PRESTOPUNDIT -- "It's a team sport, baby!"

David Horowitz flags this bit of pith from Roger Scruton:

"A single theme runs through the humanities as they are taught in European and American universities: the illegitimacy of Western civilization, and the artificiality of the distinctions on which it has been based. All distinctions are "cultural," therefore "constructed," therefore "ideological" in the sense defined by Marx -- manufactured by the ruling classes in order to serve their interests and bolster their power. Western civilization is simply the record of that oppressive process, and the principal purpose of studying it is to deconstruct its claim to our membership. This is the core belief that a great many students in the humanities are required to ingest, preferably before they have the intellectual discipline to question it, or to set it against the literature that shows it to be untenable. To put the point in another way: the Enlightenment displaced theology from the heart of the curriculum in order to put the disinterested pursuit of truth in its place. Within a very short time, however, we find the university dominated by theology of another kind -- a godless theology to be sure, but no less insistent on unquestioning submission to doctrine, and no less strident in its pursuit of heretics,... The project is ... to sever young people from [their] historic loyalties..." Roger Scruton, The West an the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, ISI Books, 2003 pp. 80-81.

Posted by Greg Ransom