Saturday, May 04, 2024

Anti-Academia and its Bitter Mutants

I'm old enough to remember when college was useless but fun instead of noxious and soul-deadening. Pieper is old enough to remember when -- try not to laugh -- academia could be defined as a "zone of truth"
deliberately set aside in the midst of society, a hedged-in space to house the autonomous engagement with reality, in which people can inquire into, discuss, and assert the truth of things without let or hindrance...

This ought to be 

a domain expressly shielded from any conceivable attempts to use it as a means to achieve certain ends, and in which all concerns irrelevant to its true purpose, whether collective or personal, whether of political, economic or ideological import, must keep silent.

How's that working out? And what happened? How is it that we've landed in a total inversion of Pieper's normative description, such that our elite universities stubbornly inhabit and inculcate a (in my words) zone of illusion

a hedged-in space to nurture the disengagement from reality, or engagement with unreality, in which people can affirm their truth, and celebrate their intersectional victimhood without let or hindrance; a domain expressly deployed to achieve certain collective, personal, political, economic, and ideological ends, in fact, any end short of the disinterested pursuit of truth.

And here we are, with normal people asking: Remind me, what is a university education good for? Detached from its proper telos -- which is to say, truth -- it cannot be good for anything but mischief. 

man's chief nourishment is truth.... anyone who wishes to live a truly human life must feed on truth. Society too lives on the public availability, the public manifestation of truth (Pieper). 

So, if the mind is not metabolizing truth it must metabolize something less, and in so doing become something other than it is. 

It's why these students don't just have "different beliefs," but rather -- as one look at them reveals -- are different, full stop, for they are like a subspecies that has devolved and veered away from proper humanness. They are missing something, with something else in its place. 

This being the case, we have a real problem, since it only takes a couple generations of these warped deviants and bitter mutants to displace the restavus. How do we de-Stalinize a whole generation that we've systematically Stalinized? 

I can't decide whether these people require cult deprogramming or exorcism, but why take chances?

4 comments:

julie said...

This being the case, we have a real problem, since it only takes a couple generations of these warped deviants and bitter mutants to displace the restavus.

The average American has no idea how rapidly the fabric of civilization can break down. On a small note of hope, at least Argentina is showing that when the circumstances are right, it is still possible to turn things around surprisingly quickly as well.

Open Trench said...

Hello Dr. Godwin, Julie, other proud Americans who read the blog. You are loved and cherished not only by me but also by many others whom you do not know.

From the post: "It's why these students don't just have "different beliefs," but rather -- as one look at them reveals -- are different, full stop, for they are like a subspecies that has devolved and veered away from proper humanness. They are missing something, with something else in its place."

Reader Julie is on board with this, commenting: "The average American has no idea how rapidly the fabric of civilization can break down. On a small note of hope, at least Argentina is showing that when the circumstances are right, it is still possible to turn things around surprisingly quickly as well."

Now, bear in mind, I am not hostile to the blog's general weltanshaung. Anything but. The good Dr., though his many long years of posting, has hown again and again a profound love for Jesus, and elevates Jesus any other being or event in history. The good Dr. has stated the life of Jesus was the singular event in world history about which all other events pivot.

Julie is a proven God-lover and virtuous beyond reproach. Kind, reasonable, charitable, and gentle in her admonishment of sinners, and ready to guide the ignorant (I raise my hand).

AND YET:

Open Trench said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Gagdad Bob said...

Now I'm reading a book called De-Fragmenting Modernity: Reintegrating Knowledge with Wisdom, Belief with Truth, and Reality with Being. Sounded promising, but it doesn't seem to contain anything we haven't discussed in a deeper and pithier way. Likewise, Schuon describes in a paragraph what it takes this guy a whole book to explicate. And Davila manages it in a sentence or two. I don't know if I'll be able to wring a single post out of it, but I'm only a third of the way through, so I'll keep reading.

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