Rotting intellectual fruit: The root causes of lower learning

OPINION:

We are constantly told it is necessary to find the “root causes” of everything: crime, illegal immigration, the wave of antisemitism spreading across many college campuses and in our streets.

Often, this call to examine root causes is simply a distraction that avoids coming up with solutions.

Let’s not kid ourselves that the resignation of the president of the University of Pennsylvania for her refusal to unequivocally denounce genocide against Jews (though Liz Magill will stay on as interim president until a replacement is found and will also remain a tenured professor) is going to solve anything so long as this attitude prevails among many faculty members and the boards that hire university presidents.

The latest involves a medical school panel at George Washington University that has defended Hamas’ “right of resistance.” It will likely not be the last as other universities confront the issue and their conduct codes.

We are paying a price for the jettisoning of standards by which right and wrong and good and evil can be defined and judged. If everybody is right, if truth is subjective, then nothing can be said to be wrong, which has brought us to the current moral chaos and intellectual flabbiness.

C.S. Lewis knew right from wrong and that wrong dominates when standards disappear. In his book “The Abolition of Man,” Lewis wrote: “In a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

It’s difficult to improve on that critique, but Lewis does in this quote, which also has modern applications:

“For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility, there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged, and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”

The propagandists are in place throughout America’s education system, especially at the college level. The rotting intellectual fruit of their excesses can now be seen on campuses and in the streets as students and others who know little other than what they’ve been taught call for the elimination of the Jewish democratic state and the murder of Jews.

Lewis isn’t finished in his critique of academia: “A great many of those who ’debunk’ traditional or (as they would say) ’sentimental’ values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.”

This book was written in 1943 in the middle of World War II, a war that united Americans and Britons. When pictures of German death camps were published, the country was shocked and revolted. The Nazi hatred of Jews 80 years ago has been resurrected in our day. This, too, is revolting, especially as it comes from what are supposed to be institutions of higher learning. More like lower learning.

If these excerpts leave you unconvinced, try this one: “An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man’s mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut.”

Yes, a mind is a terrible thing to waste. It is also a terrible thing to lose.

• Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book, “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).