The web site Tech Central Station has an interesting two-part article by Edward Feser concerning American universities; entitled “Why Are Universities Dominated by the Left?” and “The Opium of the Professors.”
Feser’s article leads up to this rather startling denouement:
“The ‘medicine’ prescribed in the university curriculum reflects this: ‘critical thinking’ is always and exclusively criticism of traditional Western notions in religion, culture, politics, and morality; ‘open-mindedness’ is always and exclusively open-mindedness toward ideas hostile to these same traditional Western notions; and so forth.
"’But does this thesis not have one glaring defect,’ one might ask, ‘in that the common man, too, often considers traditional Judeo-Christian morality burdensome, yet nevertheless does not endorse the Leftist vision of the intellectuals?’ But in fact the common man now does largely share this vision, at least in spirit, and that is one reason it continues to dominate the universities despite decades of conservative protest. This is true even though he maintains also, and inconsistently, a sentimental attachment to the older traditions of the West.
“As the intelligentsia has gotten progressively more 'progressive,' so too under its influence -- via the universities, media, mainline churches, etc. -- has the average non-intellectual, just not as thoroughly or ideologically....The call to self-reliance and self-restraint, to family and faith, still has for him its charms; yet the prospects of ever-expanding government handouts at others' expense, and of endless sensual indulgence without consequences (except to one's children, ex-spouses, the unborn, and future generations, but never mind them) -- such prospects exert a pull too powerful for the average citizen of the modern West to resist, flabby and desiccated as he is already from half a century or so of welfarism and sexual ‘liberation.’”
Is there any basis for this statement? Is the conservative trust in the common-sense of the average American misplaced? Is the American character this vulnerable?
Posted by Rick Penner at February 16, 2004 10:17 PM