This morning I happened to re-read the chapter "Metaphysical Theology and the Life of Faith" in Robert C. Coburn's, The Strangeness of the Ordinary (Rowman and Littlefield, 1990). I first read it in May of 1997. I was so impressed with it this second time around that I resolved to send Professor Coburn a note of appreciation. But I logged on only to find his obituary. I reproduce it below the fold to save it from the folly and poor judgment of librarians and webmasters. Too late by five months!
Permalinks ought to be permanent, or at least approximate unto the sublunary 'permanence' of that which, under the aspect of eternity, is impermanent.
And it testifies to the poor judgment of librarians that my copy of Coburn's book is a library discard. I was going to tell Coburn that story and praise him for his flawless prose that displays the erudition of a technical philosopher wedded to the deep humanity of a serious truth seeker. As academic philosophy succumbs to leftist infestation, and the humanities dissolve into politically correct nonsense, people of Coburn's depth and breadth of learning are unlikely to be replaced.
Note to Vito C.: you will profit from reading the chapter in question. See if you can find the book in a library. You can access a copy of the chapter's article precursor online, but the fee is ridiculous. If you want, I will send you a photocopy, gratis, if you send me by e-mail your preferred mailing address.
In September 2016, one of the living giants of Christian scholarship, the Oxford emeritus philosopher Richard Swinburne, gave an address to the Midwest Society of Christian Philosophers, in the US. He spoke about Christian sexual ethics. In an aside — meaning this wasn’t the main topic of his talk — he affirmed the orthodox Christian view that homosexuality is morally wrong. For this, he was denounced by some Christian philosophers in the audience, and the head of the group quickly apologized for the keynote speaker, Swinburne, affirming Christian orthodoxy in an address to Christian philosophers. I wrote about it here.
It is scandalous that a leading Christian philosopher cannot state an orthodox Christian position — something that all Christians affirmed until the day before yesterday — at a gathering of Christian philosophers.
Here is something equally scandalous, but far more dangerous. John Finnis is equally a giant in the world of Christian scholarship. He is a philosopher of law who specializes in natural law theory. Though he’s now based at Notre Dame, he is an emeritus professor at Oxford. Among his past students: Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch, and Princeton constitutional law professor Robert George.
Finnis is now the object of a petition at Oxford asking that he be removed from teaching postgraduate students because of his views on homosexuality.
Everyone is buzzing today about the revelation of the three academics—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—who placed over a dozen complete hoax articles with various premier “cultural studies” or “identity studies” academic journals. All three professors, it should be noted, consider themselves left of center, as does Alan Sokal, the New York University physicist who placed a hoax article about the supposed subjectivity of physics in the postmodernist journal Social Text 20 years ago.
There are termites everywhere, undermining the foundations of sanity, reason, and moral decency. There is Bergolio and his bunch in the Roman church; the lamestream media is infested with the little buggers; the academic world is lousy with leftists; the deep state is corrupt to the core; Big Tech is inimical to free speech; the Democrat Party is the party of slander and senselessness, and Hillary is on the loose. It's a stinking lousy mess all around.
When I was a young man knockin' around in the years between college and graduate school I worked at various jobs. For a time I was an exterminator for Pan American Pest Control out of Santa Monica, California. The boss wanted to set me up in the business but I had my sights set higher. I fancied philosopher a higher calling than bug killer.
It occurs to me now that I am still working in pest control and fumigation. But on the ideal, as opposed to the real, plane. I am out to exterminate willful stupidity, groupthink, the misuse of language, political correctness . . . .
100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School is now at reason #98. Despite its unrelenting negativity, prospective applicants to graduate programs will find the site useful. I cannot criticize it for being negative since that is its implied purpose: to compile 100 reasons not to go. But there is something whiny and wimpy about it.
Suppose you are paid to spend five years, from age 22 to age 27, studying in depth a subject you love and have an aptitude for in the idyllic environs of a college campus. You have been give tuition remission and a stipend on which to live. You really enjoy reading, writing, thinking, and studying more than anything else. You have good sense and avoid the folly of assuming debt in the form of student loans. You live within your very modest means and have the character to resist the siren songs of a society bent on crazy consumption. You understand that a little monkishness never hurt anyone, and might even do your soul some good.
You spend five years enjoying all the perquisites of academic life: a beautiful environment, stimulating people, library privileges, an office, a flexible work schedule, and the like. At age 27 you are granted the Ph.D. But there are few jobs, and you knew that all along. You make a serious attempt at securing a position in your field but fail. So you go on to something else either with or without some further training.
Have you wasted your time? Not by my lights. Hell, you've been paid to do what you love doing! What's to piss and moan about? You have been granted a glorious extension of your relatively carefree collegiate years. Five more years of being a student, sans souci, in some exciting place like Boston. Five more years of contact with age- and class-appropriate members of the opposite sex and thus five more years of opportunity to find a suitable mate. (But if you marry and have kids while a grad student, then you are a fool. Generally speaking, of course.)
Of course, if your goal in life is to pile up as much loot as possible in the shortest possible time, then stay away from (most) graduate programs. But if the life of the mind is your thing, go for it! What's to kvetch about? Are you washed up at 27 or 28 because you couldn't land a tenure-track position? You have until about age 40 to make it in America.
In the interests of full disclosure, however, I should say that I was one of the lucky ones. I spent five years in graduate school and received my Ph.D. at age 28. In the same year I accepted a tenure-track appointment and six years later I had tenure at age 34.
For more on this and cognate topics, see my Academia category.
Well, the Society of Christian Philosophers had a good run, celebrating its 40th anniversary at a vegan-catered conference this past weekend. Like the American Philosophical Association, the SCP is a shell of its former self, having been soul-sucked by political activists on the left. Compare Alvin Plantinga’s vision of nearly 40 years ago, as detailed in his “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” to the SCP’s vision today as summarized by one of the conference organizers:
The future is about teaching philosophy better, engaging in community outreach, rethinking “the cannon”, willing to think about mental illness, seeking to be compassionate and caring, promoting diversity and inclusion, and working to be less white. And it includes children.
This vision, relayed in typical Orwellian code, could just as well be that of any other progressive, secular organization’s. Hence, the Society of Christian Philosophers can no longer be said to exist as a distinctively Christian or philosophical organization. Its acronym should henceforth be understood to stand for the Society of “Christian” Progressives. I’m sure Uncle Al and Sr. Swinburne are proud of this bold, counter-cultural direction.
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BV comments: rethinking "the cannon"? I'd like to take a cannon to the numbskull who wrote the above statement. The word, of course, is 'canon.'
This is a repost from 1 April 2014. I was reminded of it by a missive from Spencer Case who rightly complains about a more recent bit of related academentia. But if I link to it, you won't read what I have to say below. I will talk about the latest outrage perhaps tomorrow.
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This is not an April Fool's joke.
Blind review is a standard practice employed by editors of professional journals and organizers of academic conferences. The editor/organizer removes the name of the author from the manuscript before sending it to the referee or referees for evaluation. My present concern is not whether this is a good practice, although I believe it is. I am concerned with the phrase that describes it and whether or not this phrase can be reasonably found offensive by anyone. There are those who think that the phrase is offensive and ought to be banned. Shelley Tremain writes,
For the last few years, I have tried to get the APA [American Philosophical Association] to remove the phrase “blind review” from its publications and website. The phrase is demeaning to disabled people because it associates blindness with lack of knowledge and implies that blind people cannot be knowers. Because the phrase is standardly used in philosophy and other academic CFPs [Calls for Papers], it should become recognized as a cause for great concern. In short, use of the phrase amounts to the circulation of language that discriminates. Philosophers should want to avoid inflicting harm in this way.
Let's consider these claims seriatim.
1. "The phrase is demeaning to disabled people . . . " Well, I am a disabled person and the phrase is not demeaning to me. As a result of a birth defect I hear in only one ear. And of course there are innumerable people who are disabled in different ways who will not find the phrase demeaning.
2. " . . . because it associates blindness with lack of knowledge and implies that blind people cannot be knowers." This is not just false but silly. No one thinks that blind people cannot be knowers or that knowers cannot be blind. Or at least no sane person thinks that.
Besides, it makes no sense to say that a phrase associates anything with anything. A foolish person who is precisely not thinking, but associating, might associate blindness with ignorance, but so what? People associate the damndest things.
To point out the obvious: if the name has been removed from the manuscript, then the referee literally cannot see it. This is not to say that the referee is blind, or blind with respect to the author's name: he could see it if it were there to see. 'Blind review' means that the reviewer is kept in the dark as to the identity of the author. That's all!
3. ". . . it should become recognized as a cause for great concern." Great concern? This is a wild exaggeration even if this issue is of some minor concern. I say, however, that it is of no concern. No one is demeaned or slighted or insulted or mocked or ridiculed by the use of the phrase in question.
4. ". . . use of the phrase amounts to the circulation of language that discriminates." One could argue that the practice of blind review discriminates against those who have made a name for themselves. But that is the only discrimination in the vicinity. I said at the top that this post is no joke. What is risible, however, is that anyone would find 'blind review' to be discriminatory against blind people.
5. "Philosophers should want to avoid inflicting harm in this way." This presupposes that the use of the phrase 'blind review' inflicts harm. This is just silly. It would be like arguing that the use of 'black hole' inflicts harm on black people because its use associates blacks with holes or with hos (whores).
In the early-to-mid '80s I attended an APA session organized by a group that called itself PANDORA: Philosophers Against the Nuclear Destruction of Rational Animals. One of the weighty topics that came up at this particular meeting was the very name 'Pandora.' Some argued that the name is sexist on the ground that it might remind someone of Pandora's Box, which of course has nothing to do with the characteristic female orifice, but in so reminding them might be taken as a slighting of that orifice. ('Box' is crude slang for the orifice in question.) I pointed out in the meeting that the name is just an acronym, and has nothing to do either with Pandora's Box or the characteristic female orifice. My comment made no impression on the politically correct there assembled. Later the outfit renamed itself Concerned Philosophers for Peace ". . . because of sexist and exclusionary aspects of the acronym." (See here)
The universities have become seminaries of leftism. 'Seminary' is from semen, seed. The universities have become seed beds in which the seeds of America's destruction are planted in skulls full of mush. Time to shut them down says philosophy professor Jason D. Hill. You decide whether he has gone too far or is basically on track.
When the term "Western civilization" is equated with racism, cultural superiority and pervasive oppression, and students in my political philosophy class refuse to study the works of John Stuart Mill or John Locke (or any other white thinker) because they consider them white supremacists, there is no lower level of educational hell.
[. . .]
Cultural Marxism, defined as anti-capitalist cultural critique, is the educational trope that mediates all forms of learning in today's universities - and it is simply a guise under which to politically indoctrinate students into becoming socialists who will do anything to prohibit freedom of speech on college campuses. We are witnessing a generation that will not tolerate other perspectives, students who will not hear opposing ideologies.
Socialism advocates vesting ownership and control of the means of production, capital and land in the community as a whole. Socialism is not a morally neutral system. Any system of governance presupposes an answer to the questions: Are you a sovereign entity who owns your life, work and mind? Is your mind something that can be nationalized and its material contents distributed by the state? Socialists think the answer is yes. They believe the products of one's efforts belong to the community; that the state and society have a moral and financial responsibility to care for other people's children; and that the most successful and productive people should be the most penalized.
[. . .]
You who fund our universities do so with trust that intellectuals will act in your interest and reflect your pro-American values. You are wrong. Your hard work has been financing people who think they are better than your crass materialism, who think that you (but not they) are complicit in an evil system (capitalism).
Withdraw your support and leave them to fund themselves. Let them pit their wares on the free market, where they will be left homeless. The world you desired no longer exists in our universities. It lies elsewhere, in a philosophic system waiting to be discovered or created.
Jason D. Hill is honors distinguished professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. His areas of specialization include ethics, social and political philosophy, American foreign policy, cosmopolitanism and race theory. He is the author of several books, including "We Have Overcome: An Immigrant's Letter to the American People" (Bombardier Books/Post Hill Press). Follow him on Twitter @JasonDhill6.
This press release rendered the letter signatories, who include several law school and Yale College professors, “ashamed” of their alma mater. “Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination presents an emergency—for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country,” the letter stated. The use of “safety” rhetoric signals that we are in prime identity-politics territory. Students across the country regularly claim that they are unsafe at college campuses—threatened by reading Milton, threatened by politically unorthodox views. “Without a doubt,” the letter continues, “Judge Kavanaugh is a threat to the most vulnerable. He is a threat to many of us, despite the privilege bestowed by our education, simply because of who we are.” This fear, the authors clarify, is not hyperbole. “People will die if he is confirmed,” the letter alleges.
What can we do about the destructive, self-induced stupidity of 'liberals'? I have noticed that even a crazy-headed 'liberal' can achieve a modicum of clear thinking when money is at issue. So one thing you can do is withhold funds. If you are a Yale alumnus or alumna, and not a self-enstupidated bonehead, then, when Yale asks for money, tell them "No money for you until you regain your sanity."
But be kind to the poor peon who is calling you during the dinner hour. Be kind, but be firm.
A scientist at UCLA reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by ‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?” Mathematical problem-solving is being de-emphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.
Politically correct physics? Is there no limit to leftist lunacy? A leftist is someone who never met a standard he didn't work to erode.
This is getting boringly predictable, and predictably boring. Here is yet another example, St Mary's College of California.
. . . administrators encourage students to equate opinions with personal identity. Disagreement is not just disagreement—it is an attack. Staff in the Mission and Ministry Center, the Intercultural Center, and the New Student and Family Programs encourage students to use the “oops/ouch” method. If someone forgets to use politically correct language or says anything deemed offensive, these staff members encourage bystanders to interject “oops” as a corrective, and “ouch” if they have been personally harmed. One male friend recalls being chastised for saying “you guys” instead of “you all” to a group of men. Especially offensive opinions may be reported to our Bias Incident Reporting Team (BIRT). More than fifty such reports were filed last year.
You might be interested to know that a Canadian university recently had a job ad that might be even worse than the one you mentioned from the University of California at San Diego:
. . . candidates shall demonstrate a capacity for collegial service and a commitment to upholding the values of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion as it pertains to service, teaching, and research activities.
So not only will the successful applicant spit out Far Left idiocies in class but, in addition, he'll make sure that his philosophical research demonstrates his commitment to Far Left idiocies. It's okay to argue that God doesn't exist, or that no one knows that the external world exists, or that Bruce Jenner is a woman. It's not okay to argue that Equity, Diversity and Inclusion are questionable ideals. It's not even okay to hold on to a few shreds of dignity by just ignoring the topic. No. The successful applicant will demonstrate his commitment to these idiotic "values" in published work.
They didn't explain how to do that if you only do research on vagueness or compatibilism, say. I'm guessing it would be enough, for now, to choose the right kinds of examples. Maybe if you wanted to illustrate some point about vagueness you could say this: "Satumbo is counting the pink hairs around Bruce's pierced nipple, in Arabic..." Or if you were writing about compatibilism: "Suppose that Sally is trying to decide whether ze will come out as genderqueer on Facebook. Suppose ze has a higher-order desire not to desire to come out..." I don't know. Just guessing. Maybe in the future it won't be okay to write about these topics at all, since they make it hard to demonstrate one's Far Left commitments.
Are you thinking of applying for a faculty position at the University of California at San Diego? As part of your application you will be required to submit a statement detailing your work on behalf of diversity and inclusion.
A bit more evidence that the universities of the land have become leftist seminaries.
It is a curious development. The private universities in the United States founded by religious orders have almost all been stripped of their religious character. It survives only as window dressing. But the move has not been in the direction of ideological neutrality, but toward a substitution of leftist indoctrination for religious indoctrination.
The public universities too have become seed beds of leftism, at least in the non-STEM disciplines.
The sad upshot is that indoctrination dominates inquiry in all the institutions of so-called 'higher' education in the land. There are a few holdouts, of course, and again I am speaking of the non-STEM fields, or most of them: climate science has become highly ideologized.
So I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that university is dead. It is dead in its idea, in its classical understanding.
Part of what killed it is the levelling consequent upon the foolish notion that everyone can profit from university studies. But that is a large separate topic.
I'm a junior year theology major. I recently found your blog and it's now one of my favorites. You are a voice of reason in this dark postmodern era.
As someone pursuing a BA in theology and considering grad school, I love learning, reading, and writing. I've always wanted to be the person to have ideas and spend my life thinking and writing about them.
Since you are someone who does this exact thing, I'm curious as to what it takes. How much time did you devote to studying theology or philosophy outside of classes and assignments? Did you ever write theological or philosophical essays for fun?
Any advice, especially in light of your personal experience, would be greatly appreciated. I eagerly await your response.
One question is whether one should go to graduate school in the humanities. I have addressed this question on several occasions. Here are some links:
Another question concerns the life of an academically unaffiliated philosopher. This is what I have been for over a quarter century now after resigning from a tenured position at age 41. So I don't conduct classes, give assignments, or waste time on the absurd chore of grading papers by students who could not care less about the life of the mind or about becoming truly educated.
To be perfectly blunt, I found teaching philosophy to undergraduates to be a meaningless activity in the main. Philosophy is a magnificent thing, but to teach it to bored undergraduates with no intellectual eros is like trying to feed people who aren't hungry. Depressing and absurd. Of course I did have some great students and some memorable classes. But my experience was similar to Paul Gottfried's:
Having been a professor for over 40 years at a number of academic institutions, I find Caplan’s main argument to be indisputable. The vast majority of my students, particularly those towards the end of my career, had little interest in the material I was trying to transmit, whether classical Greek, European history, or modern political theory. [ . . . ] Caplan also rolls out statistics showing most college students spend shockingly little time studying, and when polled express utter boredom with most of their courses. The overwhelming majority who graduate admit to having forgotten most of what they learned even before graduation.
It's a bit of a paradox: I would never have had the opportunity to enjoy the comfortable and relatively stress-free life of a professor for all those years if it were not for the fact that all sort of kids were attending college who had no business doing so. It is a paradox of plenty in the sense of Quine's great essay, Paradoxes of Plenty. The explosion of higher education in the 1960s, together with the Viet Nam war and other factors led to a glut of students which led to a need for more professors. So the good news is that guys like me got to be professors, but the bad news was that we had to teach people not worth teaching for the most part.
Things get worse and worse thanks to the Left's ever-increasing destruction of the universities, STEM disciplines excepted. Higher Education has become Higher Infantilization what with 'safe spaces,' 'trigger warnings,' and other incomprehensibly idiotic innovations.
I say this so that my young reader has some idea of what he is in for if he is aiming at academic career. The universities have become leftist seminaries. No conservatives need apply. Express heterodox opinions and you will be hounded and doxxed. Of course, it is not just leftists that do these things.
How much time do I spend on philosophy? Most of the day, every day. Do I write for fun? That is not a word I would use in this connection. Let's just say that I find wrestling with the big questions to be deeply satisfying and the meaning of my life. I see philosophy as a vocation in the deepest sense and a spiritual quest and something best pursued outside of the precincts of the politically correct present-day university.
The title of a recent Weekly Standard article reads:
Professor Uses 'N-Word,' Student Shouts 'F-You,' 'Free Speech' Class Canceled at Princeton.
I would write it like this:
Professor mentions N-word [no inverted commas], Student Shouts 'F-You,' [correct use of inverted commas for quotation], 'Free Speech' Class Cancelled at Princeton [correct use of inverted commas as sneer quotes].
Pedantry aside, the real problem is in the following paragraph:
Last week Prof. Rosen received national attention for using the N-word in this class on freedom of expression. Some students walked out and protested the term’s use. One report, cited in Princeton’s main campus newspaper, says that Rosen asked, “What is worse, a white man punching a black man, or a white man calling a black man a n****r?” And when Rosen was met with disagreement of his use of the N-word, and on his continued use of the term in the academic setting, he said, he would use it, “if I think it’s necessary.”
Rosen didn't use the N-word, he mentioned it. Rosen was talking about the word 'nigger' and asking whether it would be worse for a white man to punch a black man or to apply the word 'nigger' to him. That is a perfectly legitimate question and there is nothing racist about it.
There is also nothing racist about my mentioning of the word in question in the second-to-last sentence. I am talking about the word in the way I would be talking about it were I to say that it is disyllabic and consists of six letters. I am not applying it to anyone.
Which is worse, to punch a Jew (without provocation) or to apply 'kike' to him? Does it make one an anti-Semite to ask this question? Obviously not.
Read the rest to fully savor how the Left has destroyed the universities. If you are thinking of an academic career in a non-STEM field you may want to think twice.
Years ago an acquaintance wrote me about a book he had published which, he said, had "made quite a splash." The metaphor is unfortunately double-edged. When an object hits the water it makes a splash. But only moments later the water returns to its quiescent state as if nothing had happened.
Perhaps it would have been more in the spirit of self-promotion to say that his book had made quite a dent. A splash is ephemeral and what makes it sinks. A dent, however, lasts and the denting object remains in sight.
On second thought the first is the more apt metaphor given the quality of the book in question. It captures both the immediate significance of an event and its long-term insignificance.
I am afraid Professor Wax does not appreciate what she is up against. She writes,
It is well documented that American universities today, more than ever before, are dominated by academics on the left end of the political spectrum. How should these academics handle opinions that depart, even quite sharply, from their “politically correct” views? The proper response would be to engage in reasoned debate — to attempt to explain, using logic, evidence, facts, and substantive arguments, why those opinions are wrong. This kind of civil discourse is obviously important at law schools like mine, because law schools are dedicated to teaching students how to think about and argue all sides of a question. But academic institutions in general should also be places where people are free to think and reason about important questions that affect our society and our way of life — something not possible in today’s atmosphere of enforced orthodoxy.
Of course I agree with this brave little sermon. But it is naive to think that it will have any effect on the leftist termites that have infested the universities. They don't give a rat's ass about the values Wax so ably champions. Wax doesn't seem to realize that civil discourse is impossible with people with whom one is at war.
The College of the Holy Cross [Worcester, Mass.] is mulling whether to shed its century-old sports symbol the “Crusader” out of concerns the image of a Christian warrior might be offensive to Muslims.
Why not go all the way and remove the crucifixes as well? More proof that there is no more supine a chickenshit than a university administrator.
What can you do? Verbal protest won't get you anywhere. And you can't reason with the Pee Cee. You have to defund them. That will get their attention. When they call you for a contribution, tell them why you will not give them a red cent. And don't send your kids there. You are wasting your money and contributing to their trashing of Western and Catholic culture.
But don't vent your righteous anger at the poor student or worker who is on the phone.
For a good long discussion, see 'We Cannot Save Them' over at Dreher's place. Read it!
Not so long ago I was about to take a philosophy 101 class at a community college in Arizona, but the professor, who I later was told spends a substantial amount of time talking about "white privilege," was going to make it about the "sociology of philosophy." He explicitly said on day one that the class was going to focus on the racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, classism, etc. of thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and so on. I dropped with the ability to get a more sensible professor.
It's really remarkable. A classically liberal education should be about opening minds and considering ideas of past thinkers as they thought, not looking at the greatest minds through a narrow ideological filter promoting today's political ideas. Now I'm fully aware that someone like Aristotle defended slavery. Yet to primarily focus on these aspects, in an introductory course no less, is really to do a disservice. I know something about Aristotle---and I did then. The rest of the students? Probably nothing. What did they learn?
Thanks for reading my note. And thanks for your blog!
You're very welcome, George. What you say is true and important. I get a fair amount of mail like yours and it is gratifying to receive.
Leftist termites are hard at work undermining our institutions including the universities, the government, the Christian churches, and the Fourth Estate. Genuine conservatives need to emerge from their private lives and fight back, else it will be all over in a generation. One reason is precisely to preserve the private life against the Left's totalitarian encroachment. And notice I said genuine conservatives, not never-trumping pseudo-conservative, yap-and-scribble-but-do-nothing quislings such as Bill Kristol and George Will. I don't use the label 'cuckservative,' but I understand why others do.
The sociology of knowledge is a worthy field of inquiry. A branch thereof is the sociology of philosophy. But any sociology of philosophy will of necessity rest on philosophical assumptions, the examination of which is the office of philosophy. Philosophy does not allow herself to be outflanked, by anyone or anything, including sociology. She outflanks all possible outflankers. Changing the metaphor, we can can that she always ends up on top.
This is a topic worth developing, but at the moment I need to gear up for a hike. One exercise for you is to think through the following: If all knowledge is ideology in support of existing societal power relations, then what about that very claim? Does it escape being ideology in support of a different set of power relations? And if it doesn't why should we accept it? If it does, then not all knowledge is ideology.
Georgetown’s website proclaims it is “the oldest Catholic and Jesuit institute of higher learning in the United States” and is “deeply rooted in the Catholic faith.” One campus group is learning, however, Georgetown’s roots might not be deep enough.
Love Saxa is a recognized student group on the Georgetown campus, and it exists “to promote healthy relationships on campus through cultivating a proper understanding of sex, gender, marriage, and family among Georgetown students.” Given the emphasis the Catholic Church puts on these issues (for example, see here and here), and Love Saxa’s alignment with church doctrine, one might believe it safe to assume Love Saxa is squarely within safe territory at a Catholic university.
But, oh, the perils of assumption. Love Saxa is in danger of being stripped of its status as an official student group. Its offense: holding to a Catholic view of human sexuality.
What can you do? Well, if you are a GU alumnus or alumna, make sure GU does not get one penny from you. When they call for a contribution, explain why you are withholding your donation.
You can't reason with termites, but money will get their attention.
Time for a re-post. This first appeared in these pages on 18 August 2010.
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A reader writes,
Regarding your post about Cantor, Morris Kline, and potentially vs. actually infinite sets: I was a math major in college, so I do know a little about math (unlike philosophy where I'm a rank newbie); on the other hand, I didn't pursue math beyond my bachelor's degree so I don't claim to be an expert. However, I do know that we never used the terms "potentially infinite" vs. "actually infinite".
I am not surprised, but this indicates a problem with the way mathematics is taught: it is often taught in a manner that is both ahistorical and unphilosophical. If one does not have at least a rough idea of the development of thought about infinity from Aristotle on, one cannot properly appreciate the seminal contribution of Georg Cantor (1845-1918), the creator of transfinite set theory. Cantor sought to achieve an exact mathematics of the actually infinite. But one cannot possibly understand the import of this project if one is unfamiliar with the distinction between potential and actual infinity and the controversies surrounding it. As it seems to me, a proper mathematical education at the college level must include:
1. Some serious attention to the history of the subject.
2. Some study of primary texts such as Euclid's Elements, David Hilbert's Foundations of Geometry, Richard Dedekind's Continuity and Irrational Numbers, Cantor's Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, etc. Ideally, these would be studied in their original languages!
3. Some serious attention to the philosophical issues and controversies swirling around fundamental concepts such as set, limit, function, continuity, mathematical induction, etc. Textbooks give the wrong impression: that there is more agreement than there is; that mathematical ideas spring forth ahistorically; that there is only one way of doing things (e.g., only one way of constructing the naturals from sets); that all mathematicians agree.
Not that the foregoing ought to supplant a textbook-driven approach, but that the latter ought to be supplemented by the foregoing. I am not advocating a 'Great Books' approach to mathematical study.
Given what I know of Cantor's work, is it possible that by "potentially infinite" Kline means "countably infinite", i.e., 1 to 1 with the natural numbers?
No!
Such sets include the whole numbers and the rational numbers, all of which are "extensible" in the sense that you can put them into a 1 to 1 correspondence with the natural numbers; and given the Nth member, you can generate the N+1st member. The size of all such sets is the transfinite number "aleph null". The set of all real numbers, which includes the rationals and the irrationals, constitute a larger infinity denoted by the transfinite number C; it cannot be put into a 1 to 1 correspondence with the natural numbers, and hence is not generable in the same way as the rational numbers. This would seem to correspond to what Kline calls "actually infinite".
It is clear that you understand some of the basic ideas of transfinite set theory, but what you don't understand is that the distinction between the countably (denumerably) infinite and the uncountably (nondenumerably) infinite falls on the side of the actual infinite. The countably infinite has nothing to do with the potentially infinite. I suspect that you don't know this because your teachers taught you math in an ahistorical manner out of boring textbooks with no presentation of the philosophical issues surrounding the concept of infinity. In so doing they took a lot of the excitement and wonder out of it.
So what did you learn? You learned how to solve problems and pass tests. But how much actual understanding did you come away with?
I've read my fair share of [William S. ] Burroughs and I concur [with Patrick Kurp] that his stuff is trash: Junkie, Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Exterminator. All in my library. But there is a place for literary trash. It has its uses as do the pathologist's slides and samples. But put on your mental gloves before handling the stuff.
Kerouac alone of the Beat Triumvirate [Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs] moves me, though I surely don't consider him a great writer. In fact, I would go so far as to say that there really shouldn't be any university courses on Kerouac or Dylan or other culturally influential recent figures since their material is easily accessible and easily understandable. Universities ought not pander. They should remain -- or rather return to being -- institutions whose sacred task is the preservation and transmission of HIGH culture, great culture, culture which is not easily understood and requires expert guidance to penetrate and appreciate.
I am but a vox clamantis in deserto. You will be forgiven for thinking me a superannuated idealistic sermonizer out of touch with current events and trends. The West may be finished, and my preaching useless. The barbarians are at the gates and the destructive Left is eager to let them in. The authorities are in abdication. The Pope is a fool: a leftist first, a Catholic second. Leftist termites have rotted out the foundations of the universities.
On the other hand, it ain't over til it's over. So we battle on.
Interesting. Take it with several grains of salt and factor in the fact that it is by a 'transwoman.' The following is borne out by my experience:
But ultimately I don't need academic philosophy to do philosophy. My blogging over the past ten years has reached a larger audience than I could ever hope to achieve through the academic journal system.
On a really good day I'll get 3,000 page views. Usually I bump along at about half of that or less. But I reach people and influence them. Proof is the thick manila folder of fan mail I have received.
What in the world happened to the liberal arts? A degree in the humanities used to transmit the knowledge and wisdom imbued in the works of great Western artists, writers, musicians and thinkers like Shakespeare and Mozart. But today, that same degree stresses Western racism, sexism, imperialism, and other ills and sins that reinforce a sense of victimhood and narcissism. So, what happened? Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute explains in a five and one half minute video.
Apparently, such norms are white-supremacist, misogynistic, and homophobic. And what norms might these be? Why, "hard work, self-discipline, marriage and respect for authority."
Apparently you are a 'racist' if you advise blacks to "Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. . . . Eschew substance abuse and crime."
As stupid as this is, it perhaps gives us a clue as to the 'liberal' criterion of racism: Something is racist if it is something blacks can't do. So deferring gratification, working hard, saving and investing, refraining from looting, showing respect for legitimate authority are all racist because blacks as a group have a hard time doing these things.
To promote and recommend these life-enhancing values and norms is to 'dis' their 'culture.' After all, all cultures are equally good, equally conducive to human flourishing, right?
Are these the implications here? I'm just asking. I am trying to understand. I am trying to get into the liberal head. So far it seems like diving into a bucket of shit. Or am I being unfair? Am I missing something?
Just over the transom by someone in the trenches of academe:
I wonder if it's true as you say that "the authorities abdicate." When I read things like this -- they seem to come up about once a week now, or once a day -- I don't think there are authorities just abdicating. No, it looks much more like the authorities are fully on board with whatever new moronic and evil thing the leftists want to do. They seem to be using their authority to legitimate and promote everything sick and evil, from transgenderist ideology to open violent hatred of white people. They stop just short of explicitly saying that these things are true and mandatory, because (I assume) they want some veil of plausible deniability. But I don't think they're abdicating anything. I think the situation is even worse than you think it is. If only they were just lazy or incompetent or weak.
It may well be worse than I think it is. You are closer to the action than I am.
First the word. Apart from monarchical applications, to abdicate is to fail to fulfill a responsibility or duty.
My line has been the following. The university administrators and faculty who tolerate the shouting down of conservative speakers, the rescinding of invitations to speak, attacks on people and property, and the rest of Antifa-type barbarism, are essentially cowards who love their high salaries, perquisites, and privileges. They are mostly unprincipled careerists who bend whichever way the wind blows. They are not, in the main, out to destroy the universities; they simply lack the courage to take a stand in defense of the traditional values of the university and accept the consequences of so doing. They fear being called 'racists' and the rest of the names. They are squishy liberals who hope the storm passes leaving them well-ensconced in their capacious and well-appointed offices. They understand that the Left eats its own and that if they make common cause with the destructive elements, they too may be destroyed in good old commie fashion.
To sum up your view: What is going on is not abdication of authority, but misuse of authority. I am willing to change my view, but I will need some solid evidence. You need to name names.
The authorities abdicate and the collapse of the universities continues apace. Another example:
At Boise State University, in deep-red Idaho, a group of students is demanding that the university fire political scientist Scott Yenor for his scholarship on the intellectual history of feminism and the transgender movement. Even worse, some administrators are piling on.
I arise from a blissful session on the black mat, 3:10 - 4:00 AM, only to log on and find:
Under pressure from student protesters, Reed College in Portland, Oregon is considering whether or not to continue requiring freshmen to take a Western civilization course.
Once again, abdication of authority on the part of university admins. There is no coward like a university administrator. May they be treated rudely by the barbarians they enable. Suggestion to the thugs: take a page from China's Cultural Revolution and force the admins and profs to clean toilets.
William J. Bennett and David Wilezol, Is College Worth It? (Thomas Nelson 2013), p. 134:
Knowing that students prefer to spend more time having fun than studying, professors are more comfortable awarding good grades while requiring a minimum amount of work. In return, students give favorable personal evaluations to professors who desire to be well received by students as a condition of preserving their employment status. Indeed, the popularity of the student evaluation, which began in the 1970s, has had a pernicious effect.
I would say so. Here is an anecdote to illustrate the Bennett thesis. In early 1984 I was 'up for tenure.' And so in the '83 fall semester I was more than usually concerned about the quality of my student evaluations. One of my classes that semester was an upper-level seminar conducted in the library over a beautiful oak table. One day one of the students began carving into the beautiful table with his pen.
In an abdication of authority that part of me regrets and a part excuses, I said nothing. The student liked me and I knew it. I expected a glowing recommendation from him and feared losing it. So I held my tongue while the kid defaced university property.
Jeff H. and I had entered into a tacit 'non-aggression pact.' (And I got tenure.)
The problem is not that students are given an opportunity to comment upon and complain about their teachers. The problem is the use to which student evaluations are put for tenure, promotion, and salary 'merit-increase' decisions. My chairman at the time was an officious organization man who would calculate student evaluation averages to one or two decimal places, and then rank department members as to their teaching effectiveness. Without getting into this too deeply for a blog post, there is something highly dubious about equating teaching effectiveness with whatever the student evaluations measure, and something absurd about the false precision of calculating averages out to one or two decimal places.
Is Jones a better teacher than Smith because her average is 3.2 while his is only 3.1? Well, no, but if the chairman is asked to justify his decision, he can point to the numbers. This is mindless quantification, but it takes someone more thoughtful than an administrator to see it.
I strongly recommend the Bennett-Wilezol book to anyone thinking of attending college or thinking of bankrolling someone's attendance. Here is a review.
The cardinal virtues are four: temperance, prudence, justice, and courage. Of the four, courage is the most difficult to exercise. So it is no surprise that cowardice is so widespread among university administrators. There is no coward like a university administrator, to cop a line from Dennis Prager.
But the cowardice that issues in abdication of authority and the refusal to stand up for the classical values of the university in the face of barbarians and know-nothings comes with a cost, literally.
The University of Missouri is one of many universities where the administrative pussy-wussies are feeling the pinch:
Donors, parents, alumni, sports fans and prospective students raged against the administration’s caving in. “At breakfast this morning, my wife and I agreed that MU is NOT a school we would even consider for our three children,” wrote Victor Wirtz, a 1978 alum, adding that the university “has devolved into the Berkeley of the Midwest.”
As classes begin this week, freshmen enrollment is down 35% since the protests, according to the latest numbers the university has publicly released. Mizzou is beginning the year with the smallest incoming class since 1999. Overall enrollment is down by more than 2,000 students, to 33,200. The campus has taken seven dormitories out of service.
The plummeting support has also cost jobs. In May, Mizzou announced it would lay off as many as 100 people and eliminate 300 more positions through retirement and attrition. Last year the university reduced its library staff and cut 50 cleaning and maintenance jobs.
Mizzou’s 2016 football season drew almost 13,000 fewer attendees than in 2015, local media reported. During basketball games, one-third of the seats in the Mizzou Arena sat empty.
[. . .]
This phenomenon isn’t limited to Mizzou. Private institutions like Yale and Middlebury aren’t covered by public-records laws, so they can conceal the backlash. But when public universities have released emails after giving in to campus radicals, they have consistently shown administrators face the same public outrage.
Virginia Tech received numerous phone calls and more than 100 angry emails last year after it disinvited Jason Riley, a columnist for this newspaper, from speaking on campus. “While we can respond to the people who write to us, we cannot dispel the negative impression created by the media against the president, the university, the dean and the college and the department,” one administrator woefully told his colleagues.
Virginia Tech administrators also noted that news of the debacle reached millions on Twitter, where the reactions were “overwhelmingly negative toward the university and higher education in general.” Once again, a frustrated public vowed to yank support.
Universities have consistently underestimated the power of a furious public. At the same time, they’ve overestimated the power of student activists, who have only as much influence as administrators give them. Far from avoiding controversy, administrators who respond to campus radicals with cowardice and capitulation should expect to pay a steep price for years.
WSJ's Jason Riley, mentioned above, is one seriously black dude. But he wasn't prevented from speaking because of his race but because he refuses to toe the Party Line: he is a conservative black and therefore, to a leftist shithead, 'a traitor to his race.'
This shows that the overpaid administrative assholes at Mizzou and elsewhere have no clue as to the purposes of a university. You can't reach them with reasons, but they are very sensitive to emolument.
My friends in the teaching trenches tell stories that lead me to believe that so-called 'higher education' is now little more than 'higher remediation.'
The AnalPhilGen is a bit of humor from occasional MavPhil commenter Andrew Bailey. I generated the following using Bailey's 'device':
It is a consequence of proper functionalism that polyadic predicates reduce to non-human consciousness.
On the standard Kripkean modal semantics, trope theories supervene on something like Rawls' famous Difference Principle.
Intuitively it seems obvious that both definite descriptions and proper names always lead to zombie arguments.
I came to Bailey's Analytic Philosophy Generator by way of a crappy article that complains about the 'scholasticism' of contemporary philosophy "talking about itself to itself in its own jargon." The article suggests that most of what analytic philosophers write is as meaningless as the above three sentences. The just-quoted phrase suggests that the problems of philosophy discussed by academic philosophers in their narrowly-focused, jargon-laden books and articles are not 'real,' but are merely artifacts of a highly ingrown way of talking.
This is simply not the case.
If you are a philosophy 'insider' you know this; if an 'outsider' then you probably cannot be 'reached.' Or maybe you can. Let someone else try.
Having come to expect lunacy from lefties, I was not dismayed, but entertained, by the absurd bigotry that seeps out of the following passage from thisChronicle of Higher Education piece:
Now the couple weighed a new option. A producer for Tucker Carlson Tonight, a prime-time show on Fox News, had asked if Mr. Weinstein wanted to make his case to the conservative commentator and his millions of viewers.
It was a nauseating thought, says Ms. Heying. Theirs was an NPR family. Back in college, Mr. Weinstein had stood up to fraternities at the University of Pennsylvania over sexist and racist behavior at their parties. In an ideal world, says Ms. Heying, they would have talked to The New York Times or The Washington Post. But that’s not who had come calling.
"He was horrified, I was horrified," Ms. Heying told The Chronicle. "Tucker Carlson is someone he mocks in his classes."
Weinstein teaches biology and he wastes class time on political commentary and mockery of talk show hosts?
One thing I do like about lefties, though, is that they eat their own with a hunger and ferocity unlike anything on the Right. The 'progressive' Weinstein, who is now a 'racist,' is learning this the hard way. May he come to his senses. May he come to appreciate that conservatives are the new liberals, and liberals the new fascists.
"If the product is so superior, why does it have to live on the tit of the State?" (Charles Krauthammer)
One answer is that the booboisie of these United States is too backward and benighted to appreciate the high level of NPR programming. The rubes of fly-over country are too much enamored of wrestling, tractor pulls, and reality shows, and, to be blunt, too stupid and lazy to take in superior product.
Being something of an elitist myself, I am sympathetic to this answer. The problem for me is twofold. NPR is run by lefties for lefties. That in itself is not a problem. But it is a most serious problem when part of the funding comes from the taxpayer. But lefties, blind to their own bias, don't see the problem. Very simply, it is wrong to take money by force from people and then use it to promote causes that those people find offensive or worse when the causes have nothing to do with the legitimate functions of government. Planned Parenthood and abortion. NEA and "Piss Christ." Get it?
Back story here. The e-mail message that got him in trouble:
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2017 4:26 PM To: Anathea Portier-Young Cc: Divinity Regular Rank Faculty; Divinity Visiting Other Faculty Subject: Re: Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training–March 4-5
Dear Faculty Colleagues,
I’m responding to Thea’s exhortation that we should attend the Racial Equity Institute Phase 1 Training scheduled for 4-5 March. In her message she made her ideological commitments clear. I’ll do the same, in the interests of free exchange.
I exhort you not to attend this training. Don’t lay waste your time by doing so. It’ll be, I predict with confidence, intellectually flaccid: there’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty. When (if) it gets beyond that, its illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies will show. Events of this sort are definitively anti-intellectual. (Re)trainings of intellectuals by bureaucrats and apparatchiks have a long and ignoble history; I hope you’ll keep that history in mind as you think about this instance.
We here at Duke Divinity have a mission. Such things as this training are at best a distraction from it and at worst inimical to it. Our mission is to think, read, write, and teach about the triune Lord of Christian confession. This is a hard thing. Each of us should be tense with the effort of it, thrumming like a tautly triple-woven steel thread with the work of it, consumed by the fire of it, ever eager for more of it. We have neither time nor resources to waste. This training is a waste. Please, ignore it. Keep your eyes on the prize.
Paul
——————– Paul J. Griffiths Warren Chair of Catholic Theology Duke Divinity School
At most universities, if a scheduled campus lecturer expressed scholarly doubt about the severity of man-caused global warming and the efficacy of its government remedies, or questioned the strategies of the Black Lives Matter movement, or suggested that sex is biologically determined rather than socially constructed, she likely would either be disinvited or have her speech physically disrupted. Campuses often now mimic the political street violence of the late Roman Republic.
Campus radicals have achieved what nuclear strategists call deterrence: Faculty and students now know precisely which speech will endanger their careers and which will earn them rewards.
The terrified campus community makes the necessary adjustments. As with the German universities of the 1930s, faculty keep quiet or offer politically correct speech through euphemisms. Toadies thrive; mavericks are hounded.
The true maverick, I should think, abandons the leftist seminaries and strives to keep the noble ancient values alive in some other way.
Rod Dreher here exposes the latest lunacy in the precincts of mad-dog feminism. I have no objection to the main body of his post, but his opening sentence, written by a philosophy outsider, will give philosophy outsiders the wrong impression. Dreher asks, "Can somebody please tell me why anybody would choose to go into academic philosophy?"
Short answer: philosophy is a magnificent subject and one of the supports of high culture; it cannot be done well, however, without attention to the work of 'academic' philosophers from Plato on down.
Dreher seems to be assuming that the garbage he uncovers is representative of academic philosophy. Not so. Pee-Cee Unsinn is on the rise, and leftist termites have a lot to answer for in the undermining of the universities, but good work is being done in contemporary academic philosophy, not to mention the work done in decades past.
That being said, the short-term trends are not encouraging. But one cannot live without hope. One reason for hope is that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers" as Etienne Gilson famously wrote. That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) The undertakers are winning at the moment, but they will taken under in their turn.
There is no coward like a university administrator, to cop a line from Dennis Prager. That is not to say that there have never been any who have demonstrated civil courage. But we have to go back a long way to the late '60s and early '70s.
With apologies to that unrepentant commie Pete Seeger who wrote it and to all who have sung it:
Where have all the Silbers gone, long time passing? Where have all the Silbers gone, long time ago Where have all the Silbers gone, gone into abdication every one When will they ever learn, when will they e-v-e-r learn?
See here for three profiles in civil courage among university administrators.
Ann Coulter was scheduled to speak this week at the University of California, Berkeley. Last week, the university announced it was canceling her speech, providing the usual excuse that it couldn't guarantee her safety, or others'. This excuse is as phony as it is cowardly. Berkeley and other universities know well that there is a way to ensure safety. They can do so in precisely the same way every other institution in a civilized society ensures citizens' safety: by calling in sufficient police to protect the innocent and arrest the violent. But college presidents don't do that sort of thing -- not at Berkeley, or Yale University, or Middlebury College, or just about anywhere else. They don't want to tick off their clients (students), their faculty, leftist activist groups or the liberal media.
That's right: arrest the violent. And if they resist arrest? Use the force necessary to subdue them. They will call you 'fascist.' But they will call you that anyway. The epithet is without meaning as they use it. Above all, no hand wringing. After all, the miscreants are destructive, hate-America leftist thugs.
Just cut their federal funding. With Trump in the saddle this is a real possibility. Why should taxpayers be forced to support leftist seminaries? Separation of church and state doesn't go far enough. We need separation of Left and state. Just as the state has no right to impose religion on the populace, it has no right to impose that destructive ersatz religion, leftism.
A rollback in funding is probably the only way to get the attention of the corrupt administrators of once great universities and force them to cease their abdication of authority and defend the classical values of the university.
Heather MacDonald recounts her experiences at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California and at UCLA:
The Rose Institute for State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna had invited me to meet with students to talk about my book, The War on Cops, on April 6. Several calls went out on Facebook to “shut down” this “notorious white supremacist fascist Heather Mac Donald.”
Time was, when university faculty and administrators stood in loco parentis. Now their posture is supine while the students go loco.
Via Malcolm Pollack, I came to an essay by William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar in which surprising claims are made with which Pollack agrees but I don't. Deresiewicz:
Selective private colleges have become religious schools. [Emphasis added.] The religion in question is not Methodism or Catholicism but an extreme version of the belief system of the liberal elite: the liberal professional, managerial, and creative classes, which provide a large majority of students enrolled at such places and an even larger majority of faculty and administrators who work at them. To attend those institutions is to be socialized, and not infrequently, indoctrinated into that religion.
[. . .]
What does it mean to say that these institutions are religious schools? First, that they possess a dogma, unwritten but understood by all: a set of “correct” opinions and beliefs, or at best, a narrow range within which disagreement is permitted. There is a right way to think and a right way to talk, and also a right set of things to think and talk about. Secularism is taken for granted. Environmentalism is a sacred cause. Issues of identity—principally the holy trinity of race, gender, and sexuality—occupy the center of concern. The presiding presence is Michel Foucault, with his theories of power, discourse, and the social construction of the self, who plays the same role on the left as Marx once did. The fundamental questions that a college education ought to raise—questions of individual and collective virtue, of what it means to be a good person and a good community—are understood to have been settled. The assumption, on elite college campuses, is that we are already in full possession of the moral truth. This is a religious attitude. It is certainly not a scholarly or intellectual attitude.
Dennis Prager is another who considers leftism to be a religion:
For at least the last hundred years, the world’s most dynamic religion has been neither Christianity nor Islam.
It has been leftism.
Most people do not recognize what is probably the single most important fact of modern life. One reason is that leftism is overwhelmingly secular (more than merely secular: it is inherently opposed to all traditional religions), and therefore people do not regard it as a religion. Another is that leftism so convincingly portrays itself as solely the product of reason, intellect, and science that it has not been seen as the dogma-based ideology that it is. Therefore the vast majority of the people who affirm leftist beliefs think of their views as the only way to properly think about life.
I begin with Prager and return to Deresiewicz.
While I agree with the rest of Prager's column, I have trouble with his characterization of leftism as a religion.
It is true that leftism is like a religion in certain key respects. But if one thing is like another it does not follow that the first is a species of the other. Whales are like fish in certain key respects, but a whale is not a fish but a mammal. Whales live in the ocean, can stay underwater for long periods of time and have strong tails to propel themselves. Just like many fish. But whales are not fish.
I should think that correct taxonomies in the realm of ideas are just as important as correct taxonomies in the realm of flora and fauna.
Leftism is an anti-religious political ideology that functions in the lives of its adherents much like religions function in the lives of their adherents. This is the truth to which Prager alludes with his sloppy formulation, "leftism is a religion." Leftism in theory is opposed to every religion as to an opiate of the masses, to employ the figure of Karl Marx. In practice, however, today's leftists are rather strangely soft on the representatives of the 'religion of peace.' (What's more, if leftism were a religion, then, given that leftism is opposed to religion, it follows that leftism is opposed to itself, except that it is not.)
Or you could say that leftism is an ersatz religion for leftists. 'Ersatz' here functions as an alienans adjective. It functions like 'decoy' in 'decoy duck.' A decoy duck is not a duck. A substitute for religion is not a religion. Is golf a religion? Animal rescue?
An ideology is a system of action-guiding beliefs. That genus divides into the two species religious ideologies and nonreligious ideologies. Leftism, being "overwhelmingly secular" just as Prager says, is a nonreligious ideology. It is not a religion, but it shares some characteristics with religions and functions for its adherents as a substitute for religion.
You might think to accuse me of pedantry. What does it matter that Prager sometimes employs sloppy formulations? Surely it is more important that leftism be defeated than that it be fitted into an optimal taxonomy!
Well yes, slaying the dragon is Job One. But we also need to persuade intelligent and discriminating people. Precision in thought and speech is conducive to that end. And that is why I say, once more: Language matters!
Now let's consider the criteria that Deresiewicz adduces in support of his thesis that the elite liberal schools are religious. There seem to be two: these institutions (i) promulgate dogmas (ii) opposition to which is heresy. It is true that in religions there are dogmas and heresies. But communism was big on the promulgation of dogmas and the hounding of opponents as heretics.
Communism, however, is not a religion. At most, it is like a religion and functions like a religion in the lives of its adherents. As I said above, if X is like Y, it does not follow that X is a species of Y. If colleges and universities today are leftist seminaries -- places where the seeds of leftism are sown into skulls full of fertile mush -- it doesn't follow that these colleges and universities are religious seminaries. After all, the collegiate mush-heads are not being taught religion but anti-religion.
Pace Deresiewicz, there is nothing religious or "sacred" about extreme environmentalism. After all it is a form of idolatry, nature idolatry, and insofar forth, anti-religious.
Why would a critic of leftism want to label it a religion? Prager, who promotes religion, might be thinking along these lines: "You lefties cannot criticize religion since you have one too; it is just that yours is an inferior religion." Someone who opposes religion might be thinking along the following lines: "Religion is a Bad Thing, not conducive to human flourishing; leftism is a religion; ergo, leftism is a Bad Thing too."
This may be what is going on in Deresiewicz's mind. He is opposed to extreme leftism and thinks he can effectively attack it by labeling it a religion. This strategy encapsulates two mistakes. First, leftism is not a religion. Second, religion is a good thing. (I would even go so far as to argue that Islam, "the saddest and poorest form of theism" (Arthur Schopenhauer, reference and quotation here), has been of service to the benighted peoples who know no better religion: they are better off with Islam than with no religion at all.) There is also the question whether dogmas are bad for us.
But now's not the time to worry about whether religion with its dogmas is good for humans. My present point is that leftism is not a religion, and that no good purpose is served by confusing it with a religion.
Isn't This All Just a Semantic Quibble?
I don't think so. It goes to the question whether religion has an essence or nature. Some say it doesn't: the concept religion does not pick out an essence because it is a family-resemblance concept in Wittgenstein's sense. I say religion has an essence and that the following points are ingredient in that essence:
1. The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Exerience, p. 53) This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions. It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection. It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents. So it lies beyond the discursive intellect. It is a spiritual reality. It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience. An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out in the form of revelation.
2. The belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)
3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the unseen order. Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order. His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences.
4. The conviction that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.
5. The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral purification/transformation.
6. The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.
7. The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative. It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order.
If I have nailed down the essence of religion, then it follows that leftism, which is a form of secular humanism, is not a religion. Leftism collides with religion on all of these points. This is not a semantic claim but an ontological one. And the issue is not a quibble because it is important.
In sum. We must try to think as clearly as we can. We must therefore not confuse what is distinct. Hence we ought not confuse leftism with a religion.
In the last few weeks, there has been a spate of columns by writers on the left condemning the left-wing college students who riot, take over university buildings and shout down speakers with whom they differ.
These condemnations, coming about 50 years too late, should not be taken seriously.
[. . .]
Here's the problem:
It is the left that transformed universities into the moral and intellectual wastelands most are now.
It is the left that created the moral monsters known as left-wing students who do not believe in free speech, let alone tolerance.
It is the left that has taught generations of young Americans that America is essentially a despicable society that is racist and xenophobic to its core.
It is the left that came up with the lie that the university has been overrun by a "culture of rape."
It is the left that taught generations of Americans that everyone on the right is sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, racist and bigoted.
It is the left that is anti-intellectual, teaching students to substitute feelings for reason.
It’s been exactly 40 years since my late wife and I quit as English profs at Middlebury College, where hundreds of screaming students wouldn’t allow Charles Murray, one of the nation’s foremost conservative intellectuals, to speak to them yesterday, as a campus conservative group had invited him to do.
summarized by one of the conference organizers:
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