Why are Academics–and Others–so Mean ?

e all know that our universities are the very last place to go if you want a free and open discussion of ideas. Only approved progressive ideas are permitted, and don’t you forget it.

Nothing new really. I’m reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus at the gym, and author Charles C. Mann is describing wars to the death fought by academics over the decades about various migration theories in the Americas and the all-important question of when modern humans first arrived here. There’s the Clovis theory:

The “Clovis First” theory posited that the Clovis people, identified by their distinctive stone tools found near Clovis, New Mexico, were the first humans to colonize the Americas, arriving around 13,500 years ago via the Bering Land Bridge.

The academicians were arguing over whether the Americas were populated by humans before the last Ice Age when the sea level dropped enough for humans to be able to walk across the Bering Strait.

Divided the academics may be, but they are united in sneering at the efforts of amateurs grubbing around in the dirt on their farms and backyards without the trifecta of formal qualifications, government grants, and approved methods of analysis.

It’s odd how humans fight to the death over ideas. I get the necessity of fighting to the death on the border against those who would dispossess and despoil us and rape our women. But why do religions all seem to agree upon the necessity of eliminating heretics? Is heresy a life-or-death issue? That goes in spades for our modern secular religions like communism. And why do all political regimes wage war on the opposition? Why do academics insist that all the professors in the university department hew to the same ideology of logic and reason and damn to Hell the professors of another university that profess the heresy of another ideology of logic and reason?

Here’s Matt Johnson, a devoted regime supporter at Quillette and he’s writing about “Trump and the Necessity of Democratic Struggle.” Democratic struggle is okay when it’s Martin Luther King “demanding equal rights and dignity under the law,” but not when “one group demands special privileges on the basis of race, religion, or some other exclusive tribal characteristic.” You know who he is talking about:

This is a central feature of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, which explicitly calls for the elevation of some citizens and the marginalisation of others.

Now I suppose if I were a college professor and a credentialed grantee of the Grant Industrial Complex, I would be outraged at the very idea of a MAGA movement: who do those far-right racists think they are! But really, does Matt not see that the last 60 years has been a non-stop movement by liberals to call “for the elevation of some citizens” — regime-approved oppressed peoples — “and the marginalization of others” — regime-identified white oppressors? No, he doesn’t.

Let us advance a theory to explain politics, religion, and academia, in One Big Beautiful Theory.

Even though Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt differentiates between the political and the moral, writing that the political is about friends vs. enemies, and the moral is about good vs. evil, I think that it is clear that the worlds of politics and religion have usually intermingled down the ages. Let’s face it: friends are good, and enemies are evil. Political leaders always claim the support of God or the gods in their existential fight against the enemy. And religious leaders often need to deploy force in order to protect their church members from the evils of heretics and the eternal problem of the witches.

Where do our academic friends fit into this witches’ brew? It’s simple, really. Universities down the ages used to be there for the education of priests, and to keep the heretics out. Then, with the rise of the educated class, all good people decided that political leaders needed an education in modern philosophy, and eventually even economics. Then, in the Napoleonic Wars the Prussians decided that, after two centuries of being beaten to a pulp by the French, the German people needed the research university to make Germany strong.

So, academics have been politics-adjacent and religion-adjacent since olden times. They have adopted the culture of politics and spend all their days fighting ideological enemies, and also the culture of religion, eternally beating the bushes for evil heretics and MAGA witches. They can’t think of anything better to do?

Now I believe that nothing is absolute. I believe, following Kant, that we cannot know things-in-themselves. But here’s a peculiar thing. Christianity has its Trinity. The first A-bomb was tested at Trinity Site. And quantum mechanics’ notion of quarks is all about the triplet. What is going on here? Is that the secret of the Universe? Three? They told us it was 42.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: AT via Magic Studio

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