When I became interested by the power of truth in my high school economics class, I became enamored with the Ivory Tower. Not the faux-, immature form as insulated elites, but the near military truth-based social-educational organization that taught its members and discovered and codified knowledge. This tower began in North America as centers of the seminary and Biblical study. At this time, higher learning really was Higher learning, concerning the unchanging will, way and nature of God. This commitment to unchanging truth, who is a person, namely the Christ, enabled the introduction and codification of objective knowledge in scientific reasoning, pioneered by figures like Sir Francis Bacon in the 17th century. The seedbed of the university and its ensuing technoscientific apparatus grew through the tending of the Christ and people committed to Him. When I graduated from high school, I wished to peruse this garden and contribute to knowledge. In my early view, the University was the home and seedbed of knowledge, maintained by diligent husbandmen and gardeners (professors, teachers and researchers) with a view toward the Truth and the Good.
Then I went to the University of California. I did not go to Berkeley or Los Angeles, although I knew fellow students at my high school who went to both. I went to one that was known as a party school. I was reading Nietszche at the time, his Basic Writings collected by Walter Kaufmann, and I sought an institution that would accomplish both Apollonian reason and Dionysian fun. I remarked to a few students there once I began my studies at the campus that if it had not been a university, it would have been a resort. The idyllic, paradisal environment did more to promote a kind, glazing over of the eyes rather than much reason.
As an institution, my school was happy to rest on its status. By this, I mean the staff and faculty expected you to be happy just to be there and not ask them to demonstrate their competence too much. This was especially true of the undergraduates. My first quarter there, I attended a forum where the topic of discussion was free speech. As is frequent at these kinds of events, the left was broadly supportive but did not want to include conservative speakers while the right was interested in principled free speech. There was not much discussion or recognition of the value of free speech itself, which is the only means of addressing conflict without manipulation or violence. That is not a partisan claim, but one based in objective fact. The ability to speak without legal censorship was made partisan: an absurd fact in the education of a democratic populace where many would apparently rather be so tolerant that they would get rid of the means of the functioning of democracy than have an uncomfortable conversation. This is not education. As citizens, not merely consumers, not merely entrepreneurs, we must broadly agree with the ability of people, ourselves and others, to publicly communicate beliefs without legal censorship, even if it goes against our own attitudes. Free speech is as fundamental to democratic society as John Milton’s Areopagitica. About a month after this, there was a talk given at the Multi-Cultural Center by the Puerto Rican terrorist or freedom fighter Oscar Lopez Rivera, who, after spending 36 years in American prison, went on a university tour. His group, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), desired Puerto Rican national sovereignty. With over 100 bombings around the country and four people killed to prove it, Rivera wished to tell us college students about his “resistance.” What sort of country invites speakers to their campus who commit acts of terror and are responsible for the deaths of their civilians while they are eating lunch? Notably, those students, staff and faculty who would have protested most contemptuously against the arrival of Ben Shapiro, for example, on campus were sitting, admiring the ex-terrorist. This demonstrates to me that these leftists, rather than desiring tolerance, instead sought for their political views to dominate society and discourse, freedom or no. One of the staff urged the audience that if anyone of the CIA or the FBI or police was there that they were not welcome. When I asked Rivera what he thought about the four people his group had killed, he was visibly shaken, replying, “It was a different time.” Well, regardless, I am against the use of violence for political goals, and that applies to the FALN, ISIS and the CIA.
The only sacrifice we need is Jesus, and He was killed around 2,000 years ago.
Seeing this sort of behavior at a prestigious university sincerely dented my interest in operating in the sociopolitical realm of it. I understood that even engaging in good faith and seeking to help, I would be read wrongly and misportrayed, and not just by partisan political actors. This was also the first year of President Trump’s administration, an administration I had no ability to vote for but shyly supported as a rejection of the existing elitism and “masters of the universe” talk of the political and business elite (Clinton, Obama, Rubin et al.). The campus climate was not interested in this take. I decided, then, that I would focus on philosophy, truth and the good, and when I was ready, to return to political and social issues. I began to pore wholly into my studies, beginning a Psychological & Brain Sciences and Philosophy double major that I hoped would equip me to handle everything by rooting it in the evolved psychosocial mindbrain body. However, as Hilary Putnam wrote, “Cut the pie any way you like it, ‘meaning’s’ just ain’t in the head.” I looked to ground values, society and existence in the mind and brain, a true humanist like Protagoras, and found that I could not, that this was in fact a radically subjectivist task, while what I had been interested since the beginning was the unmanipulable truth. My reading of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra led to a bed of Procrustes where I was the bed and Procrustes. All I saw with this approach was my self, and my church background and Christian childhood could not justify, muster or sustain the force involved in, for the sake of myself and my knowledge, applying my will on others, the world and myself. At the end of the psychologism I had sought to ground all knowledge with, I found only solipsism: a mirror that I did not even want to look at.
I was about to enter my senior year at this time, and coincident with this mega-event and epiphany was the Covid-19 pandemic. I had been paying attention to the news throughout this time, reading about the break-out of a strange virus in China in late December while I was celebrating my vacation, and was shocked that things had gotten so out of hand. At that time, I had swallowed the party line on quite a few issues: climate change, most. I favored types like Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam, nesting next to the Austrian poet Srecko Horvat and melodramatic philosophs like Slavoj Zizek. I began to realize that the government was incompetent, and so even the sweeping changes that I was interested in seeing it administer to prevent a global environmental collapse would be ineffective. I fell into deep desperation. The status quo solutions were ineffective and under-the-table activism would likely lead to jail time. At this time, I figured the Situationists of the 60s and the Weather Underground were interesting alternatives to American consumer society.
This anarchism led me to dark places, and spiritual dark places as well. I was destabilized, but found myself healed by the love and blood of Jesus. Now I just need to pick up my cross and triumph with Him. All of these problems were nailed on the cross over two thousand years ago.
What I would hope to see at any university or institution of higher learning is staff, faculty and students genuinely, personally, and unbiasedly interested in the truth and the good. I did not find that. I found, instead, a microcosm of some of the worst elements in American society. Being an American, I can say I value convenience, nearly to the extent that it cheapens my life. America largely values freedom, consumption and luxury. The university reflects these values. Freedom in its fundamental sense is freedom from external influence, but also involves the influences that maintain this position. Consumption is reflected in our obscene interest in the new thing, when our questions and desire for fulfillment were answered and completed by more intelligent and holy people years ago. Luxury involves obtaining, looking, feeling and acting in as great material and ideal wealth as one is capable of having. Freedom, for the American academic, is the freedom to only care about his or her divided discipline of society, without a care for its social impacts. Consumption is the ability to kick off any idea of nurture and patience, creating the inability to properly value the contributions to knowledge of past philosophers, scientists and authors and promoting the cult of publishing. Finally, luxury enables someone who enters a prestige university to believe they have made it–and promptly stop any activity based on merit. In my time at the University of California, I found about as many people personally interested in the truth and the good as I can count on a hand. The academy, professor and student, was basically interested in training careerists, as fit on Wall Street, in the military-industrial complex, or in NGOs like Human Rights Watch.
When I entered my first-year, I felt a severe hollowness and emptiness. I did not know what to do and did not have a foundation in the good. I behaved immaturely and justified a fundamentally sick society.
In the words of Jiddu Krishnamurti, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” The emptiness that you feel is not going to be filled by what is causing you to be empty. Instead, choose Jesus: the love and source of creation. A personal relationship with God is the only decision that fulfills and imbues your life with supernatural meaning 24/7.
Do not look for satisfaction from that which requires you to not be satisfied. The academy, in its current state, is such a place.
Veracity as Virtue 