How Liberal Professors Think
By Margaret Snyder (01/13/04)
Life on the fringes of academia offers some telling glimpses into the early 21st century academic mind. Two of these occurred during a read-and-discuss group. The overall topic was America as the New Rome. The reading for the first session included some lengthy quotes from Adam Smith’s “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.”
Now, when a conservative reads Smith, A Scottish philosopher of the eighteenth century, he responds with a “hear, hear” because Adam Smith resonates with his own understanding of human nature. The members of this discussion group, however, pretty quickly came to the conclusion that Adam Smith’s ideas could only apply to people living in Scotland in the 18th century, and possibly by extension to other cultures derived therefrom. It is a view of man in which persons generally are motivated by self-interest.
Those present acknowledged that Americans were so motivated but they insisted that this was not true of all cultures. One historian, showing himself free of ethnocentrism, offered the example of “a man in a primitive tribe who cuts off his arm for the good of the group”. It was my impression that this was a hypothetical example, not one taken from his knowledge of a specific tribe or practice. I could be wrong.
Now, because I am not quick, it did not occur to me until later that it would not be necessary to recur to a hypothetical example of an American making disinterested sacrifice for the group. One need look only to the heroes of 9/11 for hundreds of non-hypothetical examples: the rescuers who ran into burning buildings knowing they risked death, in the hope of saving others’ lives. In fact, police officers and firefighters routinely put the common good above their own safety. And what of the soldiers in the American armed forces?
But liberal academics assume the moral inferiority of America and, mired in Rousseauvian romanticism, affirm the moral superiority of primitive peoples. Adam Smith would argue that if indeed there is a primitive man who cuts off his arm for the good of the group, it is not really from altruism but from a sense of duty. He would say the same of the American heroes of 9/11. A conservative will accept that a sense of duty is a good enough substitute for altruism: after all, the results of altruism and duty are identical. But the liberal is not satisfied except with altruism. And he doesn’t expect to find it in the (capitalist, greedy) U.S.A.
The last session of the series dealt with Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 article, “The End of History?”, in which he contends that western liberal democracy is as good as it’s going to get and that eventually the rest of the world will come around to this view. Thus, major conflicts will be no more. My first response to his article was that he failed to appreciate the mischief that will inevitably ensue from the continuing Utopian impulse of the left. The discussion did not disappoint me in this respect.
The general view was in fact one of outrage that Fukuyama could so callously dismiss the human suffering that occurs under liberal democracy: the inequality, the poverty. One person remarked that “there are still millions without medical coverage”, implying that the fault lies with liberal democracy.
A theologian remarked that the social democracies of Europe had a more enlightened awareness of the communal good than we find in the U.S. There it was again: that search for altruism. The theologian’s view is that in European social democracies, people are more altruistic and so are willing to be taxed heavily in order that others might be provided for. The conservative view is that Europeans’ willingness to leave charity to the state is less out of altruism than out of a desire for security. No space here to discuss the ills and evils that flow from the willingness to let the state take care of your every need.
Another glimpse into the academic mind came during a political scientist’s reflections on her experiences living in China. She spoke approvingly of the Chinese wanting to discard “the bad part” of Communism without losing the egalitarian spirit. “Egalitarianism--that’s good, isn’t it?” she asked rhetorically. Well, no, it isn’t. Egalitarianism looks not at equality of opportunity and freedom, but at equality of outcomes. And the only way to achieve it is through coercion of one sort or another.
These are good people, these academics. They are good and earnest and want to make the world better. And they try to do it by sharing their confused world view in a thousand ways, both unconsciously and by design, with every new generation that has come along in the last thirty to seventy years (depending on how prestigious the school is; it started at the ivies and worked its way down). They outnumber conservatives on faculties everywhere by ridiculous margins.
It’s a miracle that after all these decades the country is as evenly divided as it is.
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