Sneak Preview of 2nd Issue

A sneak preview of The Undercurrent Vol. 1, Issue 2 is now available under the “current issue” column. Check back on Wednesday for the final PDF.

Want to distribute copies of The Undercurrent where you live? Place an order for newsprint copies of Issue 2 now by contacting us. Since we sell at cost, it’s probably cheaper than you think: a mere $6.75 plus shipping gets you 250 copies. Act quickly: our printing deadline is this Wednesday, May 4.

The Liberal Slant on the Liberal War

Any American who has glanced at a newspaper in the past two years knows that the liberals are unhappy about George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.

Editorials continue to cite our failure to discover weapons of mass destruction, as well as the greater hostility and more advanced nuclear capabilities of Iran and North Korea, as evidence that the invasion of Iraq was motivated by economic interests.

Liberals accuse Donald Rumsfeld of turning a blind eye to torture and of signing condolence letters with an automatic pen. They see Condoleeza Rice’s shrugging off problems in the rest of the world as grounds for skepticism about the administration’s intent. They ask, “Does Bush plan to invade all or any of the sources of authoritarian regimes from North Korea to Zimbabwe?” (Harvard Crimson)

The left is severely critical of our efforts in Iraq. Yet if Maureen Dowd were to write a handbook called “How to Fight a War According to Liberal Principles,” Bush could comfortably sleep with it under his pillow.

Bush didn’t carpet bomb Iraq, confiscate its oil, and declare it the 51st state. Though he went into Iraq against grumbling from the United Nations, he’s certainly doing his best to make up for it now with his good-will tour of Europe to “change the ugly atmosphere” (New York Times).

On its face, the war in Iraq was a liberal dream come true. American forces carefully avoided civilian casualties, engaging in a difficult ground war when they could have simply leveled cities first and asked questions later. They struck only government and military targets. They cleanly decapitated the regime, removing a reviled dictator who had spent decades opposing multiculturalism, environmentalism, abortion, and women’s suffrage (as well as terrorizing and torturing his own people).

Bush proceeded, not to withdraw from Iraq and to leave it in turmoil as liberals erroneously predicted, but to pump billions of dollars into its economic infrastructure and to encourage the Iraqi people to engage in democratic elections. Al-Jaafari, the top-contender for Prime Minister, announced to reporters his intention to employ Islam as “the official religion of the country, and one of the main sources of legislation.” Bush did not object: like a true liberal, he showed himself to be willing to accept the results of democratic elections unconditionally.

Still the liberals are dissatisfied. They are unimpressed by the democratic elections, choosing instead to pick at the negative details. Yes, yes, says a New York Times column called “When Camels Fly,” there was indeed a democratic election in Iraq, “But we have to be very sober about what is ahead….The walls of autocracy will not collapse with just one good push.” Another article guardedly points out that, after all, “most Sunni Muslims, at the urging of their leaders, did not vote.”

Why the lack of optimism? Wouldn’t a liberal president be lauded for this step towards democracy?

The most revealing accusation, though, came in a campus publication, Yale’s Daily News, which declares Bush’s whole project defunct because: “Honest support of the spread of democracy, freedom and free markets would mean the decline of America’s own super-power pre-eminence.” Here, a college student is willing to state baldly the real issue: no matter how many people America helps, no matter how many liberal ideals Bush upholds, if America is not taking actions that will lead to its own decline–to the president’s head on a pike, the stock market in shambles, and America’s cities reduced to rubble–then America is morally in the wrong.

If America had fought an identical war in Zimbabwe against Robert Mugabe, the left would be, if not thrilled, at least not hysterical. If troops had sunk themselves into Rwanda to end ethnic cleansing–fine. Such wars could not be interpreted as selfish or self-righteous. George Bush could not stand behind a podium and proclaim proudly to the world that America’s safety was secured by the removal of Robert Mugabe.

But those on the far left, who would decry even our hypothetical Zimbabwe War, give away the deeper motives of the liberals. They see any action that America takes as “cultural imperialism”–as an assertion of what it believes to be right–merely by the fact that it takes a stand. Ultimately, the liberals do not hate the liberal Iraq War merely because of the morality of self-interest to which Bush pays lip-service, or even his loudly pronounced Christian ethic, but because he proclaims a morality period, and does so proudly.

This is the target at which all of their equivocations and pragmatism are aimed. In the face of moral certainty, the left doesn’t care how liberal the president’s war becomes–it cares only to undermine his conviction, subordinate his America to the will of the United Nations, and efface any inclinations he might have to act independently to defend an America that he honestly seems to love.

The liberals cling to petty potshots in the face of a war fought clearly in accordance with liberal ideals. It can only be because they do not care about those ideals, but merely about tearing down all ideals as such. Their op-eds are not written to champion a positive vision of the good, but to reduce all such visions to rubble.

Liberals need to find a positive moral compass if they want to make a meaningful contribution to American politics. They should pick up the mantle that the conservatives have long since abandoned: principled, secular individualism.

Rebecca Knapp is a junior at the University of Chicago. She is studying classics and plans to go to law school.

The Appeal of Ayn Rand

February 2nd marked the hundredth anniversary of the birth of one of America’s most controversial and inspiring writers, Ayn Rand.

She continues to be wildly popular among the young: some 14,000 high school students per year submit entries to essay contests on her novels and, in the past two years alone, high school teachers have requested over 130,000 copies of Anthem and The Fountainhead to use in their classrooms. They know that students respond to her stories and heroes as to few other books.

It remains, however, all too common for a young person to be told that his interest in Ayn Rand is a stage he will soon grow out of. “It’s fine to believe in that now,” the refrain goes, “but wait until you’re older. You’ll discover that life is not like that.”

But when one actually considers the essence of what Rand teaches, the accusation that her philosophy is childish over-simplification stands as condemnation not of her ideas but of the adult world from which the
accusation stems.

The key to Rand’s popularity is that she appeals to the idealism of youth. She wrote in 1969: “There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days–the conviction that ideas matter.” The nature of this conviction? “That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one’s mind matters. And the radiance of that certainty, in the process of growing up, is the best aspect of youth.”

To sustain this youthful conviction throughout life, Rand argues, one must achieve a radical independence of mind. Independence does not mean doing whatever one feels like doing but rather forging one’s convictions and choosing one’s actions rationally, logically, scientifically. It is refusal to surrender one’s ideas or values to the “public interest,” as liberals demand, or to the “glory of God,” as conservatives demand. It is refusal to grant obedience to any authority, human or divine. The independent mind rejects faith, secular or supernatural, and embraces reason as an absolute. “The noblest act you have ever performed,” declares the hero of Rand’s last novel, Atlas Shrugged, “is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four.” She meant it.

The conviction that ideas matter represents a profound dedication to self. It requires that one regard one’s own reasoning mind as competent to judge good and evil. And it requires that one pursue knowledge because one sees that correct ideas are indispensable to achieving the irreplaceable value of one’s own life and happiness. “To take ideas seriously,” Rand states, “means that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true,” that you recognize “that truth and knowledge are of crucial, personal, selfish importance to you and to your own life.”

Her approach here is the opposite of the view that ideals transcend this world, one’s interests and human comprehension–that idealism is, in the words of the religious exhortation to America’s youth in Bush’s inaugural address, “to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself.”

The advice Rand offers the young? Think, reason, logically consider matters of truth and morality. And then, because your own life and happiness depend on it, pursue unwaveringly the true and the good. On this approach, the moral and the practical unite. On this approach, there exists no temptation to think that life on earth requires compromise, the halfway, the middle of the road. “In any compromise between food and poison,” she writes, “it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.”

In a world where our President (as well as the religious warriors we’re battling against in the Middle East) equates idealism with otherworldliness, faith, and sacrifice of self, and where commentators otherwise sympathetic to his message lament that it leaves no room for worldly compromises, since, as Peggy Noonan puts it, “perfection in the life of man on earth” is impossible–Ayn Rand stands alone. She argues that perfection is possible to man the rational animal. Hold your own life as your highest value, follow reason, submit to no authority, create a life of productive achievement and joy–enact these demanding values and virtues, Rand teaches, and an ideal world, here on earth, is “real, it’s possible–it’s yours.”

Does an adult world that dismisses this philosophy as “simplistic” not convict itself?

The centenary of Rand’s birth is an appropriate time to recognize the thinker who was courageous enough to take on that world and challenge its rampant skepticism, eager cynicism, and unyielding demand for compromise, the thinker who portrayed and explained–at the most fundamental level–the heroic in man.

Onkar Ghate is a Ph.D. in philosophy and a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute (aynrand.org).

OAC Application Deadline

Dan Norton writes in:

The application deadline for admission to the 2005-06 academic year at the Objectivist Academic Center, a department of the Ayn Rand Institute, is April 18, 2005. Please visit aynrand.org/academic for more information about the OAC. The application form is available at: aynrand.org/education_academic_uapp.

Please note that there is a second deadline of August 1, 2005 for applying for the 2005-06 academic year, however, priority is given to those applications we receive by the April deadline.

I’m enrolled and the classes are quite valuable.

Welcome to The Undercurrent

Welcome to the The Undercurrent. Before we begin, let us tell you what we are not. We are not a political journal (though politics will be discussed); we are not a humor magazine (though we have every intention of being, at times, knee-slappingly funny); we are not a literary publication (though rest assured, arts and culture will get plenty of coverage). Our aim is deeper and more basic than all these. We aim to introduce you to a practical philosophy–one that could radically alter politics, culture, and every avenue of your life.

You might ask, how can a philosophy be practical? Isn’t that an oxymoron? Aren’t philosophers those bearded-professor fellows who sit around and engage in idle banter about “possible worlds,” while the rest of us go about dealing with real issues of this world?

There was one philosopher who disagreed. According to Ayn Rand–the woman whose novels and ideas inspired the founding of this publication–philosophy is an indispensable tool for achieving a successful, happy life.

Ayn Rand has inspired thousands of readers to live purposeful, fulfilling lives in pursuit of their most ambitious dreams. Her novels, most famously The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, present the dramatic stories of men and women who erected their own earthly paradise by holding fast to their moral principles.

But her heroes do not resemble the usual “moral types” in literature: they are not chaste “Christ figures” who die for a noble cause or hopelessly deluded Don Quixote types who live in their own moral dream world. They are steel industrialists, business executives, architects, scientists, students. They do not martyr themselves to save mankind or sacrifice their fortunes to save the rainforest; they let no one lay claim to their bank accounts, their independent judgment, or their lives. And they each adhere uncompromisingly to a code of moral principles.

In the media coverage surrounding Ayn Rand’s 100th birthday, many articles chided the “naive idealism” of her novels. The New York Times called her “the last Romantic,” as though depicting heroes who achieve their ambitions was a thing of the past; the New York Sun sarcastically accused her novels of “epic implausibility.”

But as Onkar Ghate eloquently addresses in “The Appeal of Ayn Rand” (printed below), Ayn Rand’s idealism is not naive; she offers a vision that is achievable and real, and she presents the principles one must follow in order to achieve it. The modern world finds this moral idealism impossible to live up to because it is jaded by two warring philosophies, both of which pit moral values against the practical requirements of life.

Today when you hear talk about “moral principles,” you probably think right away of stuffy religious zealots–the ones who go around denouncing all sexual pleasure as “corrupt,” insisting on censorship of “indecent” movies and coarse radio shows, guilt-tripping you into giving your money away to religious charities, and generally trying to squeeze all the fun out of life. Anyone who tries to live up to these ideals is widely considered silly and naive–which is no wonder, since most eventually “crack” under the pressure of their sex drives or the tightness of their wallets.

The Christian ethic has given values a bad name. The religionists’ philosophy, which has monopolized the field of moral values for ages, is as alive and kicking as ever: in the opponents of life-saving stem cell research; in those who would ban homosexuality on the grounds that “the Bible says so;” and in those who raise up as heroes the soldiers who “die for freedom”–so long as it’s not their own freedom, but the Iraqis’ (see our cover article). In short, they preach a philosophy of self-sacrifice–which cannot be lived up to in life, since its ultimate ideal is death.

Is it any wonder that idealism is dismissed as silly, naive, and impractical, when such is the only ideal we are offered? With this as the mainstream view of what constitutes values and principles, it is no surprise that being totally principled is considered impossible. To say something is painted in “black-and-white”–meaning, in clear-cut terms of good and evil–is as good as calling it shallow; stories of virtuous characters who achieve their ideals are grouped together with fairy tales.

Yet it is deeply ironic that our culture regards philosophy and talk of principles as a bunch of hot air, because that view itself stems from a certain widespread philosophy. Understandably frustrated with the Christian ethics, which condemns the pursuit of wealth and pleasure and generally stifles personal fulfillment, the relativist camp in philosophy has turned away from values and principles as such. Skeptical of the Christian moralists’ claim that values are dictated by some entity external to man (by God, by society, etc.), they gave up the quest for values–and replaced it with ambitionless, moment-to-moment impulsiveness. This view, that moral principles are baseless and arbitrary and are ultimately irrelevant to life, is called relativism.

The result is manifest in today’s society. In fact, this anti-value philosophy courses like poison through our culture’s veins. Consider: the champions of political correctness, who believe that any act of passing judgment is an act of prejudice; the champions of modern art, who equate a can of feces with the Mona Lisa; the friend who is taught by his professors that “morality is a social convention,” and then destroys his college GPA by getting wasted every night.

This is the alternative with which you are presented. The choice is to obey the principles set out by an otherworldly authority, sacrificing yourself and your judgment to a “higher ideal,” or to sacrifice ideals and judgment altogether, and be blown along by any social wind. Both choices, fundamentally, demand of you the same sacrifice: your self. Your own thinking mind, which experiences, judges, feels, and appreciates values, must be abdicated; either it must subordinate itself to God’s will or it must shut down and be driven by chance whim.

Thankfully, Ayn Rand discovered an alternative to this bleak choice. Values, according to Ayn Rand’s philosophy, are neither dutiful commandments prescribing proper behavior, nor are they trivial social conventions that can be flouted capriciously. Values are the things which you value, the goals that you seek, by a conscious, carefully charted course, in order to improve your own life. A fulfilling career; a hobby you enjoy; a satisfying romantic relationship–these are values. It is in the attainment of your values–your happiness–that philosophy should aid you. Now you see why Ayn Rand called her philosophy, Objectivism, “a philosophy for living on earth.”

Given, then, that philosophy should guide you in achieving your own values, who should be the judge of what they are and what you must do to achieve them? Well, logically enough–you are. Not God, not society, nor any other alleged “high inquisitor” who seeks to run your life, but you, who chooses your values and must take the actions to achieve them. It is your reasoning mind–which can survey the world around you, find out what it has to offer, and project the consequences of your actions–who should be the highest arbiter. Only you can get inside your own mind and decide what career (or partner or movie) will make you happiest. When your friends and your emotions are pushing you to go out and have a few extra beers on a Tuesday night, it is your mind that projects long-term, and sees that studying for tomorrow’s test will bring much greater eventual rewards (and heck, think how many more six-packs of beer you can buy with a 100 grand salary!).

Just as you cannot construct a car without a set of principles (or instructions) to tell you how, so you cannot build a happy life without a principled method. Ayn Rand, by meticulous, scientific observation of human beings, the world around us, and what we require to survive successfully in that world, discovered the method. Our challenge is to understand it with our own minds and apply it for ourselves. This publication is here to help, by showing you how philosophy is applied to daily life, and with what consequence.

Philosophy, unbeknownst to most, runs through every nook and cranny of our culture. It is like an undercurrent that flows beneath our feet and determines our direction. Today, religion and its alleged opposite, relativism, are steering our culture toward disaster. But a new undercurrent–which has inspired thousands of people to live purposeful, productive lives and vigorously pursue their values–is slowly but surely spreading. It is Ayn Rand’s life-giving philosophy of Objectivism. With your help, it can win.

Gena Gorlin is a freshman enrolled at Tufts University and the New England Conservatory.

The “Hate Crimes” Bandwagon

On January 14 of this year, the bodies of all four members of an Egyptian family were discovered dead in their New Jersey home. Until recent arrests in the case, it was widely believed that the murders were the work of Islamic militants.

For example, Daniel Pipes noted certain similarities to executions performed “in the ritualistic Islamist way (multiple knife attacks and near-beheading).” In addition, the head of the Coptic Christian family, Hossam Armanious, had been engaging Muslims in angry disputes about religion online. It was thus plausible that these disputes provoked the slayings. Because there were no signs of forced entry, some thought that the perpetrators might have been Muslim men known to the family who had pretended to convert to Christianity.

The killings were widely discussed by conservative pundits. Pipes, for example, raised the reasonable concern that law enforcement did not pay close enough attention to the possible religious motivation for the slayings. Michelle Malkin noted that crimes against certain groups, like Muslims, receive extra attention from media and law enforcement, but that crimes like these, committed against Christians, do not receive the same level of attention.

The crimes were not in fact religiously motivated. However, the discussion about the slayings raised a disturbing fact: some crimes are investigated and prosecuted more aggressively when they are committed against members of certain groups. This is America. Aren’t we all entitled to equal protection under the law? And if we are all free to profess whatever beliefs we want, why shouldn’t a crime against a Christian be prosecuted just as vigorously as a crime against a Muslim?

I wish it were true that the discussion about the Armanious murders resulted in a greater awareness of the need for all Americans to be treated equally under the law regardless of their beliefs. In fact, just the opposite happened. In order to appreciate exactly what happened and why, we must set aside the Armanious murders for a moment and consider an important legal concept in the context of a pair of murders committed over six years ago.

Two brutal slayings occurred less than a year apart and made the local news in 1998 in Laramie, Wyoming. In both, the victim was savagely beaten and left for dead. One of these murders made national headlines as a “hate crime” but the other remained obscure. In both cases, the perpetrators were convicted and sent to prison.

The murderers in the “hate crime” case were convicted of murder, spared the death penalty only because the victim’s mother asked for mercy, and will serve life with no possibility of parole. The killer in the other case was convicted only of voluntary manslaughter, sentenced to 22 to 29 years in prison, and will occasionally come up for parole.

The “hate crime” case is, of course, the murder of Matthew Shepard, and it is frequently cited as an example of why we need more “hate crime” legislation. The other case was the murder of 15-year-old Daphne Sulk by her boyfriend after he learned of her pregnancy. These were both cold-blooded murders. Weren’t both crimes committed out of hate? If so, why was only the Shepard case considered a “hate crime”? And what is “hate crime” legislation anyway?

All but seven states have hate crime statutes on their books. According to the FBI web site, federal law defines a hate crime as “a criminal offense committed against a person, property, or society, which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin.”

Hate crime statutes typically impose harsher penalties for criminal offenses to which they apply. Although the “hate crime” may not always be prosecuted as such, it will often result in greater public pressure to mete out the harshest penalty possible for the criminal offense. Furthermore, in the wake of such cases, liberal activists will often push for stronger hate crime laws. This is supposed to remedy widespread bias against some group the victim belongs to, such as homosexuals, in Matthew Shepard’s case.

But do hate crime laws really serve the purpose for which they are intended? Or do they undermine the very concept of equal treatment under the law? And what does this have to do with the Armanious slayings? We have to go beyond the legalese and ask ourselves just what a “hate crime” really is.

In her book, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left’s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds, Tammy Bruce points out that through hate crime legislation, the left has managed to make the content of our minds illegal. Take this example.

“[L]et’s say that both of the victims are gay. The grocery-store clerk…kills his victim because he hates gay people. In the…carjacking, the guy wants the woman’s car, she’s in the way and represents everything he hates (he’s poor and disenfranchised, she is not), so he hates her and kills her. Whereas the grocery store clerk is still guilty of a hate crime, the carjacker is not, despite the fact that they both killed a gay woman. The actions were the same. The only difference is what the person was thinking when he committed the crime” (p. 46).

And this is why the murder of Matthew Shepard was considered a “hate crime” while, incredibly, that of Daphne Sulk was not. In the one case, the men hated homosexuals, a protected class of citizens. In the other case, Sulk’s boyfriend merely (in the eyes of “hate crime” advocates anyway) hated a pregnant heterosexual woman.

So rather than punish reprobates like these three men for the ultimate crime, murder, to the fullest extent of the law, we are to punish some criminals more harshly than others for harboring “politically incorrect” notions? With the left legislating ideology, you might be thinking that the Republicans came to power in the nick of time.

Think again. I first learned of the Armanious slayings through the blog of the socially conservative journalist, Michelle Malkin. As the story unfolded, Malkin would make no less than five entries about the slayings with the term “hate crime” as part of the title.

When I first saw the term being used by a conservative, I chalked it up to righteous indignation and the fact that the term was being bandied about by law enforcement and the media. Indeed, Malkin herself wrote disparagingly of the notion of “hate crimes” at one point: She upbraided the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) who had not yet condemned the slayings for being “always quick to jump on the hate-crimes bandwagon when it fits their agenda.” So is the idea of “hate crime” OK when it fits the agenda of the religious right?

Some conservative pundits, like David Horowitz, the brothers Limbaugh, and Armstrong Williams, have voiced opposition to hate crime legislation. But what of those who, like Malkin, want to make anti-Christian bias punishable as a hate crime? And how serious are the conservatives as a whole about repealing these odious laws? Where does equal treatment under the law stand on the list of Republican priorities? Taking the drives to ban abortion and “defend” marriage as examples, we can surmise that repealing hate crime laws is a very distant third at best: I have heard of no credible move afoot to do so.

Worse still, the two major branches of the conservative movement offer less than nothing to the opponent of hate crime law. Not surprisingly, some Christian conservatives have chosen special treatment over the principle of equality under the law: they are actively seeking protection under these very same “hate crime” laws!

For example, after some crosses in an anti-abortion exhibit were vandalized in Louisiana, the man in charge of the property had this to say: “Defacing a religious symbol is a hate crime.” He added that since similar acts against Jews and other religious minorities would not be tolerated, they should not be tolerated against Christians.

This is not an isolated case. Pat Buchanan, who opposes hate crime laws for homosexuals, called Trent Lott a “victim of a hate crime” after he fell from grace due to some ill-considered remarks about Strom Thurmond. A conservative website hosts a petition that calls for “U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to investigate the hate-crime case of a Coptic Christian family in Jersey City, N.J.” This alone might be fine, if poorly put, but in case you were wondering what they meant: “Sign this petition urging Gonzalez to look close [sic] at what defines hate crimes and include Christians as victims.”

So the take-home message in the Armanious murders has not been that all Americans should be protected equally under the law. Instead, it has been that Christians should receive special treatment as a class protected by “hate crime” laws! But social conservatives try to enforce their ideas by government edict all the time. Who favors government “decency” standards on our airwaves? Who works to ban the teaching of evolution in our schools? Who wants prayer back in publicly-funded schools? Why would the religious right fail to recognize the golden opportunity afforded them by hate crime legislation? So the social conservatives see this as a chance to make “bias against Christianity” (whatever that might comprise) illegal.

Is the secular wing of the Republican party any better? No. Here are just two examples of the appeasement and indifference in this camp. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican governor of California, recently came under fire from social conservatives for signing a bill that added transexuality and transvestitism to the list of protected classes under California’s hate crime law. Is he too much of a “girlie man” to make a stand for individual rights? Senator John McCain did little better when he responded to calls for federalizing all hate crimes. His bold stand: “Federalizing all such crimes will simply obstruct justice by forcing them into clogged federal courts.”

The proper response to hate crime legislation is simple. First, abolish it. Second, throw the book at criminals for their actual crimes rather than for what they think. Our government exists to protect us from the initiation of force on the part of others (i.e., from fraud, theft, and murder). But holding a belief, however repugnant, does not, as Thomas Jefferson might put it, “pick someone’s pocket or break his leg.” The only valid reason to consider someone’s beliefs in a criminal case is to establish intent. This is already part of criminal law. The crime should be punished the same regardless of the belief system of its perpetrator.

Punishing someone for his beliefs in addition to his actual crime is, in fact, exactly the opposite of what the government should be doing. For example, if someone gets ten years for a crime and has two more added on because he is “guilty” of a “hate crime,” he’s being jailed two years for his ideas by the government.

Freedom of speech is guaranteed in our Constitution because government regulation of speech would prevent the open exchange of ideas. But if we criminalize ideas themselves, the guarantee of freedom of speech becomes meaningless. The American Revolution was fought not primarily with the sword, but with the pen. The writings of such men as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay were instrumental in providing the theoretical framework for our form of government as well as convincing others to fight off tyranny. Our life, liberty, and happiness were won through, and depend upon, a free, open exchange of ideas.

Don’t be suckered by the shouts of “hate crime” to compound brutality with tyranny: These are the shouts of a mob who want your head.

Gus Van Horn is a research scientist from Houston, Texas. He maintains a web log about political issues at gusvanhorn.blogspot.com.

Gus Van Horn is the winner of the monthly blog contest for April 2005.

The Academic “Rights” Smokescreen

By now, no doubt, you’ve heard the story of Ward Churchill, the renegade University of Colorado professor who is under fire for his controversial remarks comparing certain victims of the 9/11 attacks to Nazis (for their role in the global financial system) and advocating more such attacks.

Churchill’s comments, of course, were false and contemptible. They were not, however, unsurprising views for someone in the contemporary humanities. What is more interesting is the debate about American higher education that has been generated by the controversy.

Churchill’s comments caused a justifiable public uproar that was quickly channeled by politicians. Republican governor of Colorado Bill Owens urged the University of Colorado Board of Regents to review Churchill’s employment, arguing that “it is not incumbent upon the University of Colorado to subsidize someone who calls for more 9/11s.”

In response, 200 Colorado professors published a full-page ad in The Boulder Daily Camera protesting these threats against Churchill’s employment and calling on the University to protect “free speech” and Churchill’s “academic freedom.”

It is easy to sympathize with Owens. Why should Colorado taxpayers have to subsidize a man whose views they find abhorrent? The professor’s remarks do help confirm the allegation, long made by conservatives like David Horowitz, that left-wing anti-American views are all too common in American humanities departments.

They also seem to support the notion that something must be done to bring greater ideological “balance” to college campuses. One might be tempted to think that if this means firing a few Ward Churchills and hiring a token conservative or two, so be it.

Although Horowitz objects to Churchill’s views, he himself has argued that firing Churchill would violate Churchill’s right to free speech. Horowitz doesn’t actually think that the way to bring ideological “balance” to the academy is to fire leftists and hire conservatives.

Instead Horowitz endorses a position called the “Student Bill of Rights,” which is championed by a group known as the Students for Academic Freedom (www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org). SAF’s Bill states that “no faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs.”

To promote “balance,” Horowitz and the SAF urge colleges to require that professors be hired or fired based on their academic qualifications and on their willingness to foster “a plurality of methodologies and perspectives” in the classroom.

Presumably, Churchill should be permitted to spout whatever nonsense he likes outside of the classroom, but while teaching, his lectures should provide students with “dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate.” Above all he should not use his course “for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination.” If he says anything anti-American or anti-anything in the classroom, then he should be fired.

The SAF is having an impact. Bills and resolutions inspired by their “Student Bill of Rights” have been introduced in state legislatures in California, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee, and in Resolution 318 of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The professoriate is worried. The American Association of University Professors (www.aaup.org) has objected to the “Student Bill of Rights,” arguing that it is itself at odds with “academic freedom.” The AAUP erroneously accuses supporters of the Bill of calling for hiring quotas based on political affiliation, a mistake Horowitz quickly rebuts. But it correctly notes that the Bill’s anti-advocacy clause would stop professors from condemning even such things as terrorist violence, a point Horowitz does not address.

What are we to make of this mess? When a professor dares to bring controversial views into the classroom, should we side with his “academic freedom,” or the “right” of students not to be “indoctrinated”?

Whatever is to be done about Churchill and his ilk, all of this rhetoric about the “freedom” and “rights” of professors and students is completely invalid in this context.

Professors have no right to an “academic freedom” that permits them to teach whatever they like, regardless of the views of those who pay their salaries. As Onkar Ghate of the Ayn Rand Institute argues, “Free speech does protect an individual who voices unpopular ideas from governmental force, but it does not require that other citizens support him. If an individual wants others to finance the expression of his ideas, he must seek their voluntary agreement.”

Ward Churchill has the same free speech rights as the rest of us. But our free speech rights don’t give us the right to demand a free microphone and audience at Madison Square Garden–and his don’t give him the right to a job giving him the equivalent.

At the same time, there is also no such thing as a student’s “right” to be free from indoctrination in the classroom. True, no one ought to be forced to subsidize the expression of views they reject. This, however, has nothing to do with an alleged evil of being “indoctrinated.”

No student chooses to attend college on the condition that their professors will never advocate a viewpoint. The SAF, however, thinks that when professors “indoctrinate” their students, they take advantage of their students’ “immaturity” by preaching viewpoints before students have “sufficient knowledge” to form a judgment of their own. Even ignorant students, however, are not helpless pawns: no one is ever “forced” to accept anyone’s opinion just by hearing it.

Each and every one of us is bound to encounter views that we object to, even outside of the classroom. We can do all we like to avoid them, but if hearing them is a condition of getting a diploma, it is always our right to forego the diploma. We can’t demand by right that others alter the conditions on which they choose to offer us diplomas: that would violate their rights. Not their right to “academic freedom,” just their ordinary freedom of contract.

Why all the “rights” rhetoric, then, if this controversy has nothing to do with rights? The answer is that liberal invocations of “academic freedom” and conservative invocations of the “rights” of students are nothing more than political rhetoric designed to entrench their own views in the academy.

Liberals know that “academic freedom” allows them to retain an ideological monopoly on humanities departments, because this doctrine means hiring decisions are to be made by academic peers, without any veto power by people paying the bills. If liberal professors were serious about defending unpopular views like Ward Churchill’s, they would be willing to accommodate views they themselves find unacceptable.

But they aren’t. One need only consider the case of Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, to see this. In a recent colloquium, Summers dared to raise the question of whether the disparity between men and women in the sciences may be due to innate differences between the sexes. Professors were outraged by this “political incorrectness,” and called for Summers to resign. The AAUP has yet to issue any statements defending him. Liberal professors invoke “free speech” only when their ideology is at stake, not as a matter of principle.

But conservatives are no better. They know that requiring a “balance” of perspectives in the classroom would give them the chance to help end the liberal monopoly in favor of establishing another one. They don’t (yet) want to mandate that only conservative viewpoints be taught, but this isn’t the only way to smuggle in ideology. Conservatives know that all that is required to popularize an underrepresented idea is to give it equal time. But why should conservatives get to dictate to professors what will count as worthy alternatives?

There are many alternatives to liberal orthodoxy besides the typical conservative ones. One can reject the idea that socio-economic factors are destiny without assuming we are products of our genes. One can reject the idea that values are subjective without assuming that religion is their proper source. Indeed one can even reject left-wing pacifism and anti-Americanism and still think George W. Bush is an idiotic disaster! Yet conservative “equal time” lets conservative politicians decide which alternatives must be taken seriously, to the exclusion of others.

Some liberals may agree that using the language of “freedom” and “rights” to protect obnoxious professors and bratty students is inappropriate, and that government should have no say one way or the other about educational content. Still, they might object that beneath this language is a legitimate issue about standards of scholarship: even if a professor doesn’t have a right to teach whatever he wants to on the dime of another, isn’t there a principle that objective scholarship must proceed regardless of its implications for popular prejudice?

Likewise, some conservatives may say that even if a student doesn’t have a right not to be “indoctrinated,” there is still the issue that an objective curriculum must present “both sides of the story” where there is controversy.

Yet even when we step beyond the issue of rights, this debate about scholarly standards continues to offer us a false choice between typical liberal and conservative mistakes.

It’s true, scholarship is objective only if the scholar’s research takes him wherever the facts lead him, whether or not he or anyone else likes his conclusions. And educational material is presented objectively only if teachers present competing views on controversial questions.

Both of these points are fully consistent with each other. A researcher must be guided by the facts, and come to conclusions on the basis of his own best judgment, regardless of whether or not they conform to what is regarded as acceptable. When he presents these views to others, however, a requirement of effective communication is to recognize that his own conclusions are not obvious to everyone, and that they must be presented in the context of opposing views.

This doesn’t mean one shouldn’t advocate one’s own views: advocating one’s views in public, even in the classroom, is an excellent way of improving one’s understanding of them, by seeing how they stand up to scrutiny. But the best way of advocating one’s own views is to compare and contrast them with opposing views. Not everyone has to accept the researcher’s conclusions: they are free to agree or disagree according to how persuasive they find his arguments.

This is how new knowledge is discovered and spread: brave thinkers and researchers develop innovative ideas, and then show how these ideas compare to, and improve upon pre-existing prejudice.

Since these two views about the objectivity and progress of scholarship are actually consistent with one another, how is it that liberals and conservatives, who seem to hold one or the other, come into conflict? The answer is that neither side really gives a damn about the objectivity and progress of scholarship. This can be seen by examining the justifications each group gives for its position.

First, consider the conservative view that competing viewpoints must be given equal representation. According to the SAF “Student Bill of Rights,” the reason competing views should be considered is to “reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge.”

Hearing this, one is reminded of the classic conservative argument against socialism on the grounds that it is “too scientific,” as well as their argument against evolution on the grounds that it is “just a theory.” Socialism is too awful and evolution too well-confirmed to deserve argumentative tripe like this. The problem with socialism is not that it is “too scientific,” but that it has no rational scientific basis at all, neither economically nor morally. As for the theory evolution, there may be debates about the particular mechanism driving species change, but if anything is a scientific certainty, it certainly is.

Conservatives are interested in mandating the presentation of opposing viewpoints, not because it is a better method of scholarly communication, but because they are against the idea that unaided human reason can discover truths of nature. The “truths” they care the most about impressing upon the young are the ones they deem to be the sacred inheritance of tradition or the holy revelation of a God. Man left to himself isn’t thought capable or worthy of unlocking the real secrets of nature. To them, it is still original sin to eat of the tree of knowledge.

In opposing the conservative view of scholarship, it might at first seem we have an ally in the AAUP, which says of the SAF’s argument that it “is antithetical to the basic scholarly enterprise of the university, which is to establish and transmit human knowledge” and that it “reduces all knowledge to uncertain and unsettled opinion, [proclaiming] that all opinions are equally valid, [negating] an essential function of university education.”

But the AAUP also makes a qualification, admitting that “knowledge is mutable and open to revision.” This is ambiguous. It could simply mean that knowledge advances through history, even though people can make mistakes. But it could also mean that knowledge is relativistic.

Sadly their response to the “Student Bill of Rights” contains no reference to “objective facts,” but it does talk an awful lot about “scholarly and professional standards, as interpreted and applied by the faculty itself.”

That too is ambiguous: only scholarly authorities are qualified to judge what the objective facts in a given subject matter are. Then again, without even making a reference to the importance of the facts, the AAUP could be accused of thinking that it is only the judgments of scholarly consensus that matter, and this would relativize knowledge to the views of the “experts.”

Whatever the framers of the AAUP statement had in mind, David Horowitz reminds us of an important consideration: “This statement is puzzling to say the least. Major schools of thought in the contemporary academy–post-modernism, deconstructionism, and pragmatism to name three–are anti-foundationalist in their epistemologies and build their disciplines on exactly the premise that knowledge is uncertain and even relative. Has the AAUP condemned post-modernism as a threat to scholarship?”

Probably not. And whatever the AAUP thinks, it is clear that the liberal professoriate is no defender of objective knowledge. They don’t think there are any objective facts, and they proceed to fabricate “facts” en masse in the service of their political ends. (See, for example, “Afrocentrist” history, great swaths of environmental “science,” and just about anything in contemporary literary theory.)

If liberals invoke the importance of scholarly standards, it is more likely because of their reverence for the group, rather than for the facts. If things were otherwise, they would be curious to undertake research on the innate differences between the sexes that Lawrence Summers asked about. According to post-modernism, rhetoric about “knowledge” is just one group’s means of asserting power over another. Whether or not liberal professors are post-modernists, at whatever lip service they pay to unhindered scholarship is nothing more than a post-modern power grab.

In the debate between “academic freedom” and “student rights” and the corresponding liberal and conservative split over “objective scholarship,” we are presented with a false choice. In effect, “academic freedom” means the “freedom” to function by permission of the consensus, unhindered by the facts; “student rights” means the “right” to function by permission of personal, usually religion-inspired prejudice, unhindered by the facts. Both views are shamelessly unhindered by the facts.

To change the American university–and American education in general–what is needed is not more funding for professors, nor new government intrusions to “protect” students. What is needed is a change in the basic philosophy of educators and their patrons. We need an alternative to the tradition-worshipping religion of the conservatives, and the post-modernist relativism of the liberals. We need an educational philosophy that defends the objectivity of scientific fact–and one that shows how such objectivity might be brought into the humanities.

Only a philosophy that celebrates the power of the mind to know can motivate students to learn, and professors to advance the frontiers of science. Readers of The Undercurrent should have no difficulty learning which philosophy I think that is.

Noumenalself is a graduate student in philosophy at an undisclosed location. His blog is found at www.noumenalself.com.