My parents were totally sold on college. From the earliest age I repeatedly heard how important it was to get into a good school. I remember the trips we would take every fall to attend football games at Amherst College (my father’s alma mater). It seemed magical somehow. The place had a certain mystique – austere and even noble – steeped as it was in tradition and the disciplined, hard-won pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and truth.
Today, that luster is mostly gone, at least for me. I recently exchanged a few text messages with my oldest brother who also attended Amherst, much to my father’s delight. Yet our texts dealt mostly with the lunacy that’s overtaken the school and higher education in general, especially among elite institutions.
The issue at hand was a 36-page brochure, a true testament to strident political correctness, the “Amherst Common Language Guide,” created by the Orwellian-sounding Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
Not to be outdone, a short time later the school hosted a talk by an environmentalist professor from Middlebury College (my mother’s alma mater) entitled, “The Whiteness of Walden with Attention to Race,” wherein the question was posed as to whether one should “still read, teach, and study the work of this ‘dead white man’ today.” Apparently, Thoreau’s “overwhelming whiteness” is a disqualifier.
Of course, it would take a much bigger blog to catalogue all the wacky things coming out of academia these days. Suffice it to say, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Things certainly have changed over the last 50-60 years or so.
When I first arrived at Yale Divinity School in the early 80s, I eagerly anticipated becoming part of a community of Christians. To say my hopes were dashed is an understatement. What I encountered instead was a battleground of competing theologies, mostly based on secular political considerations.
At the beginning of my second year, I remember being struck by how friendly the incoming freshman class was…for about 2 or 3 weeks. They, too, had come hoping to find a supportive Christian community. But that was before the political indoctrination began. In no time flat they were embroiled in a hotbed of competing and mostly hostile camps, forced to line up with one group or another. The easy smiles quickly disappeared.
Speaking of Middlebury, as you may know, they recently disinvited yet another speaker citing, you guessed it, “security concerns.” This after they violently shut down a speech by Charles Murray a few years back, inflicting physical injury on one of the professors.
This time the offending speaker was Ryszard Legutko, an eminent philosopher, professor, and elected member of both the Polish and European Union parliaments. Perhaps most notably, he also served as a leading figure in the Solidarity movement that helped liberate Poland from communist domination.
One would have thought his perspective might be welcome. Think again. Prompted by this exercise in academic intolerance, I read his most recent book, Demon in Democracy, a somewhat overheated title provided by his American publisher. It is nonetheless a brilliant dissertation on modernity and some of its more unfortunate developments over the last 500 years.
Briefly, he identifies how the Enlightenment fundamentally redefined both human anthropology and soteriology (the means of salvation).
Anthropologically, the Enlightenment altered the traditional Judeo-Christian view of human nature. Humans in their “natural state’ were now thought to be both pure (sinless) and equal (blank slates), each possessing what Marx later called “species-being.” Here social conditioning was the sole source of all corruption and thus could be rejiggered to perfect an imagined future.
The older understanding was that human beings were sinners, that there is something inside the human heart that confounds the soul, that renders life imperfect. It is this that accounts for all personal and social difficulties.
Soteriologically, therefore, salvation was properly directed toward heaven, toward the things of God, and not any this-worldly scheme, no matter how well-intentioned.
These changes had significant consequences. For one, in antiquity, dignity was defined by character, by how closely a person aligned his or her life to transcendent norms and metaphysical truths. With the Enlightenment, dignity was assigned to absolutely everyone simply by virtue of being alive. No muss, no fuss.
With the loss of sin and the ascent of this new radical egalitarianism, the soul was left without the need to struggle or aspire to life’s higher things. In this the individual was effectively diminished, rendered malleable and soulless.
This meant that all life’s problems could now be remedied through social engineering, not only because society was the cause of all ills, but because humans were blank slates who could be reshaped at will employing the latest insights from reason and science.
Since the Enlightenment’s focus was on the future good, it was, naturally enough, highly skeptical of the past. By the same token, its enthusiasm for a promised, utopian future was virtually unbounded.
Significantly, the mechanism for effecting this future utopia, that which would fix both society and human nature, would be politics.
The modernists, yesterday and today, believe the world as it is cannot be tolerated and, as such, must be changed. The old must be replaced by the new, just as one grows up and leaves adolescence behind, effectively liberated from ignorance and superstition.
For the radical reformer there is only a dualistic choice between a progressive, salvific future and a reactionary, counter-revolutionary past.
“What the enemy of progress defended,” writes Legutko, “was by definition hopelessly parochial, limited to one class, decadent, anachronistic, historically outdated, and degenerate; sooner or later it had to give way to something that was universal, necessary, and inclusive of the whole of humanity.”
And since politics is the only mechanism for effecting such progress, all aspects of life must be modernized through political means: “thinking, ethics and mores, family, churches, schools, universities, community organizations, culture, and even human sentiments and aspirations.”
All people, structures, and thoughts outside progressive orthodoxy are deemed “outdated, backward-looking, useless, but at the same time dangerous as preserving the remnants of the old authoritarianism.”
And “once one sends one’s opponents to the dustbin of history,” he warns, “any debate with them becomes superfluous.”
This new “grand design,” Legutko says, must be implemented at all costs, despite ample evidence of its many failures. For only it can create a future of “freedom, autonomy, tolerance, pluralism, and all other…treasures.” It must be taken on faith, as in all religions.
Any argument running counter to these obvious humanistic benefits must not be tolerated or entertained. After all, the path forward has already been articulated. What’s the point of discussing discredited ideas that only serve to take humanity backward? Thus, dialogue or free speech is at best unimportant, if not counterproductive. At worst, it’s dangerous, even evil.
Perhaps, though, Legutko’s worst intellectual sin within contemporary academic circles, his apostasy if you will, is his unapologetic adherence to traditional Christianity.
After all, it was the church, as he points out, that was the one institution the communists most feared and which ultimately proved to be the greatest single force in bringing down the Polish regime.
A few years ago, my wife and I were in the area and decided to stop by the Middlebury campus. I hadn’t been there since I was a kid. For me, the highlight was seeing stately Mead Chapel (pictured above) where my mother used to sing in the choir.
If there is any hope, or so it seems to me, of loosening the stranglehold radical progressivism has on our culture, in general, and on higher education, in particular, it must begin in places like Mead Chapel, built to honor the God whose truths are not manufactured but eternal in the heavens.