BUILDING THE NEW DARK-AGE MIND

Via PJ Media:

History is not static and it does not progress linearly.  There was more free speech and unimpeded expression in 5th-century Athens than in Western Europe between 1934-45, or in Eastern Europe during 1946-1989. An American could speak his mind more freely in 1970 than now.

Many in the United States had naively believed that the Enlightenment, the U.S. Constitution, and over two centuries of American customs and traditions had guaranteed that Americans could always take for granted free speech and unfettered inquiry.

That is an ahistorical assumption. The wish to silence, censor, and impede thought is just as strong a human emotion as the desire for free expression - especially when censorship is cloaked in rhetoric about fairness, equality, justice, and all the other euphemisms for not allowing the free promulgation of ideas.

We can all but write off today's university as a place of free expression. In the age of Obama, zealots in the university have clamped down on any thought deemed reactionary. "Trigger warning" is a euphemism for trying either to censure literature or to denigrate it. "Safe space" is another term for the segregation of campus areas by race, class, or ideology. "Hate speech" has become a pejorative for uncomfortable truth.

Current popular culture is not empirically grounded, but operates on the premise that truth is socially constructed by race, class, and gender concerns. Science, logic, probability, evidence - all these cornerstones of the Enlightenment - now mean little in comparison to the race, class, and gender of those who offer narratives deemed socially useful.

The redistributionist, equality-of-result state - fueled by a national progressive ideology - is the new deity that determines what is free expression. Blasphemy is now defined as daring to use logic and evidence to expose the state's failed, deductive tenets...

Also read:

UC Faculty Training: Saying 'America Is the Land of Opportunity' Is a Microaggression

Christina Hoff Sommers: Students view 'grim feminist worldview' as truth