opinion:
Last week, prominent social psychologist Jonathan Haidt announced his resignation from his leading professional association, the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. why? Because the organization’s new requirements for diversity, equity, and inclusion conflict with his duty to teach the truth.
More specifically, Haidt said he believed the telos, the university’s purpose and end goal, to be true. “The telos of knives is cutting, the telos of medicine is healing, and the telos of colleges is truth,” he wrote.
In other words, Professor Haidt reminds us that education should be about facts, not feelings. He goes to school to learn, not to give lectures. College is a place to seek the truth, not defend your opinion.
As CS Lewis said in “God in the Dock”: If you put the 2nd one first, you lose both the 1st and the 2nd one.
The academy should be one thing, not a second thing. It should be about the exceptional curriculum, not the common core. We should be more concerned with ethics than with information, with character over career. We need to focus on how to develop morality, not just make money. A truly educated person should be dedicated to seeking the truth rather than simply being tolerant. A good education should be first, not second. To paraphrase Lewis, why content yourself with making mud pies in a back alley when you can spend your vacation at the beach?
The implication of Mr. Haidt’s resignation is that he understands that education should foster unity, not division. There’s a reason it’s called “University” instead of “Diversity”. Classical education, a truly liberating education, is not about the division of individual rights, but about the common cause of individual justice. Selfless than self. It’s unum, not pluribus. Truth and virtue, not justification and revenge. It’s about finding good things instead of being satisfied with what looks safe.
As Lewis said, if you reverse the order and look at the second thing, it’s neither first nor second. Only by dying to ourselves can any of us find our true identity. It is not found in personal grievances or narcissistic narcissism. We are neither Jews nor Greeks, men or women, barbarians or Scythians. We are human beings, selfless unity among those who have defined themselves as the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, and the embodiment of the very Way, Truth and Life.
By sticking to the second things such as “diversity, equity and inclusion,” teachers today allow young people to miss the first, thereby making a big difference to the next generation of leaders and, in turn, our country. doing harm. As Richard John Neuhaus warned, such ontological dyslexia, the reversal of the order of reality, results in “deep prejudice and anti-intellectualism, liberal intolerance and illiberalism.” only. It screams “microaggressions” and calls for “trigger warnings.” It runs away from an argument rather than into it. It leads to separation rather than integration. Focusing on division rather than unity is not the right thing to do and always leads to resistance, diminution and revenge.
Former Christianity Today member Mark Galli illustrates this point well. It encourages me to notice the passing and not the reality of what will follow. Considering human nature, [a fixation on] Identity … inevitably seems to degenerate into judgmentalism and division. [gender or race] The one thing Jesus longs for us most cannot be made possible. The obsession with diversity…has produced a generation of liberals and progressives who are narcissistically ignorant of circumstances outside their self-defined groups….identity liberalism has failed. Healthy period national politics is not about “differences”. It’s about commonality…”
Gary concludes: We take pride in our many differences. [i.e., diversity, equity and inclusion], we return to the most amazing of each of us. That is our glory. That’s our identity. “
And that is the truth.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper) is a Washington Times columnist, former university president, and radio host.
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