I’m currently reading Melanie Phillips’s The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power. Her thesis is not at all new to regular readers of protein wisdom; Jeff has repeatedly observed that “Black is white; Up is down; Potsie is the Fonz” and suchlike.
So in quoting Philips’s book I’m not breaking any ground here, though it’s nice to see someone else independently come to the same conclusion and express it convincingly.
It is paradoxical but not surprising that the assault on intellectual liberty is taking place within the institutions of reason. For decades, these have been dominated by a variety of wrecking ideologies such as anticapitalism, anti-imperialism, utilitarianism, feminism, multi-culturalism, and environmentalism. What they all have in common is the aim of overturning the established order in the West. What was previously marginalized or forbidden has become permitted and even mandatory; what was previously the norm has become forbidden and marginalized. As the philosopher Roger Scruton has written, the curriculum in the humanities is “relativist in favor of transgression and absolutist against authority.” Because these are ideologies, they wrench facts and evidence to fit their governing idea. They are inimical to reason and independent thought—and thus to freedom, because reason and liberty are inseparable bedfellows.
As Sir Karl Popper has observed, reason grows by way of mutual criticism and through the development of institutions that safeguard the liberty to criticize and thus preserve freedom of thought. Because it treats people impartially, reason is therefore closely linked to equality. Pseudo-rationalism, by contrast, is “the immodest belief in one’s superior intellectual gifts—the claim to be initiated, to know with certainty, to possess an infallible instrument of discovery. This pseudo-rationalism, the enemy of reason, is precisely what has the Western intelligentsia in its grip.
It is hard to overstate the influence on our culture that is wielded by the doctrines of anti-imperialism, multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism and the like. They form the unchallengeable orthodoxy within academia, the base camp for their “long march through the institutions,” which they have colonized with stunning success. The center of political gravity has been shifted so that anyone who does not share these values is defined as extreme.
“Progressives” on the left believe that their secular, materialistic, individualistic, and utilitarian values represent not a point of view but virtue itself. —”The Secular Inquisition,” pp. 99–100, emphasis mine
Indeed, the utterly corrupted state of academia is no new theme here, neither is its central role in the long march through the institutions, so I won’t elaborate further on that.
Nevertheless, it struck me, after reading this common protein wisdom trope in a different setting: How are we going to explain this colonization to our grandkids? When they read about how completely inverted the universities became, how will we explain why we didn’t stop this obvious insanity? It’s not as if they were working in secret. The textbooks and syllabi were right there for all to see, and the corrosive ideas regularly showed up right in front of our noses.
So what did we fail to do, those of us who had the perspicacity to see this nonsense for what it was? Were we too few in number? Was the incrementalism sufficiently subtle to prevent stomping it out each time it advanced? Are declines such as these as inevitable as entropy? Are the wrecking and undoing philosophies like invasive species whose invasion we don’t notice until it’s impossible to eradicate? Were there no natural predators in our body politic that could have contained or eliminated the threat?
This is what kills me: Many of the warnings against what the Left was actually up to were being articulated rather clearly and urgently—from the beginning—by none other than tin-foil-hatters such as the John Birch Society.
Notwithstanding their embrace of the paranoid style in politics, they recognized the Leftist poison for what it was even in the initial stages of the long march though the institutions. They freaked out every time the Left took another baby step forward. They became hysterical about all those little things that the rest of us were not in the mood to fight over, because the hills were just too small to die on. (And yes, they also shot up the walls when they mistook ordinary shadows for communists.)
They were ineffective in their warnings partly because they conflated truth with paranoia and partly because the rest of us neglected to tease it apart for them, lest we be contaminated by the stink of being thought Looney Tunez.
Maybe their sensitivity to all shades of Leftism made them canaries in the coal mine. Maybe we should have taken up the fight when their alarms went off instead of dismissing all of them out-of-hand. (What, we don’t have the ability to sort truth from their fictions?) Maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation if we were less afraid of being thought crazy and more persistent in spraying even the smallest sprigs of bindweed.
And maybe there really was nothing we could have done. Maybe the bindweed always wins and the Burmese pythons always drive the deer to near extinction.
Maybe this is the lot of man on this earth, and the best we can ever do is preach to the remnant so that they can rebuild something good that will last for awhile, for some people, until the cycle repeats and society yields again to inexorable entropy.
Jeez Jeff, you, dicentra, and Mark Steyn seem intent on ruining my weekend. I just wanted to enjoy some waffles this morning!
You wanna have a nice morning, and yet you got onto the Internet.
Huh.
Chin up, di. My son is getting ready to graduate from college in May and he and his fellows are not buying into any of the social engineering nonsense, and most of them are in the Arts.
Well, I made it through seven years of grad school without drinking the Kool-Aid, but that hasn’t stopped the long march, has it?
The edifice’s frame has already been chewed well through by termites, and it teeters in the breeze.
Agree.
O ye of little faith! I likewise made it through four years of undergrad and three of grad school without any Kool-Aid drinking. Our kids are not made of less stern stuff!
Are we not men? (and women?)
And none of those who didn’t drink the Kool-Aid are teaching college, I notice.
As the juggernaut lumbers on.
I knew we were doomed from the moment in 1985 (or was it 1986?) when, during a class discussion on scarcity resources and abortion (mind you, this was a Forestry Management 101 course: and no, I no longer have any idea how the subject came up and got all intertwined …but it had, all the same), and after listening to the pure pap opinions of …well, they were mostly children, as I was probably 15 years older than the youngest there (it was my second or third return to pre-baccalaureate academia: I always got so, so distracted with life, sigh).
After listening to each young skull full of mush proferring their pop wisdom, for perhaps 45 minutes or so, the instructor asked me to express an opinion on the subject, too.
…so I posed my answer as: how could anyone know how many and which of those aborted babies were the Einstein or the Lincoln or the Ford or the Shakespeare of our generation that had been destined to be, and was taken from us …how many were the possibility that was denied us …asserting that people weren’t user-uppers of resources, but that people were our greatest resource. The more babies the better.
Because we needed their ideas, their help. And we could never know which was going to be – would have been – the one with the idea which was salvation, was the solution …who, adding up 2 and 2, didn’t find 4, but rather came to some brilliant conclusion about space-time itself.
If it took 6000 years of human history to reach maybe a billion people, and only every epoch or so was there a Plato, an Einstein, born …so why would we so willingly – so unnecessarily – throw away tens of millions of lives … so many possibilities …that may have mattered.
I went on for awhile in that vein. Longer than I should have. Maybe getting a bit more louder, a bit more firm as I spoke.
(I dunno, I’d been listening to what came across as a bunch smug, self-centered, utterly spoiled, and self-congratulatory brats parroting the ignorance of common delusions, and something just snapped a bit …and I went from not wanting anyone to notice the wrinkled old guy in the corner, to being pissed off. Happens.)
The previously chatty group had got quieter as I’d spoken. I noticed a few uncomfortable stares directed my way …but thank gawd it was about the end of the period, and I was rather “saved by the bell” as it were.
As I got up to leave though …the instructor (maybe 10-15 years or so older than me) asked me if I would wait a minute.
I remember thinking “Oh shit, I’ve put my foot into it now.” And that it still wasn’t too late to change to Oceanography (which I did, as it turned out).
…and I knew we were doomed, when he came up to me, and asked – chatted with, really – me about …well, purely personal things: why I’d returned to school, what my goals were. If I was going to pursue a credential or degree in Forestry. And …how I’d formed my opinion of few minutes previous utterance.
…and it was apparent he felt alone. Isolated. That he bloody agreed …well, pretty much. And was in a bit of shock that anyone had spoken up like that. In public. In academia. He was surprised I’d said what he thought, too..
…I knew we were doomed.
…because even a tenured professor was unwilling to say what he believed was the right, the good, the true. Out loud. In public.
How the hell do you go against something like that. If you couldn’t speak your mind in a college as an instructor, what the hell was going on.
We were doomed.
———
…and no, I didn’t complete a degree course that interlude either. Again. Sigh. (That time, I got distracted by the shiny new personal computer thingies ….)
As you did, so did Jeff and so did I. I even did my part and taught high school and community college for a bit.
dicentra, I think it all goes back to the 4th estate being co-opted.
With Walter Duranty being one of the earliest and most egregious examples of propaganda disguised as reporting.
Hopefully, the advent of the internet is breaking down the monopoly of the 4th estate.
I can cite a lot of examples going back to the seventies where the press uncritically reported “studies” that influenced the breakdown of American values. Probably the worst was the idea that “staying together for the kids” was bad for the kids, because the trope “you have the make yourself happy before you can make others happy” was floated at the same time.
Couple the 4th estate being corrupted with the fact that Americans, for the most part, want to just go on about their business and not be bothered and you wind up where we currently are.
I think though, that since Americans generally want to be left alone (probably embedded in American DNA) it also means there’s a point beyond which they will not go. Hopefully, from what we’re seeing, we’ve reached or are reaching that point.
Americans generally want to be left alone
We may not be interested in monetary collapse, but it is definitely interested in us.
Phillips’s aggregation of all the ways in which irrationality and lies—dangerous, malicious, evil lies—have taken hold of the world entire, especially Europe and Islam, lead me to believe that we’ve reached the worst kind of critical mass: not the one where people wake up and steer away from the iceberg but the one where the evil plays itself out from sheer momentum.
My knowledge of history is sparse, but can anyone provide me with an example where society has accumulated this much prevarication and distortion and has still managed to pull it out at the last minute?
When have the inmates run the asylum nearly into the ground, and then the sane folks come along just in time to snare the crazies in butterfly nets and set things right?
When has the world wrapped itself around the axles of debt and entitlement to this degree—and then the bureaucracies that did the wrapping come to their senses and begin to soberly unwrap and untangle?
I don’t see it. Even if we take the WH and all of congress, it will be too little, too late. Electing W to the White House didn’t stop 9/11 because the plot was set in motion long before W ran for office.
I fear that the monetary/economic/financial tsunami has already been generated way out in the deep, and it’s only a matter of time before the water retreats from the beach and all that’s left is to head for higher ground.
dicentra,
When has there ever been a political system like America?
If Americans finally elect a fairly responsible political class there’s a good chance a lot of the damage will be blunted.
One of the things I like about Rick Santorum is that he did not change who he was when he lost his Senate seat.
Perhaps if we can get someone in as President who understands that it’s about doing what is right for America rather than doing what’s need to be re-elected, we just might get somewhere.
If Americans finally elect a fairly responsible political class…
Oh, HA! You had me going there! Good one! Well done!
The tsunami has been generated in the Eurozone and Arabia. It will still wash over us because we have been building in a flood zone lo this past century.
When world currencies—including the dollar—become worthless, a government made up of naught but Founders would be helpless to stop it at.
You can be the healthiest guy in the world and still die from exsanguination.
Oh phooey! I’ve been listening to this “we’re all doomed!” talk since the 60’s. It’s a bunch of nonsense.
Times are always tough for someone. We can regroup, learn from our mistakes or sit in the corner mumbling and sucking our thumbs. The hell with the latter, I say.
Oh phooey! I’ve been listening to this “we’re all doomed!” talk since the 60?s.
That talk was coming from the Left. They were pushing the Population Bomb talk for the express purpose of exerting more control over the populace, just as AGW is intended to serve the same purpose.
Their doomsday talk was based on lies, prevarication, mendacity, and lies.
What’s my doomsday talk based on?
No, it wasn’t. It was coming from the Elders who were remembering a rosy past that never was.
A piece related to this at Belmont Club.
No, it wasn’t. It was coming from the Elders who were remembering a rosy past that never was.
Again, what are my doomsday predictions based on?
I still think Abe Lincoln was onto the crux of the matter way back in 1838, when he was only 28 years old.
Also, the fact that they’ve been saying “we’re doomed” for 50 years doesn’t mean we’re not. The trajectory that these unreasonably nostalgic Elders feared has actually come to fruition in pretty much the way they said it would.
The foundations for our current troubles were laid 100 years ago, and at the time of their laying, some people saw where it would lead and they spoke out. As the problem intensified, people also spoke out and warned that if we didn’t change course, it would lead to disaster.
Yeah, they were ignored, and because they were ignored, the problem continued to intensify.
For years, engineers warned that the flood walls in New Orleans were not sufficient to withstand more than a Cat 3, and for years they were ignored. Cripes, the warnings must have got tedious.
So in August 2005, you could have just as smugly dismissed those long-standing warnings as old and moldy and invalid.
And you’d still be wrong.
Again, what are my doomsday predictions based on?
I believe you are saying that we have met the enemy and he is us, di. (Also said by our man Lincoln, albeit not as colloquially.)
[I]f it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.
Does this obviate the possibility that we’ve so weakened ourselves from the inside that foreign events can provide the final push?
Says our man, Mr. Shakespeare through King Henry V:
WESTMORELAND. O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!
KING. What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin;
If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more methinks would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.’
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
@leigh Oh phooey! I’ve been listening to this “we’re all doomed!” talk since the 60?s. It’s a bunch of nonsense..
…depends much upon the meaning of doom, then, don’t it?
Often enough, its usage is a perfectly acceptable rhetorical techique.
In my little vignette, the doom actually happened, then, didn’t it?
Anyone want to argue that the Left isn’t inordinately represented in academia?
…perhaps it was less true to speak in a 1985 voice and say “we were doomed” then to say “doom was already upon us”]?
If anything, it is moreso evident at present.
…if your point is that the doom is unraveling a bit (or can be unraveled), I would certainly agree with you.
if your point is that the doom is unraveling a bit (or can be unraveled), I would certainly agree with you.
Yes, davisbr, that is my point.
I enjoyed your vignette of your classroom experience very much. I wrote a position paper in grad school that argued that women and men have different goals not just in the workplace but in our very lives and how we live them. My instructor, who was the Dean Emeritus, took me aside and told me that it was one of the finest papers he had read in years and that he had shared it with his wife, as well.
I returned to grad school later in life and was one of the few who had small children and real life and work experience under my belt. It seemed that I often had more in common with the students from the former Soviet Bloc countries than my own, at least as far as our political views were concerned.
dicentra,
I think it really depends on Americans as to whether or not foreign events will affect us here.
If the political class continues to cling to the “we are the keepers of the world” crap, then yes, foreign events will cause severe problems.
However, if we, as Americans move in the right fiscal direction, America will become the solution to rather than part of the problem.
@leigh My instructor, who was the Dean Emeritus, took me aside and told me that it was one of the finest papers he had read in years and that he had shared it with his wife …
Even as hoary, wrinkled, tottering-on-the-edge elders, hearing “you done good” by someone respectable is a treasure you store up and cherish.
…and TY.
I think it really depends on Americans as to whether or not foreign events will affect us here.
I think it’s already out of our hands. When the Euro crashes (and Europe with it), we’ll get swept away in the undertow after a short surge, when the dollar becomes the “safe currency” clear up until it’s not.
Global finance is so intertwined and corrupted that no one country’s laws (especially newly minted ones) can stop what’s coming.
We’re not going to do what’s needed in time to stop it. Soros has already “predicted” our demise, which means he’s already laid the dynamite at the foundation, strung the det cord, and is poised in the van with the detonator for juuuuust the right time.
Even as hoary, wrinkled, tottering-on-the-edge elders, hearing “you done good” by someone respectable is a treasure you store up and cherish.
Isn’t that the truth? I glowed for a week and I still have that paper with his note written on it years later.
And you are very welcome, sir.
It’d take a bit more thinking than I’m willing to do at the moment, di, but I honestly feel you’re onto something here.
It’s essentially just that, a feeling I can’t quite crystallize it into words just yet. My thought processes run on different but, perhaps, parallel tracks.
The way I’m not on a parallel track is the focus on currencies. They’re a medium of exchange. If people make products or provide services and require those they don’t, things can still work themselves out after some pain and friction. That part isn’t written in stone.
I’m greatly more concerned with our habits of mind.
VDH, in the chat at Ricochet, spoke of the Greeks (our extreme example for the moment), who, he said, now and again to look up from their fiscal miseries to see that they live in a very hostile neighborhood. Said he, the Greeks notice that the Turks are overflying Greek airspace without so much as a how-do-you-do, and then they notice that if something untoward happens, for every bomb they may have to drop, they do not have the wherewithal to purchase its replacement. This — the Greeks’ position — is not a condition free men would willingly place themselves into.
Avoidance and denial would be two worrisome habits of mind that we share with those damn olive jockeys.
We American lucky ducks happen to live in a more or less non-hostile neighborhood. But hey, that doesn’t seem to prevent us from gratuitously affronting or otherwise pissing off our neighbors to the north, when they inquire whether we’d like to engage in a little friendly and mutually beneficial commerce. This too, I’d submit, is not the behavior of free men.
nyt
shilling for ameritopia?
link
Agreed. Free men like being friendly with other free men all the way up to the occasional exclusion of the other sorts of men.
Used to be an instinctive thing almost. But only that, almost. It actually wasn’t instinctive. It was a thing that was subtly taught and reinforced from a young enough age that it might seem that way without reflection.
Smith was fantastic on this sort of thing. I don’t know this for a fact but I’d be willing to bet he viewed Moral Sentiments as a broader and more primal thing Wealth.
Shit.
… more primal thing than Wealth.
That is a very interesting story davisbr and it makes me wonder if Obama sometimes has thoughts along these lines. What if abortion were “safe, legal, and not so much rare” in 1961 Hawaii? The world would have missed out on Dear Leader! It is a terrible truth to understand, and in Obama it seems to have taken a particularly severe form of self-loathing, under a veneer of unparalleled arrogance. Why else would he be so insistent on abortion on demand at any time on someone else’s dime, and if you don’t kill
meit the first time keep killing it untilFather loves meit is dead dead dead!happen to live in a more or less non-hostile neighborhood.
With Mexican narcotraficantes, Hezballah, and Hamas swarming around the southern border.
I feel safer already.
If people make products or provide services and require those they don’t, things can still work themselves out after some pain and friction.
But in the meantime, the grocery store shelves go empty because the cash flow has stopped and the huge, glorious chain of suppliers and distributors stops in its tracks. The last thing we want is for Hunger to set in.
Even a couple of weeks in post-Katrinaville is enough to provide the opportunity for Very Bad People to seize power where they ain’t supposed to, and wresting it back won’t be pretty.
We maybe in a bad neighborhood but there are ones much worse. There have always been ones much worse than here.
One thing I can’t help but notice: our admonishments of reproof against our people (including under that umbrella ourselves) — once a free and attentive people, whom we lately bemoan — stand in themselves as a species of argument for the progressive’s case: that though the man has a “right” to his self-defense, he will not therefore necessarily make the best judge of the wisest means to his achieving that self-preservation at which he aims.
We hear, for instance, the half-humorous, half-serious quote tossed about: “You fucked up! You trusted us!” or, in another current formulation, Mark Levin’s apt citation that “We can choose our political leadership, but we cannot choose the proper lightbulb, or health care for our families?”
Yet, we must admit what we have done. We — as a whole people — do appear to have thrown away our freedom; we have chosen badly, and this time, very badly indeed. So, it isn’t nothing, is all I’m saying. On the current empirical evidence, the progressive would seem to have the better of us.
My son has a tournament tomorrow. I leave at 6 am. Goodnight.
And to whoever deserves it, fuck yourself.
It’s always important to have a strong finish. Heh.
Deservingly, with pleasure !
We must be dogged in our opposition.
http://www2.oanow.com/news/2012/feb/09/au-detection-dogs-nab-pythons-everglades-ar-3203279/