The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 57
What is the University? It’s the center of intellectual life in civilizations in the broad era we might call Modernity. And what is the purpose of the University in its essence? If we turn to the 19th century Catholic thinker John Henry Newman and his iconic The Idea of the University, we see that it is to teach all knowledge. The Universities were originally seminaries, though, and theology sat at their heart. Newman, in this iconic and valuable work, makes a convincing case that without theology, which Universities could merely assume would be present in their beginning, other sciences less suited to the task would take up theologizing and would do so poorly. Newman is right, and this is exactly what has happened in the secular Western University over the last few centuries. In that gap, the social sciences have filled in the role of theologians, and the Critical Theory perversion of the social sciences has therefore resulted in a pervasive rot throughout Western Civilization that we are realizing only just in time. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay, perhaps an unlikely host for this subject, takes on Newman’s argument and, in fact, agrees that a mature theology must sit at the center of any vital and healthy society, including whatever institution resides at the heart of its intellectual life. What that looks like not just in a post-Enlightenment world (Modernity) but also in one that is entering its Second Enlightenment (Postmodernity) is a challenging question that he believes is the most immediate task for taking humanity through its present and emerging challenges. Join him for an unexpected and groundbreaking discussion of the centrality of theology to a thriving civilization.
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15 comments
I have long called this revolution against the education institutions as an attempt to seize what is thought by marxists to be the capital of the information economy.
Also the attack on uncredentialed expertise is what I like to call “credentialism”……
Which theology, whose theology should become the basis of university education?
That proposed by R D Rushdoony. the totalitarian theocratic Seven Mountain Dominionists, , Bob Jones University, Liberty University, Prager University, the various universities run by Opus Dei, Hillsdale College, First Things and the American Spectator, the “total truth” theology of Nancey Pearsey and her mentor Francis Schaeffer, or the Young Earth Creationists?
Or perhaps the non-dual “theology” which informs the work and life of Bernadette Roberts especially her last and greatest philosophically rigorous book The Real Christ the full text of which is available here:
http://freddieyam.com/down/roberts.real-christ.pdf
commenter wrote: “Which theology, whose theology should become the basis of university education?”
While all of your Christian fragments fought amongst yourselves over the scraps of what’s left of your religion that was killed off pew by pew by your own corrupt clergy and hypocritical adherents (through the very self-serving sin it warns is the great destroyer, Pride), there has emerged, with your churches’ duplicitous complicity and suicidal assistance, another theology that will soon become the basis of all human education across the entire world.
Over the past decades there’s been a clearly stated and never hidden power alliance of this other theology with the Rulers and Ideologues of Globalist “Leftism” who needed a fresh mass of totally subservient proletariat worker ants to replace the too individualistic Western rebellious decadent old worker bees. The Globalist Left found their new worker class in the masses of the other theology’s empire, which eagerly offered its billion-ant-strong horde of centuries-long programmed robotic and obedient masses as the Globalist’s grunts in exchange for world domination as the sole theology on Earth. The deal was done and the future sealed.
This alliance now makes your query moot and indeed blasphemous to the new theology. Which is ironic since your own “churches” sold their souls for Caesar Soros Silver to postpone their end so their greedy vain clergy and smug scold congregants could bask in their ill-gotten gain to puff up their new woke communist Christian “morals” that sold out their own peoples and opened the gates of their own societies to the Globalist’s replacements. The road of your theology’s Hellish self-demise has been paved with its own whited sepulchre mal-intentions. Burn, witch, burn.
The name of the new dominant replacement world theology cannot be written for it’s been made illegal (in my country and now in the U.S.A.) to criticize it online. Here’s a clue: This unnameable theology has been the greatest imperialist colonizer of the past fifteen centuries and also began the African slave trade centuries before Europeans, who were themselves enslaved by the millions, indeed the word slave comes from Slav, one of the theology’s most enslaved European peoples. The name of this theology is a word that means Submission.
Prepare to submit, infidel. You prepared ye their way. Now you will reap their whirlwind. And so will the rest of us, the atheists, agnostics and freethinkers, the leave-us-alones and the Nones. Thanks a lot.
Brilliant podcast. I think it will become historic.
Post-modern radical doubt is a genie that won’t go back in the bottle. This doubt has been sublimated into iron certainty by the Critical Theory practising humanities, which seems like a paradox, but I do remember something in Psychology where an open-mindedness trait is conceived of as more like a circle than an axis; at some point, one becomes so open-minded that one’s mind totally closes. Consequently, I’m rather suspicious of James’ plea for cultural renewal through the teaching of Theology as if ‘back to basics’ can put this genie back where it belongs. Moreover, I worry that Theology is the kind of ‘dusty tome’ that is irrelevant in the modern world given that we live under a Godless sky today.
Being able to maturely live with doubt through humility is a good antidote to the absolutes of fanaticism. To mature young people in this way is probably more a case of showing than telling.
It is interesting how in “Groomer Schools”, you relied on psychology a lot for normative claims, but now you are dismissing it.
What sounds like a math class actually explores epistemology:
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-876j-advanced-topics-in-cryptography-spring-2003/
I can communicate with my cats using language. (If they have read Derrida, they don’t say.) I make a proposition, then offer them a choice. They make a counter-proposition, then I compute a response to their counter-proposition that *they* consider valid. In this manner, we gain mutual rapport and understanding. My cats are not cynics, however: the development of mutual rapport and understanding engages them to seek more of it. Were they cynics, they would not live with me.
I wonder what form theology would take in modern universities. Obviously for denominational universities it would take the form of theology of that particular tradition, but what of non-denominational universities? Perhaps introductory courses in philosophy that survey a range of philosophical perspectives on these topics, or religious studies which survey the theologies of a wide range of religious traditions.
Your comment about how hard psychology and sociology are really resonate with me. I study subatomic physics, and lots of people say “oh, that’s so hard”, but actually it’s easy. It is far easier to study collections of max a few hundred particles than something as complicated as the human mind.
After studying science I studied in the humanities and was similarly impressed with the project for some time, then I became disillusioned because so much is just activists doing activism in the costume of respectable academia and its honorifics. It’s very parasitic in that sense. So much of sociology is just ill-disciplined journalism; they even have something called an auto-ethnography where students are awarded PhDs for telling stories.
I just said it was a hard problem. Didn’t say the problem was being tackled well – now that is a completely different matter.
I find it amusing that Lindsay goes to such great lengths to pretend that even though he is talking about theology, it has nothing to do with God (“‘Theism” I don’t like that word.” I guess not. Most of your friends and audience believe theists are at best superstitious morons, at worst theocratic fascists.). It would appear Aquinas was wrong that the Being he argues to in the Five Ways all men call God. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter if you call it Murgatroyd, it’s God and specifically the God of Abrahamic monotheism. I wish Lindsay would realize there’s no shame in reason leading one to recognize the power of Aquinas’s arguments.
Here’s another book you may appreciate.
https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/in-review-the-breakdown-of-higher-education
So your idea to subvert the newer nonsense leading us into the next Dark Ages is to return to the nonsense that brought about the first Dark Ages, not because it’s better but because it’s older?
It’s like people are addicted to nonsense. When one kind of nonsense starts to clear out then people just latch on to whatever nonsense happens to be waiting in the wings. It’s not usually fun meaningless nonsense either, it’s always some awful, punitive, rigid, petty, joyless nonsense and they’re never content to just stay at home and whip themselves bloody, they always have to take it out into the world and make it everyone’s problem. People must have really short memories and/or huge intellectual blindspots.
This whole podcast actually felt a little woo woo. Please don’t tell me you found Jesus or something.
You need to take the advice of your own nom de blog and chill. You might also want to read a little history.
The Roman Empire was Christian when it fell. The term “Dark Ages” refers to the roughly half millennium from the deposing of the last Roman emperor in 476 AD to about 1000 AD. The term describes the political and social chaos caused by the collapse of Rome and the loss of ancient learning caused by looting and burning of libraries and slaughter of many of the keepers of that learning (by pagan barbarian tribes, not Christians). In fact, it was the Church that preserved what little was left of Greek and Roman learning until the High Middle Ages, starting about 1000 AD.
It is also a fact that what we know as science has its origins in what was then called “natural philosophy” in the medieval university, a Church institution. No Church, no science. You are blindly accepting the long-debunked Draper-White Conflict Thesis. For decades now even most atheist historians and philosophers have recognized it is pure balderdash.
It’s also pretty rich to call “Dark Ages” the era that saw Dante’s Divine Comedy, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Bocaccio’s Decameron, Gothic cathedrals, the philosophy of Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas, and scientific advances in agriculture, optics, time measurement, and warfare. You need to put down your Dawkins and Hitchens and read some actual history by people who actually have some idea what they’re talking about.
reply to commenter who wrote: “You need to take the advice…”
I don’t understand your comment. The other commenter never mentioned Dante, Chaucer, Bocaccio, Augustine, Boethius or Aquinas. Where in their comment are these people mentioned? As well, other than Boethius, none of these people lived or worked during the Dark Ages, which you state correctly was 476 AD to about 1000 AD. Augustine predated this period and the rest came much later from the early middle ages to the early Renaissance. These names do not appear anywhere in the comment and they are not of the period you are claiming they’re from.
Also the commenter never mentioned the other two modern names you quote anywhere in their comment either; and both these names are of dead or irrelevant has-been pop culture celebrities. What do they have to do with the Dark Ages?
Perhaps if you wanted to apply your “religious” indignation and fury at a target more useful than online “atheists”, you should check out Egyptian-American Coptic Christian scholar and historian Raymond Ibrahim’s many web sites and books and channel your puffed up rage into helping him expose and fight the ongoing current genocide of Christians in the third world that Ibrahim has documented so well for decades.
But then if you did and facebook found you out, your “church” would not get its share of the Open Borders Soros cash to do your new “woke christianity”, would it? Easier to justify screaming at “atheists” using Exodus 22:18 as your banner of self-righteousness. You need to take the advice of your own book and “physician heal thyself”.
To paraphrase Gandhi, “I like your Christ; but your Christians not so much.” You always have been and always will be your own worst enemy. It’s spelled p-r-i-d-e.