Fighting the Wrong Battle: How the Academic Left Chose the Wrong War

For about three hundred years, being on the intellectual left meant something fairly specific. It meant reason against authority, evidence against revelation, and a willingness to take apart whatever was held sacred. The philosophes went after the divine right of kings and the power of the clergy. The secular humanists and the radical scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries went after superstition wherever they found it. Progress was measured by how much delusion had been cleared away and how much room that left for people to live freely.

That is not what the academic left looks like today. It has not run out of energy or money. It has picked the wrong enemy. The analytic machinery that used to be pointed at religious dogma, still the most resilient and most demonstrably false set of ideas shaping human lives, has been turned inward, onto the university itself and onto a story of ubiquitous oppression that it mostly constructed. The place that was supposed to be the stronghold of secular reason has become an echo chamber of moral grievance.

The Pass That Religion Received

The first mistake was giving up on criticising everything equally. The old rationalist tradition did not grant immunity to a belief because it claimed divine origin or long tradition. Revelation, superstition and moral absolutism were understood to be the main obstacles to civil liberty, to science and to personal autonomy, and they were treated accordingly.

In the contemporary academy, a combination of postmodern epistemology and cultural relativism has fenced off exactly those beliefs. Under the headings of anti-colonialism, cultural sensitivity and the defence of identity, religious doctrines, many of which endorse the subordination of women, fatalism, hostility to gay people and contempt for other sects, are treated not as factual claims that can be wrong but as identity markers that must be respected. I have written before about how much more readily academics blame anything other than religion, and about how cultural relativism shields religion far more than it shields politics. This post is about what that reluctance costs.

What it costs is a betrayal. An intellectual who will not criticise a reactionary doctrine for fear of giving offence has quietly abandoned the people living under it: the freethinkers, the apostates, the women and the dissidents in theocratic states and theocratic communities. Medieval metaphysics gets a free pass, and in exchange the academic gets to look cosmopolitan and tolerant.

From Truth to Moral Standing

Underneath this retreat is a change in how claims are judged. The secular project assumed that truth is objective and can be found by observation, logic and the attempt to falsify. Religious claims, about the origin of species, the structure of the cosmos or the source of morality, were answered with evidence and argument.

In much of the humanities and social sciences that has been replaced by a single explanatory scheme: society is to be understood as overlapping grids of oppressors and oppressed. Within that scheme a claim is judged less by whether it matches reality and more by who is making it and where they sit on the grid. That is a category error. The identity of a speaker tells you nothing about whether the speaker is right.

Once moral standing replaces truth-seeking, the enterprise drifts into triviality. Enormous effort goes into policing vocabulary, cataloguing small offences and deconstructing hierarchies inside some of the most comfortable institutions on earth. Meanwhile the obvious, physical enemies of human progress get little more than a shrug: theocracies that execute apostates and dissidents, religious organisations that campaign to restrict reproductive freedom, sectarian violence fed by ancient myths, and the long creationist campaign against teaching biology in schools.

The Real Adversary

None of this would matter much if religious dogma were a quaint survival from a pre-scientific age. It is not. It remains one of the best-organised and most politically influential forces in the world. It shapes legal systems, dictates school curricula, slows biomedical research, restricts what people may do with their own bodies and supplies the justification for wars. I have argued that religion is best understood as an ideology, and judged as an ideology it is among the most powerful ones in operation.

When the universities trade the fight against institutional superstition for an endless internal culture war, they leave that ground to the theologians. Many people want a coherent, evidence-based alternative to dogmatic certainty. What they find in the academy instead is opaque jargon and ideological purity tests. The secular left has lost much of its ability to persuade the general public, and the space it vacated has been filled by populist movements that mobilise religious sentiment with nobody of comparable standing pushing back.

Why the Echo Chamber Stagnates

A framework that knows its conclusion in advance cannot discover anything. If every interaction and every social outcome is assumed to be an expression of power and oppression, research becomes a search for confirming instances, and it always finds them. Inquiry turns into ritual, and scholarship into confirmation bias.

The insularity also hides from the academy its own loss of cultural authority. A seminar room is not the front line of human emancipation, and inventing new terminology is not the same as changing society. Renaming things does not make a dogma go away, and enforcing etiquette on campus does nothing to the political reach of organised fundamentalism.

Back to the Real War

If the intellectual left wants its vitality and its moral standing back, it has to go back to where it came from. Human liberation was always, at bottom, a fight for the human mind against falsehood, fatalism and unearned authority.

That takes courage of a fairly old-fashioned kind: the courage to say that reason, evidence and universal human rights outrank religious sensibilities; the courage to criticise an irrational doctrine regardless of how much cultural prestige its believers carry; and the sense to see that the greatest threat facing humanity is not insufficient ideological conformity inside the university but the continuing grip of ancient superstition on human societies. The skirmishes of moral vanity can be dropped. The war that matters is the old one, reason against dogma, and it is far from won.

Where This Started

Some time ago I watched a YouTube series of a history course taught by Yuval Noah Harari. At one point a student asked him, "Where did God come into this?" Harari's answer was: "Give me evidence of how God changed things and I will consider it, but until you do, I cannot relate to your question." I remember hearing that and thinking: what cowardice! The answer should have been, "There is no God. Next question, please." That moment is what started me thinking about the cowardice of academia on this subject.