Joanna Williams, the education editor at spiked, recently reflected on academia’s willing destruction of the foundations of freedom on which it once proudly stood:
Rather than allowing old ideas and new ones to do battle, academics today insist that discourse is comprised of a range of commingling perspectives which hold relative value. The vital process of colliding old truth claims with new knowledge has been jettisoned in favour of politically loaded goals of inclusion and justice.
It’s should be no surprise to us that Williams invokes the concept of “orthodoxy” in her discussion of the need for academic freedom:
The significance of academic freedom, as both Kant and Mill were acutely aware, lies in the fact that it enables scholars to challenge the dominant orthodoxies of the day. In order for society’s collective understanding of the world to progress, knowledge needs to be contestable and open to being superseded when intellectual advances are made. This does not mean that there is no truth or objectivity in knowledge. On the contrary, Kant repeatedly argues that truth is integral to the exercise of scholarship: ‘truth (the essential and first condition of learning in general) is the main thing’. The role of philosophers, Kant claims, is to critique existing knowledge ‘in order to test its truth’. Therefore, for understanding to advance, academics need the freedom to test existing truth claims, disprove fallacies, and propose new truth claims, knowing that these too may be tested and superseded. In sum, discovering truth is the goal of advancing knowledge, and academic freedom is essential to this process.
This resonates with the charge that Frank Meyer laid for The Philadelphia Society in his speech at the first national meeting in 1965: that conservatives must move out of their “snug fortifications” to grapple seriously with the intellectual problems of the age, without sloganizing, without pseudo-scholarship, but with philosophical rigor in re-examining theory and reality.
American conservative thought, according to Meyer, succeeds because it draws upon the respect for tradition of 19th-c conservatism while rejecting its authoritarianism and embraces the focus on liberty of 19th-c liberalism while rejecting its utilitarianism. American conservatism goes behind these 19th-c streams of political thought to 18th-c American Constitutionalism, an intellectual and political “settlement” that was able to ground a new political society on the protection of freedom as a precondition of the pursuit of virtue. The Founders were not saints, but they shared a fundamental respect for truth (we hold these truths to be self-evident) and devised a political order that would allow for men to exercise their intellectual responsibilities to advance their understandings of the nature of reality and their moral and spiritual responsibilities to seek virtue and excellence.
American conservatism, by these lights, is at its worst when it hunkers down into shrill orthodoxies, and at its best when it illuminates and exemplifies the ways that men may freely go about the search for truth, with virtue as an end and an affectionate but not slavish regard for traditional social and religious institutions as a guide. Ironically, this is true liberalism, while the quest for cosmic justice of modern liberalism has led it to repudiate both order and liberty as it has created a new orthodoxy and a new priesthood of power and social control.
Can this priesthood of the social-justice sciences and “Big Data” and the acolytes of the Common Core and “career and college ready standards” be challenged effectively by a sea of conservative sectarianism, or is more concerted effort required? Only time will tell. Meanwhile, the role of The Philadelphia Society, necessitated when academia lost its way, is to hold open a space in which the most serious intellectual work can be shared, challenged, and refined. At its best, PhillySoc has not been a place to celebrate orthodoxy but to constantly test what we hold to be true against the lights of reason and conscience. Like the blacksmith’s hammer, iron sharpens and shapes iron.
At our recent 50th anniversary meeting, Patrick Deneen asked whether it’s sufficient for conservatives simply to repeat liberty as a mantra, since in the terms of the present age, liberty has become cracked, unleashing both license as an end in itself and the hollow orthodoxies of modern academia. Meyer warned us against mantras. There is much serious repair work to be done, but it is still, as I see it, our task to proclaim liberty, rightly understood.