[Stefan Stackhouse]

No one ever got a Ph.D or tenure by staking out the position that everything as it is right now is just peachy keen. The academic profession is structured around the premise that things as they are now must be subject to criticism, and that there must be better ideas awaiting discovery. Such a premise is fundamentally at odds with Burke's thesis that society is the product of a long history of social evolution, and that the institutions, manners, customs, etc. of that society exist mainly because they have been found to work, and thus should be conserved rather than discarded. The project of changing society to conform to any of the plans hatched by intellectuals inherently requires that violence be done to that society and its existing institutions and customs. A regime that does violence to the old institutions and customs of a society is almost by definition a tyranny; it is difficult in any case to imagine how a regime can bring about the wrenching transformations of which the social engineers dream without resort to tyranny.

[Gladwin]

A lot of the people in the intellectual, professional activist community don't produce anything of real value. This causes them immense guilt, and self-hatred. They direct this hatred at the society that lets them live like parasites. So, the sit in their dusty little offices in the basements of their university, dreaming up a fantasy of their importance. They dream that they are really revolutionaries, and their ideas are superior to what currently exists.

They are the barnacles on the modern ship of democracy.

[Dems_R_Losers]

An extremely insightful reply. Do you think this inevitably leads to the kind of moral obtuseness that is so widespread in American academia today?

[Bernard Marx]

This is an informed and lucid comment. Thank you.

[pt17]

The academic profession is structured around the premise that things as they are now must be subject to criticism, and that there must be better ideas awaiting discovery.

Tis true; however, when all's said and done, a lot of the "deep thinking" turns out to be (as someone once said) "the transfer of old bones from one graveyard to another." Decades ago I taught for five years and found what Gladwin said to be absolutely true about many "educators" and intellectuals. They do sit in their dusty little offices in the basements of their university, dreaming up a fantasy of their importance. This was true in part because of tenure systems, in part because education as a profession didn't have much status and, as Gladwin says, in part because they don't produce much of measurable value. I watched a number of good people become radicalized because of their lowered sense of status and value.

[Anamensis]

The project of changing society to conform to any of the plans hatched by intellectuals inherently requires that violence be done to that society and its existing institutions and customs.

Good point.