In fact, you have heard it way too often. Commentator Joel Kotkin writes,
This shift has been building for decades and follows the increasingly uniform capture of key institutions – universities, the mass media and the bureaucracy – by people holding a set of “acceptable” viewpoints. Ironically, the shift toward a uniform worldview started in the 1960s, in part as a reaction to the excesses of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the oppressive conformity of the 1950s.
But what started as liberation and openness has now engendered an ever-more powerful clerisy – an educated class – that seeks to impose particular viewpoints while marginalizing and, in the most-extreme cases, criminalizing, divergent views.
Today’s clerisy in some ways resembles the clerical First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, which, in the words of the historian Georges Lefebvre, “possessed a control over thought in the interests of the Church and king.” With today’s clerisy, notes essayist Joseph Bottum, “social and political ideas [are] elevated to the status of strange divinities … born of the ancient religious hunger to perceive more in the world than just the give and take of ordinary human beings, but adapted to an age that piously congratulates itself on its escape from many of the strictures of ancient religion.”
You know, it could be simpler than Kotkin or Bottum are making out.
Materialism (and a bunch of other isms) simply haven’t performed as promised. Usually, the people they’re trying to shut up are saying so.
And remember, there seems to be a trend now to say that it is okay to lie in science, when defending one of these “the debate’s over” causes.
Of course it’s okay to lie. They have to lie. The truth is no help to them.
Hat tip: Mark Steyn
Follow UD News at Twitter!