Table of Contents

The failure of neutrality

To live well, we must have a confident sense of our place in the world and the significance of our actions, and we must have principles affirmed with sufficient certainty as to fortify us to make great sacrifices. On the other hand, we must be open to learning and revising our beliefs, and we must be able to recognize that others of good sense and good will do not share them. Since truth-seeking is a communal as well as individual pursuit, truth-seeking institutions must also find ways to reconcile these contrasting virtues.

The public university has done this in a very unsatisfactory way. Obviously, universities do have a de-facto official ideology. This is acknowledged whenever administrators invoke “our values” to pontificate on public matters or to to engineer the attitudes or demographics of the student body, presuming these values–diversity, equity, inclusion, democracy, secularism–are not ones anyone could reasonably dispute. Faculty candidates are forced to pledge adherence to these values in their required DEI statements; students must submit to classes promoting their particular historical narrative and moral doctrines; whole academic departments presume “our values”, and a vast administrative nomenklatura exists to enforce them.

However, the ideological commitment of the university is not honestly acknowledged. When challenged, the university will insist that its only rules are formal/procedural, i.e. scholars are not told what to say, but only how to go about saying it so that the enterprise of open inquiry is not sabotaged by heckling or harassment. This seems reasonable but actually is dishonest, motte-and-bailey obfuscation. As enforced, the ground rules turn out to circumvent debate and decide all the substantive issues, since dissent is itself defined as a form of hateful bullying. The ideological hegemony solidifies with time, as those who don’t accept the official beliefs and hierarchy of peoples are eliminated by an explicitly biased hiring system.

Historically, the committed university is the norm, from the Catholic original European universities, to the Protestant original English American universities, to the Muslim universities of the Islamic world and the Marxist universities of the communist world. The difference is that these commitments were forthrightly recognized. A dogmatic Catholic or Marxist is no doubt restricted in the ideas he will seriously consider, but he bears an awesome metaphysical and metahistorical vision, and he will insist on the virtue of honest clarity. An unacknowledged establishment, on the other hand, must favor obfuscation–words whose meaning shifts depending on political expediency, refusal to honestly restate rival beliefs, insistance on attacking the motives of unbelievers.

This situation finds its exact counterpart in the theory and practice of political liberalism. Liberalism promotes its own legitimizing origin myth. The standard story is that the Reformation led to horrific warfare, interminable because consensus on theological disputes is unattainable, and liberalism arose as a neutral arbiter between rival sects, governing only according to the dictates of publicly-accessible reason. This is a gross distortion of the record. The wars of religion terminated with secure but territorially limited religious establishments (“cuius regio, eius religio”), not secular overlordship. What we know as liberalism or leftism has never arisen as a neutral arbiter between religious factions. From the “Glorious” Revolution to the French Revolution to all subsequent European political partisanship, the liberal side has always been one of the two major factions, in no way “above the fray”; it represents the urban bourgeoisie and Deism/atheism against their antagonists.

The pose of neutral arbiter, although implausible, is maintaind because it serves the purpose of prejudging all disputes in the liberals’ favor. Since liberalism is the voice of disinterested reason, contrary arguments are automatically “religious” or “prejudiced”, thus irrational, and can be dismissed without a hearing, even when they appear prima facie to appeal only to public reason (e.g. appeals to the rights of prenatal children or the grievances of Muslim peoples against American foreign policy).

The above is reflected in influential 20th century systemizations of liberalism (e.g. those of Rawls), according to which liberal government is neutral between rival conceptions of the good and comprehensive belief systems. It is, supposedly, what any rational person would agree to in ignorance of his own wider beliefs. This liberal self-understanding has been challenged by communitarians. Absent my understanding of the good, how can I definitively answer any political question, and even if I could, via a “thin” theory of the good that prizes only freedom and opportunity to pursue any individual’s fancy, how would such an answer remain authoritative to me with my full beliefs restored? More importantly for this discussion, the fact that liberalism answers substantive questions of governance belies its claim to neutrality. The liberal thin theory is itself one rival conception of the good which liberalism establishes over its rivals. The pretense of “neutrality” only means that the liberal is not even obliged to defend the truth of his own theory of the good; it is an excuse to preempt the debate in his own favor. States have never been mere facilitators of individuals’ pursuit of self-chosen private goods. Faced with two rival moral claims on the community, or two rival normative conceptions of what type of family or economy to promote, it must choose one. Faced with rival historical memories, it chooses which to commemorate and to teach in its schools. To govern simply is to impose beliefs.

Faith and epistemic humility

Liberalism and academia’s fake neutrality arise from a real problem, the danger of epistemic closure. The story goes that once people accepted on faith a set of inherited religious beliefs, which meant they were trapped in false beliefs with no way to correct them and a tendency to kill anyone bringing them the information they were missing. The solution was to formulate beliefs only on the basis of reason and experience. Unfortunately, reason and experience are insufficient in themselves to provide indisputable answers to the problems of public life. Furthermore, permanent openness to revision is unliveable–a good life requires practical certainties in the moral and narrative spheres. It is understandable that Enlightened man would solve the problem by declaring his beliefs coextensive with Reason itself, meaning that anyone who disagrees must be irrational. Epistemic closure returned with a vengeance.

From the far side of the Enlightenment, we can recognize something a remarkable about the obedience of faith. There is a measure of humble generosity in it. A man who accepts a proposition on faith will, naturally, think contrary beliefs are wrong, but he will not necessarily think them irrational. To accept on faith means–by definition!–that to disbelieve is not unreasonable. Indeed, Christians believe that faith is a gift from God, something that could not be acheived by unaided reason, so the state of the unbeliever is simply what the state of the believer would have been if he had not received this grace. Regardless of the content of faith, simply holding it confidently as a matter of faith allows one to be open to understanding the rationale for other beliefs. One does not need to misrepresent them or impute wicked motives to their followers. This is a limited open-mindedness, no doubt, but it is not nothing, and it’s not clear that humanity has come up with anything better, given the need for practical certainties. But doesn’t religion lead to murderous intolerance–wars of religion and whatnot? Sometimes, yes. However, history since the French and Russian revolutions has shown that atheists are even more murderously intolerant. How to get people not to kill each other is an unsolved problem. No use pretending otherwise.

So far we have spoken of faith as a sort of compromise between certainty and skepticism. In fact, it transcends both of these in a very fundamental way. Certainty and skepticism are basically attitudes toward propositions; faith is basically an attitude toward persons. If asked what is the object of his faith, a Christian will not list propositions about Jesus Christ, but Christ Himself. He believes in Jesus, which is fundamentally a personal response of trust, loyalty, and allegiance. Similarly, when we describe a spouse as “faithful”, we mean “loyal” rather than “credulous”. Of course, it is necessary to assent to certain propositions about the person in whom we have faith (e.g. his or her existence and fundamental goodness), but the heart of it is a relationship of faithfulness. Cardinal Newman once wisely wrote that religion is spiritual loyalty. I think no one has ever demanded faith in propositions except as a means to maintaining some relationship of trust and loyalty–to family or friends, to clan and ancestors, to community or nation, to God and creation. Whatever orthodoxy we hold, this is the only legitimate reason to limit our open-mindedness.

Academia’s false self-understanding

Many arguments could be given for the value of open debate in a setting like academia. All have some force, but few can withstand the felt moral urgency of suppressing “harmful” or “misinformed” speech. This will be true so long as the university community, from students to administrators, are confident of their ability to identify which beliefs are worthy of respectful consideration and which can be dismissed out of hand. They can only have this confidence because they are convinced that their worldview is indisputably correct in essentials and not open to serious revision, that to question it is immoral and (even worse) low status. This is seldom stated openly, since it clashes with their self-image as open-minded seekers and bold-truth tellers on a mission of discovery. In fact, the university is peopled by closed-minded provincialists on a mission to impose the ideology of the Western ruling class.

Well, one might reply, perhaps that is just the role to which history has condemned them, open-minded souls who so happen to have nothing to learn from anyone. After millennia of darkness, mankind has finally found the one true faith, any dissent from which is superstition, fascism, racism, sexism, conspiratorial thinking, etc, etc. A successful attack on university cancel culture must attack this confidence. Modern, educated man’s worldview has three pieces: a personal and social system of morality, a metanarrative giving meaning to history, and a metaphysics giving meaning to science. I argue that each of these is grievously deficient and that its rivals, when honestly confronted, are seen to possess important truths.

Against its morality

Modern man certainly claims to be more enlightened than his ancestors (and his lower-status, less “educated” contemporaries), but the boast he most savors is his supposed moral superiority. Once, it is said, people’s empathy and sense of duty only extended to a narrow circle of kin and neighbor. As humanity advanced, the circle expanded, until it matured in moral universalism: equal concern for every person, abhorrence of favoritism toward one’s own and of discrimination against the “Other”. Today, any devotion to the particular–all tribalism, racism, or nationalism–is considered a moral defect. As part of this “expanding circle”, responsibilities toward dependents, such as children and the eldery, that once belonged to particular persons–to family members, since family is the nexus of particular, personal dependence and responsibility–are increasingly assumed by the larger community in its impersonal mechanisms of free market and socialist government. This transference also is considered moral advance, of the large political community becoming more aware of and responsive to its responsibilities to its members. It is also celebrated in the name of personal autonomy. Roles in the traditional family are determined by unchosen biological facts such as sex and parentage, while the market and state assign roles by acquired expertise, allowing individuals a greater role in determining their place. Indeed, we attempt as far as possible to remake reproduction itself conform to the demands of personal choice via easy divorce, socially-approved promiscuity, contraception, abortion, and in-vitro fertilization. This also is considered to be moral advance.

This has increased our personal freedom and material security, but it is robbing us of what gives life most of its meaning and nobility. People find their deepest call to sacrificial self-giving not in abstract universal benevolence or pursuit of disinterested justice but in necessarily partial devotions to particular others: piety toward ancestors and cultural inheritance; loyalty to friends, neighborhood, clan, and country; love of one’s own parents, spouse, and children. Preferential attachment to one’s own and protectiveness toward one’s group, which modern morality condemns as “racism”/”fascism”, all other cultures regard as a basic duty, the failure of which is ingratitude, impiety, disloyalty. In-group preference is no more intrinsically hateful than my fidelity to my wife indicates a hatred of other women. Nor is transferring duties from the family to the state an unqualified moral advance. Extended families, churches, and other local associations atrophy as the state assumes their roles; local communities wither; individuals lose a school of virtue and responsibility, and they become atomized. Our pursuit of autonomy also coms at the expense of a sense of meaning. For most times and cultures, to be a man or woman was to participate in a universal mystery, to see in one’s own body and its sexually dimorphic proclivities a calling to a distinct excellence and self-giving role as father or mother. Eliminating predetermined sex roles increases our autonomy but destroys this sense of given significance and alienates us from our own bodies, reconceived as meaningless “plumbing”. If one can without fault trade one spouse for another, the marriage vow necessarily loses significance; freedom of choice is expanded at the cost that the choice becomes meaningless. All loosening of restrictions around sex (safeguarding its connection to lifelong fidelity, procreation, the chain of generations) necessarily also diminish the act’s significance.

One must choose between freedom and meaning. The modern liberal chooses the former; the conservative chooses the latter. Are we so sure that the liberal is right as to consider the matter beyond discussion? In fact, we know that modernity’s choice of impersonality and autonomy is gravely deficient. Unchecked, it leads to loneliness, nihilism, and despair.

Against its metahistory

It has been nearly a century since the publication of Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History, but the problems Butterfield identified have only worsened, both for popular and academic history. We are still taught to see the past as a Manichean struggle between the righteous forces of progress and the wicked forces of reaction. The triumph of the former, which is all gain and no loss, culminates in the present ideological establishment. To this, the 21st century has only added a layer of crude racial essentialism, associating nefarious reaction with “whiteness”.

Whig historiography presumes the absolute moral superiority of Leftism. To the extent this presumption is questioned, as we have done above, the normative judgments of Whig history are also rendered suspect. It should also be called into question by the crimes of the Left it chooses to ignore: the September massacres, the Reign of Terror, the genocide of the Vendee, the murderous anti-clericalism of the Spanish and Mexican Republicans and Russian Bolsheviks, the Holodomor, the Stalinist Great Purge, the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields of Cambodia. The number of people killed by communism in the last century has plausibly been estimated at around one hundred million; it is frankly grotesque that its ideological cousins presume to lecture the rest of us about tolerance and human rights. The story of World War II as “the Good War” serves as a legitimating origin myth for American hegemony and the European Union, but it requires forgetting the great crimes of the Allies: deliberate mass murder of civilians by arial bombardment (especially Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki)–justified by the immoral demand for unconditional surrender, the genocidal Morgenthau Plan, internment of innocent Japanese civilians, mass rape of German women by the Red Army, the red terror that killed a hundred thousand in “liberated” France, the inhumane expulsion of 12 million Eastern Germans causing a million dead. Finally, the new racialized history exaggerates the uniqueness of Western violence by forgetting near-ubiquitous comparable behavior by other peoples.

However, history should be more than a scorecard of grievances. It should let the past be seen on its own terms, letting those who study it step outside of contemporary assumptions and gain a broader perspective. It is here that Whig history really fails by making contemporary secular Western culture the standard and telos, with the true meaning of past movements being how they contributed to the present rather than what they meant in their own context and to their participants, who were often quite backward-looking. Renaissance humanists like Petrarch were motivated to restore the supposedly more ennobling culture of ancient Rome and to protect the Church from academic Averroism. Early Protestant Reformers like Luther were motivated to restore the purity of the Apostolic Church and remove semi-Pelagian accretions; they would have been horrified by the liberal Protestantism of Schleiermacher. Nineteenth and early twentieth century critics of industrial capitalism like the American Populists, the Southern Agrarians, and the English Distributists fought the growth of wage labor to defend a society of independent yeoman farmers and artisans, which has now been forgotten even as an ideal. The Middle Ages operated on a pluralist model of authority with no sense of a State monopoly on coercion or an idea that this State’s violence enjoyed greater sanction of rationality for being free of something called “religion” (an abstraction secularist moderns struggle to define which would have baffled pre-moderns). We error in reading our post-revolutionary combat between Church and secular State onto the medieval Investiture Controversy, Guelphs vs Ghibellines, or even early-modern Josephism and Gallicanism. To step outside the assumptions of our time and recognize how contingent they are is an intellectual liberation.

Against its metaphysics

The metaphysics of academia is called “physicalism”, the assertion that nothing exists except the entities postulated by physics. It is hardly obvious what these entities are, if by “physics” we mean the mathematical structure of quantum field theory, general relativity, and statistical mechanics rather than the sloppy descriptions of popularized accounts. No one really understands quantum mechanics–what ontological status to assign state vectors, what happens during a measurement. Other big questions–whether spacetime is a substance, whether it is even meaningful to say that spacetime “emerges” from some pre-geometric reality (as many theoretical physicists have recklessly asserted), whether parts are ontologically prior to wholes, whether particles (the excitations of quantum fields) are substantial or representations of the effect of one thing on another–remain equally unsettled. There is a widespread assumption that the basic metaphysics proposed by physics is clear with only details to be worked out, but this overstates our knowledge and understates the excitement of physics.

Some would say all that really exists is configurations of fields / particles and their arrangement. What about laws, which also appear in physics explanations? The Humeans say that these are just generalizations that happen to fit all the particular events that have actually happened, but this is implausible and can make no sense of the power of physics to answer counterfactual questions. Many implicitly treat the laws of physics as entities of their own, living in some Platonic realm, but then it is hard to understand how these abstract beings influence concrete beings. The idea sounds absurd, but notice that anyone who supports the popular claim that physics explains how the universe can come into being out of “nothing”, appealing to some free-floating Lagrangian and boundary condition / path integral selection rule, is committed to this ridiculous philosophy.

I bring all this up to “problemetize”, as the post-modernists would say. It is not at all clear what a commitment to believe the world as revealed by physics actually entails. For most people, though, physicalism is a negative doctrine: there is nothing to consciousness apart from arrangement of atoms in the brain; there are no fundamentally immaterial entities like Platonic Forms or God. This version of the doctrine is clear, but it is also false.

It is certain that materialism cannot explain consciousness in humans and the higher animals. I speak here as a convert, someone who once believed that neuroscience would eventually reduce the mind to physics but convinced myself that this is impossible by reinventing (I later learned) the inverted color spectrum thought experiment. If two people experience the same color differently but have been taught to use the same word for it, no knowledge of their physical brain configurations could recognize this. There presumably are correspondences between brain states and experiences (qualia), but physics can never explain this connection, since it has no place even to talk about the latter. Intentionality is also impossible to explain materialistically: that the state of one physical system (a brain, say) was caused by and resembles another system is an entirely different thing from saying that the state of the first system is about the second. No amount of complexity, no new physics, no historical knowledge of how evolution brought things to this point, can take a single step toward bridging this gap. All materialists can do is hide the problem by redefining experience and intention to something more amenable to them (e.g. behavior), an admission of defeat. The natural inference is some form of property dualism: there are beings in this world with two sets of irreducible properties: physical and mental. Indeed, it is natural to wonder if all beings have non-physical properties.

Platonic Forms (“universals” if you prefer) certainly exist (according to their own manner of being). This is clear from the incoherence and failure of every form of nominalism. Only Platonic realism satisfactorily explains such basic phenomena as multiple instances of the same quality or relation; only it can ground truths about abstractions and uninstantiated types. Attempts to explain resemblance without universals must invoke sets of or relations between particulars which are inexplicable apart from the universals and generally surreptitiously require universals to work anyway (e.g. the resemblance relation between each two red things must be the same relation, i.e. a universal). Every mathematician at work is a Platonist, so it is unsurprising that so many great mathematicians and philosphers of mathematics have embraced Platonism explicitly–Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Kurt Goedel, and Roger Penrose, to name a few. Platonism is hardly the obsolete kook viewpoint it is commonly taken to be. Nor does Aristotle’s compromise of forms existing only in particulars and in the mind work. As Ib Sina observed, if horseness in horses and horseness in our minds is to be more than an equivocation, there must be horseness itself, i.e. the Platonic form.

If this is true, then there coexists in observed objects particularity and universality, the-subject-that-participates and that-which-is-participated-in, potency and act. The grammatical form of proper noun subject matched to predicate by the linking verb “is” reflects this duality. The question arises whether all beings are potency-act combinations (hereafter “particulars”) or if there is at least one pure act–the One or God. Such a Being could not properly be spoken of, would break our grammar which presumes in all its objects a duality which here would not apply. It is only possible through extralinguistic mystical insight of if it can somehow incarnate itself as a particular for us, the two main possibilities of the world religions. A pure act would not have distinct possible states determinable by outside influence and so could only be at the beginning of causal chains. The possibility seems outlandish, but denying it creates its own difficulties. All particulars are at least in principle multiply instantiable, so the question arises why the instantiation number of each (between zero and infinity) is what it is. In all observed cases, existence is explained by outside causality. (Despite what you’ve heard, particles don’t “pop” into existence “out of nothing” in quantum field theory. In this theory, particles are excitations of fields which are always present and whose nature grounds the Lagrangian used to make predictions; particle creation is properly thought as a transition of the field from zero particle to non-zero particle state.) Suggesting that particulars can bring themselves into being creates a metaphysical problem worse than the problem of existence: the problem of non-existence–why don’t non-instantiated possible beings exist? It is thus unsurprising that metaphysicians in many cultures have put pure act at the start of their causal chains. The union of all particulars might somehow be a pure act (pantheism), or it might be the creation of one (monotheism) or more (polytheism) pure acts. Any of these possibilities contradicts atheism, the final pillar of physicalism.

Goals of education

College graduates are often surprisingly incurious. Many claim to have a modern, scientific view of the world while admitting that they know very little science and nothing at all of the mathematics that is its language. Humanities programs are full of professed Marxists who don’t claim to know anything about modern means and organization of material production. This complacent ignorance of their own worldview, of what they profess to regard as the fundamental level of physical or social reality, is quite odd–unless their scientism or Marxism is regarded not as positive belief but negatively as a defense against the claims of spiritual realities.

Students attend college because many employers still irrationally regard a college degree as a sign of intelligence and trainability. Colleges justify a fundamentally exploitative arrangement, in which students cripple themselves with debt to pay exhorbitant tuition in exchange for a credential and little direct job training, by claiming to provide an education. What though does it mean for a graduate to be educated? One might define education by content. Traditionally, education in Europe meant knowledge of Latin and Greek and their classics. One could imagine a more modern canon of knowledge which would include being able to write computer code, speak a foreign language, play a musical instrument, be familiar with Newtonian physics, linear algebra, Confucius, Sophocles, Plato, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky… A college degree in itself doesn’t guarantee any of this. Four years is hardly enough time to learn one’s own major, much less get more than superficial exposure to anything else. And why, one might ask, should it be necessary to become educated in all civilization’s treasures before beginning work and starting a family? Better for education to be a lifelong process. In any case, today there is no specific knowledge or skill that one can presume a person to know just in virtue of being a college graduate.

In the old humanistic ideal, the goal of education is to cultivate students’ aesthetic and moral sensibilities via classical literature. This presumes Western civilization is a precious inheritance, a repository of of wisdom and beauty that should be preserved. If this civilization is in fact uniquely evil, as the Whiggish consensus of today’s humanities departments insists, then there can be no reason for humanities studies at all. If study of the classics consists of excoriation for failure to reflect modern sensibilities or of faint praise of crediting them as “ahead of their time” for subtly anticipating these sensibilities–in sum if we have nothing really to learn from the classics–we are better off just forgetting them.

We academics often promise instead to instill nebulous reasoning skills such as “critical thinking” and “problem solving”, i.e. learning to figure stuff out rather than how to appreciate things. Claiming that college graduates are proficient in critical thinking has the advantage of being less easily disprovable than claiming they are proficient in Latin, but only because of the claim’s vagueness. A truly critical mind might ask whether the thinking skill fostered in one discipline is univocally the same as that fostered by another, whether it exists independently of knowledge content, whether it can be transferred from one discipline to another, whether it is best learned in a classroom environment rather than on the job, and whether university spokesmen are sufficiently disinterested to give honest answers to these questions. In my own field, physics, the most valuable thinking skills–ability to design an experiment or theoretical model to answer a question, ability to troubleshoot nonworking apparatus or code–only come after the assimilation of a large amount of physics knowledge; in fact, they only begin to be acquired at the undergraduate level at all and mostly develop during graduate research, i.e. after the coursework part of training is mostly finished. I suspect this is generally true that the college class is a particularly poor place to learn thinking skills, that the way to form critically-thinking problem solvers is to get them out of the classroom and into the lab or workplace actually solving problems. Except for a few specialties, college just delays this.

What we provide instead is a simulacrum of thinking skills. Genuine thinking is hard, but fitting information into a pre-existing framework is easy enough. One doesn’t need to know any science or have any skill with the scientific method to say that any phenomenon one encounters is really just a matter of atoms bumping around. One doesn’t need to know any history or have any skill in the social sciences to say that whatever one has seen in the news today is really just a case of oppression by the usual suspects of the usual victims. Like easy marks participating in their own deception, graduates take great pride in these acquired attitudes that set them apart from their lower-status fellow citizens. This is class chauvinism as a substitute for true education.

Surely a part of the cure is to realize that what academia values most, its frameworks, are false, while what it values less, its subject knowledge, is often enough true. One should not expect college to provide an easy key to understanding the world–there is no such thing–but what one learns about how to conjugate verbs in German and how to solve the Laplace equation is probably reliable. We professors do indeed have things of value to offer, just not what we imagine. We are competent specialists but poor philospher kings. The modern academic worldview is drastically different from the cultures of all other times and places, and in the most important matters of dispute the culture informing the contemporary university is wrong, while the prior consensus of mankind is right. This should humble us, perhaps enough to admit that imposing “our values” on students and new faculty has been an egregious breach of ethics and abuse of power, something we must repudiate and for which we must repent.

Against 'our values': Established falsehoods in academia