The Greatest Enemy of Civilization

A number of years ago the scholar Michael Strong argued that the greatest force for evil in the world today was the academic community. He argued that the West had been wonderfully blessed by the beliefs brought forth from our culture—property rights, the rule of law, the virtues of hard work, self-discipline, personal responsibility, and initiative. These led to the good life and prosperity.

Then about 100 years ago the academic community began to undermine those beliefs—and I might add, the Judeo-Christian truths that led to them. College professors did not bother to disprove these doctrines—they just attacked them, ridiculed them, and developed a hostility toward them emanating from our universities.  Strong said, “This century-long attack on important truths that benefit humanity, replacing them with contradictory information, constitutes one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever committed.”

The attacks on classical Christian ideas led to mass poverty and murder. Numerous African governments listened to Leftist college professors and destroyed their countries. Men like Cambodian Pol Pot sat at the feet of Marxist professors in Paris then went back to his country to apply what he learned: he killed 20% of the population of his country in one of the greatest acts of mass murder in history. Strong notes: “the ideology of Marxism was responsible for 100 million murders in the twentieth century…” Marxist political leaders killed more of their own citizens as a matter of state policy then all other governments in the history of mankind combined. This murderous ideology was learned at universities.

When I was a freshman at the University of Wyoming my political science professor said, Stalin messed up the revolution but Mao is getting it right. I have always found that with the Left, “getting it right” involves mass murder.

One year one of my colleagues contracted cancer and I was called on to teach his classes. In one he used the textbook, “Lies my Teacher Taught Me.” What lies you ask? The lie that America is a great country and a beacon of hope for the world. The professor who wrote the book devoted its 200+ pages to tearing down the culture that had made him rich and free.

In the disciplines in social studies and humanities the Left-wing cult completely dominates and its destructive venom spreads into our youth, creating nightmarish consequences and the potential to ruin our civilization.

Last summer you watched America’s cities set on fire, businesses destroyed, crime skyrocket, and the rule of law suspended. The perpetrators were simply applying what they learned in their university classrooms.

Of the 1,600 public colleges and universities in America, not one has a conservative history department, sociology department, anthropology. The so called “studies” departments—black studies, women’s studies, ethnic studies, and the like are not academic departments at all but propaganda mills, taking tuition and taxpayer money to foist their extreme, anti-Christian, anti-Western ideology on students.

I have heard a hundred times of children going off to an expensive, liberal arts college, only to have their faith and their relationship with their parents and country destroyed.

Universities are no longer seekers of truth but mills manufacturing political propaganda. Writing in the Spectator, Scott Turner observes that our universities are coming to resemble totalitarian states, and like those states they “are kept in power by the skillful use of lies and pressure to conform.”

Mark Mitchell observes that, Nietzsche, the intellectual father of much of the modern university, said life was no longer a search for truth but a quest for power. This is all higher education has become. No longer a quest for truth but a lust for power. The academic community has become like Lenin: the key to life is not to understand the world but to change it.

What is to be done?

1.   Do not send your child to college to study the humanities or social sciences. You can still get a decent education in the STEMS—science, technology, engineering, and math—and possibly in a business school. But even there your student will have to take a certain number of general education classes that are at best worthless, and at worst soul-destroying propaganda sessions. So consider alternatives to college.

2.   Stop giving money to colleges. I cannot believe how many adults give money to the old alma mater only to have it used to destroy the very values that made them able to give in the first place.

3.   Be very selective. There are a handful of private colleges that are reliably conservative. If you insist on sending your child to college do everything in your power to send them to one of those. Do your research. Remember even most so-called Christian schools have capitulated to the spirit of the age and are bent on destroying your child’s Christian faith.

4.   If for financial reasons you want to send your child to the local state university remember what they will be facing. Arm them intellectually with books that will prepare them for the intellectual onslaught they will face.

5.   Pray. Our God will deal with His enemies. I am old enough to remember thinking that Communism would never die. Then in 1990, in Bill Buckley’s famous words, God cleared His throat and Communism was dead. God destroyed it. Call upon Him to deal with the academic community. And in His good time He will.

Thank you for listening. Please check the resources below. May our God bless you this day in a mighty way.

More Resources: I have a hopeful video on why God will win: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcW3ri8DcBg&t=397s

Michael Strong: https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2012/08/academia-the-worlds-leading-social-problem/

Spectator article on Jordan Peterson leaving the academy: https://spectatorworld.com/topic/jordan-peterson-crisis-totalitarian-academia/

Mark Mitchell on the death of higher education: https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/04/02/the_death_of_god_and_the_death_of_higher_education_110561.html