The problem of the dishonest, anti intellectual intellectual

If democracy, justice, science, and scholarly endeavor are liberal then such intellectual-seeming constructs as Critical Race Theory, Whiteness Studies, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Postmodernism, Existentialism, Marxism, and Platonism are not, when examined by “the known rules of ancient liberty,” intellectual. They fail Immanuel Kant’s test, that the one indispensable intellectual attribute is “a good will,” because all the other intellectual attributes can be subverted to anti intellectual purposes.

The first volume of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies states, some forty pages in, that Plato’s philosophy is essentially totalitarian, a position the modern university has answered by treating Popper as an outlier.

American thought, as evidenced in its Constitution, has such liberal intellectual sources as John Locke, David Hume, Montesquieu, Aristotle, William Blackstone’s Commentary on the Laws of England, and Abraham Lincoln’s Selected Speeches, but Critical Race Theory, Kendi’s Antiracism, and the New York Times’ 1619 Project tend to skip over the Founding principles and to base their critique on the fact that slavery, which as Lincoln noted, “already existed,” was not abolished until the Civil War.

Although Lincoln noted that the Constitution could not have been ratified if the initial version had abolished slavery, critics such as Ta-Nehisi Coates argue America’s origin in sin is what Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude calls its “ugly truth,” inescapably leading to what Coates calls “the certain sins of the future.”

Currently, such products of higher education in our democracy as Critical Race Theory, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, which pretend to advance the public good, have quite a different purpose: To document that white supremacist sinfulness is so pervasive and so monstrous that public policy must focus on improving the lot of those who denounce the country they live in. Never was Kant’s warning about the intellectual who does not have “a good will” more timely.

“How thoroughly campus cultural Marxism has come to be tolerated in mainstream society”

[From a July 2019 Facebook post] - I was once a fan of Ta-Nehisi Coates. He is a writer with phenomenal natural talents. Then he took a part-time teaching position at MIT, and he began saying things like, “Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house.” (As Doris Lessing wrote, “There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence.”)

Ta-Nehisi adopted a social-justice warrior stance which made him the idol of a surprisingly large number of progressive journalists, despite positions which were often rather strange, as you will see in the following instances.

Carlos Lozada, at the end of this post (“Radical Chic”), describes an adulation which made me realize how thoroughly campus cultural Marxism has come to be tolerated in mainstream society:

For instance, Ta-Nehisi said that the deaths of those who tried to save people on 911 left him “cold”:

“He writes of the police and firefighters who died running into the burning buildings [the twin towers on 911] in a forlorn effort to save all the people whose bodies were about to be obliterated into dust, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.””

Ta-Nehisi would apparently let _all_ criminals out of prison:

“[Jeffrey] Goldberg asked what [Ta-Nehisi Coates] would do if he were in [Mitch] Landrieu’s position — surely there was something, “I don’t know what I’d do if I were mayor, but I could tell you what I’d do if I was king.” [Ta-Nehisi Coates would] let criminals out of prison, he said. “And, by the way, I include violent criminals in that.” Goldberg asked what he meant by “violent.” “Gun crime, too,” Coates said.”

He is unconcerned with the civil rights of any group but his own:

“Everywhere he goes, Coates hears versions of the same plea: What about my group? What about Native Americans? What about Latino immigrants? What about me?

“You get here and people say, ‘Why can’t you do that for our community?’ ” Coates says one morning at a Capitol Hill coffee shop. He calls the reaction “disrespectful” ... Disrespectful because he believes the experience of blacks in America deserves its own, focused examination.”

Ta-Nehisi said that reparations would end “white guilt.”

-*—

In The Radical Chic of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Carlos Lozada writes:

“In an America consumed by debates over racism, police violence and domestic terror, it is Coates to whom so many of us turn to affirm, challenge or, more often, to mold our views from the clay. Among public intellectuals in the U.S., writes media critic Jay Rosen, he’s the man now. When the Confederate battle flag on the statehouse grounds in Columbia, S.C., seemed the only thing the news media could discuss, my Washington Post colleague Ishaan Tharoor put it simply: Just shut up and read @tanehisicoates. These days, you hear many variations on that advice.

Coates is more than the writer whose thinking and focus best match the moment. With his 2014 Atlantic cover essay on The Case for Reparations, which explores the brutal U.S. history of redlining and housing discrimination, and now with the critical rapture surrounding his new book, Between the World and Me, he has become liberal America’s conscience on race. Did you read the latest Ta-Nehisi Coates piece? is shorthand for Have you absorbed and shared the latest and best and correct thinking on racism, white privilege, institutional violence and structural inequality? If you don’t have the time or inclination or experience to figure it out yourself, you outsource it to Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2015/07/16/the-radical-chic-of-ta-nehisi-coates/]