Brainwashing at university?

A contributor on Quora.com (Ted Kord) says, as part of his comments on the idea of students being brainwashed by leftist ideology:

Now I’d like to circle back to the idea of brainwashing, and why I think that term is not quite appropriate. Institutions of higher learning are certainly advancing one strand of left-wing thought at the expense of other branches of left-wing thought. Conservative thought isn’t present enough in fields like humanities or cultural studies to bother mentioning. But political monoculture on campus only works to brainwash those with weak brains to begin with. I would contend that most students really aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid.

Ted Kord may be right that certain students, including himself, are relatively immune to being influenced by the left-wing ideas advanced in colleges. But, as a former geology undergraduate, he wasn’t himself a student of the humanities, and was only exposed to obviously left-wing ideas in the specifically ‘educational’ part of his studies. (He was training to be a geology teacher.)

A particular strand of left-wing thought now dominates the humanities. It has also started to influence other areas, some of which may like to think of themselves as mainly scientific. These include psychology, sociology, anthropology, educational theory, and medicine. Students in those areas are expected to get to grips with this brand of left-wing ideology.

Many students, particularly humanities and social science students, may already lean left before they come to college. Thus the political monoculture on campus would only serve to confirm and deepen their left-wing bias.

Left-wing ideology is designed to play on people’s sense of guilt for being ‘privileged’, and on their sense of resentment for being ‘oppressed’. Feelings of guilt are uncomfortable, and a person feeling guilty may well become an activist on behalf of the ‘oppressed’. Even those who don’t become activists may become influenced, possibly far more than they realise.

Left-wing ideology likes to present itself as occupying the moral high ground, as wanting to liberate the oppressed, and as exposing the subtle ways in which oppressors have power over certain groups of people. If a student of literature or other humanities subject constantly has to write essays interpreting literature, history, etc, from a particular left-wing point of view, it’s possible that they absorb this point of view unconsciously, however much they may dislike it, or reject it consciously. This is more likely to be the case if the student is idealistic and conscientious — the thick-skinned, firmly conservative or ‘entitled’ student is less likely to be affected.

And now tens of thousands of students are being exposed to this ideology, with no counter-ideology being promoted on campus.

Christine Fulcher

The rise of the modern ideology

The system of interpretations and evaluations that forms the modern anti-individualistic ideology is now apparently universally understood and applied, so it may be difficult to realise that it is a quite recent development.

I was shocked by it when I first started to encounter it at 13 or 14. There was really no hint of it in what I had read up to that time. ‘Socialist’ writers such as H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw took a pretty detached view of the goings-on of human society; and suggestions that it might be nice if all people lived in larger, cleaner houses, or lived in a cleaner, healthier and more aesthetic way, did not draw attention to the erosion of liberty that would be necessary even to attempt to bring this about.

My ideas of human society were based primarily on books written in Victorian or Edwardian times, with a bit of influence from such things as cynical Aesop’s Fables. I always took note of ideas about motivation and reflected upon them.

Consider, for example, A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The message of this book, to me at any rate, was that no one will do anything for anyone unless they are paid with money for doing so. In the story, Sara is left by her father at a select boarding-school. She is a parlour boarder and treated as a show pupil by the headmistress, who nevertheless resents her cleverness and self-possession, until her father dies and she is left penniless. Then she is made to sleep in an attic, where a scullery-maid also sleeps, and to work for her keep as a drudge and errand runner in all weathers, and assistant teacher of elementary French.

It is only if you have a parent who will pay for things for you that you get them, and what you get will be in accordance with how much the parent has to spend. Otherwise you will be reduced to the state of the servant girls and beggars in the streets.

Of course, people other than parents may give other people things; when Sara was well off she used to buy items of food for one of the scullery maids, and when she is poor she gives some buns to a starving beggar girl. This attracts the attention of the lady who runs the bun-shop, and she (the lady) takes in the beggar girl and feeds and clothes her from then on — in effect, adopts her, but without having to account for what she is doing to any agents of the collective.

In those days there was no compulsory education. Child adoption was a matter for individuals to undertake if they chose, with no need to seek permission.

That was the way the world was; the way people treated you depended entirely on whether you could pay for what you wanted, or needed.

Eventually Sara is found and rescued by a wealthy friend of her father’s, who has been searching for her. While he is searching for her he is made aware of how many children are living in poverty. He is sorry for them, and harrowed to think that Sara may be in a similar state, but his friend tells him that his resources are limited. He could not provide for all the destitute children, but must concentrate on finding and helping Sara, whose father was his friend.

In the world as depicted in the books that I read there was no disapproval of ambition. The respectable bourgeois worked hard and rose in the world if he could; his children lived in well-built houses with a few servants and might have Mary Poppins as a nanny.

My father had been a very poor boy, and the great efforts he had made to rise in the world had not got him very far; he was headmaster of a primary school at the London docks. My parents were respectable but still very far from rich. Nevertheless, their efforts had resulted in their being able to give their child a better start in life than they had had themselves; they had delayed having me until they had saved enough money to be sure that they would be able to pay for a professional training for me.

When I came top of the grammar school scholarship exam at the age of ten, very soon after the 1945 Labour landslide election, egalitarian ideas were bubbling invisibly below the surface, but nothing I had read had prepared me for the idea that I should not want to take exams as fast and as hard as possible, or that I should be prevented from doing so because not everyone could. To take more exams than other people and at an earlier age was apparently viewed as reprehensible; it was an attempt to score off other people. Having social interactions with other people should be one’s sole aim in life. One should not want to do scientific research just because it was what one wanted to do and what would enable one to feel most alive. One should, apparently, only want to spend one’s life doing good to other people, in some shape or form, and interacting with them socially.

These ideas may not seem strange or surprising to a modern reader, but it was the first time I had encountered them and I found that they were being used to obstruct and hinder me.

In retrospect, as a recipient of a grammar school scholarship, I was in the position of Sara in A Little Princess. With my fees not being paid by my father but by the state, I was exposed to the tender mercies of the local education authority and community generally, as Sara was exposed to those of Miss Minchin — who could no longer be bothered to provide her with a formal education, but allowed her to read the schoolbooks in the empty schoolroom when she had run her errands for the day. And she did this, not because she felt any concern for Sara’s need to rise in the world to a position that might suit her, but so that Sara might become useful to Miss Minchin as an inexpensive teacher when she was a few years older.

Similarly, my tormentors did not mind how seriously they blocked my attempts to establish my claim on the sort of university career I needed to have. My acquisition of skills and qualifications was reduced to a snail’s pace, but I was allowed to proceed with heavily handicapped supervised ‘courses’ which might eventually lead to my being useful, not to myself, but to society, in a lowly capacity as a teacher of maths.

Then I was thrown out into a society where all my efforts to recover from a bad position and regain an academic career of a suitable kind were blocked by the continued advance of the modern ideology, according to which, as I found, it is criminal to go on trying to get a career that society has shown it does not want one to have.

Celia Green

A version of this post was published in 2007.

Hayek on intellectuals and socialism

The following quotation is from Friedrich Hayek’s book The Fatal Conceit, first published in 1988, about the attitudes of intellectuals to capitalism and socialism.

The Condemnation of Profit and the Contempt for Trade

The objections of [intellectuals to capitalism ...] do not differ so very much from the objections of members of primitive groups; and it is this that has inclined me to call their demands and longings atavistic.

What intellectuals ... find most objectionable in the market order, in trade, in money and the institutions of finance, is that producers, traders, and financiers are not concerned with concrete needs of known people but with abstract calculation of costs and profit. But they forget, or have not learned, the arguments that we have just rehearsed. Concern for profit is just what makes possible the more effective use of resources. ...

The high-minded socialist slogan, ‘Production for use, not for profit’, which we find in one form or another from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell, from Albert Einstein to Archbishop Camara of Brazil (and often, since Aristotle, with the addition that these profits are made at the expense of others), betrays ignorance of [how economic activity functions].*

Hayek makes some important criticisms of the socialist attitude to capitalism. But he may be misled by the apparent concern of socialist intellectuals for ‘concrete needs of known people’. He assumes that it is merely ignorance that is the problem, and not underlying motivation.

We could postulate, instead, that socialist intellectuals have a dislike for the market order because it allows some people to become rich and, in some cases, very rich. Socialists may dislike people becoming rich because they are aware that money provides freedom, and because they are envious of this freedom.

We could also consider the following possibility:
Socialist intellectuals would prefer a situation in which they, and like-minded people, had complete control of the economy, the government, the media, and the educational spheres. They are motivated by desire for power, just like people in any other profession.

Christine Fulcher

* Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, Routledge, 1990, p.104.