The Speech - Drama in Play

This is a response to the comment by saltypig below. It apparently exceeded this site's space limits for comments so is offered here as a separate blog entry.

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I'm not altogether sure what it was about the speech that prompted your hostile reaction, so naturally I went back and had a second look at it. I read: "American society is in trouble, and not only because our traditional values and institutions are under siege. The nuclear family is crumbling as a result of government policies that are ruthless when they are not mindless. Our once great cities have reverted to a state of nature, in which the innocent are terrorized by hordes of savages who are not and cannot become civilized. Our public schools have lost the capacity to educate, and our college and universities are captives of thought police who hate themselves and hate the culture that nourishes them. The government in Washington has metastasized, weakening if not destroying everything it invades, and the federal system is moribund. The economy is sick; public and private morality is in an advanced state of decay."

Are there any untruths here? It is to this sad state of affairs that Forrest McDonald addressed his four suggestions--since you listed them I'll not waste time repeating them. But where were the "unsound, pointless, and contradictory footings offered" for them? You don't cite any examples, only draw attention to the setting in which they were offered. Now it is likely that "those kids are already destroyed before hearing his speech," but on the other hand, I would absolve Professor McDonald of "responsibility for the sickness [he] declaim[s]" because he is one of the real scholars caught up in the downward spiral that is modern education at all levels today. While higher education has always been vulnerable, it hasn't always been this bad! The product of a different and far superior order of thought, McDonald is the author of E Pluribus Unum (1965), The Phaeton Ride: The Crisis of American Success (1974), The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson (1976), Alexander Hamilton (1979), The Presidency of George Washington (1985), Novus Ordo Seclorum (1985), We the People (1992), and The American Presidency (1994), among other books, several anthologies, dozens of chapters in books and hundreds of journal articles. Serious stuff--not today's exercises in automatic writing that view everything and everyone through the lenses of race, gender and sexual preference, and who would dismiss the Founding Fathers on the grounds that they owned slaves showing utter disdain for the serious discussion of ideas. But this last is today's sordid state of affairs--I do not use it to condemn higher education out of hand because again, things weren't always this bad! It is unfortunate that today you probably can get a better education off the Internet, which is why the Internet will be the key to reviving higher education if it can be revived. I have my doubts--most Internet-based education is purely vocational, with no attention whatsoever to subjects like history, philosophy, theology, and others familiarity with which makes a person truly educated--if that's elitist, make the best of it. Cites like Mises.org are the exception to the rule. If Professor McDonald is indeed at a place where one is "engaged in a[n] adversarial relationship with books--you attack them as enemies with a view toward plundering them of information to be used as weapons in the war for grades" and say he "should have done something to halt it, or removed himself from that diseased place," then what specifically should he have done. Trust me, the tiny handful of conservative scholars left in academia are doing everything in their power to halt the leftist nonsense (they will also have to halt the onward rush into pure vocationalism), but as everyone knows they are isolated, fragmented, unorganized, and poor in resources. There is no Ford Foundation funding the so-called right. And if he should "remove himself from that diseased place" then where should he go, or have gone? There is only a limited number of spaces at the Mises Institute or the tiny handful of other such places, else I would be there. It is extremely frustrating, I can assure you, and I imagine Professor McDonald wrote his lecture out of a certain amount of frustration (expressed far more eloquently since that was his generation's way of doing things). But again, what was the alternative? Again, where should he have gone? Maybe the dwindling number of us serious about our intellects should resign ourselves to becoming burger-flippers or the equivalent, although I've decided that if that becomes my fate the article writing stops. It will simply stop, along with the blogging, etc. I will decide on that day that society isn't worth it, it's too far gone, and that I can find more pleasant uses for what little leisure time I have.