Rod Dreher's Blog, page 644

Solidarité!

UPDATE: From a reader in Paris:

This is — in a way — the beginning of the end. More than 100 dead innocent people so far. At the same time, our best special ops troops are being deployed all over Africa. We don’t have enough soldiers and our enemy lives next door. This is war, a new kind of war and we better get ready ASAP. “Hell is empty and all the devils are here”. Thank you for you prayers, this is a combat beyond reason. We won’t go quietly into the night, but we might go at the end.

Fun With Louisiana Political Ads

As you may have heard, we here in the Great State are undergoing a gubernatorial runoff. Weirdly enough for a red state like ours, the Democrat, State Rep. John Bel Edwards, is the front runner — this, mostly having to do with the unpopularity of his Republican challenger, US Sen. David Vitter. You know we here at TAC take no sides in political races, on account of our non-profit status, so I’m showing you a couple of political ads to give you an idea of the flavor of the campaign.

Vitter spent the general election portion of this campaign refusing to answer questions about his involvement in a prostitution scandal some years ago. Well, in the runoff period, this harsh Edwards ad forced him to talk:

Vitter changed strategy, and has been lately discussion his unspecified “mistakes” in the past. Here is a very weird ad now airing on TV:

If Willie Robertson has forgiven Vitter, why can’t you, huh? It’s in the Bible, bro! Thing is, the Robertsons are wonderful people, and popular here, but they don’t have the best political judgment. They endorsed Vance McAllister a couple of years ago in a US Congressional race — an endorsement that many credit with winning the rookie Republican politician the seat over his experienced GOP opponent:

Right off the bat, McAllister, who had campaigned as a Good Christian Man™, got caught in an adultery scandal, earned the nickname “The Kissing Congressman,” and lost his re-election bid, despite ads like this one, painful to watch:

So, we’ll see. Enjoy the ads.

Liberalism Murdering Liberalism

Here’s a great letter that came in last night. Boldface emphases mine:

You’re probably beyond tired of Mizzou-related emails from weary, concerned academics, but what the heck: here’s one more. I’m a professor at a small Catholic college in KC, and I can confirm that the mood on campuses is not as bad as you think it is — it’s far, far worse.

I was born and raised in Columbia, and was briefly a law student at Mizzou (until I dropped out and retreated to doctoral work in the humanities). My father taught there for many years. The racial history of Columbia, and of Mizzou, is of course checkered. Anytime you create an intellectual center in the middle of a rural area, you get tension. Same thing in Lawrence, Madison, Iowa City, Lincoln, Stillwater, Norman, Austin, Ann Arbor, and, though I’ve never been there, probably Baton Rouge. I can remember casual racism at football tailgates, and hearing comments when we Columbia high-schoolers spent time on the Mizzou campus (playing frisbee and trying to convince girls we were college students).

What the SJWs don’t understand is that there’s a difference between casual racism — which you can find everywhere in the country — and a concerted effort to oppress black students. One can only imagine what their ancestors, who braved police dogs and fire hoses and brutal beatings, would make of their wilting every time they hear a comment they don’t like. Clearly they have no sense of history. (Modern man wakes each day as if there were no yesterday, said Allen Tate.) They would not understand if you explained the obvious parallels to the French Revolution (forced confessions and loyalty pledges), internecine Communist battles, and McCarthyism (blacklisting, etc.). Their lack of a sense of history prevents them from seeing their efforts in any kind of larger narrative. There is only the present, the subjective, the personal, and the therapeutic.

There are two things that I think have been overlooked in the conversation. One is the role of economic theory and the advent of neoliberalism in the 1970s. When we define our society by our economy, and our economy is made up only of individual consumers who act in a market, then it becomes difficult to think of anything beyond your personal choice. I know you’ve talked about Matthew Crawford’s new book on the blog before. He argues that we take economic choice to be the incarnation and fulfillment of nothing more than personal desire and self-actualization. So if we are all actors in a marketplace (because that’s all society is, according to neoliberalism), and our choices reflect who we are, then no one action or choice or purchase can be said to be better or worse than any other action, and thus no way of living or social choice can be said to be better or worse. When we have economic nihilism, and when we define our society in market terms, then eventually we get the social nihilism we see today: we are beholden to no force more powerful than our own sense of self, and the good life as we define it personally, removed from any sense of society, community, or history. Consider also the economic mantra of our time: disrupt. Take all the ways we’ve done things before, and kill them. Pretending that concept stays in the economic realm is foolish.

This leads to the second thing that has been overlooked: the belief that technique can save us. All the protesters’ demands at Mizzou were technical in nature (and here I’m talking about techne, or technical thinking, versus phronesis, or practical thinking. MacIntyre covers this in the managerialism section of After Virtue.): increase minority hiring, establish a certain oversight position, and so on. Technical fixes all. But the problems are cultural. Real change in racial attitudes takes decades, even centuries. Their lack of a sense of history means they cannot understand larger forces or institutions. Can you imagine the civil rights movement cohering today? The labor movement? None of these SJWs could possibly possess the patience or understanding required to understand things beyond the self. Who has the energy to take on the centralization of capital when all that matters is the personal and the subjective? Why not just instead mandate gender-neutral bathrooms? Liberalism’s death at the hands of liberalism is the great philosophical story of our time.

I have several colleagues from both stages of grad school who teach at Mizzou, and I’ve been in touch with them. They are terrified. One cancelled classes last week to participate in the “teach-in” because, as he put it, “I want to keep my job.” Another has no doubt she will soon be asked by students to sign a loyalty pledge, which she says she will sign because she knows that if she doesn’t, she will be branded a racist and fired. And can you blame her? If a few malcontents can take down the president and the chancellor, what chance do individual professors have? What’s really incredible is that the SJW tactics and the Tea party tactics are exactly the same: give us everything we want, or we will blow up the system. All that matters is flattering our sense of self.



What I wish is that all these Mizzou students — and I can tell you as a native that most students there come from the wealthy suburbs of KC and St. Louis — could come spend a week in the lives of my students. My college has a student population that is 90% minority. Most are first-generation American or are undocumented. The rest are immigrants themselves (mostly Kenyan, Ethiopian, Bhutanese, and Nepalese). Nearly all work full time and live in extreme poverty. Our school is smack in the middle of urban blight; shootings in our neighborhood are common. Now these students see the results of injustice. These students suffer actual racism. And you know what they do? They suck it up and work to improve their lives. The idea that these precious snowflakes at Mizzou are collapsing in personal catastrophe when they see a picture of an offensive Halloween costume, while my students are literally struggling to afford food, is infuriating.

Anyway. Just some thoughts from one more exhausted member of academia.

Thank you, professor. I especially appreciate your pointing out the role neoliberal economics of the sort endorsed by both the Right and the Center Left in the US have played in conditioning us for nihilistic, will to power politics.

This letter came in, titled “Scared to Educate”:

I am a school principal in a small school. We are small so that we can attend to character development more effectively than a larger school.

I often feel like I am one incident away from losing my job due to a racial discipline issue or something about gender or homosexuality. What do you do when a lesbian student tries to kiss a girl and slaps her when she is refused?

There are some black families that seem to count it as a right to ignore facts by simply proclaiming their version of truth. Unfortunately, some of these same families are so poorly educated that they can hardly speak clearly for themselves when they most need to.

I have some students I treat differently to avoid being called a racist. There is not really any way to win once that term is thrown out.

I feel as if I am always one step away from drifting through some strange universe where logic does not work are never heard. That is a scary place to be–kind of like one of those dreams where you scream for help but no sound comes out.

I just recently had my judgment questioned due to my whiteness.

Last year we narrowed the achievement gap for all of our minority sub-populations.

I am looking for another place to work.

Today In SJW Wackadoodlery

Sadly for us all, I will be on the road for much of today, and won’t be around to monitor every gaseous eructation of the Social Justice Warriors on campus. But I can catch you up on some highlights.

This one is my favorite so far: black Cornell students compel white SJW to cancel planned march in solidarity with the black cause, because he’s white. Look:

Naturally the masochistic white SJW complied, and begged forgiveness:

Has there ever been a successful protest movement that has shamed people wanting to help them achieve their goal, and told them to stand down? This is not a protest movement; this is an exhibitionist vanity project.

Moving on, it appears that the Brenda Smith-Lezama, the student body vice president at once-proud Mizzou, told MSNBC that the First Amendment is dangerous:

“I personally am tired of hearing that First Amendment rights protect students when they are creating a hostile and unsafe learning environment for myself and for other students here. I think that it’s important for us to create that distinction and create a space where we can all learn from one another and start to create a place of healing rather than a place where we are experiencing a lot of hate like we have in the past.”

On NPR yesterday, two left-of-center writers, Jon Chait and Roxane Gay, talked about Yale, p.c., and safe spaces. Host Audie Cornish interviewed them. Excerpt:

CORNISH: Something that people may be hearing more that they may not totally be familiar with is this idea of a safe space – that students are saying that, I should feel protected and that this is something that the university or these environments should be invested in creating. Roxane, help us understand this for people who think that – who have described this as coddling.

GAY: I mean, what’s wrong with being coddled once in a while? This notion that we should just be thrown to the lions and make do is absurd. There is very little to be gained from suffering. And I think what students are looking for is a space where they don’t have to suffer emotionally. And as a teacher, I try to create as safe a space as possible, but I also know that my job is to make students uncomfortable. So I think students aren’t asking to be coddled. They’re asked to be treated with respect, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

CORNISH: Jonathan, your review on safe space? It sounds like Roxane is mixed.

CHAIT: I’m in favor of safety. What I object to is defining safety to mean the absence of contrary points of view. And by contrary, I don’t mean hate speech, I don’t mean threats, I don’t mean swastikas. What I mean is the performance of a play that people dislike politically, the appearance of an op-ed that somewhat mildly criticizes views that you hold – those are things that people have defined as threatening a safe space, and that’s a really troublesome concept for a liberal.

“What’s wrong with being coddled once in a while?” “There is very little to be gained from suffering.” Wow. It really is The Triumph of the Therapeutic.

This just in from the Minnesota, courtesy of a reader. Those college kids love them some SAFETY in Minnesota:

I’m sure there’s more a-comin’.

What We Did Last Night

That’s where Julie and I spent Thursday night. I’m not sure which was better, Diana Krall — who was very, very good — or the tagliatelle with a ragù of slow-cooked rabbit and porcini mushrooms at Domenica. Please be advised that if you are anywhere in the vicinity of downtown New Orleans and you don’t go eat at Domenica, you are dumb as a stump. Lord have mercy, but that food is good.

Will Engineers Save The Academy?

My older son Matt is really into audio equipment these days. He started a small business in which he buys old stereo stuff (turntables, speakers, etc.) at thrift shops, refurbishes them, and sells them. This morning, I asked him what he’s thinking about for college (he’s 16). He said he’s really interested in the history of technology, and also thinks a lot about infrastructure, and the intersection between ideas and matter in the construction of systems. I thought, Good, if he sticks with this, he may be able to avoid the SJW madness destroying the humanities.

The thing is, Matt really loves history, and would make a fine humanities scholar. But I don’t think he would put up for one second with the intellectual corruption of the humanities at the college level. I don’t know that he has the math skills to be an actual engineer, but he’s young yet. The way that kid can take apart a piece of equipment, figure out what’s wrong with it, and put it back together, is amazing. He was telling me this morning how interesting he finds mechanical systems. Two years ago, when I took him to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he was able to have a startlingly high-level series of discussions with the scientists there about the mechanics of getting machines into space. It was a revelation to me; I had no idea how deeply this kid had read into this stuff.

What kind of place would a kid like this find at today’s university? The thought troubled me as we drove to one of his classes.

Happily, this e-mail just came in from a professor who asked me not to identify him by name or institution. He teaches writing and speaking, and most of his students are engineering majors:

I think that if anything at all will save the academy from itself, it may well be the engineers.

The students I teach are bright, motivated and engaged. As engineers, they know that a degree is a ticket to a good job, but they also view the work of civil engineers (roads, bridges, buildings, dams, etc.) as important, necessary, and even noble, though I doubt that they would put it quite so. In many of their faces I see determination to solve the besetting problems of civilization: to get clean water to people who need it, to protect homes and offices from disaster (natural or manmade), to find ways to make things that endure. I sit on a committee whose sole purpose is to find ways to attract more young people to the discipline. We ponder how we might make more civil engineers and by what mysterious process a young person’s mind is turned to the study of structures and the proper building of them. Like all departments, mine has politics, disagreements, and even the occasional scandal. But the thing I notice most is industriousness and a certain serious excitement: things must be built, and we are going to build them, better than ever before.

I moved to this department from my graduate work in English (wherein I was exposed to the same sort of suffocating groupthink spoken of by other academics on your blog) and it felt like moving into a different world. I want to point out three things that make a discipline like civil engineering a bastion of actual education in the modern era. First, there is faith, yes, faith, in this school. My jaw nearly dropped off when I attended my first formal CE function and heard an invocation at the beginning of the proceedings. It was, to be sure, a nondenominational appeal to a “higher power” but it was there. The students themselves seem to be more consistently and sincerely religious (I’ve had students go to daily mass with me) and our alumni will frequently attribute their success first to God. The school is still broadly secular and secularizing, but it often feels to me as if it still exists in the revival era of the 1950s.

Second, civil engineering has a code of ethics. This is necessary for a profession so involved in public works, but it’s a constant topic of debate and discussion for alumni and professors. For a civil engineer, an ethics violation can mean the loss of license and reputation, but it can also mean loss of life, so ethics are taken very seriously.

Third, these students are needed and they know it. The world needs people to build bridges and water treatment plants, and our alumni need well-trained dependable people in their companies. I spoke with our new secretary recently and she told me about being overwhelmed the first day because companies would call and tell her, “We need engineers, as many as you have. Who’s graduating this semester?” We can’t make engineers fast enough.

You might well say that there’s a great gap between this utilitarian production of engineers for the industrial complex and a classical liberal education, but I think that purpose is the great missing piece in the liberal academy. [Emphasis mine — RD] You can make jokes about flipping hamburgers all you want, if language is just about power dynamic, then how can it build anything and who can it serve? Civil engineers serve, their code of ethics claims, “the health, safety, and welfare of the public.” Could any humanities department claim anywhere near so concrete and so comprehensible a mandate?

Dorothy Sayers has an essay about modern poetry being poetry of search while older poetry is poetry of statement. Anyone who reads Dante knows that the Commedia is as real and solid as the cathedral at Chartres (your book is in my stack, but I’m reading Trollope right now). One thing that the empty invective of the last several weeks at Yale and Mizzou seems to show is how language now seems to amount to people wandering around through a cornfield at night with torches in their hands, burning everything they run up against in the hope of finding a little bit of light (and, one suspects, for something to do other than wander around). I love my engineering students because for them, the world is a cornfield, they have the tractors, and it’s time to go to work.

Writing and reading should be as real as tractors. It was once, and it can be again, God willing. I want to return to the teaching of literature, but I confess that I don’t yet know how to turn the humanities away from the making torch-lighters and toward making people who put torches out so they can point out the stars.

I’ve rambled a bit on this, but I want you to know that not all of the American academy is dissolving into chaos. Over here in engineering, we don’t have time to waste on flame wars and protests. There’s too much work to do.

Boy, does that make me feel hopeful.

A View From Mizzou

Boy, my mailbag these days, you should read it. This is a slightly edited letter from a white student at Mizzou — edited to remove his name and identifying characteristics. He’s scare of the left-wing McCarthyism at the university, and once you read his letter, you’ll understand.

The student begins by talking about how he hasn’t noticed that Mizzou was any kind of hotbed of racial animus, but he admits that as a white person, maybe he has missed something. Then he answers the question I posed on the blog earlier, about whether or not most students at Mizzou agreed with the protests, and if not, why weren’t they protesting the radicals? The student writes:

When someone cries “racism”, it’s virtually impossible for anyone to speak up from the other side of the aisle without being called a racist. You’ll see precious few people actually involved with the school at any level arguing against what happened — certainly not staff or faculty because they don’t want to be perceived as being in league with [former president] Wolfe and potentially lose their job — but I think even the student voice from that perspective will be small. It won’t be a crowd of people demonstrating on the quad, anyway, and I really doubt anyone would be willing to undertake a hunger strike in an effort to reverse what happened (which, without a football team, would be unlikely to succeed anyway). One person with a sandwich board or a letter to the editor of The Maneater – maybe. But I think most people who feel like I do will keep silent because we’re too afraid of what’s going to happen if we speak up.

The damage to Wolfe is already done, but the damage to MU’s integrity and that of all the instances like this at other educational institutions that are sure to follow suit is just beginning to be known.

There’s a couple of other factors at play in the student mentality, and maybe I’m a little jaded and cynical. I think the college mentality of getting fired up that you can effect change and actually have an impact in the workings of the world, or your small sphere of influence within it, drives a lot of people (mostly undergraduates) to take up causes they know little if anything about, and I also think there’s a fair contingent of Caucasian students who don’t care enough to express an opinion either way because allegations of racism against African American students don’t directly affect or involve them. Still some might see this for what it is, realize their voice won’t do anything to stop the kind of decisions that go hand-in-hand with multimillion dollar SEC deals, and that voice will continue to murmur quietly in the background while the voice of outrage, founded or not, will continue to futilely blaze a trail toward political correctness.

I really hope that someone on campus will push for the other side of this story to be known alongside the protesters’ case. I’d hate to think the college that founded the idea of journalism school is a group of one-sided reactionaries instead of free and critical thinkers.

Let me invite dissenting students or faculty at other colleges experiencing these protests to talk about the situations there. Will there be counterprotests? Why or why not? Do the conditions this student describes above also exist at your school? I will protect your anonymity, but I do need some confirmation that you are who you say you are — that is, a real student (or faculty member, or staffer) at a real school.

What kind of university can thrive in a climate of such fear? Good grief, administrators and faculty, look at what you’re doing to yourselves and the institutions you have been given responsibility to steward!

‘Let Them Wear Off-The-Rack’

Marie Antoinette Caitlyn Jenner has learned something important in her months identifying as a female:

The hardest part about being a woman is figuring out what to wear. It’s always that way; I never thought it would come to this. I had really no sense of style. Everyone around me in my family had the sense of style — I learned as much as I possibly could. But, it’s more than that. I’m kind of at this point in my life where I’m trying to figure this womanhood thing out. It is more than hair, makeup, clothes, all that kind of stuff. There’s an element here, that I’m still kind of searching for. And I think that’ll take a while. Because I think as far as gender, we’re all on a journey. We’re all learning and growing about ourselves. And I feel the same way.

Good to know. Alert the single moms living in the trailer parks and housing projects. The Joy of Caitlyn Thought will lift their spirits!

 

The Story of an SJW De-Convert

Reader JLF, who is a history teacher, writes:

For some time now I’ve been convinced that the challenge of the 21st century is not global warming, illegal immigration, ISIS, or other hot topic du jour so much as it is epistemological, which transcends all others. We’ve lost our common understanding, our common references of right and wrong, even our common language. Without everyone knowing what persecution, or respect, or privilege means, how can anyone expect to explain any point of view? And if we can’t agree upon a historical narrative, how can you tell me I’m wrong? What purpose is left to demonstration but rage? What meaning is left in language but noise?

This is pure Alasdair MacIntyre. In late modernity, he says, we have lost the capacity for rational debate. It all comes down now to feelings — which is to say, nihilism and the will to power. Understanding becomes ever more difficult, almost impossible. Note this from the New York Times:

Chris Williams, a black student from Chicago, said he confronted [former Univ. of Missouri chancellor Bowen] Loftin at one of the forums last year after the chancellor made what he believed was a racially insensitive comment. The chancellor later invited him to a private meeting at his office, Mr. Williams said.

“In the meeting, he’s telling me how his experiences as a white male in the South are essentially the same as my experiences in the inner city of the South Side of Chicago as a black male,” Mr. Williams recalled. “I remember leaving that meeting, thinking, like, there is no recourse with administration if the guy in charge doesn’t get it and in his attempts to be well-meaning he’s just propagating that we’re the same.”

Mr. Loftin said Mr. Williams had mischaracterized the exchange. “I did share my experiences growing up only as a means of reciprocating for his telling me his story,” Mr. Loftin said in an email. “I recall the conversation as one of my listening to him primarily and his offer to help me do things at Mizzou that would improve our climate.”

This is very telling. Only Loftin and Williams know what was said in that meeting, but this perfectly illustrates why communication is so fraught and risky. Williams got a meeting with the chancellor of the university, and whatever Loftin said, Williams gave him no grace. It sounds like anything Loftin said other than, “Yes, Mr. Williams, I agree wholeheartedly and will do exactly as you say,” would have disappointed and angered Williams, because for him, the only valid perspective is the one that supports his narrative.

A reader e-mails to say that a friend of hers who is a campus minister at a large New England college held a race and reconciliation forum the other night. A black student who attended stayed mostly silent. After it was over, she asked him if everything was okay, and how he would have done the forum better. He told her that he would take out the part about forgiveness, because nobody had the right to ask him to forgive anybody.

And there you have it. The sanctity of the victim.

We come now to an e-mail I just received from a recent graduate of a major state university. Not that it should matter, but I can tell from his name that he comes from a non-European background. I’ll leave it at that. This is important:

I have been ardently reading your blog as of late and wish to contribute something towards a deeper understanding of contemporary student activism.

All throughout last year, I participated in many demonstrations on my campus in the wake of the deaths of Mike Brown/Trayvon Martin/Aura Rosser (a local victim). My deconversion occurred in the midst of a long, protracted study of Martin Heidegger’s early philosophy and Ancient Greek literature, as well as near-complete isolation from social media. What, then, was the turning point in my thinking?

Last summer, a friend was sharing news of Sandra Brown’s death with me. In my isolation, I had little contact with the following counternarrative: she was murdered by the police, who staged her suicide. “I am not surprised,” I began. Critical race theory enables such logic. My friend gave me the look: think of a stern, incensed Larry David locked in a staring contest. I had transgressed. “My friends are not able to sleep at night,” she begins, “And this is how you react?”

Deep moral conviction is at the core of this political framework. Yes, these students are armed with theory. Plenty of theories, in fact: standpoint epistemology, identity politics, intersectional (or better yet, black) feminism, and critical race theory. Yet they all converge upon a moral focal point: the victim. Theories may be modified or dispensed with outright if they do not serve this moral core. Debating about theory is epiphenomenal, and ultimately misguided if they forsake the victim and their centrality. This is precisely why they must transcend the claims of opponents, why they must shout down critics, and why free speech is moot. There is violence, the argument goes, behind all claims that may contravene the safety of the victims. [Note from Rod: This is at the center of gay activists’ success in ideologizing schools in the name of “safety”. — RD]

This is pure slave morality. Indeed, there is something noble about its absolutism, its sheer stubbornness, its puritanical fervor and moral zeal. Yet I find it far more noble not to transcend your opponents’ claims, but to struggle with them, to smash your truth against theirs. If we end up heading towards evil, so be it – we have flourished, and that is all that matters.

How do these activists overcome contradictions between theory and morality? A deep contradiction occurs when their relativistic metaphysics and epistemology runs up against the need to enshrine the victim. First, they claim nobody is objectively in the truth or the real. There are only perspectives on what is true, what is real, and what is good. Yet the victim’s perspective, as the moral axis, must be upheld, protected from the truth, the real, and the good of the WASPs, let’s say. This is the legacy of standpoint epistemology, whether or not the current activists embrace it or not. Let me reiterate: all theory is marginal, and the victim is the central axis upon which all thinking and action must spin.

If the victims put forth a conspiracy theory, it is in the truth, the real, and the good.

And this is why I left.

Everything, save for what the victim deems morally useful, must be dispensed with: the classics, the musings of our grandmothers and grandfathers, the histories and traditions of our ancestors. All must be dragged into the light, forced to rehabituate. Another contradiction emerges here: how do these activists expect to reach across difference and create a global coalition against the oppressors, if victim collides with victim? What does an Aborigine elder or Wahabbi mullah think of the queer movement?

I can hear already hear them calling out: “Only the victim or individual may speak for themselves, and thus any such musings are verboten and oppressive.”

Furthermore, think of how the moral centrality of the victim, identity politics, and standpoint epistemology collide. What happens if the individual is the arbiter of identity, and also the truth, the real, and the good? The logic of narcissism is at play here. I suspect that very few of these activists have run up against criticisms of postmodernity and its relationship to capitalism. As society fragments through constant communication, new identities are produced, and new victims emerge. Capitalism is at the core here – as more identities emerge, new markets open up, since these new identities must mark themselves consumptively.

New, different, weird, and marginal – these are the values of postmodernism, of neoliberalism, of late capitalism. These are also the values of the contemporary student activists. But I can already hear the scions of slave morality calling out: “Who are you to speak…”

When “the best lack all conviction” — I’m thinking about elites like you, Prof. Christakis — “while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” well, the center cannot hold. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am. If I thought I was, I wouldn’t be talking about the Benedict Option all the time.

The Sanity of Classical Christian Education

This e-mail, from a reader, is encouraging:

I just read your “Exiles from the Academy” blog post. I wanted to let you know that I, too, am an exile.

You might remember my email from back in April when I told you I was leaving my PhD program in English because I couldn’t stand the politicized environment. Once I left, I wasn’t sure what I would do (one struggle was that while my wife made decent money as a nurse, we had a newborn at home that she would have rather been with–I needed to find a way to support us), but I ended up as an 8th Grade Humanities (Literature, History, and Theology) teacher at [a classical Christian school].

Anyhow, I wanted to encourage you (and perhaps your readers)  in a couple of ways:

First, your blog was a lifeline for me when I was looking for Goodness, Truth, and Beauty while drowning in the ideological bullshit governing my intellectual life in the Academy. I mean, I certainly was reading good books on my own, but your blog helped provide a space where I found intelligent people actually discussing things that mattered. I found, albeit in a reduced form because it wasn’t in person, an intellectual community that helped sustain me. And I learned that I wasn’t crazy, that I wasn’t the only one in the Academy (sometimes it can feel so lonely) who resisted the brainwashing and groupthink of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Second, there are places out there willing to take in academic refugees, give them a good home, and set them up doing good work. My wife told me the other day that she noticed that I have been happier and less anxious than I’ve been since she’s known me. She attributes this to me now having good and meaningful work as a Humanities (Literature, Theology, and History) teacher at Classical and Christian school where I can put my knowledge and talents to good use. Aside from a) making decent money (not a paltry TA stipend) and b) having regular work hours, it has been working with colleagues, students, and parents who share my devotion to Christ and who are drawn to the Great Books and to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful that has done wonders for my soul. Being able to teach my students about courage and loyalty in Beowulf rather than writing about how Star Wars  is horribly racist (for example) has liberated my spirit and has reawakened in me the love of story that first prompted me to become an English major.

Eventually I’ll probably finish a PhD (I’m not sure I can stay away from school), but I will do so somewhere (like the University of Dallas) that actually loves our cultural and literary heritage.

We need to talk more about this. Classical Christian education is something people of faith ought to be paying a lot more attention to — and something that Christian philanthropists ought to be thinking about supporting. One problem with it right now is that it is often too expensive for average families to afford. Seems to me, though, that there has to be some way to bring tuition costs down if a significant number of parents opted for it.

St. Jerome Academy in Hyattsville, Maryland, revived a dying Catholic parish school by adopting the classical model, in a Catholic way. Why can’t dioceses all over the country experiment with this model in at least one of their schools? I’m not sure what the situation is for Protestants (the letter-writer teaches at a Protestant school), but we need smart, energetic, and entrepreneurial people to think about it. Here’s a great model: Sequitur Classical Academy, the classical Christian tutorials that our son used to participate in, was a start-up project of a couple of energetic Reformed guys, and it has really taken off. Istrouma Baptist, a Baton Rouge megachurch, has partnered with Sequitur, and lets them hold classes there. Sequitur is a homeschool co-op where the classes are taught by professional educators.

You can do this where you live! And you should. Curse the darkness, sure, but understand that there are people right now who are lighting candles. What’s needed is vision, resources, and a sense of entrepreneurship.

UPDATE: From a Catholic high school teacher:

I’m sure your inbox is being inundated with university horror stories, but I’ve noticed a real shift in the last three years or so with my students as they go off to college. I used to be able to count on a number of my kids going off to the elite universities and holding on to some semblance of coherence. Not conservative, per se, but decidedly grounded. The last several years have been marked with a fairly radical turn. They are being re-educated in a remarkable way, and at an alarming rate.

It’s rather disheartening. I know these kids very well. I used to joke with one of my kids who went off to [an Ivy League college] that when the revolution comes, please remember your dear old Catholic professor and NOT kill him because he’s a Christian.

I feel like I should call him up and get that in writing now. He is, of course, an off-the-rails socialist, atheist, materialist, looking to go to grad school in philosophy.

By the way, The CiRCE Institute is a great resource for classical Christian education.