Weaver Against Open-Ended Academic Freedom

Academic neutralities are tools of the Left

One of the difficulties in the rhetorical battles over freedom of speech and Left-revolutionary propaganda in the school system is as follows: the Revolutionaries, having a century ago successfully effectuated a coup within the academic establishment, are now consolidating their intellectual hegemony to prevent the propagation of older, traditional, or perceivably right wing views. This entails, of course, an opposition in practice to an environment of so-called “academic freedom.”

Yesterday’s mantras like “every voice deserves to be heard” and “all opinions have their right to be expressed” and the importance of a “marketplace of ideas” have turned out to be strategic rhetoric. The strategy is simple: when the social hegemony is inclined toward views completely at odds with your own, preach the gospel of “free speech” and “open-mindedness”. When you have obtained a position of power, nuke the liberality; after all, liberality of thinking is a means of subversion against the established doctrine.

Patrick Deneen recently wrote a great post on this problem, “Against Academic Freedom.” Therein, he observed that the original liberals such as John Stuart Mill, vocally advocated an academic setting “forbidding limitation of any view, belief, opinion, and even action, unless it could be proven that someone (usually someone else) was demonstrably harmed by the expression or act. Seemingly neutral, this principle appeared to defend the liberty of any form of expression or belief—whether religious or secular, mainstream or quirky.”

But this was precisely the very con employed by the American post-Marxist Left since the 60s. Having seen the successes of liberalism against the traditional European order, the New Left would adopt this strategy in order to provide a platform on which to generate its revolution. That is to say, both 18th century liberalism and 20th century postliberalism, operated on the same long run objectives (the eradication of traditional ways of thinking and cultural norms). Deneen writes of Mill:

However, Mill was clear that what this ideal of liberty aimed to do was to displace traditional forms of culture and long-standing belief in favor of progress.  Liberty was not merely good in itself, but was to serve the advance of social and human transformation. The means of this transformation was the support and promotion of the liberty of those who wished to engage in “experiments in living.” If such “experiments” were disapproved by those with customary belief—particularly religious believers—Mill was clear that the “despotism of Custom” was to be overturned, even through the imposition of political power if necessary. 

The liberalism, the rhetoric of an “open society,” was a head fake. And this head fake is such that it has “conservatives” of the Neoconservative and Straussian variety (such as Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin and so on) working toward the old liberal positions that the Left first leveraged, and then did away with as it gained the cultural upper hand.

This is a mistake, the mistake of neutrality.

For what has already happened, under the guise of academic freedom, is described well by Richard Weaver in his Visions of Order:

It is not too much to say that in the past fifty years public education in the United States has been in the hands of revolutionaries. To grasp the nature of their attempted revolution, we need only realized that in the past every educational system has reflected to a great extent the social and political constitution of the society which supported it. This was assumed to be a natural and proper thing, since the young were to be trained to take places in the world that existed beyond them.

They were “indoctrinated” with this world because its laws and relations were those by which they were expected to order their lives.

As I am writing about in an upcoming essay to be published in an anthology this fall, this fact of cultural reality was something stressed by Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of cultural hegemony and the tyrannizing nature of cultural institutions. In fact, this insight extends out toward Theodore Adorno’s extremely influential manifesto of sorts The Authoritarian Personality. That is to say, in Richard Weaver’s words, all cultures have a “tyrannizing image” that pulls the minds of its members into itself and helps to shape their vision of their world.

Academic freedom is a beginning stage of the attempt to replace that tyrannizing image with a new one. And that is why conservatives will not be able to adequately fight the positive vision of the Left: all they have is the neutralities of liberalism, afraid as they are to offer some alternative vision of a worldview and culture.

And indeed, the Left, having marched from the Old Indoctrinations through Liberalism, and onward to their own New Indoctrination, we find the situation described well in Weaver:

[W]e have witnessed something never before seen in the form of a systematic attempt to undermine society’s traditions and beliefs through the educational establishment which is usually employed to maintain them.

Academic freedom and free expression cannot be the solution in a situation where the stronger parties are no longer interested in them. Deneen adds:

Since creating a “neutral” community is impossible, the answer to the “woke” religion that is spreading among elites who run our nation’s main institutions is not to invoke “academic freedom,” “religious liberty,” or hopes for neutrality. Those arguments—successfully made by people like J.S. Mill nearly two centuries ago—never sought to create a “neutral” or open society. Rather, they were arguments that contained a set of substantive commitments to a social and political order fundamentally different than one governed by Christian norms: individualism, progressivism, materialism, scientism, utilitarianism, all leading to the “religion of humanity.” 

The only possibility of defeating the Left is actually defeating them. This requires a decision on commitments, rather than neutrality and the creed of non-commitment. It also requires forms of political solutions, and probably not of the democratic flavor.