Power in the university

Authority’s first duty is to preserve itself.  Jennifer Frey writing in First Things on The War on Tenure is doing her part.  Amusingly enough, I also wrote a defense of tenure when I was an assistant professor.  I can’t quite go along with this:

Tenure rights for university faculty exist for one purpose: to safeguard academic freedom.  Academic freedom is simply freedom to pursue the truth in good faith, unimpeded by fear of dismissal by those who wield power.

Oh no, my friend, the purpose of tenure is that we the faculty are supposed to be the ones wielding power.  The departments are ours, and we shall guard our control of them jealously.  “Academic freedom” is just another word for our collective authority; it means that no outsider may set limits on our research and teaching.  I get the sense that Prof. Frey really does appreciate that this is what it’s all about when she writes things like the following:

What the cases at Duke, the Mount, and USTH all appear to have in common is this: They are examples of the erosion of the traditional rights and privileges of tenure. This erosion coincides with a power shift that marginalizes the role of faculty within the university’s shared governance. This is a direct attack on the institution of the university itself.

In response to the student mobs intimidating faculty at Yale, I wrote

In previous discussions of academic freedom, JMSmith, Bruce Charlton, and I pointed out that the freedom in question has always been understood as the autonomy of the academic guild against interference by some outside force like the Church or the state.  It has little to do with the freedom of individual scholars against their peers, even though it is often formulated so as to seem to be about this.  In other words, “academic freedom” is the defense of a particular authority, which makes it easier for me as a reactionary to get behind it.  It also seems that to effectively mobilize the faculty to defend their authority, the outside subversive threat must be identified and acknowledged.

Today, the main threat to academic freedom on campus is the students.  Not all or even most of them, of course.  There is a vast silent majority that just wants to learn and/or be credentialed.  That silent majority doesn’t matter, though.  When a howling mob of grievance majors comes for your scalp, none of the students who appreciate the time you put into constructing lectures, helping them during office hours, etc. is going to be there to defend you.  What matters is the howling mob.  They are now the most feared and most powerful force on campus.  Now they even dare to challenge us, we the professors who should be their masters!  With impunity they attempt to intimidate some of our own number, demanding apologies, demanding resignations.

My fellow professors, for a thousand years, we have ruthlessly advanced our dominion over the university system, fighting off all rivals to our power and prestige.  And right we were to have done so, because authority’s first duty is always to preserve itself.  Today, a new rival has arisen from among our own students.  While they are certainly terrifying, we should not quit the field of battle yet.  They are demos, we are logos.  The university is just a circus unless we’re in charge.   Really, there is no reason we should tolerate mobs at all.  This is not free inquiry or individual expression.  When a mob forms around an isolated target and starts shouting or chanting, this is an attempt at intimidation, pure and simple.  Protests should never be allowed on campus, not even “peaceful” ones, because to gather a large crowd of impassioned youth simply is to threaten violence.   Anyone caught at one should be immediately expelled.  Anyone disrupting class should be expelled.  Anyone caught faking a hate crime should be expelled.

Needless to say, faculty have not followed my advice and so have continued to endure humiliating assaults.  Being Leftists, they can’t help it.  They really think that each generation is more virtuous than the last and that morality always consists in critiquing order, never in upholding it.  At one time, these progressive “memes” served to enhance our power (which is, perhaps, what originally recommended them), but once formulated, ideas take on a life of their own.  The faculty’s own belief system demands they acknowledge the superior authority of social justice hooligan teenagers.

I’ve come to expect students to behave like the lower primates.  What’s most shocking about the protests at Evergreen State College is the faculty response.

The students didn’t get everything they asked for…Nor did Bridges accede to this: “We demand Bret Weinstein be suspended immediately without pay but all students receive full credit” (the “full credit” was a nice touch). Bridges’s refusal to fire him (or any other Evergreen employees targeted on the student list) may be cold comfort to Weinstein, however, because Bridges also declared there would be a “full investigation” of “any complaint of discrimination”—and such complaints look highly likely in the future. Dozens of Weinstein’s fellow faculty members at Evergreen have already signed an open letter asking the college to pursue a “disciplinary investigation against Bret Weinstein” simply for publicizing his predicament: “Weinstein has endangered faculty, staff, and students, making them targets of white supremacist backlash by promulgating misinformation in public emails, on national television, in news outlets, and on social media.”

When the mob comes for you, you must take it silently, because otherwise you are putting our students in danger of backlash from Klingon warriors, or some other equally fictional menace.  I suspect this will be a common tactic.  It’s how the majority of the faculty will rationalize demanding their colleagues surrender to the mob.  Good to know.  It reminds me of how Leftist bullies in academia like to announce that they have received “death threats” whenever criticism of their outrageous behavior draws attention.  There’s no trick so stupid it won’t work when your people control the media.  Actual social justice violence is excused because we must protect ourselves from entirely hypothetical violence from non-existent “white supremacists”.

As I said in my earlier post, the university system is still not as far gone in terms of authority collapse as the Catholic Church.  But the situation is very, very bad.  Some things to look into.

1. Jonathan Haidt suggests that faculty should speak out in groups, because it will be more difficult to punish a group than a single dissenter.  (See his footnote 1.)
2. According to the Weekly Standard article, Bret Weinstein attempted to engage protesters who invaded his class in a reasoned discussion of their grievances, which of course they were not interested in having.  I admire the guy’s courage and appreciate that there wasn’t anything better he could do under the circumstances, but it still needs to be said that this is inappropriate.  If someone interrupts a biology class because he objects to the professor’s political beliefs, the only thing he should be allowed to do is apologize to the class for his interruption before being ejected by the police.  The material on the syllabus for that day, not a “dialectic” on Professor Weinstein’s alleged racism, is what should be going on in class.  Realistically, Weinstein probably couldn’t have had them ejected, but still, that’s what should have happened.
3. Sooner or later, students are going to find ways of interrupting classes that have been moved off campus.  We should be looking into online classes where each student logs in separately (no large gathering of students to disrupt) and the instructor has full moderating power.  It should be possible to create uninterruptable classes.  It would also be best to move colloquia and academic debates off of campus, for speakers’ safety.  As much intellectual activity as possible should be moved off campus, to embarrass the usurpers.  Let the world see how valuable spaces still are once the social justice rabble have claimed them.

Repost: Christianity and Love of the Other (On the consistency of particularism and Christian charity)

It is a good thing to want one’s fellow man to be happy in the everyday use of the word.  It is an even better thing to want one’s fellow man to be virtuous, better still to want him to be holy.  To love God, to affirm His Eternal Law and be conformed to it, is man’s highest calling.  Yet charity does not rest even with this, that he and I should both separately obey and separately adore God.  As Aquinas said, benevolence alone is imperfect friendship; perfect friendship also requires communion.  This, then, is charity’s end:  that my neighbors and I should be united in worshipping God, that we should praise Him–as it were–with one voice and make a collective obeisance to His Law.  As Augustine insisted, this and this alone constitutes a group of men as a true republic.  It’s fullest form is, of course, the Church herself.  In the Church, believers are united in one body that is none other than the mystic body of Christ, engaging in one collective sacrifice that is none other than Christ’s own sacrifice sacramentally re-presented.  However, while the Church is the supreme corporate offering to God, she is not, and does not wish to be, the only one.  Every authoritative organization–family, tribe, local and national community–is grounded in a recognition of a transcendent moral order and ordered to a collective conformity to this order.  So far is the Church from that jealousy that marks the secular state–the godless state that prefers to rule over a social desert so that it can rule alone–that the Church’s greatest wish for these other authorities is that they should recapture a sense of their true grandeur.

The condemnation of Action Francaise, a parallel for today’s denunciations of the Alt Right

The Southern Baptist condemnation of “Alt Right” “racism” has made me grateful that Pope Francis has thrown the Catholic Church into complete doctrinal confusion.  If John Paul II were alive today, we might be witnessing an infallible declaration that borders are immoral.  It seems as if God, in His wisdom, has allowed the Church to fall into a sort of protective intellectual hibernation.  Because we cannot yet think clearly, it is better if we speak only in postmodern gibberish.  The Magisterium is to be humiliated but preserved, and a final victory over this present egalitarian madness–if there is to be any–is to be the work and the glory of Him alone.

One hundred years ago, a movement similar to today’s Alternative Right existed in Charles Maurras’s movement Action francaise.  Like today’s Alt Right, Action francaise was a movement led by intellectuals (based on a journal, there not yet being an internet) on the principles of particularism/nationalism and rejection of democracy.  Like today’s neoreaction, its founding thinker was a nonbeliever, but the movement was friendly to the Church as an institution and so managed to gain many Catholic adherents, especially among the young, intellectual, and right-wing.

The Church was presented with a dilemma.  On the one hand, this new movement was attacking liberalism–the prime heresy of the age and primary enemy of the Church–and defending without apology the ancient regime Catholicism had built.  On the other hand, although Catholics associated with the movement such as La Tour du Pin and Maritain seemed to remain loyal sons of the Church, there was the danger that Catholics under Maurras’s sway would adopt his consequentialism and instrumentalist view of the Church.

The Church chose to condemn–Cardinal Andrieu’s statement being a mix of name-calling, attribution of Maurras’s private beliefs to the whole organization, and outright lies–and in doing so dealt a terrible blow to French monarchism and made a great gift to anti-clerical republicanism.  Eventually, Action francaise submitted, but only after being reduced to a fraction of its former self.  Such has long been the status of the Church that it has power only to harm its friends.  Pius XI wrote a whole encyclical against communism, and this did nothing to check the horrors of godless socialism.

From Volume 9 of Henri Daniel-Rops’ History of the Church of Christ:

Criticism had long been directed against Action francaise or, more exactly, against the principles on which Charles Maurras claimed to base his political doctrine…the French bishops asked that Maurras’s works be placed on the Index.  On 26th January 1914 the consultors announced that seven of those works stood condemned; and their decision was confirmed by the General Congregation, which added the paper Action francaise.

Pius X, however, delayed publication of the verdict.  When it was reported to him on 29th January, by the secretary of the Congregation, he replied that the works in question were certainly prohibited, that the condemnation would be promulgated from that date, but that the decree was not published until such time as he personally thought fit.  ‘Maurras’, he declared, ‘is a good champion of the Church and of the Holy See.’  Other reasons for this clemency were his unwillingness to disturb Catholicism in France on the eve of a war which he regarded as certain, and his anxiety not to offend the many distinguished Frenchmen, religious and secular, who had begged him to deal gently with the culprit.  Benedict XV adopted the same attitude:  in 1915, after careful consideration, he decided that if the decree were published during the war, “political passions would prevent a fair assessment of such an act on the part of the Holy See”.  So there the matter lay, as expressed by Pius X:  Damnabilis sed non damnandus–condemnable but not to be condemned.

The affair took a new turn after the accession of Pius XI in 1922…

Pius was still studying the works of Maurras, Daudet and Bainville, as well as the pages of Action francaise itself, when alarming reports reached the Vatican of the movement’s rapid progress among Catholic youth.  A quarter, if not one-third, of French seminarists were adherents of Maurras, while A.C.J.F. complained that Action francaise was drawing off the most active elements of right-wing Catholic youth.  The Camelots du Roi, a royalist organization for propaganda used by Action francaise for public demonstrations and acts of violence, particularly struck Pius XI.  In May 1925 the Cahiers de la Jeunesse catholique belge organized a referendum on this question:  ‘Among writers of the past twenty-five years, whom do you consider as your masters?’  Maurras headed the list with 174 votes; Cardinal Mercier came last with six.  The Belgian episcopate took fright; a group of distinguished Belgian Catholics published a warning, and Pius XI resolved to stand no more nonsense.

…

The Pope, however, refrained from immediate recourse to stern measures.  The Action francaise movement included so many excellent Catholics who did not share all Maurras’s philosophical ideas–although they were more or less contaminated by the ‘pernicious atmosphere’ of positivist naturalism–that he thought it more useful to enlighten them before striking a final blow.  After vain approaches to various members of the French hierarchy, he delegated this task to the aged Cardinal Andrieu, Archbishop of Bordeaux.  On 27th October 1926 there appeared in Aquitaine, the diocesan bulletin, a declaration by that prelate.  Having had to reply to a group of young Catholics ‘on the subject of Action francaise and the attitude they should adopt toward it’, he advised them to break away from it as quickly as possible.  The wording of the archiepiscopal declaration was extremely harsh, describing the directors of the movement all together as ‘atheists or agnostics’, as ‘Catholics by profession but not by conviction’, as ‘amoralists’, and so on.  The document, however, made the whole problem absolutely clear by denouncing in the plainest terms the Maurrasian heresy.  Its only faults were a lack of serenity, the attribution to Action francaise as a whole the philosophical ideas of its leader, and even the attribution to Maurras himself of opinions he had never taught, e.g. the need to re-introduce slavery.  The stroke was therefore excessive and not very skillful; but it was an important warning , exceeding in importance that of the tired old man who had delivered it.  There could be no more room for doubt when, on 5th September, a letter from Pius XI to Cardinal Andrieu was published, congratulating him upon having denounced ‘a rebirth of paganism.’

It may be that Pius XI thought that sufficient, that the Catholics of Action francaise would listen to his appeal and abandon the movement.  There appears, however, to have been some hesitation in the ranks of Action francaise as to what attitude should be adopted.  Some, e.g. Jacques Maritain, believed it would be possible for Catholics to remain within the political movement while eschewing doctrinal errors.  Others protested that the papal condemnation was only a political and even a police measure inspired by politicians of the Briand type, and that if they had to choose between their two loyalties they would prefer Action francaise.  Many ecclesiastical authorities, with Cardinal Maurin, Archbishop of Lyons, at their head, advised a course of ‘wait and see’.  Whid did the directors of the monarchist movement suddenly favor a more stubborn attitude?  On 15th December, in reply to various notes in Osservatore Romano and under the title ‘Rome et la France‘, Charles Maurras’s journal published an article of astounding vehemence, accusing a ‘small gang of simoniacal agents’ of insulting good Frenchmen ‘in their conscience as believers and in their honour as men’.  Five days afterward, in Consistory, Pius XI retorted by expressly forbidding all Catholics to belong to the undertakings, to remain in the school or to read the journal ‘of men whose writings set aside our dogma and our morality’….Rome replied on 29th December 1926 by publishing the decree of the Holy Office as drawn up in 1914.  To it was added an explicit condemnation of the journal Action francaise.

…Pius was coldly resolved upon victory.  At his request 116 French bishops signed a manifesto approving and explaining the condemnation; those who believed they ought not to sign paid dearly for their refusal.  Cardinal Billot was obliged to resign and retired as a simple Jesuit to a house of the Society.  Several religious also, some of them notorious, were punished…Meanwhile the Sacred Penitentiary decreed that any priest who gave absolution to supporters of Action francaise would be suspended from hearing confessions, that seminarians faithful to the movement would be dismissed, and that the faithful who remained stubborn in rebellion would be regarded as public sinners and refused the sacraments.

France became at once a tragic stage upon which friendships were destroyed and families divided among themselves, as in the days of the Dreyfus affair.  Good Catholics were seen carried to a civil grave because of their allegiance to Action francaise; priests censured for having taken the last sacraments to fathers who stood condemned; marriages and baptisms performed as in the worst days of the Terror.

[Fast forward a decade to 1937]

After a visit to Paris by Mgr. Ottaviani, assessor of the Holy Office, a new letter was sent to Rome, in which the [governing] committee [of Action francaise] expressed its ‘sincere grief’ for what had been ‘disrespectful, offensive and even unjust’ in their attitude, and rejected ‘every principle and every theory opposed to the teachings of the Church’.  The Holy Office replied on 5th July by lifting the condemnation of Action francaise, but without mentioning that of Pius X against Maurras’s philosophy.

To be clear, Catholics did have a duty to disassociate from Action francaise while it was condemned, because the Pope did have the authority to command it.  The virtue of obedience is never clearer than when the command is foolish.  Still, no one has the authority to keep us from recognizing it as foolish.  Someday, the Church will ready to pronounce on the questions posed by European nationalism, but not until her current fever has passed.  When it does, will there still be any European nations?

Cross-post: graduating seniors, please don’t try to make the world a better place

Original on the Orthosphere

If I were to give a commencement address:

Graduating seniors, my message to you is simple:  do not try to make the world a better place.

I realize this contradicts everything you’ve been told since you arrived four years ago.  Since your freshman orientation, you have been encouraged to engage in activism, to join protests, to raise the consciousnesses of your benighted and bigoted elders.  But that’s strange in itself, isn’t it?  The presumption must be that you are wiser and more compassionate than the mass of men who make up the status quo.  After all, if you were uninformed or had an overly simplistic understanding of the world, it would be better if you didn’t change the world until after overcoming these defects, since there would be no reason to think your changes would be for the better.

Now, the prior speakers have already praised your passion, idealism, commitment to social justice and so forth, so let us grant for the moment that you are wiser than the men of previous generations who bequeathed to us the existing order.  When did you get this way?  To be really confident that other men’s group attachments or understandings of sex are mere bigotry, that other men’s religions and philosophies are mere superstition, that other men’s property is unjustly held, requires arduous prior study.  You must have sought out the strongest arguments of the other side and subjected your own to ruthless examination.  You must have approached those you would condemn and listened to them with sympathy to be sure there is no aspect of the case you have failed to consider.  A century ago, men like Planck and Einstein revolutionized physics, but even though they were certainly geniuses, they first had to have a very deep understanding of classical, Newtonian physics, its strengths (which their new theories had to reproduce) as well as its weaknesses.  Likewise, for you to condemn a society, you must have come to understand it better than its own defenders and participants.

When, exactly, did this happen?  Did it happen while you were here?  Even if so, it’s odd that you were encouraged to start inflicting your virtue on the world from your freshman year, before this process could be completed.  Do you regret any position you took prematurely as a freshman?  Have you found all your early positions ratified by further study?  What luck that would be!  I’m twice your age, and many of the things I said in my twenties, even with a bachelor’s degree to my name, now embarrass me.

But how could this process of rigorous critique have happened here, when you have demanded, and the administration has granted, that no beliefs of which you disapprove may be presented on campus, that aspects of Western and non-Western civilizations you deem “hateful” have “no place in our community”?  So, in fact, this detailed examination of our civilization, which you find so grievously wanting, must have happened before you even arrived here–or else it would have been foolish to have let you decide what ideas may and may not be given respectful consideration.  It must have been in high school that you gave all those “dead white men” their careful hearing and exposed their errors.

Or perhaps it didn’t happen at all.

To learn, one must at least suspect that one might be ignorant, and I hope I have planted a seed of suspicion in your minds.  Not that you are wrong, but that you cannot really be so confident that you are right.  Here, though, are two truths of which you can be certain.  First, it is easier to destroy than create; you’ve known this since you started playing with those legos for toddlers.  Second, simply maintaining a level of civilization–to say nothing of advancing in technology or “social justice”–is tremendous work, work that must be repeated each generation.  We often fail to show our ancestors sufficient gratitude for this work.  Yes, society is natural to man.  But just as it is natural to the predator to hunt its food and yet any day this may be exhausting work with uncertain outcome, so we humans must expend great effort to maintain a good that is natural to us.  Given this, it would be no small accomplishment to leave the world not worse than one found it.

Consider one more argument against trying to make the world a better place.  You will probably fail.  It is statistically certain that most of you are not destined for the history books.  By the time you reach middle age, your lack of world-historical importance will hopefully have become clear to you, and with it a growing acknowledgement of your own mortality.  How will you make sense of your life?  How can you find some meaning in your short time on Earth?  You may ask yourself how most men and woman have faced these questions throughout history, having realized at last that you are not different than them.  You will find that past generations drew solace from their very smallness, the fact that although they were unimportant and their time was brief, they participated in something larger:  a fixed and divinely-ordained order of nature, the multi-generational chain of memory of a particular culture, nation, or race.  These are the ideas that you, as an emancipated, rational citizen-of-the-world now want to undermine.

You might well ask me what an ambitious young man or woman should do, if not make the world a better place.  Well, you could try raising a family.  If you ask yourself what your parents’ main accomplishment was, most likely this would be it.  Why imagine you should do anything grander?  Remember my second truth.  Just carrying things forward–holding down a job, caring for children and teaching them well, maintaining a house and the friendship of neighbors–is a huge undertaking, the work of a lifetime.  Or how about this:  instead of trying to make the world a better place, why not let the world make you a better person?  After all, you are still very young, and the world still has much to teach you.