Scholars vs. Ideologues
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Scholars vs. Ideologues Juliana Geran Pilon
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Not a few among today’s intellectuals, both inside and outside the ivy-towered temples of higher learning, sound like modern-day Jeremiahs who lament the false promise of America and capitalism while genuflecting before the prospect of a brave new world. Self-styled secular prophets, they gravitate to what Lewis S. Feuer called “the ideological mode of thought.” 1 But there is one crucial difference: unlike their putative Hebrew predecessors, argues Feuer, “as ideologists, [they claim] to know the plan of God in history and His long-term purposes.” Ideology is not merely a replacement religion for most of its adherents. It also provides a lofty political mission: building the City of Man. The promise of a utopian “higher society” inebriates its proponents, who embrace the new political religion with pious devotion. The anti-liberalism pervading the academy today can best be understood with this in mind. Paul Hollander’s influential Political Pilgrims similarly noted that many intellectuals are blinded by a lust for power to which, secretly and not-sosecretly, they feel entitled. “The utopian susceptibilities of contemporary Western intellectuals,” observed Hollander, “are part of a long-standing tradition of seeking heaven on earth . . . [which] is not to say that utopian and religious designs are antithetical, but that the utopian ones often feed on and derive from religious impulses.” These utopian ideals tend to have much in common: they are in principle applicable to all mankind, and must be radically, categorically different from present circumstances. But by far the most important element is that 1
Lewis S. Feuer, Ideology and the Ideologists (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1975).
Juliana Geran Pilon is a Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization; [email protected].
J.G. Pilon
[utopians] lean toward the belief that most people do not know what is good for them, that the individual pursuit of happiness is inefficient and often leads to the collision of the desires of different individuals (which could be averted in the utopian framework proposed). It follows from the compelling character of many utopian schemes that those intent on their realization cannot, in good conscience, exclude the use of force to bring it about and to maintain it. 2 Thus paternalism trumps individual freedom, as the guardians of the Common Good promote it uber alles. But if a sense of alienation cum arrogance is the intellectual’s occupational hazard, a visceral hatred of one’s society need not be. Yet so it seems to be, throughout America’s campuses, particularly in social science and history departments, most of whose faculty appear obsessed with national self-flagellation. And no wonder, considering that so many of today’s professors were yesterday’s radicals. Those of us who attended college during the 1960s and ‘70s witnessed the hate-filled student riots,
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