When Professors Go Woke

An Open Letter to Timothy Burns

In a response to an email Timothy Burns sent to his students banning BAP book Bronze Age Mindset(BAM), I made this comment on Twitter, 4 February:  “And now, so called classical profs, who have never read BAP, are banning books, based on a reviewer who does not understand BAP.  This. Is. Modern. Academics.”  

This statement of fact did not sit well with Burns who, though he has no discernible Twatter account, emailed me his objections same day attaching a Quisling’s screenshot of my post.  The details of that exchange are immaterial.  Rather, the gravity of Burns’s letter to students and faculty, should concern any thoughtful person who understands the present political landscape and politics generally.

We are living in a dangerous time; free expression of political opinion is under assault.  The writings of the American Founders, replete with caution about stifling political speech, are ignored.  A deliberative public government cannot function without a freely expressed political opinion.  

Those who engage in this practice of repressing political opinion reveal themselves as despotic.  And there are so many of them, it raises the question:  do we live in a despotism?  While the rights of speech have never been unlimited—Jefferson’s letter to Madison on 28 August 1789—understood political speech was not meant to protect “false facts” propagated by those who “affect injuriously the life, property, or reputation of others.”  Today, having the wrong political opinion leads to libel and/or slander, those injurious false facts Jefferson warned about.  Yet, the mob cheers.  

This cancelation culture (which is radically different from the more ancient practice of boycott) is, necessarily, part of a growing practice of political violence:  the only way to stop speech is fear.  Woke/SJW’s threaten those who disagree with them, journalists dox and report private conversations to smear those they disagree, which leads to deplatforming and the chilling effect on political speech, people who support particular candidates are physically beaten, and in a few instances, murdered.  People live in fear of their livelihoods being taken from them, no less than their actual lives for believing the “wrong” things, or voting for the “wrong” candidate.  Now we can add to the list that no one is safe if they are reading the “wrong” books.  Someone check the Stasi archives; they want their book-banning manual returned.

Our nation’s capital bespeaks of the medium as the message.  It is a military occupied zone.  Our representatives signal they are most afraid of the people, from where their legitimate authority derives.  No more apparently.  The present political situation in the country, our country, necessitates a response against the illiberal reactionaries who would use their position, and their political power, to single out those they disagree.  The email you sent has more in common with the wokeness of the leftist age than the preservation of human liberty ensconced in the “laws of Nature and Nature’s God.”

That email was widely shared on the internet and generated much interest.  Therefore, I quote from it in full:

Dear Students, 

I want to call your attention, and ask that you read with care, the Substack article below, which I forward with Dr. Thompson’s permission.  I wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Thompson:  BAP’s teaching is morally repugnant, crude, misogynistic, anti-rational, racist, neo-pagan, anti-Semitic, and diabolical.  It is fetid purulence of a sick puerile mind.  It has absolutely and categorically no place in our graduate program.  I counsel you in the strongest possible terms to steer well clear of it.

Yours, 

Timothy W. Burns

Professor of Political Science

Graduate Program Director, Political Science

Baylor University

The attached article that you found immense agreement was the first of a series of libels against BAP entitled, “Bronze Age Pervert and the Fascist New Frontier.”  

I will not focus on Thompson’s (CBT) ad hominems regarding BAP.  These were thoroughly refuted in my two prior objections:  “Natural Right and the Online Right,” and “Setting the Record Straight.”  It is most unfortunate that you do not state for yourself what you find objectionable in BAM, and instead allow Thompson to be your spokesman.  What matters here, the crux of the issue, is the banning of a book from a program of political science at an institution of higher learning.  

You state in no uncertain terms that BAM “has absolutely and categorically no place in our graduate program” [emphasis added].  While your email was directed to students, your language also applies to professors under your authority because, as you state, you believe it has “no place” in the program you direct, a mandate you doubtless have the de facto if not de jure authority to enforce.  You are the director.  Your email bespeaks of “directing.”  Otherwise, why say it?

The problem presented by your directive is twofold:  it is a regrettable instruction to both students and professors.  Woe be to those professors who are reliant upon you for their evaluation, tenure, and promotion.  But, the same goes for your students, who, should they be caught reading BAM either inside or outside your program, may be evaluated negatively.  

I should not have to remind you, that you, as director of a program and speaking in the official capacity of said program, instructed a book had “no place” in your program.  None.  Not even as a subject of examination or criticism.  That is banning. It is Philistine.  You are no Vandal, at least not trained to be, yet, not only are you, as the official director of a program prohibiting professors to not offer this book in their classes, but you are instructing students to come nowhere near the book, as if by osmosis they may become infected with a mysterious disease.  Therefore, even the claim that the email was a mere suggestion, falls flat, and is unpersuasive.  If you wanted to make a friendly suggestion, you should have, you know, made a suggestion supported by argument, not sent an official “no place” email.  

There is a more serious implication rising from your official email that calls into question your dedication to Leo Strauss’ teachings, but also your commitment to political philosophy in general. How can you condemn something without examining it?  How can you question the opinion of the city if you will not question the works of its dissenters?  

Some foundation needs laid.  Your attack on liberal education will be where I shall turn, and represents the heart of my argument.  Your email and agreement with your woke spokesman represents a most grievous transgression for someone who purports to be a student of φιλοσοφια—a lover of wisdom.

Strauss spoke against a similar phenomenon that you encourage as official policy.  It is most instructive for us, at this particular juncture in our national politics, to review his arguments.  In his 1941 “German Nihilism”¹ Strauss lectures about what the young Germans believed in the period leading up to the Great War.  Those young (men mostly) objected to modernity insofar as it dictated a perverted view of civilization; theirs was an objection against the prevailing sentiments of the day:  ”the conviction underlying the protest against [modernity] has basically nothing to do with…nationalism.  [It is] rather a love of morality, a sense of responsibility for endangered morality.” While it is true that these youthful Germans popularized their arguments in the “most provincial, most unenlightened” way in the country, their “vulgarity” of argument, he notes, were part of the reason their appeals became a persuasive “success.”  We must not fail to note here that, though their presentation may not have been erudite, public arguments were made by them with little response.²

To turn to the question of nihilism, in this sense, Strauss claims that the NSDAP youth were decidedly not nihilists.³  They were in fact engaged in “moral protest” against what they considered the weakness of the modern west, or, though Strauss did not exactly put it this way, but he captured the sentiment, they opposed globalism (“internationalism”).  

Strauss does not reject these concerns.  He takes them seriously.  In this sense, Strauss, following Henri Bergson, speaks of their reasonable objection to the open society (note, this is not drawn from Karl Popper) which the globalists are in constant effort to bring into existence—the embrace of “all humanity.”⁴  This desire to draw into their bosom the entire human race was alarming because the open society is based on a great “hypocrisy,” and brings with it an “immoral” or “amoral” political hegemony.  This is why Strauss understood that their concern is motivated by "a love of morality, a sense of responsibility for endangered morality.”

We must pause here to note, as Strauss does, that this concern is not specifically about national socialism.  In fact, he notes theirs was a passionate response that effects particular human beings in particular times.  The reaction against this “endangered morality” is similar to that we find in Plato’s Γλαυκων, Rousseau, and Nietsche.  Therefore, this passion is not in itself nihilistic, just as Glaucon was not nihilistic.  The human reaction to these developments is understandable, if not natural.  Let it be stated unequivocally that Strauss himself took the passionate and spirited objections of the young Germans as “perhaps not even entirely unsound.” 

The specific form of this passion represents the concern over a prevailing leftism, which includes, but is not limited to, the imposition of a submissive society at the hands of the State.  Of course, this does not mean it might not lead to nihilism (and for Strauss, he notes that in this particular instance it “led…to nihilism”), but only because of certain “circumstances” that developed in “post-war Germany.” Nevertheless, Strauss appreciated that before the war ended, certain Germans were opposed to the prevailing opinions of the day because of the “otherwise necessary coming of the communist final order,” which was a future based on servility.  That socialism of the communist kind (to say nothing of their siblings, the NSDAP who opposed them on this particular point) wanted to usher in a “debasement of humanity” that was subservient to, “last men.”  Strauss continues speaking, the “pacified planet…was positively horrifying to quite a few very intelligent and very decent, if very young, Germans.”  They saw a most bot-like life where no greatness existed.  In this sense, and in this sense only, the inarticulate passions of those who opposed the globalists were only capable of saying “NO.”  

None other than Churchill noted the similarities between the these socialist political family members by comparing them to ugly children.⁵  Strauss said, however, that there was “choice” to be made in Germany, and could have yet been made.  The implication is that there was a better choice to be made between the “progress” (historicism!) of internationalism, and the German opposition to it—they were nevertheless historicists too!  This means they were trapped inside an ideology they knew not how to work themselves out of—all they knew was the “historical” argument.

To many of these young Germans, they had nothing to lose.  The economic situation, and opportunities, had dried up.  Those “very intelligent…and decent” people who could leave, like Strauss, did so, but that did not mean they did not share a concern about the progress of Socialism in all its guises.  Today, we see the same characteristics in the rise of the Davoisie, and their Great Reset.  But, as it pertains to Strauss’ lecture of that time, a choice could have been offered to them if they had the right kind of teachers/professors who understood them, and the gravity of the political situation before them.  For reasons I will describe below, they were incapable.  Strauss explains, to put it another way and in a modern context, “it is not unnatural that the intelligent section of a young generation should be dissatisfied with what they are told to believe” by Boomers.  

In these crucial years, salutary teachers were in great need, and failed to meet the requirements of the times.  They knew less how to meet it, any more than the younger generation knew how to oppose historicism with the natural right alternative.  We are told that the practice, and belief in, an older form of instruction declined in that time.  We are facing a similar situation here in our time.  Jacob Klein, was no less aware that the same thing could happen here in the “ever-present danger of sedimentation, fossilization, or petrification of our knowledge.”⁶  But, it was our elites wielding the power of State institutions like those of “higher” ed, that he feared most because it would cut off “searching and questioning, the basis of all liberal learning."

The natural inclination of the younger generation who have understandably and rightly convicted your generation is not without merit. Even Strauss understood this, yet he was manly in his response to note that this “youthful character” should be met by a worthy academic.  All of this to say, that the youthful θυμος you appear threatened by needs met by a particular kind of teacher who understands them:  “I am convinced that about the most dangerous thing for these young men was precisely what is called progressive education:  they rather needed old-fashioned teachers, such old fashioned teachers of course as would be undogmatic enough to understand the aspirations of their pupils.”  

The reality is these BAPsters need not the dogma of a cultish and priestly class, one which is itself subservient to the ideological monolith in modern academe.  Your email represents a dogmatic and irrational response to a genuine objection against the progressive globalism of our times.  What Strauss said about the young Germans is no less true in our day as it pertains to generations X through Z.  They “[are] in need of teachers who could explain to them in articulate language the positive, and not merely destructive, meaning of their aspirations.”  

Professors in the time of Babylon Berlin who had the same opportunity we have at present failed because, a “quick glance at their opponents who were at the same time opponents of the young nihilists…committed frequently a grave mistake.  They believed to have refuted the No by refuting the Yes, i.e. the inconsistent, if not silly, positive assertions of the young men.  But one cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood.”  You and your spokesman make the same grave mistake to "not even try to understand the ardent passion underlying the negation of the present world and its personalities.” 

My intent is not to hold account how you misunderstand BAP—though it is clear you do—my point is that, even if you think BAP/BAM is incorrect, you are engaged in the same failures as the German professoriate.  He castigates the modern German professors for not making an argument, when “the only answer which could have impressed the young nihilists, had to be given in non-technical language…which would have impressed [if] they had [only] heard it” [emphasis added].  

What shall we say to our esteemed professor, Strauss, who made it clear that “even if it were true that man does not need political philosophy absolutely speaking, he does need political philosophy as soon as reasonable political action is endangered by an erroneous political teaching.”⁷  What can be more clear is that young students need to hear an apologetics of reason from the home of reason, as Allan Bloom wrote, and especially at a time when the “curiosity, longing, and primarily previous experience” of the students has changed.⁸  

By sitting in judgement of them, refusing to engage them, by condemning them, you are refusing to persuade them.  You cannot provide students with “moral virtue” if you decline to speak with them and then banish what influences them.⁹  You have planted your flag upon the ground that Bloom found so abhorrent and are partaking in the Closing of the American Mind.  Imagine, if, Socrates would have refused to address arguments that needed probing.  His interlocutors would have suffered in their soul.  

Harry V. Jaffa once demonstrated his commitment to questioning any who might be willing to listen.  It was memorialized in this exchange:  “I once asked a teen-aged student who was among the leaders of the Black Students Union who he was so sure of himself.  He replied, ‘because of my sincerity.’  I then asked him if he thought that Hitler had been any less sincere.  He merely stared blankly at me.”¹⁰  As I can personally attest, no student of Strauss ever turned away a student because they disagreed.  In fact, they relished the opportunity to engage students who disagreed with them.  Such is the philosopher’s task; such Strauss implored us to do.  Jaffa goes on to account the the opposite of the philosopher’s task by making an argument counter to the illiberal Herbert Marcuse.  Marcuse, the darling of the Boomer mindset, brought to higher education “Repressive Tolerance,” meaning, a justification for intolerance.  Much like the language you use, Marcuse believed we should not be tolerant toward the “radically evil.”  He criticized what has now become the norm in modern “higher” ed, that is, the “free and equal discussion” of the ideas.  He, and the left, have succeeded in rooting that out, thus making the university a place of not of learning, but propaganda, and conformity.  You now find yourself closer to Marcuse than Strauss.

It is inconceivable for Strauss, who spent his life criticizing the moral bankruptcy of higher ed, that any professor would cede the field to their alleged opponents and/or to students who, in Strauss’ mind, were the ones who needed to hear the arguments of philosophy the most.  Ask any of Strauss’ students—Gildin, Butterworth, Lowenthal, among many others—and they recount how Strauss would personally accept, and then probe, their opinions.  He would not have had the impression upon them if he had not engaged them in a clear simple language of rational dialogue.  If he had rejected them, they would not have the blessings of their life they have today.   

You are only solidifying the belief in those potential students that you have nothing to say to them, and that their path is right by erroneously accusing them of moral failings that you could only know if you could see inside their heart.  I should not have to remind you, that this is a sin (1 Samuel 16:7, Hebrews 4:12, Acts 15:8, 1 Cor 4:5, et. al.). 

If you had some sense of what BAP is doing, you would not have adopted your spokesman’s comic book assessment as your own.  You have not understood BAP as he understands himself, which is, as Strauss wrote, the paramount job of professors.  Our “highest duty,” he goes on, is to “truthfulness and justice.”  These know "no limits.”  But even Strauss knew that-to carry on with your characterization of BAP—the “merely uncivilized” are not "diabolical.”  Perhaps if you practiced the command, “let us reason together” instead of promoting an academic burning at the stake, there would be a fruitful and illuminating dialogue—for you as much as them.

There is another point I wish to make:  your agreement with your spokesman in the email you attached, proceeds to chastise BAP for employing the works of other heretics:  Nietzsche in particular.  But CBT has also claimed that Strauss himself was a Nazi, and unqualifiedly so.  The question must be raised that if BAP is to be written out of your program because of his seemingly puerile prose, then why not Nietzsche, or Marx, who also wrote some rather objectionable things?  Why not Rousseau, who opined it might be worthy to breed Orangutans with humans to decipher the result?  Why not Heidegger, who, Strauss took seriously and lectured about often, and wanted to meet (but did not want to shake his hand) and who never recanted his Nazism?  Therefore, why not Strauss himself whom your spokesman believes is a literal Nazi?

I may not agree with much in BAM, but I will not take him out of context and libel him to score political points with the left.  When you ban books, you have done a larger disservice to philosophy.  If you think BAP (or your students!) are wrong then you should defend philosophy by correcting their opinions through questioning.  That is what someone who believes in architectonic authority of philosophy would do.  Instead, by banning this book, you have contributed to the exclusion of philosophy and repeated the mistake made by many in the past—helping to drive the possibility of philosophy underground. 

Strauss understood that liberal education was meant to be dedicated to the great books, but that interest had waned in modernity both inside and outside the academy.  The greatest minds in the greatest books provided for a certain type of education that would be the “counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture…”  But, Strauss also wrote that “liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness.”  He argued we should spend our leisure with the greatest minds and engaging them in dialogue/conversation about “things beautiful.”¹¹

Strauss understood more than I think even his students realize when he wrote, “the crisis of the West consists in the West’s having become uncertain of its purpose.  The West was once certain of its purpose—of a purpose in which all men could be united, and hence it had a clear vision of its future as the future of mankind.  We do no longer have that certainty and clarity.”¹²  Modern academics has not been that “counterpoison,” nor has it revived in students a “clear vision.”  Instead, with few exceptions, it has joined the culture, and muddied the purpose.  

The reason BAM has been so popular and influential is because it comes from outside the academy.  There is nothing interesting coming from the professorial class.  Unlike most works from academe that no one reads, BAM will be read, for good or ill with more interest and with more longevity.  The reason for this is clear for anyone paying attention to the political developments over the last 40 years.  His is the most articulate vision against our woke reality and the onset of political despotism.  In this way, by your thoughtless brimstone against BAPsters, you stand with the culture and against the philosopher.

The age of digital has been extended into every aspect of life and the effects of our present reality, dividing those who want to extend the globalist scheme against those who do not.  I believe Strauss understood this in his undeveloped comment that the West had failed to be “dedicated to a universal purpose, to a purpose in which all men can be united:  a society can be tribal and yet healthy” [emphasis added].  Marshall McLuhan, who spoke most about this phenomenon during Strauss’ lifetime, understood that the effect of electric would force a people to divide because of the “bewildered” (Strauss’ term) society that lacks meaning and purpose.  We are becoming more tribal as a means of protection and life, but not all tribalism is unhealthy.  Enter BAP.

Few, if any, modern professors are speaking to the deepest human needs of the younger generation.  By rejecting the BAP phenomenon, you are ceding the field to your opponent.  But, you might contend, BAM is no great book and therefore unworthy of serious consideration.  Perhaps, but he has more readers than Interpretation.  Those who have rejected him in the most simplistic way have done so “because most readers are not careful readers, and the deliberate contradictions that careful readers notice and defuse remain ticking time bombs among the majority of careless readers.”  The book “points beyond itself” and can teach a new generation to read, and want to read more.  In BAM, BAP discusses the great works.  Many such examples:  Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Heraclitus, Hegel, Schmitt, Homer, Aristophanes, Empedocles, and, The Bible.¹³  

Will BAM be salutary for a new generation?  It is an open question.  Mine is not an explication of BAM, nor an apology, it is deliberate engagement.  Philosophy demands nothing less.

1. Copy of original manuscript in possession of the author.  Edited version located in Interpretation, vol. 26, no. 3 (Spring 1999) :  353-378.

2.  What makes this most astonishing is that in the original manuscript, crossed out, Strauss states that this lowest form of argument was but one form of “German Nihilism,” and he predicted the higher form would live on.  That the professoriate could not even address the lower form was most disappointing.

3. It is a great question whether anyone can truly be a nihilist.  The use of the word, in this sense, can be meant ironically:  See my essay in honor of Professor Harry Neumann, “Quid Sit Deus.”

4. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (London :  MacMillan & Co., 1935), 230.

5. Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston :  Houghton Mifflin, Company, 1948), 15.  It should be added that practical wisdom by Churchill was demonstrated by his assessment of their actions, not just the words, of Germany.  

6. Jacob Klein, “The Idea of Liberal Education,” 167.

7. Strauss, “What can we Learn from Political Theory?” The Review of Politics, vol. 69, no. 4 (Fall 2007) :  520.

8. Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 21-22.

9. Ibid., 26.

10. Harry V. Jaffa, “The Reichstag is Still Burning.”

11. An Introduction to Political Philosophy, 311, 314, 316, 319.

12. CAM, 3.

13. There is no grander and excellent review of BAM than Michael Millerman’s “A Book on Fire.”  It makes your spokesman’s series, mere child’s play.