The academy was taken over by people who do not believe in any truth except the one they impose on others

One Cosmos Under God Robert W. Godwin

Put another way, almost everything objectionable about the left begins with an assault on human language, which is not this or that specific language, but our very means of access to a transcendent realm charged with the noetic light of the Other. This simply cannot be overemphasized, for it explains the specific way in which revelation is "eternally true," whereas any form of materialism is "eternally false" -- including secular leftism a priori. You will have noticed, however, that leftism must always -- always -- misappropriate and piggyback on this or that liberal or religious truth, truth that it covertly denies at the outset.

To cite just one obvious example, the use of the the state to force "homosexual marriage" upon us obviously has nothing to do with promoting marriage but destroying its very foundation -- including, of course, its linguistic foundation. "Marriage" is a word that actually means something, both literally and spiritually, which is to say, a sacred union between a Man and a Woman. Therefore, anyone with a remnant of common sense -- anyone not already infected by leftism -- knows without thinking about it that homosexuals cannot marry for the same reason that a baseball player cannot kick a field goal...

This ubiquitous pattern of language abuse by the illiberal left was described by Michael Polanyi back in the 1940s. First, undermine the possibility of truth and meaning, so that there is no way to arbitrate between competing "truth claims." Next, seize positions of power in order to arbitrarily impose your own truth. This is how the academy was successfully taken over by people who do not believe in any truth except the one they impose on others and enforce through the mechanisms of speech codes, political correctness, and denial of tenure to those who do not conform. Free scholarship is replaced by all sorts of mechanisms of coercion. You may not be aware of the coercion until you step outside the bounds of what is acceptable, as we see in the global warming debate...posted by Gagdad Bob at 4/10/2007 07:10:00 AM 44 comments links to this post