The Mass Production of Intellectuals

Higher Education in the West has been in free-fall for a long time. Several years ago Michael Strong wrote an essay calling higher ed the greatest enemy of mankind. He said the wretched ideas emanating from the academy had gotten more people killed in the last hundred years than any government or army. Charlie Kirk challenged universities head-on, setting up on campus and inviting all—student or professor—to debate him. The effort got him killed. An Oxford don recently wrote that the plague of wokeism on campus is caused, ultimately, by the faculty.

Recently Chilton Williamson, an engaging conservative writer published in the Spectator—a secular British publication—wrote an essay entitled “The Tyranny of the Mass-Intellectual.”

Throughout the ages philosophers and theologians have wondered, from whence does virtue come? How does right thinking and right living emerge in the individual? Williamson says the great thinkers in history never arrived at a definitive answer. Now, however, our university faculties have arrived at the answer. They, themselves, know what virtue is and it is their job to pound it into the brains of their students. “A high-school diploma is confirmation that one’s progress toward virtue and the virtuous life has begun; a Bachelor of Arts degree is the equivalent of a certificate of virtue acquired; and a PhD is confirmation that the holder is adept in virtue, entitled to go forth into the world to rule, transform and perfect it.”

What education has become is an engine for mass-producing virtue as the liberal elite define virtue. It’s why Hillary Clinton, a graduate of Yale Law, called people outside her orb, “deplorables.” In the view of the elite that is what the rest of us are. We have not imbibed at the fountain of virtue produced for us by our intellectual betters in the major universities. Especially the elite universities.

Again, Williamson: “Modern liberals, and now progressives, understand it as their inalienable right to power, conferred by an ideological education that guarantees the promotion of the sole correct way of thinking about politics and society, man and nature, man and his human destiny, that is… the one and only true virtue.”

What the Progressives have done, in their own minds, is produce the only source of legitimate moral authority. That would be of course themselves. They have established their own church, The Church of God without God. In my 25 years within secular higher education I was astonished at how confident my colleagues and students were of their own virtue. They were totally confident they know how to run other people’s lives. That they knew what was good and virtuous for everyone. How what we now call “wokeness” was the good and perfect religion. And that they had the responsibility to teach it to everyone and impose it on everyone. The fact they were failures in their own personal lives bothered them not at all.

Williamson says higher ed is now an engine for mass producing woke intellectuals. Anyone who challenges their authority is a heretic of terrible proportion.

Christianity still stands athwart the pretension of this mass-producing monster. Williamson says the final triumph of Christianity is found in how we respond to Descartes’ famous dictum, “I think, therefore, I am.” Christians instead say virtue is found in this dictum: I love, therefore I am.”

Nothing provides a greater contrast to the woke industrial complex than the love of Jesus Christ. It can’t be mass produced. But the Holy Spirit plants it in every heart that bows before Him.

Wokeism at universities is the product of the faculty: https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/academics-are-to-blame-for-the-woke-wreckage-at-universities-27ht2xdjc

The Greatest Enemy of Civilization: The Academic Community; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79zJJDe6LeM