Which leads us to the professors themselves — the field generals of the antiwar movement. It's worth noting that few of them will come from math and science departments. Rather, they'll come from the social sciences and humanities — disciplines whose prominent players have spent the last quarter century disparaging the very methods of rational thought, deductive and inductive reasoning, as Eurocentric hogwash. It's no coincidence that the three most influential thinkers among social scientists and humanities professors over the last quarter century have been Les Trois Stoogés of French Philosophy, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. What the three have in common is their insistence that language creates reality and their denial that facts exist independently of political perspectives. This is a handy epistemology if you're a superannuated Frenchman and you spent the early 1940's handing Jews over to Nazis, or, for that matter, if you're a graying academic and you spent the late 1960's cowering before snot-nosed sophomores who demanded curriculum changes at your college.
This became, in any event, the dominant epistemology of students who earned degrees in the social sciences and humanities in the wake of the 1960's — and it's they who've become the tenured radicals pulling the puppet strings of campus antiwar movements. They will, rest assured, hold many more "teach ins" — for they are by now seasoned pros at polysyllabic rabble rousing. Yet they cannot teach in any meaningful sense of the word since they cannot think. They are incapable, for example, of thinking through the basic if-then logic which binds together the denial that facts exist to the denial of the Nazi Holocaust. Or the European slave trade. (Mark Goldblatt, NRO) |