I have a love-hate relationship with academia. I grew up in a family of academics and have been fortunate to study under phenomenal teachers, professors, and mentors both in Europe and the United States. For them, I have profound respect and gratitude.
Yet, I have encountered numerous intellectuals in the West who may be competent in their narrow field but are deeply ignorant of why America is a uniquely free and prosperous country and why Western civilization has created the most viable models of human flourishing. Not only do they fail to recognize indisputable historical facts, but they also espouse a blinding, visceral anti-American and anti-Western bias that defies any principles of good science and scholarship.
When I was a college student in Europe in the early 1990s, the university was an oasis of free thought. It was a sacred space for knowledge, highly conducive to a genuine exchange of ideas and respect for dissenting opinions. This was all the more remarkable in the wake of communism’s collapse in Eastern Europe. The intelligentsia of my youth was synonymous with pro-Western dissidents and free thinkers. This is still true in Eastern Europe to some extent, despite the recent proliferation of leftist NGOs that promote woke propaganda and sponsor various media outlets to amplify it.
Traditionally, intellectuals have been prone to eccentricity, contrarianism, and liberalism in the classical sense. This, however, is vastly different from what Western intellectuals have become today. Most of them have become irrationally dogmatic and intolerant in defending a false and pernicious narrative, whose goal is indiscriminate critique and destruction of traditional Western society. This results in a seeming paradox whereby the “smartest” people in a society are woefully devoid of common sense and wisdom. Suffice it to mention their inability to define basic terms such as “man” or “woman” and their blind submission to the cult of climate hysteria or transgenderism.
While “wokeness” is a relatively new phenomenon, its philosophical foundation is just a metamorphosis of decades-long anti-Western tendencies. The legendary economist and Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek discussed in detail the predominant leftist bias of intellectuals decades ago, in his 1949 essay “Intellectuals and Socialism.” Hayek’s brilliant analysis diagnoses the problem with remarkable precision and explains why intellectuals are disproportionately influential in shaping public opinion. Hayek remarked:
In all democratic countries, in the United States even more than elsewhere, a strong belief prevails that the influence of the intellectuals on politics is negligible…. Yet over somewhat longer periods they have probably never exercised so great an influence as they do today in those countries. This power they wield by shaping public opinion….Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists, deriving from certain tendencies of abstract thought with which for a long time only the intellectuals were familiar; and it required long efforts by the intellectuals before the working classes could be persuaded to adopt it as their program.The term “intellectuals,” however, does not at once convey a true picture of the large class to which we refer, and the fact that we have no better name by which to describe what we have called the secondhand dealers in ideas is not the least of the reasons why their power is not understood….Until one begins to list all the professions and activities which belong to the class, it is difficult to realize how numerous it is, how the scope for activities constantly increases in modern society, and how dependent on it we all have become. The class does not consist of only journalists, teachers, ministers, lecturers, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction, cartoonists, and artists all of whom may be masters of the technique of conveying ideas but are usually amateurs so far as the substance of what they convey is concerned.The class also includes many professional men and technicians, such as scientists and doctors, who through their habitual intercourse with the printed word become carriers of new ideas outside their own fields and who, because of their expert knowledge of their own subjects, are listened with respect on most others.There is little that the ordinary man of today learns about events or ideas except through the medium of this class; and outside our special fields of work we are in this respect almost all ordinary men, dependent for our information and instruction on those who make it their job to keep abreast of opinion. It is the intellectuals in this sense who decide what views and opinions are to reach us, which facts are important enough to be told to us, and in what form and from what angle they are to be presented.
Is there a cure for the overwhelming anti-Western bias of most American intellectuals and the harm it causes? First, we need to restore education to its former quality in the classical liberal arts tradition that examines the achievements of Western civilization and what makes America unique. American schools and colleges that teach traditional values have seen a welcome increase in enrollment over the past decade or so, but such programs need to proliferate more widely. Removing public funding from institutions that promote destructive anti-American studies and activities is another major step in the right direction.
The recent emergence and recognition of conservative, libertarian, and classically liberal media outlets and think tanks can also help neutralize the anti-American groupthink prevalent in legacy media and major cultural and educational institutions. Making traditional good values and proper education mainstream would eventually displace the anti-Western narrative and foster an intellectual class that would actually benefit our society and appreciate its blessings. In other words, we need a widespread American Renaissance.
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
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