Currency Perversity Or Dimension Reduction?

Quotable – Note: A long quote today, but thought it too brilliant not to share in its entirety for those of us sickened by the “liberal elite” no-holds-barred attack on what remains of our culture and the ongoing destruction of our universities. 

“It is worth acknowledging that the demand for ‘safe spaces’ has a deep moral or intellectual component. What these battalions of crybullies want is to be protected not only from physical harm but also from anything that would challenge their settled ideas of virtue regarding race, sexuality, ‘the environment,’ political responsibility, the Second Amendment (and, increasingly, the First), and so much more. It used to be that the very pattern of a liberal arts education was set by the figure of Socrates calling his interlocutors to debate about essential questions. What is the good life? What is virtue? Can it be taught? What is truth? How do we recognize it? How can one justify going to war? What is the best way to organize society?

“Those were the sorts of questions that, once upon a time, those who were privileged enough to go to college paid good money to think about seriously. By acquainting one with the great debate conducted from the dawn of recorded history until the day before yesterday, a liberal education initiated one into a never-ending conversation. ‘Being educated’ meant immersing oneself into the stream, if not the scrum, of that debate and understanding that one’s own position on the tiny lip of the present moment offered but a poor resource for understanding the important questions that confront us all as imperfect and mortal creatures.

“IT USED TO BE THAT THE VERY PATTERN OF A LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION WAS SET BY THE FIGURE OF SOCRATES CALLING HIS INTERLOCUTORS TO DEBATE ABOUT ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS.

“Today, by contrast, a college education, apart from whatever technical or administrative skills it may impart, seems geared to reinforcing a set of intellectual and moral clichés and protecting its charges from confronting any idea that has not received its Good Housekeeping Seal of political correctitude. Enforcing a regimen of intellectual timidity fired by ravenous moral resentment, today’s colleges are in fact factories for the production of sclerotic, politically correct conformity on any contentious moral or intellectual issue. The spectacle of college administrations first inculcating and abetting this timidity and then capitulating to the groundless anger that it feeds upon would be comical if it were not blighting the lives of those it pretends to help. ‘We are,’ as G. K. Chesterton observed in another context, ‘on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.’”

–Roger Kimble, The New Criterion