Marxists consider the soft sciences as the chink in the armor of reason. And so they attacked it. The strategy: nurture hatred and suppress logic. The tactic: political correctness. To this point, the Marxist war on reason has proven highly successful.
The Left’s toxic brand of false logic has now infected the entirety of academia. The proof: universities routinely deploy DEI initiatives that nurture and promote nonsense, including the reality-defying queer theory and the absurd notion of skin color that begets critical race theory. These practices allow so-called historians to adopt a revisionist history that cherry-picks facts to spin false narratives. And the list goes on.
Added together, all of this plays into the Marxist's tried and true “oppressor vs oppressed” routine teased out through preposterous theories like “intersectionality,” proponents of which charge like insane chickens into a meat grinder in a race to claim the prize of the most oppressed.
In other words, it’s a shit show.
Soft sciences — especially sociology, history, and humanities — rely on interpreting facts that can be difficult or impossible to quantify compared to hard sciences such as earth and life sciences. Soft sciences place more emphasis on the narrative than the facts they use to create them and, because of this, can more easily be influenced by political and other biases.
Not long ago, reason served as a reliable deterrent to these biases. A historical narrative, for example, had to make logical sense by accounting for as many facts as it had at its disposal, not just the ones that agree with the preferred narrative.
A glaring example is the 1619 Project, the invention of Nikole Hannah-Jones and her motley crew of wannabe revolutionaries. The Washington Post observed, “The 1619 Project started as history. Now it's also a political program.” The left-leaning new outlet almost got it right. If the writer omitted the word “also” so the sentence reads “Now it’s a political program,” it would be a solid assessment.
Not a political science program — unless it was a Marxism in-action practicum — but a blatant attempt to rewrite history according to the tenets of critical race theory. Instead of the proletariat pitted against the bourgeoisie (oppressed and oppressor), the 1619 Project crew wanted to sow hatred among blacks against whites which, in turn, would spawn hatred across the Western gamut.
"Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go," as Jesse Jackson put it in 1987. Things have only gotten worse. Jackson was talking about the college course Western Civilization, which used to be a graduate requirement when the university still made sense. Nikole Hannah-Jones and her stooges upped the ante. They mean Western Civilization itself has to go. It’s gotten that bad.
And it’s not over. Princeton History professor Matt Karp noted in an X post, “The #1 story in the US History job market, over the last ten years, is the overall decline in tenure-track job openings. But the #2 story is the change in which jobs are being offered.”
“Overall postings in US history dropped from an average of 156 t-t [tenure track] jobs per year to an average of under 99,” Karp wrote in another post. “Even leaving out the Covid drop in 2020, the average over the last two years is 115.5. That's a substantial and possibly crippling decline, as @dbessner & others have noted.”
On the other hand, in the Fall of 2011 and 2012, 10% of job postings for U.S. history professors were for African-American specialists. By the Fall of 2022, that number had jumped to over 35%. Fewer history professors and substantially more ethnic specialist history professors. Good job, Marxists! Keep stirring up hate based on skin color. That ought to help rot the nation from within.
How did it get this bad? There are a lot of reasons. For one, political correctness infected the universities like a brain-eating virus, for one thing. That meant academics had to choose their words carefully or risk being labeled a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, or whatever, logic be damned.
According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the term Political Correctness “first appeared in Marxist-Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917.” It lay more or less dormant in America, like a virus waiting to attack the immune system called reason, until the 1970s when the New Left began injecting it into the culture.
Today, “Academics thrive in an economy of their own making. They subtly redefine commonplace words or concepts into jargon and then act as if they have access to esoteric knowledge,” wrote savvy commentator Very Moisturized on X. “Thusly, their public enemy #1 is the ‘average joe’ who can distill complex concepts into simple English.”
Put another way, academics today live in a never-never-land where reason and logic don’t apply. The once-vaunted Ivory Tower is guarded by moats of gobbledygook designed to keep reason and logic at bay.
Not all academics have taken a bite of the stupid fruit. College professor Wilfred Reilly, commenting on the post by Very Moisturized, observed, “What separates the humanities-academic conceptions of ‘racism,’ ‘violence,’ ‘whiteness,’ and even ‘rape’ or ‘genocide’ from common-sense conceptions of these things is basically just that they are nonsense.”
Nonsense indeed. Relativism — the doctrine that there is no objective truth, or, as Nietzsche put it, “There are no facts, only interpretations”— is taken for granted by the Left. Without it, their menacing scheme to take over the world would fall apart.
Political Correctness proved to be a highly effective weapon against academics who valued their reputation more than reality because their livelihood depended on it. It’s a testament to their character: they’ll do anything for a buck, even deny truth in favor of a lie.
“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it,” Orwell wrote in the novel 1984.
“It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it,” Orwell continued. “Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.”
It’s no longer fiction. That’s where we are. Leftists not only have to believe boys can be girls and girls can be boys, they want to. They deny reality so they can make God in their own image.
“Hell is the impossibility of reason,” said Charlie Sheen’s character in Platoon. But we’re not quite there yet. Where there is reason, there is hope. The fate of the country rests in the hands of Average Joes and those who refuse to abandon reason, and like Socrates and Jesus, are prepared to give all for Truth.
I just wonder how long it’s going to take for academia to swing back the other direction. If I’ve seen one TikTok from some sniveling post grad whining about not being hired, I’ve seen a hundred! Let me put it another way. I know quite a few smaller business owners and every one of them has stated they prefer older employees because they’re less trouble. They would rather pay a candidate more and not have to deal with worrying about pronouns and all of the entitlement issues they find in new graduates. Having less college is now a good thing, apparently!
Great article. Reason for most people was a way to navigate life which focused mostly on the real problems we faced in the moment. Today life is much easier so we are distracted by things our forefathers would never have even considered so we can ignore reason and imagine how tough others have it. I guess it is either our guilt or we need a cause.