AICE English Language A Level
Analyzing Interview: Spoken Language
2016
LA: I decided I’d be spoiled a little bit like you are.
HH: Well, I’m very jealous of you being in California. What took you out there? Were you doing Hillsdale meet and greet fundraisers?
LA: We had a reception last night in Costa Mesa, and we had 900 people here. It was ridiculous.
HH: But I wasn’t there. That’s not possible.
LA: Yeah.
HH: You only get those numbers when I’m there.
LA: Well, the numbers that we drew in Phoenix were higher than that with you. They were about 80 people or 100 people higher…
HH: Only because my people want…
LA: …which means that’s what you’re worth.
HH: Yeah, that’s what people want, is the free food. So what did you talk about to the Costa Mesa people?
LA: I talked about the college eruptions and the terror war, and their connection.
HH: And that is exactly why we’re going to postpone our consideration of Dr. Arnn’s brand new book, Churchill’s Trial. Chapter four is scheduled for the Hillsdale Dialogue this week, but between the college disruptions, the attack in Paris, the subsequent arrests later in the week, the other threats around the world, I thought we’d spend this Hillsdale Dialogue talking about the here and the now, the present as opposed to 2,000, 2,500, or even 50 years ago, Dr. Arnn. So let’s just, I want to turn the floor over to you. What to make of what is going on, on college campuses across America before we turn to what’s going on in the diseased minds of terrorists?
LA: Well, it’s a collapse, that if it continues, it will mean a collapse in civilization itself. Colleges began a kind of nihilistic turn in the late 19th Century, early 20th Century, and I’ll give a quote that’ll explain it. Frank Goodnow, founder of the American Political Science Association, president of Johns Hopkins, wrote in an essay that you can read in our Constitution reader, “We professors take ourselves too seriously sometimes, because really, what our students will eventually think will be dictated by the economic and other circumstances that prevail in the future.” Now if you think about that, first of all, that’s a horrifying thing for a teacher to say. What is the value of his life? But second, it impugns the learning enterprise, right? It doesn’t matter what you learn. In the end, you’ll just be affected by your environment.
HH: Right, right.
LA: And that is connected, of course, to the great effort in modern historicism and liberalism to try to dictate or govern or administer everything in the environment. If you really want to have an impact, change all the conditions of society. And so government becomes a vast engineering project. And so what are these groups saying, right? First of all, there are these micro-aggressions, and that means somebody, an example is somebody wore, two girls wore a sombrero and some mustaches to a party on Halloween. And so this is an atmosphere of hate and racism against all marginalized groups. A Claremont McKenna College, and my dear friend and yours, Charles Kessler, has a really great essay in the Wall Street Journal this morning about what’s going on there. You know, the president there organized his own sit-in, in his own office.
HH: That’s remarkable.
LA: It is. I mean, you can’t believe it. And there are like 20 groups that are marginalized and require changes in the curriculum so courses everyone has to take, general education courses in all this gender and race study, ethnicity study and culture study, so they want to remake the university, and they want to have a say in hiring more people who are sympathetic to that. And that’s raging across the campus. And in my opinion, that connects to the terror war in this reason. What is this ISIS thing – Islamic state of Iraq and Syria. And sometimes, it’s called ISIL. Obama started calling it that, and that means Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which is a wider area than Iraq and Syria.
HH: Yup. That’s why Lindsey Graham insists on using ISIL. He wants people to understand they want it all.
LA: Yeah, and you know, that means, you know, it means the seaboard, the land near the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. And so what is this thing? Well, first of all, there’s a guy named Scott Atran, who happens to be known to an old friend of mine from Pocahontas, Arkansas. And I got on to him by this. But he’s a very serious figure, and he’s got a long article recently in the New York Review of Books you can read. What’s going on with these people? How are they recruiting? Western, especially Westerners are flocking to these, to the cause of ISIS. And the thing is, it’s a grand and glorious cause that wants to remake the world and give meaning to life. And it’s part of the emptiness that came into the American intellectual life with historicism. And that’s this Frank Goodnow, right? After all, if you believe what he believes, what would you ever mean by a great book? What would be the use of me and you, Hugh, talking about great books and great events of the past?
HH: It would be a circus act. It would be a carnival.
LA: It leaves you empty, see? And so there’s a kind of emptiness in the West, and ISIS is filling it.