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.