The English faculty at Leicester University recently decided to expunge works such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Beowulf from their curriculum. They hoped that removing classical “Western” works from their curriculum would attract more students. That decision accentuates a trend that has been underway in American colleges, too: Eliminating course that many students claim glorify western imperialism, capitalism, and chauvinism. The students, and often faculty, demand colleges take down portraits and statues as well. The University of Pennsylvania removed a portrait of Shakespeare that had graced the walls for years. Not to be outdone, the San Francisco Board of Education removed Abraham Lincoln’s name from a public school.
In 1987, Alan Bloom published his insightful book, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Improvised the Souls of American Students. Bloom taught at the University of Chicago which published the Great Books of the Western World series. The Great Books series has served as a basic curriculum in colleges that offer the Great Books program, most notably the University of Chicago and Columbia University.
Bloom argued that American students have become impoverished in the soul because they no longer engage with the classics of Western Civilization. The Great Books program presents writings from influential authors regardless of whether their views are radical, liberal, conservative, atheistic, or theistic. The editors trust that, with open liberal education, students will have the ability to make educated decisions on what is right and what is wrong. That is the heart of liberal education. The slogan is “Let the great conversation take place.”
Radical students of the 1960s did not subscribe to that commitment. Because they were sure that their revolutionary Marxian, Freudian, Nietzschean, and Darwinian views contained all truth, they sought to cancel any other views, especially religious views. They directly assaulted traditional American values of God, family, and nation. They treated with disdain anything related to traditional Christian morality.
During the 34 years since Bloom published his book sounding an alarm about the closing of the American mind, what he feared has come to pass. The students so ill-served in the 1980s and beyond have taken their revolution outside of academia. Now they dominate in media, education, government, entertainment, the arts, and sports. Not only have they fully embraced the radical atheistic ideas of Marx, Freud, Darwin, and Nietzsche, they refuse to permit anyone who embraces traditional religious and liberal ideas to work in those institutions.
The university is no longer a place of liberal education in the best sense of the term. It will not give all ideas a fair hearing, it figuratively burns books, and it routinely bars speakers. Only those who advance the radical atheistic left are welcomed. Worse, universities use all means necessary to protect and advance leftist hegemony.
So, there you have it. That is the reason for cancel culture, with its intolerance for traditional religious moral views. Cancel culture is at war with the core American culture of God, family, and community. It wars with the view that America has a special mission in God’s Providence to be a City on a Hill. Its acolytes disdain the people, whom they once called deplorable and now label as insurrectionists. Cancel culture’s practitioners know better than the people because they have the “correct” ideology.
But they are wrong. The truth will withstand open discussion, freedom of expression, and public debate. In fact, the truth becomes clearer during that discussion. The ideologues who hold that we are merely evolving animals who rise to the top through survival of the fittest, that religion is a cancer that must be removed, that we are driven by sexual impulses not divine sentiments, and that the masses must be ruled by the dictatorship of the proletariat are wrong. Those ideologues will fail because those ideas are false.
Today’s censorship by big tech social media, the Deep State, universities, print and broadcast media, corporations, government resulted from the Closing of the American Mind that began in our nation’s universities during the 1960s. The remedy is to reopen the Great Conversation. Let’s discuss Marx and his Worker’s Paradise. Let’s discuss Freud and his Religion as Illusion. Let’s discuss Darwin and his theory of Evolution. Let’s discuss Nietzsche and his idea of the Superman. Let’s discuss all that ideas and more in light of the Great Books of the Western World. And let’s bring in the rest of the world’s classics. Let’s have a free and open, no holds barred, discussion. In that way, we can reinvigorate the America I know and love.
“The remedy is to reopen the Great Conversation”.
It is unrealistic to think that wishing will make it so. The Left, or whatever you want to call it, doesn’t want a great conversation. It wants control, and it now has the means to impose it without opposition. It took centuries of effort and struggle to establish freedom of expression and classical liberal values.
It also involved struggle. Reestablishing freedom of expression will require defeating the forces of suppression and destruction of opposing ideas. It took the defeat of the Nazis to open American institutions to a marketplace of ideas. Hopefully, it won’t require kinetic confrontations, but it will require recognition of the need to stand up to intimidation and cancellation.
@ liz44:
I suggest that MAGA people take back the elementary school education to teach their values then high school and so on. If the left can do it so can the patriots.
Once the Trumpers control the House of Rep they could alter financing for universities so that government grants are based on courses taught.
I remember reading The Closing of the American Mind when it was first published . It was all the rage at the time. It is sad to see how prescient Bloom was.
People who deplore the intellectual hell-hole that now describes universities show that they have read Newman’s essay on universities, but have not looked at the history of universities. Most of the free thinking that led to what we call freedom of speech never occurred at universities; the books were written by people who had no association with universities at all. And the reason: because universities have, historically, been centres of conformism or repression. Most recently, we see that many well-known American universities supported the murderous Hitler regime. (Read Stephen Norwood, ‘The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower’.) During the 1950’s, conformism took the form of a slavish obeisance to the conservative rhetoric espoused by Joseph McCarthy. Now, it’s the Left’s turn.
Daniel Davies’ solution of re-opening the great conversation does not go far enough. Where precisely does one open this conversation? Clearly, not at the current universities. Then where? Unless one can come up with specific solutions, there remains nothing concrete that can be done and no conversation to have.
I despair! As a former lecturer in English, with a Ph D in that subject and living in England, I am dumbfounded at this latest stupidity. I don’t think Leicester U will actually go ahead and do this – at least, I hope not – but the rise of the cancel culture, the Stalinist Left, and the dumbing down of the Western mind are all extremely worrying. I trust none of my former students are involved in this idiocy.