A while ago I wrote an article that generated quite a discussion. With this I was well pleased.\u00a0 Yet, I must confess, my pleasantness over the response with which this issue was met was qualified by a frustration mixed with regret over the fact that ours is a time when this would be considered an issue at all.<\/p>\n
Particularly disconcerting were the remarks made by one respondent, a self-avowed \u201cliberal\u201d who also claims to be a college professor of many years.\u00a0 While some of his comments were not devoid of insight, the thrust of his reasoning left me disheartened, for in spite of <\/em>his age and vocation as an educator in the liberal arts and humanities, the anti-intellectualism and, thus, raw emotion on display in his engagement with a race-based issue\u2014typifying, as it did, the reaction to racially-oriented questions that we have long since come to expect from his ideological and professional brethren\u2014is further confirmation that ours is indeed an age notable for its conspicuous absence of genuinely mature <\/em>thought, i.e. thought that is at once sober, daring, and rigorous.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Such tough-mindedness is a commodity that is all too rare these days.\u00a0 Most contemporary thought, whether it manifests itself among the left or among the conventional right, is, for the better part of it, juvenile. And that the reduction of Western civilization to a one-dimensional caricature of Oppression incarnate and the concomitant dominance of the idiom of \u201cracism,\u201d \u201csexism,\u201d \u201cclassism,\u201d \u201chomophobia,\u201d \u201cxenophobia,\u201d \u201cspeciesism,\u201d \u201cageism,\u201d and the like appropriated to describe it are the characteristics of the preponderance of literature that is scholarly no less than that which is popular demonstrates beyond a doubt that the zeitgeist <\/em>is one of adolescence.<\/p>\n In the Age of Adolescence, the ad hominem <\/em>argument\u2014since Aristotle recognized as logically fallacious\u2014has become the staple of contemporary discourse, particularly discourse over matters of race, gender, class, and sexual morality.\u00a0 Conversation\u2014once treated as an art\u2014has become a virtually extinct species as argument has given way to name-calling, the analysis of conclusions to the imputation to one\u2019s opponents of nefarious motives, the pursuit of coherence and clarity to political activism.\u00a0 Those who know better\u2014or who we think should know better\u2014prefer to construe reality in rigidly dichotomous terms, a realm of angels, populated by themselves, and one of demons, inhabited by their adversaries.\u00a0 Hence, the conventional rightist\u2019s notion that his leftist counterpart is a \u201cmoral relativist\u201d is a fiction of the first order.\u00a0<\/p>\n The problem with the leftist\u2019s thought isn\u2019t that it is relativistic; the problem is that it is a specimen of the most invidious absolutism. <\/em>\u00a0\u201cMainstream\u201d or \u201cmovement conservatives,\u201d to say nothing of neoconservatives, tend toward absolutism as well, but few among their number would deny this. The leftist, however, has acquired for himself a reputation for being a \u201cnuanced\u201d thinker, a reputation owing in no small measure to his endless castigations of his right-wing nemeses for their \u201csimplistic\u201d judgments.\u00a0 However, this reputation is thoroughly undeserved.\u00a0 It is the antithesis of nuance, the height of being simplistic to, say, unequivocally condemn raw statistical economic inequalities as the offspring of nothing other than \u201csavage capitalism;\u201d American led wars as \u201cmilitarism\u201d or \u201cimperialism;\u201d opponents of \u201caffirmative action,\u201d abortion, \u201cgay marriage,\u201d illegal immigration, and \u201cthe Ground Zero\u201d mosque as \u201cracist,\u201d \u201csexist,\u201d \u201chomophobic,\u201d \u201cxenophobic,\u201d and \u201cIslamophobic,\u201d respectively.<\/p>\n As I have already said, there are many on the right who are not above resorting to this anti-intellectualism.\u00a0 Conventional \u201cconservatives\u201d not infrequently lend credibility to the left by either denying the charges of \u201cbigotry\u201d and \u201chatred\u201d that the latter makes against them or by hurling them back: in either case, FOX News \u201cconservatives\u201d and the like reinforce our culture\u2019s soft headedness by implying both that such epithets are meaningful and <\/em>that they are germane to intelligent discourse.\u00a0<\/p>\n Accusing a fan of MSNBC of being a \u201cFOX hater,\u201d as Bill O\u2019Reilly is prone to do, aside from being infantile, is also question-begging, and for at least two reasons: (1) criticism, even harsh and ostensibly unfair criticism, doesn\u2019t necessarily reflect \u201chatred\u201d; (2) the objections that a person makes against FOX, however ridiculous or inordinate they may be, are more likely than not to be the causes <\/em>of one\u2019s \u201chatred,\u201d not the effects. <\/em>And what can be said of \u201cFOX hatred\u201d is equally true of \u201cracism\u201d and the rest of the litany of our adolescent culture\u2019s sins.\u00a0<\/p>\n The vapidity, excessive self-indulgence, immaturity, hypersensitivity, and transparent moral exhibitionism that commentators on both left and right decry about our \u201ccelebrity\u201d driven culture they themselves tend to display within venues\u2014like academia and news media\u2014that are supposed to be devoted to the promotion of the free exchange of ideas.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is a most lamentable state of affairs, but it is to be expected in the Age of Adolescence.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A while ago I wrote an article that generated quite a discussion. With this I was well pleased.\u00a0 Yet, I must confess, my pleasantness over the response with which this issue was met was qualified by a frustration mixed with regret over the fact that ours is a time when this would be considered an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n