Letters to a Young Conservative (11 page)

Let us put aside buncombe and talk a little sense. Technology, not feminism, paved the way for mass female entry into the workforce. The vacuum cleaner, the forklift, and the birth-control pill had far more to do with this than all the writings of Betty Friedan and all the press releases put out by the National Organization for Women. Think about this: Until a few decades ago, housework was a full-time occupation. Cooking alone took several hours. The vacuum cleaner, the microwave oven, and the dishwasher changed that. Until recently, work outside the home was harsh and physically demanding. Forklifts and other machinery have reduced the need for human muscle. Finally, before the invention of the pill, women could not effectively control their reproduction and therefore, for most women, the question of having a full-time career simply did not arise.

So technology made it possible for women to work. This was perhaps inevitable, but what was not inevitable was the shift of values that went with the change. The feminist error was to embrace the value of the workplace as greater than the value of the home. Feminism has endorsed the public sphere as inherently more constitutive of women’s worth than the private sphere. Feminists have established as their criterion of success and self-worth
an equal representation with men at the top of the career ladder. The consequence of this feminist scale of values is a terrible and unjust devaluation of women who work at home. This has been recognized. Less noticed has been the other equally unfair outcome: Women are now competing with men in a domain where, at the very top level, they are likely to lose.

Dear Chris,

I am not sure that it was the wisest idea to share my letter on feminism with the chairwoman of the Women’s Studies department. Isn’t this the woman who looks like Janet Reno, wears ridiculous hats, and comes to class with a big dog? She sounds quite terrifying. Now if I am found in a back alley mauled by a bloodhound or stabbed in the back with a hatpin, you will know where to direct the authorities.

You note that much of the humanities program—including the Women’s Studies department—is made up of “postmodernists.” Who, you ask, are the postmodernists? The postmodernists are the Truly Profound Ones. By way of illustration, let me offer this passage by literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman. “Because of the equivocal nature of language, even identities or homophones sound on: the sound of Sa is knotted with that of ca, as if the text
were signaling its intention to bring Hegel, Saussure, and Freud together. Ca corresponds to the Freudian Id (‘Es’); and it may be that our only ‘savior absolu’ is that of a ca structured like the Sa-significant: a bacchic or Lacanian ‘primal process’ where only signifier-signifying signifiers exist.”

This has all the hallmarks of postmodern thought. It is pompous, verbose, and incoherent. To a certain type of intellectually insecure person, postmodernism and its intellectual cousin, deconstructionism, can appear profound: “Gee, that sounds very complicated. These people must be incredibly brilliant.” Tens of thousands of graduate students have been fooled in this way by people such as Hartman and the master of postmodernism, Jacques Derrida. Serious thinkers see through Derrida in an instant. Michel Foucault reportedly said of Derrida, “He’s the kind of philosopher who gives bull-shit a bad name.”

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss all postmodern thought in this way. Philosopher Richard Rorty and literary critic Stanley Fish are both lucid writers, and they put forward substantial claims. Their fundamental claim is that there is no such thing as objective truth. Even science, Rorty and Fish assert, does not describe “the world out there”; rather, it is a Western cultural construction that has no more claim to reality than anyone else’s cultural construction. In an article in the
New York Times,
Fish even suggested that the rules of science are just as arbitrary as the rules of baseball.

Postmodern theory suffers from the weakness that the postmodernists themselves don’t believe it, as their actions show. When Richard Rorty needs a medical checkup, he doesn’t go to a witch doctor; he checks into the medical center at the University of Virginia. When Stanley Fish and I debate on campus, we do not travel there in an oxcart; we go by plane. “Show me a relativist at 30,000 feet,” Richard Dawkins writes, “and I’ll show you a hypocrite.” Airplanes fly, Dawkins points out, because a lot of Western mathematicians and engineers “have got their sums right.”

In other words, science works because the universe operates according to certain regularities or laws, and science is devoted to discovering those laws. Of course, scientists do not claim knowledge of final or objective truths, but they do insist that the Newtonian account of the universe is superior to the Ptolemaic account, and that the Newtonian account has itself been surpassed by that of Albert Einstein. Even though scientific hypotheses may be culturally conditioned, it is only when they have survived criticism and testing that they are held to be valid and true.

Too embarrassed to challenge the authority of science, some liberal scholars concede that facts are known, but they insist that values are relative. These scholars are, strictly speaking, logical positivists rather than postmodernists, and their view appears much more reasonable. After all, we can verify facts but values would seem to be the product of individual and cultural preferences.

The Greeks, however, thought otherwise. The ancient Greeks held that there was a moral order in the universe that was no less real or true than the laws governing the motions of the planets. Moreover, the Greeks believed that this moral order was accessible to human reason, much like the laws of nature. On what basis do liberal scholars reject the Greek view? They point to the existence of widespread moral diversity. People in America disagree about morality, and different cultures have different views of morality. Thus the prevalence of moral disagreement is offered as evidence that there is no moral truth.

But the liberal view is not convincing. So what if people disagree about values? People also disagree about facts. If the Gallup organization conducted a survey of the world’s people and the world’s various cultures, it is quite possible that most people and most groups would emphatically reject Einstein’s proposition that E=mc
²
. This disagreement would hardly refute Einstein; it would prove only that the majority of the world’s people are wrong. So, too, the presence of moral disagreement proves nothing about whether moral truths exist. Socrates argued that, if anything, disagreements invite investigation so that we can determine which moral opinions are true and which are false.

In my view, the great intellectual challenge facing conservatives is to make the case for morality at a time when many in the West have ceased to believe in an external moral order. The decline of belief in such an order
is the most important political development of the past two centuries. Indeed, this decline has created the “crisis of the West.” This crisis is not simply one of the “death of God.” Rather, as Friedrich Nietzsche predicted, if religion withers away, so does morality. The reason is that religion is the primary source of morality, and therefore morality cannot long survive the decay of religion.

What is the liberal response to this decline of morality? To welcome it, in the name of freedom. That was Nietzsche’s response as well. Liberals, like Nietzsche, speak about creating “new values.” Some liberals even dream about creating a “new man” free from the traditional impediments of human nature. The liberal commune, based on shared possessions and free love, is one such social experiment. The Nazis and the Communists also tried to create new men and new values, with less benign results.

Conservatives recognize that efforts to change human nature and invent new values are both foolish and dangerous. Conservatives accept human nature for what it is, and are cautious about schemes to alter it. Moreover, conservatives prefer to stand by old values while recognizing that they need to be adapted to new circumstances. Our challenge, different from that of conservatives in the past, is to articulate reasons for those values to a society that has lost its moral consensus.

Dear Chris,

The postmodernists may be an especially loony bunch, but their prominence in the academy raises the question: Why are professors so left-wing? Each year the
Chronicle of Higher Education
publishes a survey of the attitudes of professors, including their political identification. Liberals outnumber conservatives by more than two-to-one, and the ratios are even greater in the humanities and social sciences. Moreover, this ratio becomes more lopsided as one moves to more selective and elite universities. What’s going on here? Writer Michael Kinsley has an explanation: Professors are simply more intelligent than the rest of the population. If this is true, it poses a problem for conservatives. Do education and intelligence lead one to adopt the liberal viewpoint?

Hardly. There are many intelligent conservatives, but they tend to be in business. Conservatives tend to go into
business because they care more about money; liberals tend to go into the academy because they care more about power. One reason for this divergence of interests is that conservatives in general are practical people—they emphasize what works—while liberals are theoretical people—they emphasize what ought to work. “Why do people have to work for gain? Why can’t they work out of solidarity with the community?” When you hear someone talk like this, you know you are listening to a liberal.

This is not to say that conservatives have no interest in becoming professors. Some do, but they are usually concentrated in economics or the hard sciences. Once again, the reason has to do with the conservative bent toward practicality: equations that add up, theories that can be tested, and so on. By contrast, liberals prefer such fields as sociology and literary criticism because in these areas their theoretical perspective never has to meet the test of reality.

I am probably not typical of conservatives in that I once seriously considered becoming a professor of history, literature, or American studies. But, as I realized soon after graduating from Dartmouth, a grim future awaited me in the field of American studies. The place is a mecca for radicals. “Truth in advertising” demands that it be called un-American studies. The point is that once liberal ideologues dominate a field or a department, they frequently conspire to keep conservatives out.

Consider Harvard’s black studies program. Its spectrum of opinions ranges from liberal to radical-left.
There are no conservatives in the department. Is this because there are no conservative academics good enough for Harvard? Not at all. Thomas Sowell at the Hoover Institution has arguably produced more original work than half of Harvard’s black studies department. Some of the liberals at Harvard are utterly mediocre figures who would be teaching at community colleges if they weren’t liberal and they weren’t black. Sowell, too, is an African American, but he is the wrong kind of African American. Despite his prodigious scholarship, he falls outside the range of acceptable opinion in those quarters.

So part of the reason for the liberal bias in academia—especially in the humanities and social sciences—is that the academy reflects a temperamental and ideological self-selection at work. But there is a second reason why professors, as a group, tend to be liberal. They have a visceral hostility to capitalism, one of the reasons why so many once found themselves attracted to Marxism (and some are still). Not that they find Marx’s theories about surplus value or his predictions about the future to be particularly convincing. They turn to Marxism as a vehicle for expressing their animus toward capitalism.

Why, then, do professors dislike capitalism? Because they are firmly convinced that capitalist societies are unjust. Many professors believe that, in a just society, the largest share of wealth and influence should be held by the most intelligent people, that is to say,
themselves.
In a capitalist society, by contrast, the ones who have the most influence and make the most money are entrepreneurs.
The typical Ivy League professor may earn $100,000 annually, but he is outraged to see a fat Rotarian with a gold chain dangling on his chest pulling in $1.5 million a year selling laundry detergent. He concludes that something has to be wrong with a world that produces results like these.

That’s when he becomes a registered member of the Democratic Party.

Dear Chris,

If there is one institution that is even more left-wing than the typical American university, it is the media. Most reporters, I realize, deny this obvious fact. They cannot deny that journalists overwhelmingly vote for Democratic candidates and support liberal causes because several surveys have documented this. What they do deny, therefore, is that their personal convictions have anything to do with their reporting.

But is it possible to stand in isolation from one’s deeply held views when one is covering stories that have political significance? Some reporters don’t even bother. These fierce ideologues are few, but they are sometimes found in influential places. A few years ago, Fox Butterfield wrote an article about conservatism in the
New York Times
in which he quoted me as saying, “The question is not whether women should be educated at Dartmouth.
The question is whether women should be educated at all.”

I called up Butterfield and informed him that while that line had appeared in the
Dartmouth Review,
its author was another student, Keeney Jones. I said that I would appreciate Butterfield’s publishing a correction. Butterfield became defensive. He pointed out that I had
quoted
the line in question in one of my
Policy Review
articles. “So you did say it,” Butterfield insisted. I was dumbfounded. I told Butterfield that, by his logic,
he
could now be held accountable for the line since he, too, had quoted it in
his
article. The man still didn’t get the point, and he refused to correct his error. Now, we are not talking about some dimwit but about a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at a leading newspaper.