Writing in the Chronicle Review, Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, argues that Catholic Universities occupy the vanguard of current intellectualism — precisely because of their inheritance in the tradition of natural law. As Wolfe explains it, “the natural-law tradition […] is premised on the idea that there are certain truths in the world that remain true irrespective of whether the laws and conventions of any particular society adhere to them. At its worst, belief in natural law can lead to ideological rigidity and inflexible inhumanity. But at its best, respect for natural law gives one the self-confidence that makes possible the passion and curiosity that fuel intellectual inquiry.”

No one could have predicted, 30 or so years ago, that such self-confidence would ever be necessary in American higher education. At the height of the cold war, American universities produced those intellectual figures whom David Halberstam called “the best and the brightest,” and humility was not exactly one of their personality traits. But in a remarkably short time, the culture of American academe shifted from the hubristic arrogance of those who believed they could bend a foreign country to their will to those currently ensconced in the university who doubt the possibility of will, truth, morality, beauty, or any other category that strikes them as ready for deconstruction. At a time when the only thing we can know is that we cannot know anything, the claims of natural law suggest to us not that the world is unknowable, but that we have simply stopped, for whatever reason, trying to know it.

Natural law, in short, inoculates us against postmodernism. While there are no doubt exceptions of which I am unaware, I have yet to come across all that much enthusiasm for the ideas of Jacques Derrida and Stanley Fish at the Catholic colleges with which I am familiar. Catholics are likely to hold that the truth of God’s existence must mean the truth of man’s reason, art’s beauty, and morality’s universality.

Wolfe — himself a Jewish non-believer — alludes here to foundational beliefs, kernel assumptions that underpin religious ideologies. In short, he’s pointing to the “leap of faith” required by any rigorous philosophical pursuit that ends with the acceptance of (and absolute belief in) universals. Unencumbered by suspicions into the nature of transcendence, the animating beliefs of Catholic universities, Wolfe argues, have evolved to the point where truly “liberal” inquiry is encouraged. Judgment is allowed, because “tolerance” is decided upon, not mandated.

It […] makes a certain amount of sense, as paradoxical as it may sound, that colleges belonging to a tradition whose 19th-century popes had little respect for liberalism typically have resisted recent illiberal efforts to restrict the free-speech rights of faculty members and students who question affirmative action or criticize hate-speech requirements. Indeed, the most egregious example of speech codes that violated fundamental rights to free speech were fashioned at public universities, like the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, most of whose faculty members would have described themselves as politically liberal and relatively secular in matters of faith.

Wolfe’s piece is an interesting read — not so much for its philosophical critique of the postmodern project, but for it’s critique of postmodernism as it exists in most prevalent incarnations. Which is to say, in the dogmatic application of certain of postmodernism’s observations, improperly applied, by those who misunderstand postmodernism’s philosophical conclusions.

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