If You Know You’re Right, Step on the Gas! The Rise of Fundamentalism in Academia and Hollywood
If You Know You’re Right, Step on the Gas! The Rise of Fundamentalism in Academia and Hollywood
“It’s the inability to take seriously the idea that you might be wrong”
I took this word fundamentalism, which is usually applied in specifically religious contexts and said, “You know, there's something broader going on here and it's not specifically religious.”
It's a temperament. It's an intellectual style. It's the inability to take seriously the idea that you might be wrong. Someone with a fundamentalist mindset might give lip service to “maybe I'm wrong,” but they act as if there can be no doubt that they're right. Moreover, no matter how often they've been wrong in the past, this time they always know they're right.
Well, it's not actually a bad thing for people to strongly believe what they believe. That's what drives science forward; pitting ideas, including prejudices, strong ideas against each other. That's not bad. What is bad is if the fundamentalist mindset gets in control of the law or the levers of society. Then it says, “We have the right idea. You have the wrong idea so you need to shut up, and we will shut you up.”
Jonathan Rauch on his book Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought
I couldn’t believe what they had done to my professor, to my mentor.
He was everything an academic should be—brilliant, well published, and devoted to his students.
He hosted salons at his apartment and organized campus events where he lured out-of-town scholars to interact with us. What college student wouldn’t want to spend his Friday evening listening to economic historian Robert Higgs explain the rise of the warfare-welfare state!
My professor made his politics clear.
He was a classical liberal in the tradition of Friedrich Hayek, but we shouldn’t dare suck up to him. If our papers regurgitated his views, he would grade us down. He encouraged us to do the opposite, to tell him why he was wrong.
His example played a big part in me thinking that I might pursue a career in academia.
But then he was denied tenure.
After hearing the news, I was furious. I decided I never wanted a small group of small-minded people to hold so much power over me.
I’d take my chances in the real world.
Many assume that colleges have always been strongholds of the left, but that’s not quite right. Consider the middle of the 20th Century.
In The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt point out that back then studies showed that professors leaned left, but not by a big margin. Even into the mid 90s—when I attended college—the left-right ratio stood at about two to one. Then things started to change, and by 2011, the ratio rose to 5 to 1.
In fields that address social justice concerns, the change was even more dramatic. In academic psychology, for instance, the ratio shot up from about two to one or four to one in the 90s, to 17 to one by 2016.
Other surveys show even more lopsided disparities.
And the shift isn’t just about political affiliations.
Alan Charles Kors once told me an anecdote about his undergraduate years at Princeton in the early 60s. As a sophomore, he took a 20th Century European history course from a Marxist professor.
The professor emeritus of history at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of FIRE recalled what happened when his professor returned the class’s midterm exams so many years ago:
He stood before the class and he said, “You have shamed me. You’ve all written what you thought I wanted to hear. So I’m changing the final exam. I’m going to make one quarter of it on the work I most disagree with in the 20th century. And I’m not going to ask you to critique that work. I’m going to ask you to recreate its arguments with intellectual empathy, so that I can be certain that you know views that are antithetical to my own.”
The book was Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. It changed my own intellectual and moral life. I cannot imagine my colleagues doing the same thing in American academic life today.
Although Kors’ Marxist professor and my professor held different opinions of Hayek, they shared something important—the belief that the search for truth should trump politics. Today’s lopsided left-right ratios would be less worrisome if academics had the same priorities, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Kors said he could not imagine his colleagues exhibiting the same devotion to scholarship, but he made that comment a decade ago, before academia’s latest spasm of conformity.
Check out some of the unsettling findings from a 2021 survey of 468 psychology professors from 100 top American universities:
When asked whether scientists should prioritize truth or social equity goals when the two conflict, among men, the majority (66.4 percent) prioritized truth, 32.4 percent said “it’s complicated,” and 1.3 percent prioritized social equity. Among women, the majority (52.1 percent) said “it’s complicated,” 43.0 percent prioritized truth, and 4.8 percent prioritized social equity.
A professor’s purpose is to pursue truth, yet 57% of female professors fail to affirm that purpose as their highest priority. A doctor’s purpose is to heal patients, but how would you feel if you were seriously ill and ambulance brought you to a hospital where 57% of the doctors failed to affirm that purpose as their highest priority?
Imagine they told you that “it’s complicated” or that they regard some other goal as more important than saving your life.
Those priorities help explain why, as Lukianoff points out, cancel culture is happening on a historic scale. And as The Free Press recently documented, many dissidents who haven’t been fired are leaving.
The university’s future looks even more intolerant because younger academics, male and female alike, tend to be more strident than those they’re replacing.
Would Kors’ Marxist professor get tenure in the Princeton of tomorrow?
After starting in network news and then doing some time as a think tanker, I segued into the film industry where I have spent most of my career. If you’re snickering at me, I can’t blame you.
My youthful rejection of narrow-minded academia hasn’t exactly led me to an open-minded wonderland. And if you overlook the differences in parties and awards shows, academia and Hollywood start to look pretty similar.
Both are high-status, culture-making institutions where many people angle for relatively few positions. Both foster an insider-outsider environment where you’re either in or out of the club.
Both are suckers for unproven fads, which they celebrate as sacred truth. In both cases, the failure of a fad does little to shake insiders’ faith in the righteousness of the club.
Both obsess over certain types of diversity (like race and sex), while eschewing others (like intellectual). Both assume the groups they dub “marginalized” agree with them, even when they don’t. Both weed out dissenters in an ongoing pursuit of ideological purity. Both used to lean left, and have recently fallen into uniformity.
Much of that sounds like fundamentalism.
The Jonathan Rauch quotation that begins this piece comes from an interview I conducted with him for my 2016 film Can We Take a Joke?
Rauch went on to say, “The fundamentalist mindset is like the raisins in the cake in a free society. It's actually a good thing. It adds vigor to discussion. But you can't put the cake inside the raisins. That’s not a good idea.”
Yet here we are.
And fundamentalism’s hunger for purity ends up demonizing many on the left such that the real divide isn’t so much left-versus-right as the far left versus everyone else.
Think of the progressive San Francisco filmmakers who had their film cancelled by a top theater chain. Or the gay Latino director shunned by LGBT film festivals because his gay Latino protagonist befriended a white woman and temporarily harbored anti trans views.
Or think of Meg Smaker whose documentary Jihad Rehab was progressive enough to be embraced by a post-George Floyd Sundance Film Festival, but was still excommunicated months later when activists revised the line between good and evil yet again.
And fundamentalism stings even when you’re not in the crosshairs.
Fundamentalists cook up big ideas that are too good to test and then serve them to millions of college students and movie fans. They search for solutions to the world’s biggest problems while keeping one eye closed.
And why not?
If you’re headed in the right direction, there’s no need to wait for evidence or seek out the opinions of those slobs on the wrong side of history. When you know you’re right, just step on the gas!
Correction: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly claimed that UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh left UCLA for the Hoover Institution due to cancel culture pressures. I apologize for the error.
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and a soon-to-be-released feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.
Because they ARE religious zealots. Only people who've grown up in a Judeo-Christian world think that a religion requires a god (many religions didn't have gods & many people's concept of god didn't include omniscience, omnipotence, creation or eternality). For example, the Greek Gods were not eternal, they did not create the universe, they were neither omniscient nor omnipotent. Same w/ Norse Gods, who weren't even destined to prevail.
The Left is a religion. It's a system of beliefs that separates the believer from the non-believer, elevates the former over the latter, and that provides salvation (both to individuals and their societies); it has original sin, ritualistic practices. It's a religion.
If I told you that Jesus can eliminate hatred, poverty, inequality, disease and save the planet, you'd know I'm making a religious claim. If I tell you the government can eliminate hatred, poverty, inequality, disease and save the planet, you'd ask me where to vote for that....don't you see the obvious religiosity of these claims? You're simply making government or experts or both into gods. It's sheer paganism (pay your taxes, wear your mask, support LGBTQ+ etc) and the gods/experts/government will save you. (There's a profound difference between the Christian God & the pagan gods, but pagans still equal religion; the Left is pushing a pagan concept of god,but it's a religion.)
We've all become so secular that we can't recognize religion w/o the label, but let's be clear: the Left isn't like a religion, it IS a religion. These are religious nutters, so act accordingly.