Richard Rorty, who died not long ago, was a major postmodernist philosopher who reasoned that since we can never know an objective truth, we must instead pursue pragmatism. He was also a popular professor at Wellesley, Princeton, the University of Virginia, and Stanford. Rorty at least tended to face up to the implications of his beliefs and was honest about what he wanted to achieve. Here is what he thinks of his students, their parents, and the beliefs they tried to instill in them. In this agenda, he is by no means alone:

The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students . . .

When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank. . .

You have to be educated in order to be . . . a participant in our conversation . . . So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours . . .

I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents . . . I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause ( “Universality and Truth,” in Robert B. Brandom [ed.], Rorty and his Critics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, pp. 21-22).

Why do parents send their children to colleges that subject them to this sort of teacher?

HT: James Tallmon & Rob Spinney (two Patrick Henry College profs who are emphatically NOT like this!)

President Bush had planned to worship at an unregistered house church when he visits China for the Olympics. But the still-communist Chinese government has put the kibosh on those plans. For good measure, officials have sent pastors and other potential dissidents out of the city while President Bush is in Beijing, lest he meet with them and make a statement critical of the regime. See Bush’s worship plans in China » GetReligion .

In a tribute to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Masha Lipman describes two worldviews:

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a premodern giant who defied the limits of human ability and the forces of nature. His world was that of ethical absolutes, unshakable values, spiritual discipline and self-sacrificial commitment. . . .

Solzhenitsyn’s life and his writing were an uncompromising war against the communist regime. His grim courage and selfless devotion, comparable to that of early Christians, gave him moral superiority over his communist adversaries. He defeated Brezhnev’s Politburo, and, instead of being killed or jailed, was expelled from the country.

But for all the admiration his books and personality inspired, his teachings sounded too rigorous to his contemporaries, at home and abroad. For his part, he couldn’t accept the relativity and uncertainty of modern life.

Russia’s destiny was more than a literary or a scholarly subject to Solzhenitsyn — it was his mission. The perennial Russian debate of the past 150 years has been between Westernizers and Slavophiles, or those who promote nationalist ideas of Russia’s special path. Solzhenitsyn’s opponent in this debate was the only other man of an equal moral stature — Andrei Sakharov, the academic and human rights activist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. Both men sought to liberate Russia from communism, and both were almost inhumanly brave in their challenges to the regime. But Sakharov, a Westernizer, saw a solution in “convergence” with the West, which he regarded as a world of liberty and justice, while Solzhenitsyn, a nationalist, looked for Russia’s salvation in its historical, cultural and religious roots.

So there is the choice: absolutes or relativism; premodernism or postmodernism. What the article misses–and perhaps Solzhenitsyn realized–is that relativism and postmodernism can yield a totalitarianism of its own, a realm of absolute, morality-free power. And that Western civilization ultimately rests on the absolutes.