The Necessary Preconditions for Intellectual Growth: Integrity at the University Requires Diversity of Thought

Analyzing the problematic subcultures which arose in the last decade or two on university campuses and which are now spreading to other parts of society, author Bradley Campbell distinguishes between ‘dignity culture’ and ‘victimhood culture.’

The ‘victimhood’ culture assigns permanent moral values to an individual based, not on her or his being a rational human being, but rather based on the individual’s race, gender, ethnicity, etc. According to this ideology, an African-American is essentially a victim, regardless of academic or economic achievements. So is a woman, or a person whose heritage is from the Spanish-speaking parts of Central or South America.

Likewise, a person of “white” (European) descent, or a male, is permanently an ‘oppressor,’ despite the morality or immorality of any of his actions. Being a victim or an oppressor is, for those who embrace victimhood culture, an innate and immutable status. Bradley Campbell writes:

Dignity culture fights oppression by appealing to what we all have in common. Our status as human beings is what’s most important about us. But victimhood culture conceives of people as victims or oppressors, and maintains that where we fall on this dimension is what’s most important about us, even in our everyday relationships and interactions.

Although the ideology of the victimhood culture arose at universities, it is not friendly to intellectual integrity. In fact, integrity and consistency are not virtues in the eyes of victimhood culture.

The political vision of the Enlightenment - that the governed, being uniformly rational despite differences of race or gender, are the source of the government’s legitimacy because their rationality directs them toward a general consensus about those social structures which best preserve life, liberty, and property - is not accepted by the victimhood culture.

Citizens or voters in a state - or researchers or professors at a university - do not have validity because they embody human reason’s quest for knowledge, according to the victimhood mentality. Instead, victimhood teaches, they are valid because they are of a certain race, gender, ethnicity, etc.

This means that victimhood culture is ultimately incompatible with the goals of the university. Pursuing truth in an environment of vigorous debate will always involve causing offense — and one of the shibboleths of victimhood culture is that it’s okay to offend the oppressors but not the oppressed. Many campus activists, realizing this, have attacked the ideals of free speech and academic freedom. One of these visions will have to prevail — either dignity culture and the notion of the university as a place to pursue truth, or victimhood culture and the notion of the university as a place to pursue social justice.

Some critics of victimhood culture, Bradley Campbell writes, mistakenly assume that the campus activists who promote the victimhood culture are too fragile, too much like a snowflake, to be confronted by a diversity of opinions. Campbell disagrees. He argues that the victimhood culture is a reaction to what it perceives as injustice.

This raises several questions: How does one determine what is justice or injustice? How does one respond, rather than react, to it? These questions are at least as old as Socrates, and are never easy to answer.

Is it an injustice for a person to be exposed to individuals who have contrasting opinions? Or is it a healthy and intellectually stimulating experience?

It’s not that campus activists are afraid of taking risks; rather, they’re outraged by what they see as injustice. An example from the book’s first chapter actually highlights the difference. In the 1990s, parents began following medical advice to keep their young children away from peanuts. Peanut allergies were very rare at the time, but they could be deadly. The strange thing was, peanut allergies began to skyrocket after that. We now know this was precisely because children were no longer being exposed to peanuts. It turns out that early exposure to peanuts is good for most children’s immune systems.

Bradley Campbell examines a recent book, written by Lukianoff and Haidt. He argues that the book makes the mistake of labels in the ‘social justice warriors’ as fragile snowflakes. Campbell argues that the advocates of victimhood culture aren’t timid, but rather they are mistaken.

Lukianoff and Haidt use the analogy of peanut allergies:

What Lukianoff and Haidt say, correctly, is that this illustrates the principle of antifragility. As with the immune system, various kinds of adversity often strengthen us. Campus activists, like the parents protecting their children from peanuts, often embrace a myth of fragility. They believe people need protection from microaggressions and conservative speakers, lest they cause them harm.

Instead of embracing head-to-head debate with those who embrace divergent viewpoints, the campus activists believe that they need to shelter their fellow students from those viewpoints. These activists picture themselves, not as timid or fragile, but rather as strong: hence the ‘warrior’ in ‘social justice warrior.’

But they view their fellow students as fragile, as victims, and as members of various oppressed classes. Hence the drive to shelter them.

The question which these advocates have failed to contemplate is this: might it not be a strengthening experience for their fellow students, the alleged victims, to learn that they will not wither when encountering a diversity of opinions, but rather that such intellectual sparring is in fact a strengthening experience?

The Building Blocks of Both Fiction and History: Archetypes

In literary studies, scholars use the word ‘archetype’ to describe a pattern which is at the highest or broadest level of application. An archetype is a feature of reality which is so ubiquitous in human experience that it requires no explanation.

The reader will note that ‘arch’ occurs in both ‘archetype’ and ‘overarching’ - these are patterns so universal that they encompass both fiction and reality, and are in some sense inescapable. They constitute limits to imagination in fiction, inasmuch as any and every author will obliged, often unconsciously, to include them.

Leland Ryken, James Wilhoit, and Tremper Longman write:

An archetype is an image or pattern that recurs throughout literature and life. More specifically, an archetype falls into one of three categories: it is either an image or symbol (such as the mountaintop or evil city), or a plot motif (such as crime and punishment or the quest), or a character type (such as the trickster or jealous sibling).

Part of the definition of what it means to be human - part of the essence of being human - is shown in archetypes. They are necessarily a part of human life.

Any discourse about humans or about human life may or may not include archetypes, but if that discourse takes the form of a sustained narrative, it will necessarily include archetypes.

Archetypes are a universal language. We know what they mean simply by virtue of being humans in this world. We all the experiences of hunger and thirst, garden and wilderness. Ideas and customs vary widely from one time and place to another, but archetypes are the elemental stuff of life. In the words of literary scholar Northrop Frye (noted archetypal critic), “Some symbols are images of things common to all men, and therefore have a communicable power which is potentially unlimited.” Another literary scholar defines the master images of the imagination as “any of the immemorial patterns of response to the human situation in its permanent aspects.”

Some scholars, notably C.J. Jung, have been prompted by archetypes to posit some form of collective cultural memory. Whether or not one accepts Jung’s hypothesis, it is understandable how the ubiquity of archetypes could tempt him to invent such a conjecture.

Archetypes also explain the power of narrative. A gripping narrative often seizes the reader in ways more powerful than a sharp polemic or brilliantly logical argumentation.

Such elemental images are primal in the sense of being rooted in essential humanity, independent of civilized trappings and complexity.

As something essentially human, archetypes can cross all boundaries: cultural, linguistic, social, racial, religious, etc.

Archetypes are contained in, and shape, the deepest levels of human thought, consciousness, perception, and awareness. Developmentally, they must take up residence in the human mind at a very early age. Humans use them to process sensations into perceptions.

Perhaps the only structures deeper than archetypes would be Kantian notions of space and time. The will have also embedded themselves into the structures of all human languages.

There are also psychological overtones to an exploration of these elemental images of human life. The modern study of archetypes began with psychologists (though archetypes have long since been separated from that source). Part of the psychological dimension is that there is wisdom and strength to be found in being put in touch with bedrock humanity in this way. Carl Jung wrote that archetypes “make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them.”

All authors, knowingly or not, will work with archetypes as they create narratives. Some authors consciously and deliberately use archetypes, and have the opportunity to create narratives which are more effective in moving the emotions and more effective in powerfully imprinting themselves on the mind.

Leland Ryken, James Wilhoit, and Tremper Longman continue:

A further useful thing to know about images and archetypes is that when we begin to categorize them, we find good and bad, desirable and undesirable, ideal and unideal versions of the various categories. Kings can be benevolent or tyrannical, for example. Lions are usually a negative archetype, but the can also symbolize power or rulership in the hands of the good.

Not only in fiction, but in accounts of historical events, archetypes will make themselves felt. The habit of examining a text in terms of its use of archetypes should not be restricted to literary studies. It is equally as valid in history. Because history and fiction are both human experiences, they are both shaped by, and composed of, archetypes.

The universality of archetypes allows the reader to span the chasms of time, space, language, and culture to engage in narrative texts. A narrative which is several millennia old can take hold of the reader’s mind as effectively as if it were written yesterday.

General Notes Concerning History

History has three levels: First, the physical and mechanical facts about people and events, caricatured under the heading of “dates, kings, and wars.” Second, a deeper level looks at the ideas, trends, and movements underlying the first level, “-isms”, politics, and ideologies. Finally, there is a history to the development of philosophy, religion, and worldviews.

Higher level critical thinking about history is possible only when the individual is in command of the lower level data. Attempts to wax philosophical about history in the absence of specific evidence result merely in vacuous generalizations.

History begins with text, with written records of human activity; anything prior to writing is speculative and not part of history, and properly belongs under headings like “archeology”, “paleontology”, and “prehistory.” For the nearly simultaneous start of writing, civilization, and history, a certain amount of stability was needed: the continental drift which now moves land masses a fraction of an inch a year used to move them miles in the same time; volcanic activity was many times what it is now, causing entire mountains to rise and fall rapidly. Geological instability delayed the widespread use of writing and the founding of communities.

History is ultimately about constructing and analyzing narratives, sometimes competing narratives about the same facts; a mere list of facts is a chronicle and not properly a history. A mere list of facts would also be useless and uninformative. The quest for an “objective” history is absolutely necessary, yet elusive. The absolute and objective historical narrative exists, and we seek to discover it, not invent it. Yet human reason and human cognition remain limited, and so our ability to discover is limited; we may be happy that this ability is limited, rather than completely nonexistent.

When we examine a historical person, we can choose the method by which we will conduct our historical evaluation: we can either confine ourselves to the texts written by that person and the actions performed by that person, or we can include other personal data about that individual. The latter approach is called ad hominem, and often includes a quasi-psychological investigation into the childhood relationships to the parents.

Historians also distinguish between primary texts and secondary texts. Primary texts were written at or near the time and place of the events which they describe, and written by eyewitnesses or someone with direct knowledge or experiences of the events. Secondary texts are written by people at removed in either time or space from the events they describe.

One constant factor in history is human nature: from the earliest recorded human thoughts, roughly 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, until the present time, human beings have asked the same questions, encountered the same problems, and sought the same goals. This is what makes you as human as Aristotle or Cleopatra. This is why we can understand the concepts and passions of texts which are thousands of years old: because the authors shared the same unchanging human nature which we all have.

Partly because we all share this same human nature, and perhaps partly for other reasons, there are “eternal questions” which recur throughout history. Historians disagree on exactly how many “eternal questions” there are, but here’s an example of what three of them might be:

• How can I escape my “subjective bubble” (my ideas, perceptions, and opinions) and obtain objective knowledge?
• Does God love me or hate me, and why?
• How should a community or society be organized? How should society and government interact?

There are many other candidates for “eternal questions”. The reader’s imagination should suggest some.

It becomes necessary to clearly and rigorously define some words: “history”, “religion”, and “philosophy”.

The role of religion in civilization and history is both significant and obvious. The emergence of religion from early, non-religious phases of civilization is not so obvious.

Early civilization embraces myth, magic, and manipulation, and lacked religion. Myth explained; magic and manipulation were attempts to control the forces of nature, obtain fertility, and ensure military victories. This type of polytheistic paganism prescribes some ritual or sacrifice designed to persuade a deity to deliver the goods.

Religion concerns relationships: the individual’s relation to God, and to other humans. A religion has a text and a founder. Religion is an attempt to bridge the gap between the perfect/infinite deity and the imperfect/finite human. Religion is personal, inasmuch as it treats both the human and the deity as person, i.e., having beliefs, desires, emotions, and agency. Religion is not private, inasmuch as it encompasses visions of society. A religion is related to a way of life; it has various forms in different times and places; it can be related to geography.

Religion is not ethics and morals, is not traditions, rules, culture, opinions, beliefs.

To directly contradict what has been stated immediately above, there is a different paradigm in which ‘religion’ is defined as exactly those those things: culture, tradition, institutions, and organizations. In such a paradigm, then, religion is an artifact, and the word ‘religion’ then does not refer to the relationship between the individual and the deity, and does not refer to a state of affairs in the world.

We can see how such great confusion has emerged about religion: the word ‘religion’ itself is subject to two quite different definitions. Does it refer, on the one hand, to social and cultural artifacts, or on the other hand, to the deity’s personal agency and relationship to human beings?

Three cornerstones of civilization, as it emerged in the ancient world: (1) the alphabet replaces other symbolic forms, (2) monogamy is valued, (3) human sacrifice is gradually phased out.

Another recurring theme in history is the tension between centralized and decentralized forms of government. From Persia to Rome, from Alexander the Great to the Holy Roman Empire, this will be a consideration; feudalism, often derided as an archaic system, proves to be, in this light, a champion of local independence and of decentralization. It is also no accident that the series of “Star Wars” films by George Lucas echoes the events of Roman history.

Feudalism also introduced a mutuality of obligation: the feudal lord was obliged to his vassal to the same extent that the vassal was obliged to his lord.

As we look at historical texts, we will need to be alert to issues of translation and transliteration.

Maps are also an important part of studying history.

There are different ways to look at historical change: it might be an organic process, working its way gradually through societies and populations in the attitudes and decisions of the average person, or it might be the decisive choice of one man at a crucial moment. History is either a series of historical choices by great men at decisive moments, or it can be told as a gradual process of growth and change in slow waves and trends through entire communities, cultures, and civilizations.

Population and Economics: the pattern seems to be that a steadily growing population is the best circumstance for economic prosperity and stability, as well as political tranquility. If the population grows too quickly, too slowly, or erratically (i.e., the annual rate varies too much from one year to the next), or if the population does not grow at all, or even shrinks, then economic hardship is inevitable. This pattern is relevant to events both in the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. It is relevant also to the study of Thomas Malthus, whose brilliant, but sadly misunderstood, views have been reinterpreted in light of the discovery of the fact that our planet has always produced more food than was needed by the humans living on it, and that all hunger and starvation has been unnecessary, and the result of human incompetence or greed. The deeper insight of Malthus was the imperfectability of the world.

Since the time of Moses, we see that the majority trend within “western” or “Euro-centric” civilization has held a certain “sympathy for the underdog”, a tendency to consider, and act in, the interests of those who are most vulnerable in society. Notable exceptions, of course, exist, in the persons of Nietzsche, Hitler, and Stalin. But general trend has held, and perhaps even gained in predominance, over time. This strength, however, of our civilization has also recently become a weakness, because those who wish to gain power by claiming to be victims can exploit this sentiment. It has now become necessary to distinguish between those who are at the bottom of societal structures and those who merely claim “victim status” as a path to political power. In non-western, or non-Eurocentric societies, this path to power is not open.

The events of history take place within the framework of time, space, matter, and energy. Another way of saying this is that the events of history involve elements that are, at least in principle, directly or indirectly detectable by the five senses. We need to be aware that these are the minority of events. The majority of events are composed of elements that lie outside of space and time, which are therefore not composed of matter or energy, and not detectable to the five senses. Strictly speaking, history does not concern itself with such things. Practically, however, we will concern ourselves with them to some extent, when we consider the history of philosophy and the history of religion. We need to be aware, then, that we have, at that point, left behind history, narrowly defined, and entered a separate field of study.

Given that text is central to historical study, issues of language will interface; at a minimum, we will need to continuously acknowledge that we are dealing with texts that are either translated into our language, or written in an older form of our language. Philology is relevant to history.

Popular Sovereignty in an Unlikely Context: Spanish Scholasticism

A century before John Locke, a Spanish cleric named Juan de Mariana articulated what would become known as key Lockean concepts. In his writings, which are part economics and part political science, Juan de Mariana asserted that a king cannot claim that he owns the property of his subjects.

Juan de Mariana is analyzing feudalism, and more particularly, a late form of feudalism as he encountered it in Spain. In such a structure, all land was ultimately understood to be royal property - understood as the king’s personal property. Through layers of subinfeudation, it was parceled out to vassals and serfs.

This economic system is often called ‘manorialism’ or ‘seignorialism.’

Earlier Germanic forms of feudalism featured a mutualism or reciprocity in which the lord and the serf each owed things to the other. This later form of feudalism had decayed into more of a top-down structure.

As a scholastic, Juan de Mariana developed his thought systematically. It is noteworthy that he took property rights as an axiom in his logical system. This foundation entails political liberty and personal freedom.

Writing about him, Jesus Huerta de Soto notes that

From this, Mariana deduced that the king cannot demand tax without the consent of the people, since taxes are simply an appropriation of part of the subjects’ wealth. In order for such an appropriation to be legitimate, the subjects must be in agreement. Neither may the king create state monopolies, since they would simply be a disguised means of collecting taxes.

The notion that each individual person can have property, and that the king may not violate the property of his subjects, is foundational to other human rights and civil rights.

Juan de Mariana is formulating something very near the ‘consent of the governed,’ a phrase which would become associated with Locke’s thought, although Locke himself seems not to have ever written this exact phrase.

As an economist, he was alert to the subtle ways in which the king might violate the property rights of the ordinary people. Jesus Huerta de Soto writes:

And neither may the king - this is the most important part of the book’s contents - obtain fiscal revenue by lowering the metal content of the coins. De Mariana realized that the reduction of the precious metal content in the coins and the increase in the number of coins in circulation is simply a form of inflation (although he does not use this word, which was unknown at the time) and that inflation inevitably leads to a rise in prices because, “if money falls from the legal value, all goods increase unavoidably, in the same proportion as the money fell, and all the accounts break down.”

Segueing from economics to political science, Juan de Mariana went on to note that as the total number of laws or regulations increases, the likelihood of an individual being aware of any specific one of them decreases. A state with a high degree of regulation will find itself therefore unable to accurately enforce all of them.

He lived in Spain, which at the time was shaped by the Habsburg absolutism. There was no parliamentary body.

The laws would therefore be enforced on a hit-or-miss basis, and as the general population becomes aware of this pattern, corruption and lawlessness will increase. As a state legislates more and more laws, these laws will receive less and less respect.

A state with few laws will be more likely to be able to enforce them consistently, accurately, and thoroughly. Juan de Mariana’s advice to the monarch is, therefore, to make as few laws as possible.

He articulated principles of Lockean political liberty and personal freedom, and did so long before Locke.

The Middle Ages: When and What

What is that period of time we call the ‘Middle Ages’? When was that period of time?

These two deceptively simple questions are challenging, in part because the Middle Ages is a construct. In history, a ‘construct’ is something which is not an event, not a place, not a person, and not a date. A construct is not a specific, concrete, verifiable datum.

Instead, a construct is a vague generalization which attempts to capture a pattern or trend among historical events. In the language of the mathematical sciences, it is a best-fit line.

There is a precise and unambiguous answer to questions like these: When was the Battle of Hastings? Where was the Battle of Hastings?

But a construct, like the Middle Ages, is rather impressionistic and does not admit of such precision or verification. As historian Irma Simonton Black writes,

The Middle Ages, then, was a time of excitement and danger, of isolation and self-reliance, of faith, progress, and much, much more.

Note that the concept is large enough to embrace opposites: medieval thought contained seeds of both free-market capitalism and statist communism. It laid the foundations for the zenith of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also for atheism. It modeled both political liberty and authoritarian control.

Notably, the Middle Ages took the Germanic structure of early feudalism and created a system which, unlike the previous Roman imperial system, imposed mutual obligations: the vassal was obliged to serve the lord, but the lord was equally obligated to provide for the vassal.

Attempting to give temporal starting and ending points for the Middle Ages is a vain task; author Irma Simonton Black presents her effort:

The term refers to a period of time of about one thousand years following the collapse of the Roman Empire during the fifth century (400 to 500 A.D.). Modern historians divide this era into the Early Middle Ages (until about 1050), the High Middle Ages (from 1050 to 1300), and finally the Late Middle Ages or Renaissance.

Note that she identifies the ‘Late Middle Ages’ with the ‘Renaissance’ in contradiction to numerous other historians. Such a conflict in definition will have no resolution, because of the high degree of ambiguity inherent in the concepts.

Debates about when the Middle Ages ended and when the Renaissance began are fruitless because the question itself is malformed. Unlike that Battle of Hastings, or the Coronation of Charlemagne, or the signing of the Magna Carta, a conceptual construct like the Middle Ages or the Renaissance cannot have a precise date.

If we cannot answer the question about when, perhaps we can explore the question about what.

“Middle” was used because historians used to think of these years as a time of intellectual stagnation which came between the high civilizations of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and modern times. More modern historians looked more closely into the period, however, and recognized it as a time of great and valuable change and growth.

In the Middle Ages, thinkers like Thomas Bradwardine laid the foundations for modern physics. The Magna Carta established legal rights for women.

Women in the Middle Ages still faced challenges, but had gained a social and civil status far greater than women in Greece and Rome. Scholastic philosophers argued that the universe was organized around rational thought, and that therefore it was valid to use mathematics to explore the observational and empirical sciences; they thereby set the stage for modern chemistry.

Although some scholars had used the word ‘Renaissance’ to intimate that the medievals were ignorant, they in fact had access to the large corpus of text which the Romans and Greeks had left for them. John Scottus Eriugena, for example, was carefully analyzing Greek text in the 800’s A.D., centuries before the self-proclaimed ‘Renaissance’ declared that it had ‘discovered’ them.

Questions about the ‘what’ and the ‘when’ of the Middle Ages will never receive fully satisfactory answers.

Importantly, however, it is clear that the centuries after 476 A.D. were filled with formative and influential events. Thinkers and writers established what would become the modern notions of mathematics, chemistry, physics, and philosophy. Artists produced works of lasting value. Engineers and mechanics developed significant machinery.

Writers during the Renaissance era attempted to cast the medievals in a bad light. They argued that the people of the Middle Ages were ignorant and superstitious.

The conventional image, which relied on generalizations, of medievals as oppressed and unimaginative has been shattered by research about the specific people and events who lived during these centuries.

Unintentional Mutilation of Text: Speaking the Written Word, Reading the Spoken Word

It is common practice to task students with reading poetry. They have an anthology book, or some electronic text on a class’s website, and are told to read various poems by various dates, and then to be ready to discuss, analyze, write about, or take a written examination about these poems.

This is the ubiquitous structure of literature classes.

In this way, students are exposed to, and hopefully consume, magnificent poetry: Longfellow, Wordsworth, Blake, Poe, etc.

There may, however, be something fundamentally wrong with this approach: poetry is almost always designed to be an auditory, not a visual, experience.

Among the exceptions are visual poems, sometimes called ‘concrete’ poetry, like Lewis Carroll’s “The Mouse’s Tale.”

Despite these anomalies, the vast majority of poems are intended mainly to be heard.

Would it be more legitimate for teachers and professors to assign students to hear, rather than read, poetry? With the ability to post audio files on the web, this could be easily done, and might in some cases conform more closely to the author’s intent.

By the same token, is violence done to written texts when they are transformed into ‘audio books’?

A novel by, e.g., Jane Austen or Mary Shelley, was written to be visually consumed, not auditorily. If a person listens to Middlemarch or Atlas Shrugged, rather than seeing the text, is the experience less than, or other than, what the author intended?

When approaching a text, then, it is worth asking, relatively early on in the process, whether the author intended the text to be seen or heard.