NeoNeocon highlights an article by Crispin Sartwell in the LA Times, titled The Smog of Academic Consensus. In it, Sartwell notes the overwhelming political bias among faculty, especially in the humanities, and points to its self-reinforcing nature.

And because there’s a consensus, there is precious little self-examination; a slant that we all share becomes invisible… Academic consensus is a particularly irritating variety of groupthink. First of all, the fact that everyone agrees and everyone has a doctorate leads to the occasionally explicit idea that all intelligent people think the same thing – that no one could disagree with, say, Obama-ism, without being an idiot… [A] professor has been educated, often for a decade or more, by the very institutions that harbor this unanimity. Every new generation of professors has been steeped in an atmosphere in which the authorities all agree and in which they associate agreement with intelligence – and with degrees, jobs, tenure and so on. If you’ve been taught that conservatives are evil idiots, then conservatism itself justifies a decision not to hire or tenure one. Every new leftist minted by graduate programs is an act of self-praise, a confirmation of the intelligence of the professors.

For vivid illustrations of this phenomenon in action, Indoctrinate U is a good place to start. See also this, this and this.

Update:

This interview with Indoctrinate U’s director, Evan Maloney, may also be of interest. Here’s a taste.

If we look at it today, it appears that in academia, the long march has succeeded. The ideology of the Frankfurt School now seems to be the default position among academics. But even though the roots of the movement may go back that far, it really was in the late 1960s when today’s crop of academics became politically active. Anti-war activists in the late 1960s ran the risk of getting drafted for Vietnam. And because they opposed that war, they naturally wanted to stay out of the fighting. So a lot of them worked around the draft by going into academic programs that would allow them to avoid the war. And finding an environment that they found friendly to their views, they stayed. And their presence served as an advertisement to like-minded people who may not have wanted to go work for ‘the man’ in the private sector. This attracted more fellow travellers into academia.

By the late 1970s, there was enough of a critical mass of ideologically-driven academics that they began to amass power within academic institutions. By controlling hiring committees, they were able to ensure that their colleagues were as ‘ideologically pure’ as they were. And by attaining power within school administrations, they were able to institute policies such as speech codes that tried to ensure that same ideological purity from their students. By the mid-1980s, we started seeing political correctness dictate the intellectual environment on campuses, and people started facing academic retribution for saying things that were ‘incorrect’ and for thinking things that ran counter to the dominant thinking. Groupthink set in, and the group became more extreme in the conformity that it demanded from people.

If students and faculty are spared serious, thoughtful contact with opposing arguments, their own views can easily become lazy, reflexive and glib. One can simply feel one is right, or ought to be, and that may be the end of the process. This should matter irrespective of one’s political leanings. If a person wants to be right about a given issue, it helps to know why their ideas are sound, if indeed they are. And knowing why an idea is sound generally arises from that idea being tested, vigorously, by people who disagree.

A while ago, the Liberal Conspiracy website inadvertently entertained us with the musings of Zohra Moosa, who was, sadly, “tired of spending so much of my time defending the most basic principles of what I stand for,” and, worse, “justifying why social and environmental justice are worth spending a lot of society’s money on.” Instead, Ms Moosa longed for “a space where these ideas are a given and the debate is about how best to actualize them.” As we’ve discussed elsewhere, radical socialist principles are so much easier to have if one isn’t obliged to defend them or explain how they might work. Explaining what “social and environmental justice” entails and why it should command “a lot of society’s money” is, it seems, an enormously fatiguing business and would, according to Ms Moosa, only “serve to distract.”

A more recent article, by Red Pepper contributor Laurie Penny, adopts a similar approach with a passionate rumination on “hypermasculinity” and “the madness of young men.” Ms Penny describes herself as a “socialist, feminist, deviant, reprobate, queer, addict, literature student, journalist and sometime blogger.” Her article begins thus,

Hypermasculinity, like hyperfemininity, is a pose of the powerless. There is a reason you don’t see gangs of City bankers stalking Moorgate and Maylebone with long knives and hoods pulled down over their heads – and it’s not because they’ve been better brought up.

Adamant stuff, if not entirely convincing. You’ll notice there’s no mention of the considerable number of working class youths who don’t roam the streets armed with knives intent on looking menacing. Instead, it is simply asserted that criminality and thuggish posturing are “poses of the powerless” and nothing at all to do with how children are raised. Or indeed with whether they’re raised in any meaningful sense of the word. 

When you’ve got money and status and class and education and power, you don’t need to act out physical prowess and aggression because it’s not all you’ve got.

Well, perhaps; though this assertion is somewhat at odds with the very next sentence. 

The hard-working ladies at Spearmint Rhino might well testify to the fact that City lads too are prone to the odd bout of gibbon-like strutting and howling.

At this point one might wonder why it is that some boys from very humble beginnings nevertheless go on to achieve varying degrees of “status, class, education and power” – perhaps even as City bankers – while others from similar backgrounds do not. One might think this a subject worthy of mulling, perhaps even research. Though, clearly, Ms Penny doesn’t. Instead, such details are brushed aside in favour of a statement that is much less intriguing but undoubtedly true. 

Finer minds than mine have discussed this function of the culture of young male violence.

While advocating voting based on skin pigment, Ron Rosenbaum champions the phenomenon of liberal guilt:

Since when has guilt become shameful? Since when is shame shameful when it’s shame about a four-centuries-long historical crime? Not one of us is a slave owner today, segregation is no longer enshrined in law, and there are fewer overt racists than before, but if we want to praise America’s virtues, we have to concede – and feel guilty about – America’s sins, else we praise a false god, a golden calf, a whited sepulcher, a Potemkin village of virtue…

Goodness, a moral crescendo is upon us. Someone fetch a towel. It’s heartening to know that there are among us some whose moral insights are so keen they entitle those so endowed to dictate how the rest of us should – must – feel.

Guilt is good, people!

Well, that rather depends on what a person is feeling guilty about, or pretending to feel guilty about.

The only people who don’t suffer guilt are sociopaths and serial killers.

Actually, while individuals described as sociopaths are generally unrestrained by empathy, some have been known to be moved by quite improbable, often ludicrous, things. Simulating feelings purely for effect is another common marker of sociopathy, and it’s possibly worth noting that such people also tend to be grandiose, narcissistic and insufferably self-righteous. 

Guilt means you have a conscience. You have self-awareness, you have – in the case of America’s history of racism – historical awareness… Critics of Obama supporters who use the phrase “guilty liberal” or “liberal guilt” in a condescending, above-it-all manner suggest there’s something weak about feeling guilt.

There is a non sequitur here, one that’s repeated several times. An awareness of history – say, regarding slavery – doesn’t in itself necessitate feelings of any particular kind. It isn’t clear, to me, why a person should feel profoundly responsible for the actions of complete strangers who lived centuries earlier. Unless, of course, one subscribes to notions of some collective, genealogical guilt, with its infinite regress and connotations of collective punishment.

This particular critic of liberal guilt would argue that such claims and protestations aren’t “weak” as such, insofar as they require a great deal of effort to maintain. (For instance, saying “we have to… feel guilty about America’s sins” – followed by the words “a false god, a golden calf, a whited sepulcher, a Potemkin village of virtue” – isn’t an easy thing to do while keeping a straight face. Though the effort isn’t necessarily deserving of applause.) What irks isn’t feebleness, but incoherence and dishonesty. To publicly rend one’s garments over some vicarious, borrowed sin is not to affirm conscience or poignant human feeling, but to parody those things and to indulge in emotional pantomime and moral masturbation. Rather like this:

But was slavery not immoral? Was not the century of institutionalised racism and segregation that followed the end of slavery a perpetuation of “flawed values” that the nation should feel an enduring guilt over? Should we abolish the history and memory of slavery and racism just because they’re no longer legally institutionalised?

Again, note the car crash of non sequitur. I’ll paraphrase for clarity:

Slavery was immoral. It was abolished. Therefore we must still feel guilt, or pretend to – all of us, indefinitely and forever. And those who don’t pretend to feel this way are abolishing history.

Assertions of this kind are, very often, for the benefit of a sympathetic audience and thus, ultimately, for the benefit of the performer. As I’ve argued before, saying, very loudly, “it’s all my fault” is only a notch and a half away from saying “it’s all about me.” Rosenbaum goes on to claim,

People who lack guilt also lack humility.

Well, people who affect guilt and presume to tell others that they too should pretend such things are, in my experience, the really arrogant sons-of-bitches. That’s my objection to the nasty little vanity called “liberal guilt”.

Avoid feeling guilty; make a donation.

A while ago, I quoted an essay by Professor Zygmunt Bauman – a prolific, if unconvincing, advocate of socialism – and noted his readiness to make rather questionable statements. Among them, his belief that a leftist worldview follows from two assumptions:

The first assumption is that it is the duty of the community to insure its individual members against individual misfortune. And the second is that, just as the carrying capacity of a bridge is measured by the strength of its weakest support, so the quality of a society should be measured by the quality of life of its weakest members.

These, Bauman claims, are, or should be, the “constant and non-negotiable assumptions” of the left. But one of them at least has an obvious flaw. The components of a bridge do not, I’m assured, have volition. Bricks, cables and metal beams do not make choices that determine their strength and functionality. Human beings do make choices that very often, quite dramatically, determine their prospects and quality of life. Bauman’s essay frequently assumes a kind of self-evident righteousness, the details of which are never quite explained, leading to a tone that is not so much analytical as tribal and pious: 

The left wants a humane society, one that strives for justice for all its members. The left defines a just society as one that is aware that it is not-yet-sufficiently-just, that is haunted by this awareness and thereby spurred into action.

Bauman is happy to insist that his assumptions are “the basis for a self-assertive left,” and that they “set the left on a perpetual collision course with the realities of the human condition under the rule of capitalism.” Not a perpetual collision with the human condition per se, of course – such a thing couldn’t possibly be entertained – but with the human condition “under the rule of capitalism” – also referred to as the “global capitalist order” – one which entails “wastefulness and immorality, manifested in social injustice.” These are bold claims, and fairly typical, yet Bauman – hailed as “one of Europe’s most influential sociologists” – seems to feel no obligation to substantiate them with particulars. These things are, apparently, simply understood. Despite a rush to claim the badge of “social justice” – a term that remains oddly undefined – the professor doesn’t explain in any detail what kind of action he would have us spurred towards. And given the role of individual judgment in how a person’s life plays out, questions of moral action do necessarily follow. Lots of them. I raised a few of the more obvious ones before, but I think some of them bear repeating:

Why is a society to be measured by how the least able fare, seemingly irrespective of why that situation arises and persists? How are people to be insulated from, and compensated for, what are often consequences of their own choices and priorities? How much control is to be exerted and how many freedoms curtailed – including the freedoms of those suffering misfortune? On what basis does Professor Bauman imagine he has a right to ensure that society’s members optimise the quality of their lives, insofar as they’re able? How, exactly, will this feat be achieved, and by whom?

If some individuals fail to make the approved decisions in the approved sequence and with sufficient foresight, will those choices be made by others, and if necessary enforced? Will individuals be compensated for all of their own shortcomings, dispositions and misjudgments, or just some of them? Who is Bauman to determine what constitutes an acceptable qualitative outcome? And how far would he go to ensure those outcomes are arrived at, regardless of the cost to others who may not share his view?

Tawfik Hamid ponders jihad and the perils of euphemism.   

Yes, the word “jihad” has several, including some peaceful, meanings – but that doesn’t change the fact that most authoritative Islamic texts and systems of jurisprudence maintain that its primary meaning is “warfare to subjugate the world to Islam”… And it is simply a fact that jihad, as taught by Sunni Islam’s four schools of jurisprudence, is either a war to defend Muslims or to impose Islam on non-Muslims. It may be uncomfortable to admit these facts – and doing so may run certain risks. But it is true, and the costs of ignoring reality are far higher than the benefits of glossing over it.

Not that this has prevented Islam’s hagiographer-in-chief, Karen Armstrong, from glossing furiously, with claims that, “jihad… for most Muslims, has no connection with violence,” and, “until recently, no Muslim thinker had ever claimed [violent jihad] was a central tenet of Islam.” By whitewashing the concept of jihad and its fundamental importance in Islamic history, apologists, moderate believers – and those to whom they appeal – are tactically wrong-footed. Moderation so conceived is essentially a sleight-of-hand, and, however well-intended, is at odds with history and Muhammad’s own exhortations to violence. It isn’t enough to pretend that jihad was originated and understood as something fluffy and benign. (In May 1994, when Yasser Arafat called for a “jihad to liberate Jerusalem,” it wasn’t entirely obvious how such a thing might be achieved by an inner spiritual struggle with no physical connotations.)

Hamid continues,

Islamists are not waiting for “infidel” Americans to define jihad for them; they defined it themselves, a very long time ago. If Muslim leaders wish to insist that the word refers primarily to a peaceful struggle against the self, they have that option. Let them clearly and publicly denounce the current doctrine and establish a new one. That’s the answer – not redefining reality… The movie The Usual Suspects may have put it best: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” One of the most devious tactics used by the Islamists is scaring their enemy out of speaking the plain truth about this virulent strain of Islam, for fear it might alienate or offend millions of moderate Muslims. But this ensures that no one will directly confront their violent ideologies and the books that contain them.

Revisionists like Armstrong would have their readers believe that jihadist ideology is an aberration of Islam, disconnected from the religion’s history and origins. But jihad – understood as aggressive warfare to advance the spread of Islam – is not some modern invention of bin Laden, or Sayyid Qutb, or al-Wahhab. It’s the invention of Muhammad and his immediate successors, and has been sacralised and codified by centuries of Islamic law. This is jihad as it appears in many Islamic schoolbooks. Mainstream commentaries on the Qur’an, including those by Ibn Kathir, explain in detail what constitutes “provocation” and thus justifies jihad. Kathir, like many others, defines as provocation pretty much anything that hinders the spread of Islam or contradicts its message. Thus, the threshold is so low – and so unilateral – as to enable the aggressor to cast himself as victim. This historical line of thinking explains in part the passive-aggressive tone so common to Islamist rhetoric. 

This accumulation of precedent and theology, and the sacralising of expansionist supremacism, cannot be wished away as some malicious fabrication. It has to be challenged head-on and, if possible, reformed. The theology of the past needn’t define a religion’s future; but it’s hard to see how a more functional form of Islam can be coaxed into existence on an institutional scale without a searching critique of its founder and his behaviour. This is the intimate flaw of Islam; the source of so much dysfunction and extraordinary insecurity. The founder of a religion, his example and the means by which he urged others to propagate the faith are not insignificant details. They influence laws, a worldview and the broader tenor of what follows. And when atrocity and intolerance can be traced back directly to Muhammad’s own deeds and purported revelations, dissonance and dishonesty may be difficult to avoid.