On this forum there has been a spirited, but civil and polite, debate over whether Harvard deserves support in its stand against Trump’s attack on it. It’s a pretzel of an issue, and I appreciate the arguments of both sides, I really do (and can be momentarily swayed to one side or the other).
But in the end, I cannot support either side. Trump wants to bully and even destroy any institution that stands up to him. (I think the campaign to end certain bad things in the universities is just a pretext, just a way to get support from his MAGA people.)
But Harvard wants to destroy civilization. And it’s been doing a damn good job of it, too. Some posts have rightly stressed Harvard’s good work in fields other than the Humanities: medicine, physics, biochemistry. But weighing that against the further development and spreading of evil philosophy, I think Harvard, and all universities, are net destroyers not benefactors.
In fact, Trump is the product of the anti-freedom, anti-life, anti-conceptual philosophy that has been dominant at Harvard in particular since at least the time of William James, and probably going back to the Hegelians of the 19th Century (but I don’t know that history).
Harvard is a symbol of the state of all Anglo-Saxon universities, so I wouldn’t single it out . . . except for the surprising assemblage of evil philosophers it has been home to:
William James (“Truth is what produces the sentiment of rationality in me.”)
C.I. Lewis (“The ‘human mind’ is a coincidence of individual minds which partly, no doubt, must be native [determined by inborn nature], but partly is itself created by the social process.”)
W.V.O. Quine (“Physical objects are imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries—not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. . . . in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind.”)
Nelson Goodman (“Principles of deductive inference are justified by their conformity with accepted deductive practice.” Goodman is the creator of “grue,” “bleen,” and “bagleet.”)
John Rawls (See “An Untitled Letter” by Ayn Rand.)
There was also Robert Nozick who, though analytic and confused, was better than his colleagues. And Steven Pinker.
None of this means “take Trump’s side.” Again, Trump is the long-range product of two centuries of Anglo-American philosophy. Trump could not have emerged from obscurity in Harvard’s early years, in the 1700s, when it was a bastion of pro-freedom thought. Trump could not have risen 40 years ago, when there were enough minds not destroyed by post-Kantian philosophy to recognize irrationality and dishonesty for what it is.
Harvard is not actually supporting the rule of law or anything that Trump is attacking. It can’t be, because its Humanities faculty is skeptical and subjectivist. And, judging by Jordan Peterson, mystical.
The conflict is not between Trump and the last bastion of resistance to MAGA-ism. Instead, the two sides are like the difference between Ellsworth Toohey and Gus Webb, with Trump as Webb. Don’t try to choose the lesser evil.
And re-read “The Establishing of an Establishment” on how, short of the State Science Institute, government support for “science” corrupts it.
P.S. Speaking of “science,” has anyone at Harvard questioned climate hysteria? I’d be surprised if any professor there has.
