Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

A recent cultural development could go down in history as the worst scourge ever unleashed upon Western Civilization: the installation in the past 40 years of an indomitable and ubiquitous presence on college campuses of baby-boomer professors. Forget about barbarian and Muslim invasions, about epoch-shaping plagues, revolutions, and wars, about the Avignon Papacy or the Protestant Reformation – all of these were mere triflings by comparison. None of these had the power to destroy civilization comparable to the infectious consumerist nihilism of college professors who came to “maturity” in the 1960s. So, it could be highly important, if what this article essentially says is true, that the tenured radicals are on their way out.

It might seem odd to those who are defenders of the professorial class that I should accuse them of consumerist nihilism. But it is a plain fact of the matter. For all their talk about respecting “difference,” or about undoing the inhumane social structures built up by the modern “will-to-power,” or about helping the poor and disenfranchised, most boomer professors are rank materialists. Their highest spiritual value is quite utilitarian: they wish to extend the condition of the bourgeoisie as a privileged class throughout the globe. This sort of ethos is deadly to all traditional cultures, but it is lethal to the West most of all. Boomer professors tend to harbor a pernicious set of affective and philosophical positions: relativism, libertinism, the denial of the inherent dignity of the human person, hatred of traditional Christianity, and aversion to pre-political institutions that cannot be absorbed into the state.

The boomer professors created a condition of life on college and university campuses that basically encouraged young students to behave like barbarians. Boomer professors see no problem with promiscuity and drug use, and they tend to laugh off alcohol abuse. For 40 years, they inculcated a condition of self-hatred among the best and the brightest young students, a condition that is absolutely crippling to civilization.

The article above suggests that a turning point may be upon us. Many younger faculty members, the article claims, are more politically moderate. There are at least two reasons for this shift, so it is suggested. First, colleges and universities are facing the pressure of business demands from which they had been traditionally insulated. They are focusing more on business schools, computer science programs, and other practical science programs. These programs tend to attract more so-called “conservative” students. Faculties have had to adjust themselves accordingly.

Second, within the humanities and social sciences there has been a turn to quantitative analysis and empirical investigation. Younger faculty members see this type of approach to their discipline of study as less ideologically driven.

I would argue regarding this second point that there is a tremendous price to be paid. For neither the human person nor society can be understood by way of quantitative analysis. Human goals and the conditions of moral dignity have to be rationally assessed if the person is to be understood. But these are not quantitative realities. No mathematical equation can give us any insight into moral goodness or the ends toward which human persons should strive. So, a turn to the quantitative ensures ignorance of the human person. Even worse, it might further enable monstrous confusions about the nature of the human person, pushing false claims about the person as if they were derived from scientific investigation.

The article indicates, by way of a couple of quotes, that there really is not that much of a “sensibility gap” between younger faculty members and their boomer forebears. I would suggest that this is so because both the boomers and those who have come in their wake suffer equally from materialism – though it may be materialism of a slightly different variety. The boomers tend to be proponents of dialectical materialism, seeing in the course of human history the possibility of a movement toward a more perfectly utopian social arrangement. The younger faculty members are more pragmatic in their materialism. They ignore, as a condition of their methodological pursuit, any concern with a wider dialectic of history.

In either case, the result is the same: humanity is not understood, because person and society – in what constitutes them as such – are not reducible to a flow of quantitatively analyzable material processes.

I am a gen-x’er. So, naturally, I would want to put the blame for the degradation of the humanities more on the boomers than on their younger peers. The boomers were the first to strip away thoroughly the human aspect of the humanities. Oh, sure, they had the help of their own Marxist, Freudian, and Nietzschean forebears. But their silly revolution in the late ‘60s sealed the fate of the contemporary university, and possibly of Western Civilization at large. For the death of the humanities that they struggled so mightily to ensure might very well portend the death of humanity. No doubt the radical environmentalists among them would be pleased with this result.