One, Two, Many Truths: With the collapse of “actually existing socialism” in 1991, the universities of the West found themselves saddled with a new mission. With their ideological competitors now soundly defeated they were no longer required to demonstrate the superiority of capitalist values. Their job now was to cement in place the crushing victory of free-market capitalism. Intellectual pluralism was out and unchallengeable dogma was in. As far as the academic community was concerned, it was a case of: “We are all commissars now!”
WHAT’S HAPPENED to our universities? That is the question
which New Zealanders educated in the universities of the 1970s and early 1980s
are asking themselves. Their search for answers has been prompted by the
failure of at least two of New Zealand’s academic institutions to defend the
principle of free speech on their campuses. Such a dramatic departure from the
academic values of the second half of the twentieth century, while disturbing,
is surely inseparable from the many other changes that have transformed our
universities over the course of the past 35 years. What’s happening on today’s
campuses has been brewing for a long time.
What sort of world was it that required our universities to
be centres of intellectual pluralism: places where different ideologies
contended with one another openly and without undue rancour? First and foremost
it was a world in which the struggle between market-driven and market-suppressing
ideologies was ongoing. In the 1970s and well into the 1980s the outcome of the
Cold War was still in doubt. Vast swathes of the planet and hundred-of-millions
of workers remained off-limits to capitalism. No matter how truncated and
unfree, there was still an alternative to the free market – and, as any good
capitalist will tell you, competition enhances performance.
Universities, like all the other important institutions of
capitalist society, had to demonstrate the superiority of capitalist values
over communist ideology. If Soviet universities were hidebound bastions of
unchallengeable dogma where intellectual unorthodoxy wasn’t simply unwise but
punishable by dismissal, imprisonment, or worse, then the West’s universities
had to be showcases of intellectual ferment and free debate.
Censorship and the suppression of free speech might be
attempted by misguided university authorities (as they were in the early 1960s
on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley) but all such attempts
were stoutly resisted by staff and students. The Berkeley “Free Speech
Movement” marked the beginning of the campus upheavals that made students a
by-word for radical dissent throughout the 1960s and 70s.
With the collapse of “actually existing socialism” in 1991,
the universities of the West found themselves saddled with a new mission. With
their ideological competitors now soundly defeated they were no longer required
to demonstrate the superiority of capitalist values. Their job now was to
cement in place the crushing victory of free-market capitalism. Intellectual
pluralism was out and unchallengeable dogma was in. As far as the academic
community was concerned, it was a case of: “We are all commissars now!”
For students, the new regime was even more rigorous. The
intellectual leaders of free-market capitalism had noted the effects of heavily
state-subsidised or even “free” tertiary education on students. From the
perspective of the free-market capitalist, giving young people the space and
time to think about the world they were about to enter had proved a near fatal
mistake. High fees and crippling student loans were their answer to the radical
dissent of the 60s, 70s and 80s. Serendipitously, the policy of “User-Pays”
turned out to be a genuine “twofer”. Not only did it transform students from
scholars into paying customers; but also, by requiring university staff to give
these “customers” what they were paying for, it undermined academic freedom.
Students won’t pay for exams that are “too hard”, or enrol in courses that are
of “no use”.
That only left the pesky problem of “Truth”. Traditionally,
this was the whole point of attending university: learning how to approach,
ever more closely, the true nature of things. For the free-market capitalist,
however, the only truth worth pursuing was the truth of free-market capitalism.
But, how to establish that truth without encouraging the growth of a
counter-truth? That was the problem.
The survival strategy free-market capitalism came up with
was nothing less than brilliant – and astonishingly successful. To protect the
brutal realities of capitalism it was necessary to conceal them behind one,
two, many realities. Turn the whole idea of a single truth into a monstrous and
authoritarian notion – like the communist ideology of the now defunct Soviet
Union. What this meant in practical terms was that while in the STEM
disciplines 2+2 had to remain 4; in the humanities 2+2 could equal whatever the
hell you liked!
Henceforth, and in perfect conformity with the
individualistic ethos of free-market capitalism, each human-being would be
given the right to determine their own truths. Naturally, these would be
derived from their own insight and experience. The sum total of these insights
and experiences constituted an individual’s “identity”. Protecting one’s
personal truths and protecting one’s identity were thus made one and the same.
Anyone attempting to impose an unwanted and/or false identity upon the
individual: one that did not accord with the truths they had derived from their
own insight and experience; was to be resisted as an “oppressor”.
Since free-market capitalism can only be overthrown when
people are willing to subsume their own individual identities in a collective
identity arising out of such all-embracing categories as “human-being”,
“citizen”, or “worker”, the irretrievably divisive politics of identity have
emerged as free-market capitalism’s surest defence. The only injustice capable
of uniting these diverse identities is the wicked lie that there are causes
around which it is possible for diverse identities to unite.
This is what the liberal arts faculties of our universities
have become: institutions dedicated to the investigation, celebration and
protection of personal, sexual, ethnic and gender identity. While the STEM
faculties crank out the technologists needed to keep the free-market capitalist
machine running, its commissars in the humanities make sure that the monstrous,
planet-destroying reality of its existence remains hidden behind a bodyguard of
truths. Each of them ready to use the thug’s veto against anyone foolhardy
enough to raise their voice in opposition.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Friday, 18 October 2019.
