Free Republic

Where to start… A few days ago Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote, “So we end up populating what we call the intelligentsia with people who are delusional, literally mentally deranged, simply because they never have to pay for the consequences of their actions, repeating modernist slogans stripped of all depth. In general, when you hear someone invoking abstract modernistic notions, you can assume that they got some education (but not enough, or in the wrong discipline) and too little accountability.” On Monday, James Kunstler wrote, “But the dishonesty at work is pretty obvious, and the problem with dishonesty in financial affairs...

Hegel's Deity: How Evolution Gave Us Postmodernism, Deconstructionism, and Political Correctness Nancy Pearcey March 27, 2015 5:59 AM | Permalink How has evolution shaped our view of humanity? We often hear that evolution is the key scientific prop for the philosophy of materialism, with its reduction of the human person to a complex biochemical machine. But spiritualized versions of evolution have appeared as well -- for example, in the philosophy of Hegel. In our own day, Hegel's spiritual/cultural view of evolution has led to its own form of reductionism: the postmodern reduction of individuals to social groups based on race,...

The talking heads continue to yap about the source of the savagery driving Jared Lee Loughner. Many on the left have tried, and failed, to pin the blame for the Tucson massacre on the Tea Parties or, just as ridiculous, on Sarah Palin. Meanwhile, the 900-pound gorilla in the interrogation room remains unquestioned and unchallenged. Its name is "deconstructionism." Deconstructionism is historical relativism on crack cocaine. The "theory" is being freely and openly distributed to almost every college student in America. Courses in most of the humanities typically include the works of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. In fact, it...

Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about this morning – the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it – where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic. We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been...

Melanie Morgan might not have a profile as high as some other pundits of the right, but she is emerging, in my book, as one of conservatism's most fearless and articulate advocates.Last month, I noted an epic dust-up on "Hardball" between talk radio host Morgan and feminist Naomi Wolf. On today's show, the two again clashed. Last time around, I suggested that Wolf might be America's most passive-aggressive woman. Today, she showed herself to be one of its most alarmist. The topic was the controversy over the extent to which Alberto Gonzales [at the time Pres. Bush's White House counsel]...

As readers of this space know, we frequently subject academics to what we view as constructive criticism. As travelers through the blogosphere may have noticed, they sometimes answer those critiques. “Someone named Candace de Russy (on the usually unbearably dreadful National Review blog on the university situation 'Phi Beta Cons') cites someone else named Laura Ventura at Accuracy in Academia to the effect that the fact that the journal Critical Inquiry has more citations of Derrida and Marx than of C. S. Lewis and Thomas Jefferson is an indication of the journal’s ‘anti-American, anti-war, and anti-Christian’ stance,” Bucknell sociologist Alexander...

Far too little attention has been paid to addressing the fundamental role that ideological indoctrination in classrooms and lecture halls has played in delivering the atrocities of Nazism to the world. The German university was the ideological originator of Nazism, turning romantic racial myths and superstitions about Germany and the Jews into a systematic “scientific” body of knowledge that gave rise to Nazi racial policy and justified the horrors of the Nazi atrocities. Professors and academics with multiple Ph.D.s eagerly collaborated with the Nazi leadership and selected who was to be sterilized and who lived or died for the glory...

Address to: Summer Sounds Symposium Punga Cove, New Zealand February 11 2006 For the past three decades and more, many of the leading opinion makers in our universities, the media and the arts have regarded Western culture as, at best, something to be ashamed of, or at worst, something to be opposed. Before the 1960s, if Western intellectuals reflected on the long-term achievements of their culture, they explained it in terms of its own evolution: the inheritance of ancient Greece, Rome and Christianity, tempered by the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the scientific and industrial revolutions. Even a radical...

Question for the day: if liberalism isn’t dead, then why are autopsies performed so regularly? In the latest examination of the much-probed cadaver, the New Republic’s editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz, recalls that John Kenneth Galbraith, in the early 1960s, pronounced American conservatism dead, citing as heavy evidence that conservatism was “bookless” or bereft of new ideas. Peretz writes, “It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying.” Liberals, he says, are not inspired by any vision of the good society; the liberal agenda consists of wanting to spend more, while conservatives want to spend less. And the lack of new ideas...

...Derrida... was... one of the most famous intellectuals of the past 40 years. His celebrity rivaled that of Jean-Paul Sartre. As the founder, honorary CEO and chief publicist for an abstruse philosophical doctrine he called "deconstruction," Mr. Derrida was celebrated and vilified in about equal measure.... What is deconstruction? ...[D]econstruction comes with a lifetime guarantee to render discussion of any subject completely unintelligible.... the view that the meanings of words are completely arbitrary and that, at bottom, reality is unknowable. [I]f you dress up the idea in a forbidding vocabulary, full of neologisms and recondite references to philosophy, then you...

America's core culture has primarily been the culture of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers who founded our nation. The central elements of that culture are the Christian religion; Protestant values, including individualism, the work ethic, and moralism; the English language; British traditions of law, justice, and limits on government power; and a legacy of European art, literature, and philosophy. Out of this culture the early settlers formulated the American Creed, with its principles of liberty, equality, human rights, representative government, and private property. Subsequent generations of immigrants were assimilated into the culture of the founding settlers and modified it, but...

These are uncertain times for literary scholars. The era of big theory is over. The grand paradigms that swept through humanities departments in the 20th century — psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, post-colonialism — have lost favor or been abandoned. Money is tight. And the leftist politics with which literary theorists have traditionally been associated have taken a beating. In the latest sign of mounting crisis, on April 11 the editors of Critical Inquiry, academe's most prestigious theory journal, convened the scholarly equivalent of an Afghan-style loya jirga. They invited more than two dozen of America's professorial elite, including Henry Louis...