The true bane of America and much of the Western world today boils down to a single word that I wager a lot of Americans have never heard: post-modernism. In a nutshell, this philosophical system, which is an unsurprising artifact of the “anything goes” 1960’s, boils down to the following:
- There is no reality.
- There is no truth.
- There is no reason or logic.
- There is no universal morality.
I had a taste of this weirdness in my classes back in college, but this insanity truly hit me in the face like a wet mop when I went to graduate school a decade or so later. On the one hand, it made it remarkably easy to write my essays because elegantly-argued nonsense (aided by a few cold beers) was considered brilliance, but being old-school enough to still believe (apologies to Superman) in truth, justice, and the American way, I was glad to take my degree and make a run for the door. Although I later taught both high school and college, my disdain for the baleful effects of the fantasy world of academia on young minds definitely affected both my teaching methods and classroom expectations.
If you have ever wondered why so many young adults go off to college and come back with a head full of incomprehensible jargon and hearts and souls wiped clean of reason, empathy, patriotism, and morality, you can thank the prevailing winds of 50+ years of pea-brained academic theorists and their commitment to sophistry disguised as deep thought. Our schools of Law, Education, Medicine, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, Mathematics, and every other mode of thought and inquiry one can imagine have been wrecked by the dilettantes of post-modernism and its mendacious offshoots.
Higher education is in a lot of trouble today because many parents and students have grown wise to the grift. There will, of course, always be a market for a rigorous and well-designed course of study in college and beyond that imparts knowledge that prepares young adults for lives of professional accomplishment while teaching ethical behavior based on a value system where truth, logic, and morality are at the center. Such an education is still available in colleges and universities that are old-fashioned enough to still cherish and nurture academic excellence. Unfortunately, you might have to squint hard to find this, and many facets of our higher education system sell nothing but snake oil and silliness.
A “post-modern” nation that accepts the unacceptable and tolerates the intolerable is incapable of sustaining itself in the long term. We are on the brink of destroying ourselves because we have been denied the wisdom of a past far more enlightened than the woeful indoctrination that is today spewed in our colleges and universities by those who believe there are no immutable truths worth teaching and prefer instead to fill young minds with the mush of their own muddled thinking and their sloganeering perversions masquerading as profundity.
To continue subsidizing this idiocy with our tax dollars and tuition payments is madness, but to change course will, by necessity, engage our country in a loud and ugly fight with wealthy, powerful, and sneaky academic institutions that will fight to protect professors and staff who believe it is their duty to attack America from within—while hiding behind the very freedoms that America guarantees.
The question of whether Americans will continue to support institutions that hire professors and create programs of study that teach students to hate our nation is one that crashes headlong into the desires of parents, students, and alumni who are hoping the tattered prestige of once-great colleges and universities will continue to provide a path to wealth and privilege. Academia will count on this naked self-interest to shield them from reforms that will both re-focus their missions and lower the outrageous costs now incurred by students and their families.
Many will, of course, refuse to believe the truth that large swathes of our higher education system have become the anti-American enemies of free speech and inquiry while propagandizing for the downfall of our nation. The swift and certain personnel and program cuts that are now desperately necessary will lead to howls of dismay from those who have long enjoyed immunity from both questions and oversight as they have spewed their poisonous ideas into eager and impressionable young minds in classrooms across America.
According to the Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who lived and worked in the 19th century, “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” No two sentences could better sum up the conundrum of our 21st century: We are inundated with information, yet many of our best minds are spiritually and morally adrift, unsure of where to turn for guidance and direction.
If you have ever wondered why Democrats and their allies can sincerely and absolutely believe that criminals are heroes and law-abiding citizens are oppressors, you need only take a moment to consider what is being taught in our colleges by highly credentialed and seemingly intelligent people who deny both reality and reason exist. Decade upon decade of Marxist-infused academic drivel has produced an elite class of moral and intellectual pygmies who believe they are completely right and the rest of the world is dead wrong.
We have a huge task ahead if we are to save our culture and politics from the rantings of the academically brainwashed, but to fail to fight this battle today will result in more disaster tomorrow because fanaticism and ignorance are a deadly combination. Although it is maddening to try to have any discussion with terminally-enraged people who believe reality, truth, reason, logic, and morality are illusions that can be discarded in the pursuit of whatever unreal, untruthful, unreasonable, illogical, and immoral subversions of Judeo-Christian norms and American values are most destructive to the common good of our country, we need to engage in a national debate about the harm now being done and how we can quickly reverse it—once and for all.