I pay to Christopher F Rufo’s online service a subscription to receive updates on what Rufo is working on. He is a younger conservative, probably a genius, who is able to grasp complex, obscure trends and movements effecting our culture, and then he crafts clear, practical, workable, articulated answers to solving these swirling, bewildering, perplexing problems.
His August 10th online email to me was entitled The Arc of Reform. He is crafting a counterrevolutionary response for American conservative to promote to stall and defeat the cultural, ideological revolution, the long walk through the institutions, pushed by the radical, Postmodernist Leftists.
Rufo serves on the board of governors for the New College of Florida. They are restoring it to its classical liberal arts mission, away from DEI wokeness. They replaced the top administrators and the state is taking control of the college. Many leftist professors have left that college in protest.
They abolished gender study departments and queer theory programs as inimical to that liberal arts mission to educate the students. They rolled back the encroachment of gender ideology and queer in its academic offerings.
He is not against intellectual, spoken and written freedom of expression for any professor on any campus anywhere, but the taxpayers need not automatically finance such views, especially if they are radical, take the money of hardworking Americans, and then ungratefully work to overthrow all that we stand for, poisoning the minds of our youth, brainwashing them into being little Marxist activists and automatons.
Rufo writes that the classical liberal arts education prioritizes the pursuit of the true, the good and the beautiful over the deadening, bureaucratic trinity of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
By abolishing gender studies, that pseudoscientific, nonscholarly vessel for partisan activism, they can reintroduce students to the classically liberal education and revive the pursuit of transcendental truth that is incompatible with gender theories and queer theories. The woke culture is anti-normative and postmodern. Rufo wants universities to move away from left wing nihilism and towards higher principles.
He wants to work with governors and legislatures across the red states to take back the lost and degraded college system, but, Jordan Peterson, on a recent Dave Ramsey show, dismissed universities as lost, and we will not get them back. Should we believe Rufo or Peterson?
I think what Rufo is spearheading is sensible and worthwhile, and I support it. On the other hand, I look for permanent moral and cultural victories, so working for institutional reform within the system seems to me to be well-meant but rather inclined to be short-term victories.
I side more with Peterson. He is working to educate and inspire people as individuals outside the system, and as a maverizer promoting Mavellonialism, I tend to promote the Petersonian way: if we can teach people to think, radically think, seeking knowledge and wisdom, especially given them by the Good Spirits, then future generations, as individuator-anarchist supercitizens, can grow and increase our knowledge, wealth, liberty, goodness, technology and wisdom, without doing so as institutional occupants.
We still need institutions to function and we still need to work, have government, economic activity, military defenses, church, school and colleges, but, maverizers, inside of all institutions and outside of all institutions, are best situated to reform and counter-revolutionize institutions from within and without.
No comments:
Post a Comment