Occam's Razor at PCU

Occam's (or Ockham's) razor is a principle attributed to the 14th century logician and Franciscan friar, William of Occam. The theory of Occam's razor is used mostly by the quantum physics and chemistry crowd, but it suits my purposes in this discussion.

The principle of Occam states: "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." The principle includes the idea that one should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed. This principle is often called the principle of parsimony and underlies all scientific modeling and theory building.

Basically, it tells us to choose, from a set of otherwise equivalent models of a given phenomenon, the simplest one.

Unfortunately, Occam's razor does not fit with all university studies and certainly not with the pontiffs of PC.

We know that most American and Canadian universities are politically correct hellholes where political correctness is the Byzantine complex of specialization and expansion of bureaucracy, as well as steadfast rules for every social, political, personal or cultural situation.

But these rules, regulations, taboos and "must do's" would serve a beehive traffic pattern better than a university. A hive needs all that specialization. It is a place where there is no room for change, adaptation, freedom or other opinions. The hive works to serve and perpetuate the queen.

What works for bees, however, does not work so well for human beings or the life of the mind. That hive and swarm mentality engenders mediocrity and groupthink. It is vicious and cruel and excludes ideas and excellence in favor of a phony egalitarianism and intellectual black hole. There is nothing more cruel or mindless than a university deep into political correctness.

In the modern university, creativity and inventiveness and individuality are lost because that disturbs the business of the hive, which the modern university has become.

Political correctness has a way of making drones of us all, as there is no disagreement or straying from the norm. Operating like a human hive, the university requires the various workers and drones to conform to political correctness, multiculturalism, diversity, gender parsing and the rest of the dark world of PC that includes the buzzwords and social constructs handed to us since the '60s.

Tragically, what has gotten lost in American and Canadian universities is the knowledge and conviction that Western culture and tradition, along with its history, is supremely worthy of being taught and accepted as the norm.

College students and professors are not totally to blame, however, for the creation of the hive mentality. We can lay that at the feet of cowardly college and university administrators, boards of regents, foundations, government research grants, oversight committees which don't oversee – in other words, the powers that be.

In this day and age, the funders and overseers go about their business as beehive ayatollahs. Through their protection of the politically correct code they they have acquiesced and become the morality police and cheerleaders for that folly of modern times.

Since the late '60s and early '70s, university administrations have been afraid of their own shadows. They capitulate to every whim of the PC crowd lest some professor, feminist or professional victim call them names like irrelevant, racist, homophobic, sexist, militaristic, xenophobic, nationalistic, accomplices to hate crimes, or control freak.

Meanwhile, with few exceptions, anyone in or out of the university setting not adhering to the PC line is called those names and cut out of the discussion. The university administrations rarely protest. Because they do not, real ideas and real debate hardly ever take place, except within PC coordinates and parameters.

Nonetheless, human beings are not bees. Human beings don't all think alike, nor do they comfortably choose to associate with anyone and everyone at all times and places. That is human nature.

But to the politically correct it is racist, phobic and (pick a grouping). But don't say it too loudly lest the ayatollahs of PC accuse you of hate speech or a hate crime and actively try to shut you up.

It is the worst kind of oppression, in which the life of the mind is forced into the iron maiden welded by the left and the deconstructionists.

Meanwhile, university administrations seldom punish or rebuke the people who abuse and misuse students or professors or others who break the PC code.

They are quick to punish some young man for calling a loud-mouthed woman on campus a "water buffalo" but never give a thought to punishing those who destroy conservative or politically incorrect campus newspapers or posters or broadsides.

Rarely do they lift a finger to bounce the brownshirt storm troopers of PC who deny David Horowitz, Ann Coulter and Robert Bork their right to speak on campus.

Cowardice on the part of university administrations means that everything that does not fit the hole of postmodern leftist deconstructionist groupthink becomes a crime.

Professor Harvey Mansfield is pilloried for his honest statements regarding grade inflation at Harvard, and Professor Kenneth W. Hearlson, a political science professor who taught contemporary politics at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, Calif., is suspended for making politically incorrect statements about Muslims – statements that tapes show were nothing of the sort.

What do we get for all the political correctness that has smothered campuses for years? Are young men and women better educated? Is freedom and inventiveness flourishing? Is American literature plowing new ground or making people enjoy reading again? Is art at new heights? Do young people hang together exchanging ideas or culture?

Or are we more segregated on campuses than ever? What about science, how many American scientists are we graduating these days? Or are they still deconstructing and postmodernizing Western tradition, making victimology and new classes of privileged untouchable minorities as a new way to make a living of our collective guilt?

Recently, I read a book suggested by journalist J.R. Nyquist. Morris Berman, author of the provocative "Twilight of American Culture," finds universities bleak and getting bleaker. His findings coincide with historian and culture critic Gertrude Himmelfarb. Berman's findings include the following statistics:

42 percent of American adults cannot locate Japan on a world map, and 15 percent cannot even locate the United States.

40 percent of American adults do not know that Germany was our enemy in World War II.

84 percent of American college seniors do not know who was president at the start of the Korean War.

58 percent of American high school seniors cannot understand a newspaper editorial in any newspaper.

According to a U.S. Department of Education survey of 22,000 students in 1995, 50 percent were unaware of the Cold War and 60 percent did not know how the United States came into existence.

63 percent of American adults believe that the earliest human beings lived at the same time as dinosaurs, 53 percent do not believe the earth revolves around the sun, and 91 percent can't state what a molecule is. A United Nations study indicates that out of 158 countries the U.S. ranks 49th in literacy and that 3 out of 4 adults have never read a book. Almost half the population reads at a fifth-grade level or less. Meanwhile, a Gallup survey revealed that universities are not doing the basic job of teaching:

25 percent of college seniors could not locate Columbus' voyage within the correct half-century;

25 percent could not distinguish Churchill's words from Stalin's, or Karl Marx's ideas from the U.S. Constitution;

40 percent did not know when the Civil War occurred; most could not identify the authors of works by Plato, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton.

In the '60s, scholar and academic Robert Nisbet wrote "The Degradation of the Academic Dogma." Nisbet maintained that professors, administrators and the government were in large measure responsible for what later became political correctness, the dumbing down of America, and the stifling of the intellectual life of the West – especially in America.

According to Gertrude Himmelfarb, Nisbet found that universities were straying from their original mission. Part of the reason was the flood of funds that they received from government, foundations and private endowments. This resulted in an exponential increase in projects, programs, institutes and centers "unrelated to the teaching function of the university ... the university was transformed into a multiversity."

Harvard is a case in point. The Harvard Institute for International Development was involved in one of the biggest scandals of the '90s wherein approximately $54 million was pumped into the group's effort to "help" Russia transform itself into a free-market economy. Rather a lot of the money went into the black hole of administrative costs and little helped the Russians.

This is only one instance of the far too cozy relationship between government and universities. Others abound, and usually it means millions in grants and funding for some project whether or not that project really deserves funding. Hardly anyone pays attention to the merits of each project.

Recently we find that universities are the biggest roadblock in getting our foreign student visa debacle under control. Thousands of foreign students never attend the universities at which they are supposed to be studying, but the universities don't care. They want the money, so they look the other way.

Apparently, that situation may be about to change. Yet in the long run, it will most likely be business as usual. Like many other entities, universities have become as much about money-making as anything else.

Perhaps it should not be surprising, therefore, that universities don't see political correctness as a problem. They are too busy counting up the dough in their stock portfolios and trust funds – at least at the majority of the Ivy League schools.

In his latest in National Review, writer Stanley Kurtz basically tells us that political correctness contributed to 9/11 by making us blind to any but the politically correct opinions of certain academics.

Kurtz maintains, "Actually, the "post-colonial" scholars who dominate Middle Eastern Studies – most of them deeply hostile to American foreign policy – have long stigmatized and ostracized academicians who work with the American government. Esposito (the PC academic accepted by the State Department) was only able to get away with forging government ties because his fellow scholars knew that his sympathies were with the fundamentalists. With experts in Middle Eastern languages and cultures in short supply, the state department – partly because it had few other options, and partly, no doubt, out of liberal naïveté – ended up relying on Esposito for its assessment of the Islamic fundamentalists."

How did universities and the professoriate get this way? It began when universities became involved in students' lives after World War II. The GI Bill sent thousands to college campuses for degrees and with it came tons of government money. It was a wonderful thing for the GIs and a well-deserved reward, but it also gave the universities a taste for money, much of it they rarely had to account for.

The money tree was important, but what became just as important were the social concerns that grew during the decade from hell, the '60s. Social concerns politicized the universities and when that happened, debate and free exchange of ideas went the way of the buffalo – few and far between.

Universities began to capitulate to student demands on everything from subject matter to grade inflation to ROTC on campus – and the die was cast. It was at that time the current crop of university professors were students. They turned their hatred for the war into hating or mistrusting all things Western, and that included Western civilization. Money and careers and academic niches were to be made in that hatred.

It was not only the obvious Marxist left that took over, but also an anarchistic and nihilistic view called postmodernism and deconstruction.

Combined with the natural leftist tendency of intellectuals and the elite, the deconstructionist, or what I call "chaos theory," played its part in concentrating on Western guilt and failures while ignoring the golden age that the West had helped to outline.

I said OUTLINE – not perfect. The doctors of guilt used Western idealism and guilt, a combination not shared by any other culture or intellectual tradition, against the West and the U.S. They added the gamesmanship of moral equivalency. What came out of that was political correctness. PC has never been successfully challenged until recently.

When the university intelligentsia began to deconstruct Western civilization, that meant that Western classical education was going to be dissected as well. That dissection seemed to be one-sided.

Rather than incorporate aspects of other cultures into teaching Western tradition, they dumped Western tradition almost completely. It seemed that lesser cultures were given higher status, but they had to do this by totally demonizing Western culture.

It is a simple fact that Western culture and tradition allowed the freedoms that made the university leftists and deconstructionists so rich and famous and free to be one-sided. Much like a spoiled child would remember only that mom and dad were not perfect and CHOSE to remember selective events and mistakes in order to have the moral high ground.

By doing that, the spoiled child and the politically correct bunch create a permanent dependence as well as keeping the right to stake a claim on vilifying mom and dad into infinity – OR until the folks run out of patience and take away the checkbook and credit cards.

However, university intelligentsia and students don't seem able to find intellectual honesty. Rather, they are comfortable that they have traded reason for ideology and have in essence become the butchers of Western society.

To them, America and the history of the West, along with literature, art and music was just about an irrelevant bunch of old dead white guys. The new left and the chaotic left had successfully intimidated university administrations into compliance with their butcher shop agenda.

It should come as no surprise that those same universities became the politicized entities of today.

There have always been politics and theories and rebellion at universities. But these days rebellion is by those who don't follow the PC code or fall in with leftist groupthink.

The ideas contained in the university code of political correctness come out of the schools of thought of old dead European white guys like Hegel, Marx, Marcuse, Gramsci and Heiddeger. Chaos and anarchy evolve from the deconstructionists and postmoderns like Lacan, Derrida and Foucault.

Basically, it amounts to more old dead leftist white guys whose theories are harder to fathom than Hegel and Marx. The language these theories are couched in add to the Byzantine intellectual haze. Language holds the key, and unless one is familiar with the buzzwords and academese, one is out of luck.

On the other hand, what might be called conservative or libertarian intellectual studies are marginalized, vilified or locked out of the exchange of ideas. If you asked 10 leftist college students who Von Mises or F.A. Hayek was, they most likely would not know. But they would know Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky. The chilly hand of PC is responsible for this.

But the modern leftist thrives to reconstruct and criticize, while the modern rightist or libertarian has to depend on a few university departments or institutes or conservative think tanks to promote or reflect on conservative and libertarian notions.

Well-fed university professors and their equally well-fed students can afford to carp at the West and the United States. Safe, fat and happy, they have the time and wherewithal to condemn the U.S. as the "Great Satan" of humanity and blame all the world's woes on Western values.

Dr. Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institute at Stanford recently wrote: "Anything that can show America or Americans in a bad light is irresistible to large segments of the intelligentsia. Such moral one-upmanship is the norm on campuses across the country – at least among the faculties, many of whom are 1960s radicals who have never had to grow up, thanks to being sheltered in the womb of academic tenure."

The collegiate and intellectual left did not blink or break stride when Marxism in the form of communism and socialism failed miserably around the world. They just recreated Marxism in the new skins of political correctness and now it is called progressive, or in most cases, the Democratic Party.

Hillary Clinton, Cynthia McKinney and Sheila Jackson Lee, as well as Patrick Leahy, Teddy Kennedy, Tom Daschle and George Miller would be good examples. The progressive and unaccountable left now probably controls half the votes in the United States. They get their intellectual ammunition from the universities, which everyone, left or right, pays for.

These new forms are still basically Marxist, still Hegelian, still anti-capitalist, anti-Western, anti-Christian and anti-intellectual. But the new order that combines chaos and Hegel use identity studies and politics to further its agenda and build a case for legitimacy.

At universities, black and women's studies, or whatever is the identity group du jour, are now considered more worthy of study than Shakespeare, Aquinas, Locke or Smith.

Universities think nothing of keeping Jefferson, Madison and Washington on the same level as Yasser Arafat, Abu Nidal, Robert Mugabe or Che Guevara. Entire budgets, departments and administrators go along with the foolishness.

When a majority of Harvard grads don't know important aspects of American history but still have time to take courses in some forced series of hothouse identity politics, something is seriously wrong.

There are entire departments, with accompanying deans and advisers, that teach topics not as part of a historical whole but from the perspective of an aggrieved and perpetually victimized minority overview.

By that I mean critical areas from math to science are being set up with the cloak of PC. Some universities are being taught from the point of view of a person's color or sex or ethnicity.

In fact, in some places feminist professors are demanding that math be taught with a feminist perspective. Some university feminists do not want to discuss the science of Sir Isaac Newton because they view his science as male-oriented.

Gertrude Himmelfarb says, in an article in Commentary magazine, that there was actually a collegial feminist debate on "Toward a Feminist Algebra." Furthermore, there are complaints that conventional mathematics suggests "a woman whose nature desires to be the conquered other"; and a book, "The Science Question in Feminism," declares Newton's "Principia" so suffused with "gender symbolism, gender structure, and gender identity" as to be nothing less than a "rape manual."

It is also a sad fact that civil rights for blacks, which should be equality before the law, have ended up being hijacked by every other group with an agenda not half as legitimate. In the atmosphere of the 60s all kinds of categories of people have taken the status of "preferred minorities."

It is a shame that a color-blind and gender-blind society was not allowed to evolve the last 40 years. The reason it didn't evolve was not an increase in oppression but rather that the aggrieved discovered a special privilege niche as well as a never-ending cash cow.

As long as they could think up criticisms and parse their identity into ever more grievances, they had tenure and book deals and status on the lecture circuit.

White male oppressors became an oppressed group themselves, and victimization became a permanent subgroup of Americans, with new additions every day. The balkanization of America is as much about money and the business of victimhood as it is about anything.

In fact, political correctness works and fits very well into that entire societal institution of setting Americans apart from one another.

Thus, it wasn't enough to add courses in the history of women or even specific histories of women or minorities to American history. Political correctness required entire academic superstructures and departments to keep that separation alive and funded.

Political correctness and the balkanization of our society at the university level are running downhill to flood everything in America from corporations to government departments. We are drowning in perpetual grievances, and the situation is choking out rational intellectual pursuits.

In all probability, American universities will not be reformed until the generation now holding them intellectually hostage is in the boneyard.

A Canadian university professor declares that "with the constant surveillance of the PCP (politically correct police – those rabid vigilantes empowered by incompetent administrators), I found myself even wondering whether I should upgrade my lectures to incorporate new facts which I knew would bring the ire of the PCP down upon me should they find out. (I struggled, for example, with whether I should tell my students that recent research had shown that the corpus callosum of women had 250,000 more neural fibers in it than the corpus callosum of men. ..."

A Spanish intellectual tells us that "the ongoing Bolshevization of American intellectual life can only reinforce the cancerous growth of various forms of therapeutic and egalitarian statism."

Check out my website at www.aldenchronicles.com and contact me at wulfric8@excite.com or alden@newsmax.com.

Diane Alden is a research analyst with a background in political science and economics. Her work has appeared in the Washington Times as well as NewsMax.com, Enterstageright, American Partisan and many other online publications. She also does radio commentaries for Steve Myers' show on Liberty Works Monday and Friday mornings, and can be heard regularly on Mike Fleming, WREC in Memphis.

Diane Alden’s articles, as those of Thomas Sowell, are always an enjoyment for the intellect. Her articles are profound and eye opening each one deserves careful reading.

Kudos Ms. Alden

I personally lay the blame on 2 entities.

1. TRIAL LAWYERS. Without them and their greedy selfish stupid lawsuits PC would and could NEVER exist.

2. People who serve on juries that allow assinine decisions and idiotically large settlements. Granted these people have been jury selected and then manipulated by those in group 1 BUT they too are guilty of creating the monster PC

The most politically correct statement that I ever heard was a slogan from a California High School. It proudly announced over the radio that "We all look different, but we all think alike. That is true diversity."

I am not making this up.

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