Bottomless Irrationality

A reader forwards me an email containing a link, quipping, "Lord, Berkeley. We should nuke the place from orbit, just to be sure." On clicking, I was unsurprised to find my browser pointed to pure lunacy, but did check the date upon seeing the title, "Occupy the Syllabus". Here is but a sample:

Furthermore, the classroom environment felt so hostile to women, people of color, queer folks and other marginalized subjects that it was difficult for us to focus on the course material. Sometimes, we were so uncomfortable that we had to leave the classroom in the middle of lecture. For example, when lecturing on Marx's idea of the "natural division of labor between men and women," the professor attributed some intellectual merit to this idea because men and women are biologically distinct from each other, because women give birth while men do not. One student asked, "What about trans* [sic] people?" to which the professor retorted, "There will always be exceptions." Then, laughing, the professor teased, "We may all be transgender in the future." Although one might be tempted to dismiss these remarks as a harmless attempt at humor, mocking trans* [sic] people and calling them "exceptions" is unacceptable.

The date was not April 1, and I must agree with a comment from the forwarded email that, "There might be no bottom". This rivals a piece on "microaggression" I ran across not so long ago in its staggering foolishness. These leftists are demonstrating intellectual bankruptcy, although they strike me as too far gone to be able to realize it.

Were the left not so thoroughly entrenched, thanks to the cultural dominance of altruism and our mixed economy, I'd bet heavily on Objectivism very quickly sweeping into intellectual dominance in short order.

But we aren't just trying to persuade minds. That task is difficult enough without the additional, artificial barriers to rational discourse people like these will gleefully keep in place and expand.

-- CAV