Education involves these goals at all levels, from the primary instruction offered to all normal children to the higher education traditionally provided only to the most promising young adults. The shift in the content of education from the primary to the tertiary level can be explained not only by the natural growth of the human mind as it approaches adulthood but also partly in terms of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Human beings’ most basic needs are physiological: food, warmth, sleep, and the like. When these have been satisfied, people go on to seek safety, then relations with their fellow human beings, then esteem and a sense of accomplishment. Once they have satisfied all these needs, they can concern themselves with higher yet more nebulous ambitions such as creativity, reaching one’s full potential, or self-actualization. Maslow’s hierarchy runs from needs that are urgent for all men yet concrete and well-defined, to immaterial and vague goals that are not particularly urgent for most of us most of the time. It is often represented as a pyramid, with a broad base gradually narrowing as one moves toward the upper levels. In healthy societies, the very peak of Maslow’s pyramid is so small that it is possible to name many of the men occupying it: names like Goethe, Pascal, Da Vinci, Leibniz, and Mozart.
Higher education is an elite enterprise concerned mainly with matters fairly high up Maslow’s pyramid, though the men occupied with it are not normally those at the very top. The character and quality of the higher education a nation provides for its young elites says much about it and is one of the best measures of its advancement.
We inhabitants of the West are living through a late phase of our culture, in a society gone flabby from prolonged prosperity. A leading characteristic of such phases is that Maslow’s pyramid becomes top-heavy: too many people are working on self-realization and not enough are growing turnips. Everyone forgets about the necessities of life to focus on luxuries. This results in an evolutionary mismatch. We are adapted to an environment where most people spend most of their time securing basic needs, and relatively little on creativity and trying to reach their full potential. When large numbers of people naturally suited to growing food and providing security are drafted into the world of higher education instead, strange things start to happen there, and the nature of education itself is inevitably and profoundly altered.
How does this process operate? The philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre once drew a contrast between practices and institutions: practices are forms of human activity that provide social benefits, and institutions are human organizations created to foster, protect, and perpetuate such practices. For example, medicine is a practice which combats illness, thus extending and improving human lives. But medical practice would be unable to flourish for long without being embodied in institutions: primarily hospitals, but also including research laboratories, medical schools, etc.
The point at which MacIntyre was driving is that there exist ends or goods proper to practices themselves and ends proper to the institutions established to foster the practices—and these two sets of ends are not identical. They may even conflict. For example, the end pursued by the practice of medicine is the combatting of illness. Hospitals are set up to foster this practice. Yet those in charge of hospitals eventually and almost inevitably start making decisions with a view not so much to the quality of medicine being practiced there as to what is good for the hospital itself. Marble flooring might be installed, e.g., or a public relations campaign staged to increase institutional prestige and attract external funding—but without necessarily contributing anything to the curing of patients.
Many examples could be cited of how what is good for institutions may be given priority over the needs of the practices they were established to foster, but the principle aim of institutions considered as such is usually growth. The bigger the hospital becomes, the more people it can employ and the greater the rewards available to them. Examples of absurdly unjustified institutional growth are easy to find. Here is just one: in 1914, fewer than 4400 men administered the Royal British Navy, the largest in the world; by 1967, over 33,000 men were being paid to administer a Navy that had largely ceased to exist. This did nothing for British Naval power, obviously, but it benefited the administrators themselves.
Education is obviously an important human practice in the sense intended by MacIntyre. The goods or ends it pursues are mainly the three already stated: the acquisition of knowledge, the improvement of the mind, and the transmission of a cultural patrimony. The great European universities were established during the Middle Ages as places where a few men could cultivate rational debate, be trained in canon law, and study the works of Aristotle. The first scholars often literally did not have a roof to protect them from the rain. Gradually, universities acquired better physical endowments, but for centuries academic life remained the preserve of a small minority. In early America one had to demonstrate mastery of Greek and Latin before being admitted to a college. As late as 1910, only six percent of Americans graduated from secondary school, to say nothing of higher studies.
The first seven decades of the twentieth century witnessed reckless, headlong growth in educational institutions. This required drawing in students ever lower down the hierarchy of natural gifts. First attendance and then completion of secondary school became nearly universal. Then, following the Second World War and the GI Bill, tertiary institutions simply exploded. By 1975, 27 percent of men and 22.5 percent of women were earning bachelor’s degrees (up from 7.5 percent and 5 percent respectively on the eve of the war).
Enrollment plateaued soon after because a minimum IQ of about 115 was still considered necessary for a young person to derive much benefit from a college education. But even that weak standard has been eroding in recent years. A recent meta-analysis found that while the average American undergraduate in 1960 had an IQ of 120, the figure has now sunk to 102, equal to that of the average white American. There is no longer anything “higher” about higher education. Obviously, instruction has had to shift accordingly. As the late columnist Joe Sobran famously quipped: “In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high schools to teaching Remedial English in college.”
Worthwhile learning has been replaced in part by frivolous classes in basket weaving, but often the new substitutes are worse than any frivolity: the students are indoctrinated in pernicious ideological fixations such as antiracism, feminism, post-colonial theory, etc. A powerful factor favoring this shift is precisely the lower intelligence of undergraduates. The ideological courses are far simpler in content that genuine academic study and almost impossible to do badly in unless a student is reckless enough to dispute the ideas presented. Why should a mediocre student risk his grade point average trying to master formal logic, particle physics, or the history of the Protestant Reformation when he can take oppression studies and get an easy “A”?
The scholarship produced by academics has gone through a similar change. This may have begun in schools of education, where young doctoral candidates have long occupied themselves with such weighty matters as the best way to arrange tables and chairs in an elementary school lunch cafeteria. But the nonsense has spread throughout the humanities and social sciences, and is now threatening STEM education.
Evolutionary psychologist Ed Dutton recently did a short video on a completely unremarkable young female
academic who just received a doctorate from Cambridge University with a dissertation entitled Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose. According to Dutton, the thesis shows how literature registers the importance of olfactory discourse, the language of smell and the olfactory imagination it creates, in structuring our social world. The broad aim is to offer an intersectional and wide-ranging study of olfactory oppression.
Essentially, what the young lady did was read some feminist novels by Virginia Woolf, note all the passages referring to odors, and then fit them into a ready-made interpretive scheme built around the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.
I have not read her dissertation, so it is just possible I am being unfair—although I doubt it. It hardly matters, however, for I only mention this young woman as a convenient example. Whatever the qualities of her work, most academic dissertations are now every bit as pointless and absurd as what I have just described. This particular thesis achieved notoriety only because the author bragged about her accomplishment online and was met with gales of scorn from the general public. Dutton claims that hers is far from the worst dissertation he has heard about. For comparison he mentions Dr. Desiree Odom’s A Multiple Marginalized Intersectional Black Lesbian Leader: A Critical Feminist Autoethnographic Narrative. In plain English, this woman wrote a doctoral thesis on herself.
Some legitimate and worthwhile learning and scholarship still goes on within universities, but it is under threat due to a kind of Gresham’s Law of the intellect whereby bad scholarship drives out good. In sum, the utopian attempt to extend the benefits of higher education to the general public has led to a catastrophic decline in the practice of education itself. And we must bear in mind that the very attempt was only made possible by the unexampled material prosperity of America and other Western nations, i.e., their success at securing the more urgent needs farther down Maslow’s pyramid.
Continuation
Dutton mentions the probability that our newly minted olfactory racism scholarette has received public funding. Again, the particular case hardly matters—the point is that most young women in the academy benefit from such funding. This means working men have had a portion of their earnings confiscated to allow her to peruse Virgina Woolf novels and grind out empty verbiage about oppression. It is a crying injustice that should not be tolerated one minute longer. Yet in return for such support, the young lady looks down her snout at the men funding her! They are simply not “educated” enough to be worthy of her consideration.
What explains such women’s limitless faith in the objective validity of academic credentials? In part, their own mediocre intelligence and the limits precisely of their education in the authentic sense. Learning and acquired mental acuity are goods difficult to appreciate except by those who already have them in significant measure themselves. It is hard to judge uphill on education because people by definition cannot know what they do not know. Dull and untrained minds cannot have a proper sense of what they are lacking. All they can judge by is externalities—such as academic credentials. Any fool can see a degree hanging on someone’s wall in a way he cannot so easily see the benefit a gifted mind has derived from, for example, extended immersion in the Latin classics. Hence we find women in the tragicomic situation Henderson describes: lonely and miserable even as they reject legions of men on the basis of meaningless credentials. And we are asked to believe they do so because they value education. I feel myself crashing into the limits of the English language’s capacity for expressing contempt.
The relation of the genuine life of the mind to today’s corrupt academy might be illuminated by comparison with the ancient Christian doctrine of the church invisible. Christians believe the church derives from God himself, yet this presents an obvious problem. God is perfect, while the church is made up entirely of imperfect, sinful men (wise theologians admit that ecclesia semper reformanda – “the church is always in need of reform”). The explanation of this apparent paradox is found in the distinction between the church visible and the church invisible. Normally when men refer to the church, they have the everyday, visible church in mind. But this human institution is less important than the true, invisible church responsible for the work of salvation, and whose composition is known to God alone. The invisible church somehow exists within the visible, but is never identical to it. Obviously, the decay of genuine learning within a corrupt academy is analogous to a near-throttling of the invisible church by the visible.
If you give an uneducated (in the proper sense) person an educational credential, he—or more to the point, she—will accept it unquestioningly as a proof of her own real accomplishment. Dutton reports that the young olfactory racism expert weathered the storm of public scorn directed at her successfully. He even quotes her as saying, “I’m fine, I’m quite pleased that I’ve upset these basement-dwelling incels.” It does not occur to her that the incels may only be incels because thousands of academic spinsters like herself are ludicrously deluded as to the value of their own attainments.
In short, the corruption of our educational institutions has produced a status-mirage that women are unable to see through, one which condemns both themselves and men to childlessness—though not necessarily depriving the women of polygynous sex with men above them in the outward status hierarchy.
In addition to the mediocrity of their minds and the modesty of their attainments, women in the academy may have difficulty seeing through the corrupt status hierarchies in which they are enmeshed simply because they are women. As I wrote in a recent essay, the sex generally consists of “impressionable conformists with a powerful need for social approval.” Status hierarchies are produced by men, as Napoleon knew (“Les femmes n’ont pas de rang”). Women rarely consider them critically; they accept them as given, and all their instincts concerning the “attractiveness” of men operate downstream from there. If a society is healthy, its status hierarchy embodies sound values, and female hypergamy functions as a spur to worthwhile male achievement. If a society is sick—we get what we see in Henderson’s article. (...)
So in general, as I said, women accept the authorities and status hierarchies that they find in place. This is probably because authority and status are essentially male concerns. Les femmes n’ont pas de rang—women are never going to tear down corrupt hierarchies for us, nor is it reasonable for men to blame them for being as nature made them. Their sexual instincts will function properly again once we have replaced rotten hierarchies with sound ones in better accord with the nature of things and a proper sense of values. When we do, we shall never again have female olfactory racism scholarettes turning up their noses at hardworking men.
What, Then, Must We Do?
Some years ago I came across an amusing article about a fire breaking out in an office building. What was amusing was the reaction of the female employees. Firemen, as everyone knows, do not enjoy the very highest status within our society, despite the dangerous and life-saving nature of their work. But every dog has its day, and even firemen come into their own when a fire breaks out. Under such circumstances, there is no time for discussion or persuasion. Everyone who knows what’s good for him must do exactly as the firemen direct, including the corporate CEO. You do not give firemen any backtalk while a fire is raging. For a brief moment, they are at the top of the status hierarchy.
Well, these corporate “career girls” were practically swooning. Once out of the building and in safety, they began marveling to one another how manly those guys were. This was virility the likes of which they had never known. It was the first time in their whole lonely, miserable lives that any man had put them in their place, and they were simply beside themselves. It was better than Love’s Sweet Fury.
It would be interesting to know whether any of these women went on the internet afterwards to seek dates with firemen. I doubt it. Most firemen are not terribly “educated,” and often earn less than the ass-sitting female paper-pushers they rescue. Perhaps if women had to spend several post-pubertal years being continually rescued from burning buildings, we could foster a baby-boom. Instead, of course, America’s fire departments are busy replacing firemen with firewomen. (When a large part of Los Angeles recently burned down, it emerged that the three persons in charge of the fire department were all lesbians.) So those rescued women probably went back to their sterile lives as soon as the building reopened. What a pity.
So what can we do? It is tempting to say we must raise the status of young men. But the solution to the problem described in Henderson’s article is surely not for policemen, farmers, and plumbers to get post-doctoral fellowships in feminist theory. If we cannot make female hypergamy function correctly once again by raising the status of men, all that remains is . . . to lower that of women. In effect, this is what briefly occurred in that burning office building. And the women just loved it.
Feminists, like broken clocks giving the right time twice a day, have described how women under “patriarchy” eroticize and derive pleasure from their own oppression, meaning their exclusion from the male status hierarchy. They are correct. The reader who wishes to observe how women might be made happier once men finally work up the gumption to deprive them of status is advised to watch my favorite Italian movie, Swept Away (1974; avoid Madonna’s 2002 remake). It was made by a woman—and could only have been made by a woman. Meanwhile, clueless male traditionalists offer nothing but laments that women are no longer being placed upon sufficiently high pedestals, unaware that their excessively elevated status is now the principal factor in their loneliness and sexual frustration. Watch the movie!
Sex is not simply something that happens in people’s bedrooms. It structures the whole of society. Societies that are badly out of order sexually, as ours is, can expect to experience sexual dysfunction and a potentially catastrophic decline in fertility. Women need men’s love, but to get it they need to respect men. (For men to respect women is also nice, but not as essential—although discussed ad nauseam.) Women have traded love for status, a properly male concern, and they are deeply unhappy. This is because they are not getting the love they need, neither from the men above them in the status hierarchy who can go from hookup to hookup nor, even more obviously, from the lower-status men their inborn instincts virtually compel them to reject. And it does not matter that these men are not actually unworthy of them. For women, all that matters is the outward status hierarchy. (...)
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