Fred Siegal:
...Another insult the incoherent left throws out these days is liar. They clearly do not understand the dictionary meaning of the term, and apply it to factual assertions they do not agree with. It boils down to the same problem Seigal describes in his conversations with the Deaniac. They don't comprehend the difference between insult and reasoned argument. However, insults are rarely persusive. Read Seigal's whole piece.
Back in the fall of 2003, when Dr. Dean was still riding high in the Presidential primary, I’d listened in on a conversation among undergraduate Deaniacs outside my office at Cooper Union in the East Village. "This just doesn’t feel like America any more," one of them said to a friend, who replied, "Fuck Bush," and pointed to a button on his jacket bearing the same slogan.
It’s an old professor’s habit, but I had to engage them. "What does that mean?" I asked the fellow with the button. "Bush is bullshit," he replied, "the most evil man in the world." When I said that wasn’t an argument and pressed him, he acknowledged that "Saddam isn’t a good guy," but "who are we"—he pointed both to me and his like-minded friend—to "judge Saddam Hussein?"
"Why not?" I asked. He replied with an answer right out of the postmodern playbook. Americans can’t judge another culture, he insisted, because there is no common morality. But if that’s the case, I asked, why then was George Bush "undoubtedly the most evil man in the world?" He seemed puzzled by the idea that his version of an emotional truth might seem incoherent to others.
Like the fascist writers of the 1930’s from whom their postmodern teachers had drawn their ideas, these Deaniacs were both engaged in politics and deeply cynical about democracy, which they saw as a game manipulated by nefarious forces led by Fox News. As they see it, there is little to argue; the only question is "which side are you on?" Doubtful that informed debate could settle much, they hoped to impose their will on a backward country that wickedly refused to see the appeal of a "Fuck Bush" platform.
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As academia turned to political activism, think tanks took over its role as the main source of policy ideas for new, generally Republican, administrations. In this last election, academia contributed little in the way of usable ideas, though it was a major source of Democratic Party funding.
"While Republicans were commandeering the nation’s political apparatus," noted historian Richard Wolin, the theorists of a postmodern left, cuckolded by history, were conquering academia. Their victory has come at a high cost. Once a forward-looking hothouse for discussion and debate, academia, taken as a whole, has been increasingly dominated by freeze-dried 1960’s radicals and their intellectual progeny, who have turned much of the humanities and social sciences into a backwater.
In 1989, when Eastern Europeans were reclaiming the ideals of human rights and political freedom, students and faculty on the Stanford campus were marching with 1988 Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson shouting "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture’s got to go." Up the road, Berkeley—a city, dominated by the university, which conducts its own foreign policy—announced it was adopting Jena in Communist East Germany as a sister city, this just a few months before the Berlin Wall fell.
But then again, academia has been getting it wrong over and over again. Criminologists, as a group, were convinced that crime couldn’t be cut; sociologists were sure that welfare reform couldn’t work because it didn’t go to the root causes of poverty; and Sovietologists were certain that the USSR of the 1980’s had matured into a successful, even pluralistic society. As for radical Islam, the consensus view of the Middle Eastern Studies Association was that the danger to America came from a "terror industry" which conjured imagined threats in order to justify American aggression.
But even as academia’s batting average has declined, its claim to superior knowledge has expanded. The old ideal of disinterested scholarship, or at least the importance of attempting to be objective, has been displaced. In 2003, the University of California’s Academic Assembly did away with the distinction between "interested" and "disinterested" scholarship by a 45-3 vote. As Berkeley law professor Robert Post explained, "The old statement of principles was so outlandishly disconnected to what university teaching is now that it made no sense to think about it that way."
The reality, as Professor Post recognized, is that many professors now literally profess. Far from teaching the mechanics of knowledge, they are in fact preachers of sorts, spreading a gospel akin to that of Howard Dean. And if they are part of grievance-studies departments, like Ward Churchill or Joseph Massad, there never was any expectation of objectivity: They were knowingly hired as activists and are now puzzled as to why this has become a problem for some of their students and the larger public. After all, what they preach is built into the very orientation students are given when they arrive on campus. New students at many schools are quite literally given a new faith in which the world is divided into victims and victimizers, with little room for common ideals of citizenship or rationality, and no basis for debates that approximate the give-and-take of politics.
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The effect of victims-studies departments, in which intellectual standards are ignored—the personalization of the political by way of feminism, and the epistemological nihilism of postmodernism—has cut much of academia off from its lifeblood of free and open debate. Like the Deaniacs, who wrote off the success of the Iraqi elections, they never need to refine their arguments in light of new evidence, since criticism can be written off as "Republican," or "racist," or "sexist," or "Islamophobic," or just plain "bullshit."
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If the Democratic Party comes to be dominated by angry ill-informed activists who believe that George Bush is more evil than Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, it will have a bleak future. It’s time for Democrats, if only out of their own self-interest, to start paying attention to the tragic decline of our college and universities. If they don’t, the party’s future will be in the hands of the acadeaniacs.
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