Some 50 years ago in 1970, an essay in National Review’s 15th anniversary issue looked at the negative effects of the adversarial “academic attitude” on our society. Today Power Line’s Scott Johnson harks back to that essay and quotes major portions of it in a column.
What is surprising is how well it holds up half a century later with, as Johnson notes, the substitution of Black Lives Matter for Black Panthers and Antifa for Students for a Democratic Society. It almost could have been written yesterday. Note how timely this segment feels.
This settled antagonism, this spirit of inner defection, exists in its most concentrated form in the academy (the only American institution, let us note, that is entirely run by liberals, and, not coincidentally, the institution furthest along toward disintegration). But the attitude spreads out beyond the academic foci and affects those who participate in one way or another in what we can very broadly call intellectual culture: the media, the arts, publishing. Madison Avenue and so forth. The key assumption — it may be powerful and aggressive, or muted though still very much there — is that all insight, imagination, refinement, all spirituality even, spring from, or at least are inextricable from, an initial nay-saying to the surrounding society.
Coincidentally, I became a full-time university faculty member that year - 1970 - and in the decades since the situation described has only gotten much worse.
