The Solution to Campus Wokeism? Enlightenment Principles

By Charles Hilu

Thursday, July 28, 2022

 

James Lindsay, who has worked to expose the lunacy of leftist ideologies such as critical race theory, spoke to young conservatives at Young America’s Foundation’s National Conservative Student Conference on Thursday.

 

He outlined to students the connections between identity politics and Marxism, explaining that the view of one group as an inherent oppressor and the other as inherently oppressed is an intrinsically collectivist and authoritarian one.

 

While the subject of his talk was interesting, there was a point in the question-and-answer portion of his lecture that was especially important. It gave students an idea of how they can fight back against indoctrination without necessarily calling it out publicly and risking cancellation.

 

A student told Lindsay about his experience in his math class, recounting that he felt the lectures he was supposed to attend were useless, given that the professor was just repeating the material in the textbook without challenging students to think critically about it. He said this phenomenon was also likely happening in the liberal arts and asked Lindsay how students can learn about the world despite their dogmatically leftist professors.

 

“You actually pointed at [the solution], which is that you have to do the study yourself. You have to be autodidactic,” Lindsay answered.

 

“You are going to have to step outside of the frame of your professors,” he added, “and you’re going to have to start coming together as students who are interested to learn, interested to find the truth.” He advised conference attendees to simply read the texts for themselves, maybe forming little book clubs where they discuss their ideas freely outside of the classroom.

 

This advice may seem like common sense now, but it was once a revolutionary idea, especially during the advent of the classical liberalism of the Enlightenment. One of the first people to articulate it as political theory was Immanuel Kant. In his 1784 essay, “What is Enlightenment,” he defined the concept as “man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity.”

 

That immaturity, he said, comes about when people allow others to think for them, abdicating their responsibilities to gain knowledge. If a man wants to become enlightened, Kant argued, he must “dare to know,” not accepting the dogma of a church or a state without question.

 

Now, some in our contemporary culture need a reminder of Kant’s ideas. There are people in our world who have taken up the mantle almost as a magisterial authority in their advocacy for social justice.

 

Ibram X. Kendi has said that “the very heartbeat of racism is denial,” arguing that people who push back on allegations of racism against them are illustrating their own bigotry. In this view of the world, people must accept critical race theory unquestioningly, which flies in the face of the ideas Kant expressed.

 

In Kant’s time, achieving personal enlightenment was much more difficult to do. Though the printing press was centuries old by the time he wrote his essay, books were still expensive, and people had far less leisure time and disposable income. Now, we have access to the mass production of books both old and new, as well as libraries at our universities that are filled with them.

 

Additionally, governments in Kant’s era were wont to ban books that challenged their authority. Though we have seen publishing companies and retailers engage in soft bans, these controversial books are still ultimately available, at least, far more than books that were prohibited in the 18th century.

 

Conservative college students have the resources at their fingertips to achieve Kantian enlightenment, and Lindsay’s advice allows them to do so without necessarily facing too much pushback. Having the fortitude to speak unpopular truths is courageous, but not all people are willing or equipped to do that.

 

But the least everyone can do is read materials themselves and come up with their own opinions. Brave people in Kant’s time did it amidst harder barriers than there are today. What excuse do we have?