Twilight of the Universities

In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis prophesies the twilight of the universities. “In a sort of ghastly simplicity,” he writes, “we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” Today, the space where intellect, wisdom, and common sense once commingled, forming the intellectual heart — the very source of John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University — has become a vacuole of attrition. Various ideological succubae have drained naturalness and intelligence until all that remains are malformed sentiments puffed and prodded and propped, creating a surrogate organ unfit for human nature but perfectly suited to the deadening identity politics that have swept through our institutions. This is loss without gain; Newman would understand.

At the heart of identity politics is the fallacious and ideological piety that a person’s “discomfort” is a result of embedded and pervasive prejudice. The microaggressions he is made to endure, being either un- or sub-conscious on the part of the perpetrator, are all too conveniently free from basic principles of verification and are instead extorted into existence, and into governing policies as apodictic fact. And that is the point, isn’t it? If the agenda is intrinsically fraudulent, then it can only be manufactured into existence by equally fraudulent language games in which every drive is a lust to rule.

This extorted reality, wholly artificial and yet viciously inalienable, attempts to render dissenting, nuanced, and Christian voices not participants in the dialogue of the liberal arts but nonentities. The Christian approach is nullified by claims of victimhood, which, for those with eyes to see, is similar to Moloch, that bronze statue of costly sacrifice that seeks to consume the young in a diseased fire. For this new progressivism to function, it must take on the patina of dialogue. It finds a congenial partner in its own reflection, which neither disagrees with itself nor alleviates the highway of superimpositions suffocating intellectual discourse, goodwill, and common sense.

I have experienced a Catholic institution undergoing this ideological takeover. Of great importance is that these ferociously quick changes are newer, unlike at other American universities, which are now nothing more than celebrated incubators of “wrongthink.” That newness makes the loss a far more poignant and potent moving image of decline and fall. Such radical ideological shifts have occurred primarily in the past few years; prior to that, the institution had an often unexpressed but nevertheless real sense of traditional principles. Like all universities, it has had a history of highs and lows, but nevertheless it retained the rarity of an animal on the extinction list found again. It always re-found and re-formed itself around the naturalness of traditional living, and it imbued that within its educational principles. It was never a Stanford or a Berkeley, but neither did it offer discipleship to modern infatuations, nor was it one of the many universities formed admirably in response to the intellectual and moral morass, such as Hillsdale, the University of Dallas, or Ave Maria. It was a university that had somehow escaped, again and again, ideological makeover — until now. What remains is a protracted burial of sorts. There is, for those still living, heartrending grief. What is lost when the order and integrity of an educational system heave and die is the relation of educator and student, of wisdom as a journey from the profane to the sacred, from ignorance to truth.

University politburos erode the élan vital, that vital force, of those professors who dare to defend academic freedom, Catholic identity, and conscience rights, and who believe that diversity measures require prudent definition. If diversity and inclusion are indeed anything meaningful, they could never be monolithic vagary. Neither are they a concatenation of empty mumbo jumbo strung out on the savage little superiorities that come from the unchecked license to suppress essential civilizational values under the banner of the cult of victim.

“At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right.”

— Miguel de Unamuno, spoken to Fascist General José Millán-Astray at the University of Salamanca during the Spanish Civil War

When René Descartes rendered the mind and body diametrically unrelated, both freedom and truth became identified with the will no longer subordinated to the intellect. This alienation motivates the current societal demands for an intractable pan-agreement on race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and so on. It is bolstered further by a pantomimed democracy, becoming increasingly totalitarian as it influences businesses and higher learning. Both the enforced pan-agreement and its companion, a weakened democratic state, are the inevitable result of an understanding of truth and freedom as wholly nonrational and thus unable to be examined, defended, or rejected on rational grounds.

This is where critical race theory (CRT) finds its perfect “hallowed” ground. One of the key features of CRT is the view that traditional law and legal institutions, academic and educational institutions, are utterly and systemically biased against racial minorities. The notion of natural law, in which an intrinsic goodness is open to all persons as a guiding principle, is either held suspect or outright rejected. Everything is a socially constructed concept; truth and guiding principles are products of affective will-to-power and consensus. According to CRT, such notions as due process, academic freedom, and processes of grievance are part of a traditional, conventional system that is systemically unjust. There must be, therefore, an overthrowing of all traditional, conventional legal and educational structures if CRT is to deliver social and economic justice. This means:

A. Due process is not a natural right of all human beings but secondary to the affective character and emotive power of testimony, and

B. a person’s victimization oversees the parameters of academic freedom and should suppress that freedom if it violates sentiment.

CRT, now dilated into all types of identity politics, is the perfect vehicle to empower, via enforced “celebration,” all the identities opposed to Catholic teaching. Many faithful Catholic educators gladly teach themes from Sanger and Sartre, from Foucault and Butler, espousing their potential merits and defects. But it is quite another thing to be forced to condone, even celebrate, these identities as the new ideal, and to have to do this at a Catholic institution where the natural and justifiable expectation is an upholding of Catholic teaching. How, then, is the university to be in any way Catholic, beyond the most nominal recognition of a distant historical founding, if, for example, the pro-life club is refused a place at Fall Fest, or if a eucharistic procession is deemed offensive? At this particular university, the entire full-time staff of the theology department was let go, and the only full-time philosophy professor let go, thereby removing any foundation in Catholic teaching — a so-called source of discomfort and oppression. Is this the welcomed inclusivity? And in the glorious, fallacious logic of it all, apparently this is the Catholic identity. We haven’t lost our Catholic identity, silly, only gained it through a redefinition of terms, which, of course, can be redefined in perpetuity!

“The God whom atheists abandon is of mean conception and easily abandoned because He is in their own image.”

— Fr. Martin C. D’Arcy, Humanism and Christianity

What is a foundation at all if it can be redefined into oblivion? CRT, like so many other ideologies, will only permit other fallacious will-based desires, which may, at present, be rejected by conventional taboo but not by any meaningful objective grounds when Cartesianism is the secret foundation. If a person desires to become another race and surgically alters his face to take on the features characteristic of that race, this is considered aggressive ethnic appropriation. But how is that different from transgenderism, in which the Cartesian-like mind performs or assigns gender? How is any of this different from the shifting-sands foundation of CRT? What genuine grounds are there to argue for meaningful differences? If there are no grounds, what is the point of academic institutions, if all things are will-based, nonrational, competing perspectives? At best, we can have a sociological accounting of those shifting and competing perspectives, but no more a higher learning, which receives its ascent only from participation in irreducible Truth. At worst, we have something else altogether. Plato sensed its blinding and unrelenting loss: the prisoners in the cave are enslaved in every conceivable sense, for they consider themselves the freest and most enlightened. For them, what is up is down, and what is down is up; the good is fiercely loathed, and the greatest of lies is loved as the home of truth and goal of life.

When falsehoods are accepted to ratify a needed sentiment and condition, no matter how painful, these falsehoods inevitably open the door to more degenerations in meaning and intelligibility. The way forward when faced with questions of diversity and inclusion is never one convenient lie but always the inconvenient truth motivated by love as wisdom. For it is only in Truth — not as a subjective possession but as transcendent Beauty and Goodness — that we are set free.

“We seem to be caught between two forms of sacrilege, the one dealing in sugary dreams, the other in savage fantasies. Both are forms of falsehood, ways of reducing and demeaning our humanity. Both involve a retreat from the higher life, and a rejection of its principal sign, which is beauty. But both point to the real difficulty, in modern conditions, of leading a life in which beauty has a central place.”

— Roger Scruton, Beauty

If, for Plato, the difference between knowledge and delusion separates the living from the dead, how do we respond to those educational regimes that morally molest the youth, sacrificing their spiritual wonder to the ever-genuflected altars of cancel culture? To think that our alma maters mean “nourishing mothers,” when so many institutions are becoming, at best, absentee parents, and, at worst, nests of vipers!

“You cannot imagine what sorrow and anger seize one’s whole soul when a great idea, which one has long and piously revered, is picked up by some bunglers and dragged into the street, to more fools like themselves, and one suddenly meets it in the flea market, unrecognizable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion, without harmony, a toy for stupid children.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons

Education steeped in transcendental Beauty and the Great Books of history and culture raises the passions into the fullness of Being. But now it is replaced by a dictatorial ugliness that flattens the passions into serviceability and rids the heart of love. Everything becomes plaything as instrument, rather than play as the paideia of a transcendent ethos. Wisdom places the student as an orbiting planet around the divine Sun, as a person and citizen on the way to the light of which we are not the source. But ugliness allows for the eclipse of the Sun, a totalizing revolution, in which we manufacture the dim light of false wisdom through sex, identity, politics, social engineering, and a categorical refusal of all divine meaning. But crucially, the anchor is sexual politics as the most entrenched form of totalitarian ideology. The breaking down of sex and embodiment, in which the divine is now perpetually malformed into our shifting image, has no positive goal. Its movement comes from the destruction of all prior foundations. This is the new root of education, and it will consume itself from within and without. In essence, there is no chance for higher learning in such a consumptive foundation.

“Esther did not like love, she did not want to be in love, she refused this feeling of exclusivity, of dependence, and her whole generation refused it with her. I was wandering among them like some kind of prehistoric monster with my romantic silliness, my attachments, my chains. For Esther, as for all the young girls of her generation, sexuality was just a pleasant pastime, driven by seduction and eroticism, which implied no particular sentimental commitment…. The centuries-old male project, perfectly expressed nowadays by pornographic films, that consisted of ridding sexuality of any emotional connection in order to bring it back into the realm of pure entertainment had finally, in this generation, been accomplished. What I was feeling, these young people could not feel, nor even exactly understand, and if they had been able to feel something like it, it would have made them uncomfortable, as if it were ridiculous and a little shameful, like stigmata in ancient times. They had succeeded, after decades of conditioning and effort, they had finally succeeded in tearing from their hearts one of the oldest human feelings, and now it was done…they had reached their goal: at no moment in their lives would they ever know love. They were free.”

— Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island

Faithful Catholic professors at the university in question, who now must find new jobs, will have to look out of state or even out of the country, move their families, and disrupt their children’s schooling and friendships. These are not small prices to pay. These same professors may have to accept entry-level positions that do not reflect their exceptional skillset or years of service. This is the reality of being a Catholic and teaching according to Catholic principles at a Catholic university: getting kicked to the curb and perp-walked out, stripped of any sense of integral personalism. Academic freedoms are whittled down into sharpened daggers to silence these Catholic voices. The foundational rights to dialogue, discourse, and disagreement are now perverted into the plaything of totalitarian ideological demand. To speak the truth will be to suffer for it. To be a Christian is to learn to die.

“It is only by a definite and even deliberate narrowing of the mind that we can keep religion out of education…. Now secular education really means that everybody shall make a point of looking down at the pavement, lest by some fatal chance somebody should look up at the lamp. The lamp of faith that did in fact illuminate the street for the mass of mankind in most ages of history, was not only a wandering fire seen floating in the air by visionaries; it was also for most people the explanation of the post…. The stoic, like the tramp, may lean on it; the optimist, like the drunkard, may embrace it; the progressive may attempt to climb it, and so on. So it is with those who merely bump into a headless world as into a lampless post; to whom the world is a large objective obstacle. I only say that there is a difference, and not a small or secondary difference, between those who know and those who do not know what the post is for. The deepest of all desires for knowledge is the desire to know what the world is for and what we are for.”

— G.K. Chesterton, “The Religious Aim of Education”

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