1: "FICTION CALLS THE FACTS BY THEIR NAME": The New Left's Pop Philosopher

ALMOST HALFWAY THROUGH THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, GEORGE Orwell published his classic novel, 1984. Orwell described a society that exhibited an extreme form of political correctness before such a phrase had entered common parlance. At the time of its printing, 1984's futuristic dystopia of Oceania mirrored the totalitarianism that had swept across Eastern Europe.

Orwell's biting prose, which had earlier made him a hero of the intelligentsia when he penned such vehement denunciations of British colonialism as "Shooting an Elephant" and "A Hanging," now transformed him into an object of hate among those who still believed that a City upon a Hill existed between the Carpathians and the Urals. Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984, finds himself in a society where euphemisms are the staple of language. The Ministry of Truth's main purpose is to spread lies. Forced labor camps are renamed "joycamps." The party's slogans—WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH—reflect a world where the meaning of words is topsy-turvy. There is even a name for this new language: Newspeak.

Real-life Oceanias are not hard to find. Walk onto any of a great number of college campuses today and life imitates art. University administrators and professors preach the gospel of "tolerance" but are completely intolerant of anyone who might challenge the liberal orthodoxy.

Examples abound. At Cornell University, when a mob of student activists burned hundreds of copies of the conservative campus newspaper—copies they had stolen—the dean of students attended the newspaper burning to show his support for torching free speech. Moreover, a Cornell spokesperson defended not the conservative newspaper's right to free speech but rather the liberal activists' right to theft and newspaper torching: "The students who oppose the Cornell Review have claimed their First Amendment right to be able to have symbolic burnings of the Cornell Review." Administrator John Smeaton banned displays of the American flag by Lehigh University employees after glimpsing the Stars and Stripes adorning a campus bus on 9/11. Speaking fluent Newspeak, the insensitive vice provost maintained, "The message was supposed to be that we are sensitive to everyone." At Minnesota's St. Cloud State University, the university president forced a student journalist to undergo "multicultural sensitivity training conducted by Multicultural Student Services" merely for arguing, perhaps illogically, that banning credit card companies from campus is illegal in the same way that banning blacks is illegal. The public condemnation of the student and the punishment meted out would "teach others the lesson of tolerance," said the intolerant school leader.

The ancient university mottoes veritas and lux et veritas weren't always empty slogans. But today they've yielded to intolerance advertised as tolerance, politics disguised as scholarship, indoctrination calling itself education, and other phenomena that inhibit the search for truth. In some classrooms, ignorance is indeed strength.

The person most responsible for this development is a German émigré named Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), who preached that freedom is totalitarianism, democracy is dictatorship, education is indoctrination, violence is nonviolence, and fiction is truth. Nothing better sums up the modern academic Left's Orwellian dishonesty than what Marcuse called "liberating tolerance," which he defined as "intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left." Even if today's professors, administrators, and campus activists haven't read anything Herbert Marcuse wrote—and many of them haven't—his ideas are nonetheless pervasive. His influence is so profound that the denizens of academe carry out his marching orders without ever getting them from the original source.

It is not terribly unusual to hear lies told in the service of ideology. Far more extraordinary is forming an ideology that serves to codify lying as a legitimate form of discourse. This is precisely what Herbert Marcuse did.

Marcuse was the pop philosopher of the New Left. He allegedly coined the catchphrase "Make Love, Not War," but even if he didn't, that spirit certainly dripped off the pages of several of his books. When Parisian students revolted in May of 1968, they carried signs reading "Marx/Mao/Marcuse" as they tore apart the city. In America he came to even more renown—or notoriety, depending on one's perspective—as the mentor of Angela Davis, the militant fugitive whose manhunt, capture, and trial on charges of murder and conspiracy created a media sensation. One Marcuse admirer ventured to guess that "among pure scholars he had the most direct and profound effect on historical events of any individual in the twentieth century."

Copyright © 2004 by Daniel J. Flynn