The View From 1776

Politically-correct, multicultural education, like a lost spacecraft drifting forever in space with no destination and no way to return home, has lost contact with real life.  It has become a caricature of science, a bastardized version that Friedrich Hayek called scientism.

Jacob Laksin’s review on the City Journal website of Yale professor Anthony Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life describes the growing irrelevance of liberal education in the hands of liberals.

Mr. Laskin writes:

As a professor in Yale’s Directed Studies program and a self-identified political liberal, [Professor Anthony] Kronman has an advantage over the conservative critics whose arguments he revisits here—bien-pensant academics can’t dismiss him as just another “wingnut” wielding his ideological ax against the Ivory Tower.

Kronman acknowledges that many humanities programs exist mainly to inculcate students in the “political liberalism” of their professors...

After fifty years in which most Americans have been exposed to college-level social sciences, it’s easy to forget how far we have drifted into empty space with no markers for civilized conduct and reasonable discourse.

The “social” sciences were a product of the French Revolutionary philosophers who gave us the atheistic and materialistic religion of socialism.  Their conception was that laws similar to those in physics and chemistry could be discovered by intellectuals, who are entitled to use them to control political societies and individual human beings, directing them toward the intellectuals’ vision of perfection.

In that regard, look at current campaign proposals by liberals.  The common thread among them is the assumption that only the political state can improve people’s lives.  It is a liberal article of faith that individual economic and social freedom lead only to the bete noir of socialism: unequal distribution of income.  Better for all to be equally poor than for some to succeed exceptionally, even if the latter raises everyone’s living standard far more than high taxes and suffocating regulations.

For example, Congressman John Dingell proposes to eliminate the home mortgage interest tax deduction for people whose houses are, in his opinion, too large. 

New York’s liberal mayor Michael Bloomberg imposed limitations on the cooking methods of restaurants on the questionable theory that government regulations are required to improve personal health.

Democrats want to raise automobile mileage standards to levels that can be met only by forcing us to stop driving the roomier autos we favor overwhelmingly.  Federal mileage standards are based on the average of all cars sold by a manufacturer.  So few Americans want to buy small, high-mileage cars that Detroit will have to sell them at a loss to raise the average mileage of all cars that it sells.  The result will be to hand the domestic auto market over to the Asian producers. 

John Edwards, campaigning forthrightly as a socialist dedicated to forced income equality, proposes to raise the Federal minimum wage and taxes on individuals and corporations to levels that will result both in accelerated outsourcing of jobs, and further losses of market share to low-cost Japanese and Chinese producers.

For American liberals, heirs to the French Revolution’s scientistic tradition, there are no independent values, no right or wrong.  As Thomas Huxley, Charles Darwin’s evangelistic champion of atheistic materialism proclaimed, there is no such thing as sin; there is only survival of the fittest.

Liberals are so preoccupied with looking into the mirror to admire their god - themselves - that they fail to notice the implication of their paradigm.  If there are no independent standards of right and wrong, there is no basis for opposition to Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler.  Survival of the fittest means that might makes right.

Liberalism therefore is a one-way street headed toward tyranny.

Individuals, both in socialistic political doctrine and in Darwinian evolution, are like wood chips floating on a stream.  Soulless, impersonal, random, materialistic forces of the physical world are the only factors ultimately controlling human life.  Individuals, in that conception, have no meaning outside their economic and social classes, which exist only to implement the will of the political state. 

Liberty for individuals in this servile political state, fittingly for a materialistic polity, is confined to indulgence in sensual pleasure: gambling in state lotteries, doing drugs, marital infidelity, sexual promiscuity, and lewdness and crudity in entertainment.  To paraphrase Marx, self-centered sensuality is the opium of the liberals that keeps the masses subservient.