poisoning children’s minds with tribal suspicions. Never use those terms.” Why not discuss “diversity” and “inclusion”? Why not talk about their conceptual utility or disutility, their practical applications, and put their use and misuse into historical context? 

Finally, Bauerlein believes educators should privilege the past; “The call of “relevance” should be resisted, as should the drift toward contemporary readings. It’s a presentist impulse that matches too closely the world’s norms. As a rule, the old is better than the new.” As a rule, that rule is wrong. An educator's job is not to prepare students to live in the past—which is, after all, a foreign country; they do things differently there--but to know enough about it to help understand the present and shape the future. 

On the other hand, if students are steered towards ancient wisdom rather than towards contemporary pabulum, at least they won’t have to read Mark Bauerlein.

 The Sorry Situation of Catholic Schools | Mark Bauerlein | First Things

Have some sympathy for Victor Davis Hanson, who, with his recurring "woke" nightmares, must have a hard time sleeping at night. In a primal screed at American Greatness (a publication devoted mainly to belittling America), Hanson can’t stop gnawing at the bone of “wokeness”; he wonders, for instance, “whether the woke progressives now in power in Washington dislike the habits and traditions of the United States even more than [our enemies] do.” He claims that “the new woke United States exudes both arrogance and weakness, a fatal combination for a major power.” He warns that “In the West in general, and in the United States in particular, we are seeing a final fruition of decades of woke self-loathing.”

Obviously obsessed and wide-awoke, Hanson just cannot stop. He is utterly relentless, a latter-day Ahab repeatedly harpooning the great white woke whale: “The sight of a pride flag flying on the Kabul embassy as the most lavishly supplied and funded military force in history scrambled to fly home, abandoning allies and employees, was a bitter metaphor of the arrogance, ignorance, and impotence of woke ideology.” And again: “The idea of meritocracy is disappearing, replaced by woke reparatory fixations on race, in the manner the ideologically correct Soviet commissariat destroyed Russian institutions or Mao’s cultural revolutionary insanity destroyed millions of Chinese.”

What phantoms haunt the dreams of Victor Davis Hanson? “The millions of opportunistic mediocrities emerging from the shadows to mouth wokester shibboleths about climate change, diversity, equity, and inclusion, identity politics, and transgenderism, while damning the customs, traditions, history, and values of a prior society that alone is responsible for their very affluence and leisure.” As I said, it must be hard for Hanson to get a good night’s sleep; perhaps he should try counting wokester shibboleths?

Losing what grip he ever had, Hanson reminds us that this ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around: “This cannibalistic woke revolution is no Wobbly mine takeover, no 1960s Woodstock, not even a Black Panther, Weatherman, or Symbionese Liberation Army violent spasm. Instead, wokeism is so institutionalized that, like the Soviet Party or the adherents of Mao’s little red book, joining the virtue-signaling wokesters is seen as a smart career move. Going woke is a bully’s paradise, an indemnity against a past ill-considered tweet or a future peccadillo. Indeed, it is quasi-religious groupthink proselytizing.” 

Caveat lector: this is what sleep deprivation can do. Plagued by self-conjured demons of "wokeness," Victor Davis Hanson--a man intelligent enough to have written numerous books, to have taught at accredited universities (and at Hillsdale College), to have been named a Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and to have been awarded the National Humanities Medal--has become just another vitriolic voice in the increasingly unhinged right-wing chorus.  

When it comes to sleep, a good pillow can make a world of difference. If only there was a trustworthy pillow salesman to whom Victor Davis Hanson could turn... 

The Cycles of Revolutions in Our Midst › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

Victor Davis Hanson - Wikipedia

Wide awake and worried about Wokesters under the bed

 

Friday Miscellany

Does the First Amendment allow you to shout “FIRE” on a crowded university campus?

The reason I ask is that the “Foundation for Individual Rights in Education” (FIRE) has released a summary of its own investigation into reported violations of “constitutionally protected free speech” by college professors. The summary (link below) is headed “REPORT: 3 in 4 campaigns targeting faculty expression result in punishment”; it then asserts that “74% of smear campaigns result in an investigation or another punishment,” thus concluding that such campaigns have “an alarming 74% success rate”.  

“Smear campaigns” is, of course, an entirely unfair and unwarranted categorization which leads one to suspect FIRE’s objectivity. That aside, note that while the heading refers to “punishment,” the data itself refers to “an investigation or another punishment”. Is it reasonable to classify an investigation as a “punishment”? Might some supposed investigations have been merely cursory or pro forma and not punitive in the least? Should allegations of “hate speech,” bias, or classroom misconduct not be investigated?

Moreover, does the “alarming success rate” indicate widespread violation of professors’ rights or, to the contrary, egregious violations by said professors of academic standards? The FIRE summary, at least, provides no detail to help us judge the question. It does, however, specify the percentage of professors dismissed for their alleged misconduct: “A quarter of such attacks result in scholars losing their job.” (“Attacks” is another pejorative characterization—why is a complaint necessarily an “attack”?)

We can conclude, then, as follows: of the speech-related complaints that FIRE examined, 26% went nowhere (no investigation or disciplinary action); 25% led to dismissal of the professor; and 49% were investigated with some lesser but unspecified consequence (e.g., a slap on the wrist, a reprimand in one’s faculty file, or a mandatory stint in a Black Lives Matter re-education camp). We might also note in passing that the report found that, while roughly 2/3 of complaints came from sources with views to the ideological Left of an accused academic, 1/3 came from sources to the accused’s ideological Right. Given the predominantly left-wing tilt on campus, these numbers make intuitive sense.

Regarding “free speech” on campus, I suggest we keep in mind Stanley Fish’s dictum, “There is no such thing as free speech, and it’s a good thing, too.” Speech limits (like limits on other conduct) are always being set, always being questioned, always being challenged, and always being reconsidered and/or revised. The boundaries of academic discourse are no more fixed than the boundaries of, say, network television, Hollywood films, or the use of social media by incumbent Presidents.

REPORT: 3 in 4 campaigns targeting faculty expression result in punishment (thefire.org)  via RealClearInvestigations.com    

Do not be misled by the title of Bruce Abramson’s “The Conservative Temperament Is Dooming America”; the article is a call to arms against “the stupidity, cruelty, and moral bankruptcy of radical leftist wokeism”. Abramson’s complaint about “the conservative temperament” is that it is not, by nature, sufficiently aggressive or militant; instead, it empowers “respectable, cautious, incrementalists like Mitch McConnell, John Roberts, and Kevin McCarthy—fine men blessed with none of the skills necessary to lead a counterrevolution.”  

Let us briefly pause to consider that characterization of those men. "Respectable" may be in the eye of the beholder, but "cautious" and "incrementalist" have actual meanings that do not seem consistent with the public records of the aforementioned individuals. In other words, WTF?

Moving on: a counterrevolution is precisely what our woke age calls for, says Abramson. “If the right wants to fight, it’s going to have to jettison its collective conservative temperament and embrace personalities capable of leading a restorationist movement.”

The term “restorationist” is well chosen (even if my spell-check program rejects it). Abramson and his comrades on the Right want their country back; they want the old order restored. They seem surprisingly inarticulate about the exact nature of that old order, but I can offer a hint: it rhymes with “right” and with “fight” and it feels comfortably at home on Tucker Carlson’s show every night.

The Conservative Temperament Is Dooming America | RealClearPolitics

Finally: I leave the interpretation of the following story to individual readers. At Massive Science, Briley Lewis states, matter-of-factly and without a trace of alarm, “Our Sun is middle-aged, with about five billion years left in its lifespan. However, it’s expected to go through some changes as it gets older, as we all do — and these changes will affect our planet. New research published in Nature Geoscience shows that Earth’s oxygen will only stick around for another billion years.”

Oh? Ought we to be concerned? Ms. Lewis does not editorialize; she simply explains the science. “One of the Sun’s age-related changes is getting brighter as it gets older. When a star runs out of hydrogen fuel in its core, the core has to get hotter in order to fuse the next element, helium. As the core gets hotter, the outer layers expand, and the star gets brighter. This extra energy hitting Earth will eventually cause our planet to warm up and slowly lose its oceans and its oxygen.” Lewis draws the obvious conclusion: “Planets like Earth only have oxygen for a fraction of their lifetimes. When we try to find habitable worlds, this will be important to keep in mind.”

That is American optimism and the American can-do spirit at its best! Go ahead and use up the planet; it’s going to run out of oxygen eventually anyway, and we can always find another habitable world somewhere…

Earth's oxygen is projected to run out in a billion years (massivesci.com)

Hegemony and Its Discontents

{This post will conclude, for now, my foray into the furor over Cultural Marxism; but, as Jordan Peterson is my witness, I will be back.}

Michael Walsh, in his Introduction to his book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, declares:

Few ideas have proven more pernicious than those of the so-called Frankfurt School and its reactionary philosophy of “critical theory.” At once overly intellectualized and emotionally juvenile, Critical Theory—like Pandora’s Box—released a horde of demons into the American psyche. When everything could be questioned, nothing could be real, and the muscular, confident empiricism that had just won the war gave way, in less than a generation, to a fashionable Central European nihilism that was celebrated on college campuses across the United States. Seizing the high ground of academe and the arts, the new nihilists set about dissolving the bedrock of the country, from patriotism to marriage to the family to military service. They have sown “destruction, division, hatred, and calumny”—and all disguised as a search for truth that will lead to human happiness here on earth. ¹

If Walsh is correct that “when everything could be questioned, nothing could be real,” then our plight can be traced back at least to Descartes and his methodology of “radical doubt,” or even further back to the ancient Greek skeptics. Mr. Walsh, of course, is skeptical himself regarding the motives of “the so-called Frankfurt School”; he claims they have disguised their evil intentions “as a search for truth”. He has thereby unmasked them and revealed their true agenda—precisely the sort of thing “Critical Theory” endeavors to do.

Another salvo against Cultural Marxism comes from Jefrey Breshear, who writes:

The Critical Theorists held a common commitment to Neo-Marxism and the belief that Western civilization in general, and Christianity in particular, have been sources of imperialism and repression force throughout history. In their view, Western civilization was built on aggression, oppression, racism, slavery, classism, and sexual repression. Decades later, this ideology influenced the founding of the many “critical studies” programs in universities such as African-American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Feminist Studies, Peace Studies, and LGBT Studies.

Students exposed to “critical studies” learn about “marginalization,” “exclusion,” “silencing,” “false consciousness,” and other aspects of what Antonio Gramsci called “cultural hegemony,” the basic contention of which is that the ruling class sets the limits of acceptable discourse.    

Breshear continues:

In retrospect, the Frankfurt School had a significant impact on the evolution of the American left over the past seventy-five years, particularly the kind of cultural Marxism that spawned the New Left movement in the 1960s. ² Since then, the left has launched an unremitting culture war of attrition that has largely succeeded in secularizing American culture and undermining traditional values and institutions, and much of its ideology, inspiration and tactics were gleaned from the Institute for Social Research.

The Left, of course, would deny that it has “launched a war”; proponents of “Critical Theory” see themselves as offering a kind of cultural self-defense and pushing back against the dominant cultural paradigm.

Finally, British philosopher Roger Scruton scolds Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School:

By constantly notching up the critique of American capitalism and its culture, and by making only muted or dismissive references to the real nightmare of communism, those thinkers showed their profound indifference to human suffering and the unserious nature of their prescriptions. Adorno does not explicitly say that the “alternative” to the capitalist system and the commodity culture is Utopia. But that is what he implies. And Utopia is not a real alternative. Hence his alternative to the unreal freedom of the consumer society is itself unreal—a mere noumenon whose only function is to provide a measure of our defects. And yet he was aware that there was an actual alternative on offer and that it involved mass murder and cultural annihilation. For Adorno to dismiss this alternative merely as the “totalitarian” version of the same “state capitalism” that he had witnessed in America was profoundly dishonest.

I grew up in the era under discussion, and I can assure Roger Scruton that there was no shortage of voices denouncing communism and its awful history. Scruton and other conservatives have long insisted that we in the West face a binary choice between consumer capitalism and Soviet-style communism; if we dare to criticize the one, we are told we are inviting, even enabling, the other. That rhetoric somehow retains its power; even today, a quarter-century after the demise of the Soviet Union, the specter of socialism continues to haunt the American mind. ³

The binary choice was, and is, an illusion; unfettered capitalism or totalitarian communism were not the only options then and they are not the only options now. Which is why “Critical Theory” can be such a useful tool in challenging us to find better ways of going forward—assuming, of course, that forward is the way “we” want to go.

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¹ Michael Walsh, if you have not noticed, tends towards the hyperbolic.

² I have no doubt that the “cultural Marxists” had some influence on the New Left of the Sixties, but I would not agree that they “spawned” it; to the extent they did, they had a lot of help. The New Left is often associated with Students for a Democratic Society; the group’s famous “Port Huron Statement” should be required reading for anyone who wants to opine on the New Left:

 http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDSPortHuron.html  

I suspect you will be amazed at how idealistic and how utterly not radical it seems.

³ “The Haunting of the American Mind” is an excellent title for a collection of meandering essays about American conservatives’ fear of “collectivism”. It might begin this way:

“A specter is haunting America--the specter of communism, aka collectivism, bolshevism, socialism, Cultural Marxism, and liberalism. The specter is large, it contains multitudes and it assumes many forms: from FDR’s New Deal to LBJ’s Great Society, from Medicare to Obamacare, from integrated lunch counters to besieged Christian florists, from welfare queens to super-predators, and from gun control to public health mandates about vaccines and masks. When American conservatives hear words like “collective” or “the common good,” they reach, often literally, for their guns.”

If that seems exaggerated to you, I direct you to a prime example of the frightening reality of contemporary American conservatism: https://americanmind.org/essays/red-november/ The author, a pseudonymous “Peachy Keenan,” clearly has aspirations to making a splash much like Michael Anton did in 2016 with his “Flight 93 Election”. I find “Red November,” which begins with “Don’t let the commies win,” terrifying.

The Urtext

Preface: Michael Minnicino’s seminal essay, “The New Dark Age,” first appeared in the Winter 1992 issue of Fidelio, from the Schiller Institute, a German-based organization founded by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the wife (now widow) of Lyndon LaRouche. The essay is widely considered the Urtext for opponents of “cultural Marxism”. *

In 2010, certain public events led Minnicino to address his former involvement in the LaRouche organization (cult?). In doing so, he disavowed, sort of, his essay on the Frankfurt School:

Actual free inquiry is impossible inside the LaRouche organization: too many possible conclusions or lines of research must be consciously or unconsciously dismissed because of LaRouche's prior "thoughts" on the matter. The same is true with my Frankfurt School work while I was in the organization. I still like to think that some of my research was validly conducted and useful. However, I see very clearly that the whole enterprise - and especially the conclusions -- was hopelessly deformed by self-censorship and the desire to in some way support Mr. LaRouche's crack-brained worldview. So, in that sense, I do not stand by what I wrote, and I find it unfortunate that it is still remembered.

With that mea culpa in mind, let us briefly consider Minnicino’s 1992 essay, “The New Dark Age”.

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“Who will save us from Western civilization?” (Georg Lukacs)

Everything you need to know about Michael Minnicino’s "expose" of Cultural Marxism you can glean from the following excerpts:

The Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a religious celebration of the human soul and mankind’s potential for growth. But the concept of the human soul has been undermined by the most vociferous intellectual campaign in history…

The cultural shift away from the Renaissance ideas that built the modern world began as a formal political conspiracy ¹ to popularize theories that were specifically designed to weaken the soul of Judeo-Christian civilization in such a way as to make people believe that creativity was not possible, that adherence to universal truth was evidence of authoritarianism, and that reason itself was suspect. This conspiracy was decisive in planning and developing, as means of social manipulation, the vast new sister industries of radio, television, film, recorded music, advertising, and public opinion polling. The pervasive psychological hold of the media was purposely fostered to create the passivity and pessimism which afflicts our population today.

So successful was this conspiracy, that it has become embedded in our culture; it no longer needs to be a “conspiracy,” for it has taken on a life of its own. Its successes are not debatable—you need only turn on the radio or television.

Our universities, the cradle of our technological and intellectual future, have become overwhelmed by Comintern-style New Age “Political Correctness”. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, our campuses now represent the largest concentration of Marxist dogma in the world. The irrational adolescent outbursts of the 1960’s have become institutionalized into a “permanent revolution”. Our professors glance over their shoulders, hoping the current mode will blow over before a student’s denunciation obliterates a life’s work; some tape their lectures, fearing accusations of “insensitivity” by some enraged Red Guard. Students at the University of Virginia recently petitioned successfully to drop the requirement to read Homer, Chaucer, and other DEMS (“Dead European Males”) because such writings are considered ethnocentric, phallocentric, and generally inferior to the more “relevant” Third World, female, or homosexual authors.

In Minnicino's telling, the Cultural Marxism conspiracy originated in Frankfurt in the 1920s at the Institute for Social Research (ISR), the brainchild of Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs. The ISR was intended to fill an analytical gap created by Marx’s materialism, which held that the life of the mind and of the human spirit—ideas and creativity—were merely byproducts of economic forces and therefore irrelevant to the Marxist program. Marxists like Lukacs wanted to apply a Marxist critique directly to culture; Lukacs spoke openly of the need to harness “diabolic” and “demonic” energies to create the kind of religious zeal that characterized early Christianity.

Michael Minnicino reduced all this to a caricature:

The task of the Frankfurt School was first, to undermine the Judeo-Christian legacy through an “abolition of culture”; and, second, to determine new cultural forms which would increase the alienation of the population, thus creating a “new barbarism”.

The Frankfurt School brought together, Minnicino alleged, a diabolical mix of “Communists, non-party socialists, radical phenomenologists, Zionists, renegade Freudians, and at least a few members of a self-identified ‘cult of Astarte’.” Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the group quickly ran afoul of Stalin, who terminated Soviet support for the ISR in the late 1920s and forced Lukacs to confess his deviationist sins. ³

With Lukacs back in the Stalinist fold, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse emerged as the prominent figures of the Frankfurt School; they each fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and emigrated to America, where they continued their work. The philosophers Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin are also associated with the Frankfurt School, though their actual involvement was peripheral at best. ⁴ 

Marcuse, who worked for the US government in the 1950s as a “Soviet analyst,” gained his fifteen minutes of fame in the 1960s when he became a guru to America’s “New Left,” largely on the basis of his book Eros and Civilization. Adorno and Benjamin, on the other hand, were pivotal, or so Minnicino claimed, in “the shaping of the electronic media of radio and television into the powerful instruments of social control they are today.”

In “The New Dark Age,” Minnicino contended that Benjamin and Adorno sought to challenge the objective validity of all aesthetic, epistemological, and moral judgments; they conspired to separate the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, the better to deconstruct and “desacralize” them all. They observed that, while the miracles of modern media could make great art, literature, and music available to millions, the processes of mass reproduction and mass distribution would inevitably trivialize the resulting cultural “product,” making it just another commodity: consumers could choose from postcards bearing photos of the Mona Lisa or of Mickey Mouse, both for the same price.

All that, of course, is simply what capitalism does; it needed no help from a conspiracy of German emigres. Understanding the pernicious potential of mass media, however, enabled the cultural Marxists to use it to “demoralize” and further alienate the masses and to “disengage” the popular mind. Minnicino quoted Theodor Adorno (writing in 1938) on the effects of mass media on the general populace:

“Subjects develop certain capacities which accord less with the traditional concepts of aesthetics than with those of football or motoring. They are not childlike, but they are childish; their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped but that of the forcibly retarded.”

In other words: mass media makes idiots of us all, which makes it the ideal weapon for undermining Western civilization.

Contrary to Minnicino, however, Adorno and his colleagues did not promote commercial mass media; they denounced it and its debilitating effects, and they sought to unmask the corporate interests and political agendas behind it. While much of the Sixties’ counterculture was succumbing to the lure of “tune in, turn on, and drop out,” Adorno and Marcuse were working to keep young people politically engaged rather than distracted, misinformed, tranquilized, and alienated by corporate media.

With “The New Dark Age,” its inaccuracies notwithstanding, Michael Minnicino was said to have identified the forces stalking the academy: for cultural conservatives, “Frankfurt School” and “cultural Marxism” were henceforth to blame for America’s fin de siecle turbulence.

Minnicino’s eventual retraction attracted, as is customary, almost no attention at all.

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/7/26/161347/099

https://archive.org/details/TheNewDarkAgeTheFrankfurtSchoolAndPoliticalCorrectness/page/n7/mode/1up

*Journalist Andrew Woods traced the history of Lyndon LaRouche’s obsession with the Frankfurt School in a 2019 article for Commune: https://communemag.com/the-american-roots-of-a-right-wing-conspiracy/ Among other observations, he notes that the phrase “cultural Marxism” is a gloss on the Nazis’ fevered denunciations of “cultural Bolshevism”.

¹ There was, of course, no “formal political conspiracy”; preaching as he was to a paranoid choir, Minnicino chose his words accordingly.

² Since Minnicino later disowned his essay, I will not engage in extended rebuttal of his claims; suffice it here to say that his portrait of American campus life is beyond risible.

³ Stalin’s attitude toward culture resembled that of the character in a play by Nazi author Hanns Johst: “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.” (The actual quote is “When I hear the word culture, I release the safety on my Browning.” I prefer the misquote.)

⁴ Benjamin committed suicide in 1940 in a small town on the French-Spanish border while fleeing from the Nazis; his work received little if any attention until the late 1960s, when Hannah Arendt brought it to public attention. As for Gramsci, he spent the last decade of his life in Italian prisons, where he died in 1937 from mistreatment and deliberate medical neglect. His contribution to "cultural Marxism" was immense, and I will discuss it at length in a later blog.

"Nihilism without the Abyss"

{I continue to ponder the rise of Postmodern Cultural Marxism and its trusty sidekick, Political Correctness. In today’s episode, Allan Bloom, in the tradition of William F. Buckley Jr., makes a name for himself by biting the hand that feeds him.}

"We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part." (Allan Bloom)

"What a waste it is to lose one's mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful, how true that is." (Senator Dan Quayle, 1989)

In 1987, Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind and became the most famous academic since Timothy Leary. Bloom’s book addressed what he called “the decomposition of the university,” as novelist Saul Bellow explained in his Foreword:

The heart of Professor Bloom’s argument is that the university, in a society ruled by public opinion, was to have been an island of intellectual freedom where all views were investigated without restriction. By consenting to play an active, ‘positive,’ or participatory role in society, the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society’s ‘problems.’ Preoccupied with questions of Health, Sex, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes, and the university has become society’s conceptual warehouse of often harmful influences.

Bloom himself put the matter this way: “A liberal education is one that helps students to ask themselves and answer the question, “what is man?”  In our chronic lack of certainty, this comes down to knowing the alternative answers [to that question] and thinking about them. For modern nations,” Bloom continued, “which have founded themselves on reason in its various uses more than did any nations in the past, a crisis in the university, the home of reason, is perhaps the profoundest crisis they face.”

For Bloom, the crisis was best expressed by the approach of “deconstructionist” professors of literature “who say that there is both no text and no reality to which the texts refer.” ¹ Bloom also criticized contemporary “relativism,” even while acknowledging its link to tolerance and open-mindedness: “Almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.”

For Bloom, the point of students’ keeping their minds open was to allow professors to fill those minds with Truth and Wisdom. Echoing William F. Buckley, Bloom suggested that academic neutrality was impossible:

“Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection; but even the neutral subjects, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person. Democratic education wants and needs to produce men and women [who are] supportive of a democratic regime.” 

Acknowledging that the history of American racism—slavery and Jim Crow—made it necessary to address and to correct “ethnocentrism,” Bloom believed that multiculturalism and diversity had become overemphasized, at the expense of traditional academic concerns and standards. Not everything was about race, he argued, or about gender. The problem went beyond the university; the entire society was kowtowing to such demands, “Much of the intellectual machinery of twentieth-century American political thought and social science was constructed for the purpose of making an assault on [the] majority. The very idea of a majority is done away with in order to protect the minorities.”

Bloom was exposing what he saw as the triumph of the “protected” class: all those victimized snowflakes clamoring for affirmative action, the shelter of “hate crime” legislation, and the provision of campus speech codes and “safe spaces”. These developments were consistent with the “values relativism” previously mentioned, a relativism which Bloom insisted led inevitably to nihilism.

Bloom located the source of these philosophical evils in the writings of a host of modern German philosophers: Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, Freud, Heidegger, Eric Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. In fact, wrote Bloom, “Our intellectual skyline has been altered by German thinkers even more radically than has our physical skyline by German architects.” ²

Even if American nihilism was, to quote Holden Caulfield, “phony,” Bloom found it troubling:

Although nihilism and its accompanying existential despair are hardly anything but a pose for Americans, they pursue happiness in ways determined by that language [caring, self-fulfillment, expanding consciousness, and so on]: a search for an inwardness that one knows one has, but which seems to have no relation to the outer world. No wonder the mere sound of the Existentialists’ Nothing or the Hegelians’ Negation has an appeal to contemporary ears. American nihilism is a mood, it is nihilism without the abyss.

“Cultural Marxism,” which for Bloom was a misnomer, was but the latest iteration of nihilism: “The later Marxists in Germany,” he explained, “were haunted by the idea of culture, repelled by the vulgarity of the bourgeoise. In general, sophisticated Marxism [turned into] cultural criticism of life in the Western democracies. But none of it came from Marx or a Marxist perspective; there is not a single element of Marx in any of it. It was, and is, Nietzschean, variations on our way of life as that of ‘the last man.”

Whatever its origins, the academic plague had arrived and was devastating the American university:

As in the Middle Ages, the major student activity in social science is now to identify heretics. It has become almost impossible to question the radical orthodoxy without risking vilification, classroom disruption, loss of the confidence and respect necessary for teaching, and the hostility of colleagues. Racist and sexist are very ugly labels—the equivalents of atheist or communist in other days with other prevailing prejudices—which can be pinned on persons promiscuously and which, once attached, are almost impossible to cast off. Nothing can be said with impunity. Such an atmosphere makes detached, dispassionate study impossible.

Somehow, despite the intimidating atmosphere, Bloom was able to write The Closing of the American Mind. Along with E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, Bloom’s book was hailed as a defense of classic liberal education against obnoxious students chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!”  More than that, it was a wide-ranging philosophical polemic against Western modernity and its Nietzschean premises; it was also a best-seller that turned Bloom into a celebrity and a conservative icon. Neither Bloom nor his book were universally applauded, however; one reviewer compared Bloom to Oliver North (“vengeful, reactionary, antidemocratic”) and said that The Closing of the American Mind was a book that “any decent person would be ashamed of having written”. Noam Chomsky called Bloom’s arguments “mind-bogglingly stupid,” while Camille Paglia credited Bloom with having fired “the first shot in America’s culture wars”.

One thing is certain: The Closing of the American Mind got people’s attention.

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https://theclosingoftheamericanmind.com/#TheGermanConnection

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom

¹ Bloom was likely alluding to Stanley Fish’s Is There a Text in this Class?

² Interestingly, Bloom’s academic mentor was the German-born philosopher Leo Strauss.

Freedom's Just Another Word

{I have decided to take a deeper dive into the origins of the “cultural Marxism”/ “political correctness” brouhaha. How deep I can go, and how long I can remain beneath the murky waters of academia, remains to be seen.}

Last week on “The Attack of the Postmodern Cultural Marxists,” the intrepid trio of James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose was fighting the good fight against Critical Theory and Political Correctness. In today’s episode, we flash back to an earlier, more innocent time, a time when America was still Great; but Red Forces were already at work undermining that Greatness and poisoning the minds of America's Impressionable Youth. Before the Postmodern Cultural Marxists, and paving the way for their invasion, there were the Secular Liberal Academics, armed with their specious “academic freedom”. One brave man stood against them; here is his story.

In 1951, mirabile dictu, a new star was sighted in the sky of American conservatism: William F. Buckley, Jr. published, at the tender age of twenty-five, his first book, God and Man at Yale. In addition to heralding its author’s bright future, the book deconstructed what he saw as the shibboleth of “academic freedom”. Buckley’s assault on the citadels of liberal academia had little immediate effect (other than launching his career), but his arguments are worth revisiting.  

Buckley’s book featured an Introduction from veteran journalist (and convert to conservatism) John Chamberlain, who, like Buckley, described universities as business enterprises beholden to their stockholders and their customers. ¹ Chamberlain posed succinctly the question Buckley would address:

Should the right to pursue the truth be construed as a right to inculcate values that deny the value-judgments of the customer who is paying the bills of education? Must the customer, in the name of Academic Freedom, be compelled to take a product which he may consider defective?

The “customer” here is the student, or, alternatively, the bill-paying parents of the student.   Should not he who pays the piper get to call the tune? Is not the “customer” always right? Why allow professors to bombard students with views the students do not want to hear and that the parents of said students do not want them to hear? Moreover, Buckley argued, the trustees of a university have the right and the duty to make sure the product being offered in the classroom conforms to standards and values they have set; “In the last analysis,” he wrote, “academic freedom must mean the freedom of men and women to supervise the educational activities and aims of the schools they oversee and support.”

If, Buckley insisted, the trustees and alumni of Yale were overwhelmingly God-fearing Christians who believed in the free market and in American-style individualism, and if the same was true of the parents who sent their children to Yale for instruction, should not the school’s teaching reflect and promote those values? According to Buckley—who used, by his own admission, somewhat informal research techniques—Yale was awash with professors teaching agnosticism, socialism (that is, Keynesian economics), and collectivism, the very opposite of what All Good Yale Men believed. In moderately high dudgeon, Buckley proclaimed himself shocked by the “extraordinarily irresponsible educational attitude that, under the protective label of “academic freedom,” has produced one of the most extraordinary incongruities of our time: an institution that derives its moral and financial support from Christian individualists and then addresses itself to the task of persuading the sons of these supporters to be atheistic socialists.” The nerve of such people!

Buckley did not expect, and was not advocating, either “academic freedom” (as commonly understood) or “scholarly objectivity”; both concepts, he thought, were as fanciful as unicorns. He believed that a university’s job was to promote certain values and certain ideologies and to do so unapologetically. Teaching being an activity done by humans, academic impartiality was a myth: “It has never been practiced, and, in fact, can never and ought never to be practiced.” The university and its hired help (professors) should endorse certain values and ideas and should dismiss and even condemn others.

Ironically, Buckley’s rejection of the university’s claim to “value-neutrality” foreshadowed claims that would be made decades later by left-wing “critical theorists” who posited that impartiality is only a façade which always conceals some agenda, and that an important function of education is to teach students to strip away the façade and reveal the agenda behind it. In the same way, Buckley and his conservative colleagues paved the way for claims of “hidden liberal bias” in the media, thereby anticipating postmodern suspicions of “hegemonic narratives”.

In God and Man, Buckley privileged students’ perceptions of left-wing bias over faculty or institutional protestations of neutrality. Like today’s students denouncing a professor for allegedly “racist,” “sexist,” or “homophobic” comments or attitudes, Buckley found the demons of collectivism and atheism lurking in every lecture and in every text. ² As a Christian conservative, he felt marginalized and ignored in the Yale milieu; like other marginalized individuals (or members of marginalized groups), he was keenly aware of, and sensitive to, the significance of what perspectives are not offered or encouraged, either in texts, in lectures, or in class discussion. He bemoaned, for example, the failure of Yale’s economic courses to balance the theories of Keynes and Marx with those of Hayek, von Mises, and Frank Knight; if, like Buckley, you supported the Chicago school of economics, you were, or you felt like, a pariah. ³

Buckley asked the reader to consider a hypothetical situation: a well-qualified professor of economics cannot get hired at a university because he espouses, and intends to teach, the virtues of socialism. Buckley saw nothing inappropriate about this; school authorities, he said, have every right to proscribe views with which they disagree. After all, no professor could get hired by any respectable university to advocate for Nazism, white supremacy, or anti-Semitism; lines had to be drawn regarding acceptable discourse. Universities are employers who can hire and fire whom they please and who can, like any employer, dictate terms of employment—such as the content of an academic class—as they see fit. If the socialist (or racist, or anti-Semitic) professor cannot find work, then he can either change his tune or his profession.

Buckley’s view, in 1951, foreshadowed by several decades the claims of postmodernists like Stanley Fish: There’s no such thing as academic freedom, Buckley insisted, and it’s a good thing, too.⁴  Such was the conservative argument: impartiality was a myth and liberal bias was everywhere—if you were astute enough to see it. Liberal professors smuggled their views into ostensibly “objective” presentations; the selection of course materials alone sent messages about “politically correct” opinions. Conservatives wanted to change that, not by eliminating academic bias but by making such biases more explicit and more favorable to conservative views; they wanted schools to teach and straightforwardly espouse traditional Christian values, free market economics, Eurocentric male literature, and a version of history centered on “American Exceptionalism”.

As I said at the outset, Buckley's book did not succeed in its aim; academia persisted in its comfortable liberalism. Decades later, however, other critics, and not only conservatives, spoke out against stultifying academic orthodoxies and against what they saw as an alarming  trend towards "political correctness".  We shall consider those critics next.

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¹ In his Introduction, Chamberlain observed that he and Buckley might be, as we say, on the wrong side of history, but, he added, “There is no compulsion on the decent human being to be “with history” when history is driving headlong toward an abyss.”

² Buckley also provided unverified quotations attributed to professors, quotations intended to confirm their supposed biases. In the 1990s, critics of “political correctness” claimed that students were surreptitiously recording classroom lectures and discussions so that they could denounce instructors who uttered “incorrect” words or phrases. Once again, Buckley got there first, though without the latest technology.

³ He also questioned the failure of a professor teaching a class on “Historical and Literary Interpretations of the Old Testament” to provide a “Christian” perspective. I assume Buckley eventually learned that the “Old Testament” is the sacred scriptures of Judaism, so that a primarily Christian perspective on them would be, well, odd.

⁴ My allusion here is to Stanley Fish’s classic, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too.

Baby, Don't Fear the Postmodernists

{More of my haphazard thoughts about postmodern Social Justice/Identitarian politics; I’ll get back to Russian history shortly.}

According to its critics, the postmodern Social Justice movement fosters a divisive “identitarian” politics; moreover, it has taken on some of the more unwelcome characteristics and practices of religion (sacred texts, dogmas and creeds, orthodoxy and heresy, intolerance, excommunication and anathema, etc.). Those are not the SJW movement’s only faults, but they are prominent among them.

Let us start, then, with “identity”. A young Alasdair MacIntyre (twenty-three at the time!) wrote the following back in 1953:

Every individual finds himself with a given social identity, a role or set of roles which define his phase within a set of social relationships, and these in turn constitute the immediate horizon of his life. Kinship, occupation, social class, each provide a set of descriptions from which individuals derive their identity as members of a society.

“Social identity” is hardly a new concept. MacIntyre chose not to multiply “identity markers” endlessly, but he clearly could have identified such markers as education, income/wealth, religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc. My point being that the understanding of “identity” as both a social construction and an available existential project—meaning, it is something parts of which are given and parts of which are acquired, parts of which are fixed and parts of which we can endeavor to change and to shape—existed well before the phrase “identity politics” came along.

So, for that matter, did “identity politics” itself exist before the label was coined; it just wasn’t called that. What was “Jim Crow” but a century of white identity politics? What was the suffragette movement if not a reaction to male identity politics? What were laws criminalizing same-sex sexual activity if not expressions of heterosexual identity politics? What were Sunday “blue laws” or Prohibition if not the result of Christian identity politics?

When dominant social groups impose their will on the rest of society, they do not call it “identity politics”; they call it “politics” so as to disguise their hegemony.¹  It is only when previously unrepresented or under-represented groups assert themselves that “identity politics” is invoked, always pejoratively; and it is only when members of such groups insist on the right to decide for themselves the nature and value of their “identity markers” that they are perceived, correctly, as a threat. After all, no status quo can abide large numbers of people (especially people traditionally marginalized) claiming to be independent of established social distinctions and identities: the result would be chaos. Without uniforms, that is, how would we know whom to salute?

The precocious young Master MacIntyre also noted that secular causes often resemble religions:   

For the most part lacking a religious perspective, the members of modern industrial societies have also mostly lacked any alternative framework of beliefs which would enable them to criticize and transform society…We can understand in general the attractions of the project of elaborating a secular doctrine of man and society that would have the scope and functions of religion, but would at the same time be rational in the sense that it would be open to amendment by critical reflection at every point, and that would enable men to self-consciously and purposefully achieve such transformations of social life as they wished to see. Such a doctrine becomes an urgent necessity when traditional religion ceases to provide an effective vision of the world for groups at once numerous and influential, and when their position in social life is such as to deprive them—really or apparently—of any stake in the social order.

Individuals or groups deprived of “any stake in the social order” seem, unsurprisingly, to be at the heart of “Grievance Studies”. As such, they can be (and sometimes are) rude, pushy, obnoxious, extreme, intolerant, unreasonable, infuriating, and overbearing: in other words, they can at times display the same traits which dominant individuals and groups have used to get ahead. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but that does not guarantee it will always be appreciated.

On balance, the furor over the “postmodern paradigm” strikes me as a tempest in the academic teapot, and alarms about the “death of liberalism,” “cancel culture,” and “political correctness” strike me as overblown. That does not imply that the Social Justice crowd is beyond criticism; their claims, like everyone else’s, should be subjected to a rigorous hermeneutic of suspicion ² and a healthy dose of their own medicine.

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The Alasdair MacIntyre quotes are from his book Marxism and Christianity.

¹ In my last post I used “woke,” and now I’ve used “hegemony”; see how easy it is to play the postmodern-jargon game?

² Not only did I find a way to use “hermeneutic of suspicion,” I played it on a space marked “triple word score”! Also, what if a bunch of “critical theory” scholars formed a band and called it either “Herman’s Hermeneutics” or “Herman and the Hermeneutics”?