Blame the English Department

Over at the National Review Online's higher education blog, Phi Beta Con, Carol Iannone speculates that the Virginia Tech English department is to blame, on the grounds that (A) Cho Seung-hui was was an English major; (B) English departments are awash in postmodernism; and (C) postmodernism teaches students that there is no absolute truth, and thus no right or wrong.

This idea is so transparently foolish that even the other Phi Beta Con bloggers quickly knocked it down. The larger question is why someone smart enough to string words together into coherent sentences would say such things in the first place. The answer, I think, lies with the intersection of hard-line conservatism and Internet-age intellectual combat.

The type of conservatism espoused at NRO Online is founded on a small number of foundational, easily-understood truths, such as:

1) "Liberalism is bad."
2) "Moral relativism is bad."
3) "People need to know their place."

The upside to this approach is that it gives you a handy, wallet-sized set of intellectual principles that can be applied to any situation. The downside is that you quickly run out of new things to say. One solution to that problem is to locate new arenas in which to fight your ideological battles--thus, Phi Beta Con, which is really not a higher education blog at all. It's just an excuse to give principles 1,2, and 3 above a new spin--for #1, railing against the professoriate; for #2, mocking postmodernism; and for #3, nodding with approval at Charles Murrayesque arguments that we're sending too many kids to college who really don't have the intellectual chops for it and should, for their sake and ours, resign themselves to domestic servitude instead.

But even this strategy runs its course after a while--there are (thankfully) only so many Ward Churchills out there to be made of fun of. The only thing left is the popular news cycle. Once Virginia Tech was beset by tragedy, it was just a matter of time before someone at Phi Beta Con connected the familiar dots. The narcissism of the truth-teller also comes into play here--I imagine Carol Iannone believes she's the only one brave enough to speak what others only dare to think.

In reality, the logic of ideological warfare and the constant need to say old things in new ways simply drove her to espouse ideas that are not just facile, but indecent. This is real moral relativism, a kind much more damaging than anything taught in the English Department at Virginia Tech or anywhere else.

Update: In another example of tasteless, tenditious hobbyhorse-riding, a different Phi Beta Con poster offers an alternate culprit : the fake boys crisis that Sara Mead debunked last year.