By Gabriel Noah Brahm · Friday, January 19, 2024 Collin May’s essay “Critical Theory as an Anti-Emancipatory Project” appeared earlier this week in TelosScope.
 Collin May would not seem like an ideal target for cancelation—if by that one means someone relatively defenseless, inarticulate or unable to speak for himself, lacking in intellectual resources to understand his predicament, uncredentialed, without elite professional training in the subject he is accused of mishandling, or ready access to legal counsel. Or if by that one means someone accused of having done something wrong under murky circumstances, in any way nebulous, difficult to check, or hard to prove one way or the other.
To the contrary. May is himself a lawyer, trained philosopher, theologian, and scholar of Islam. Yet he ran afoul of the powers of “woke” that be, over the publication of an academic book review on the subject of Islamic history, published years ago in a prestigious outlet, just when he had stepped into a prominent role as a Canadian civil servant.
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By Collin May · Monday, January 15, 2024 Gabriel Noah Brahm’s interview with Collin May appears here.
The rapid expansion of woke ideology and its attendant cancel culture has produced both a popular and an academic backlash. The recent appearance by the trio of university presidents before the House of Representatives Education Committee has only served to focus that backlash against the conformism and anti-free speech culture that dominate many university campuses.
On a popular level, we are all familiar with concepts such as anti-racism, settler colonialism, and the ubiquitous EDI—equity, diversity, and inclusion. On the intellectual level, the backlash focuses on a growing sense of scholarly puritanism attributed to anti-Enlightenment theories that underly these public concepts. The theories include: neo-feminism; postmodernism, often with a Foucauldian inspiration; and critical theory. As far as critical theory is concerned, the spotlight shines on German-American critical theorist Herbert Marcuse.
Marcuse is famous for an essay he wrote in 1965 entitled “Repressive Tolerance.” In it, he argued that tolerance in the liberal capitalist West was simply a veil that oppressive right-wing movements and state institutions used to dominate public discourse while silencing left-leaning activism. In response, Marcuse called for the outright suppression of speech and discourse deemed right-wing. In other words, intolerance for allegedly right-leaning narratives, with untrammeled promotion of the supposedly emancipatory left-leaning narratives.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, January 2, 2023 The following comments refer to Robert Redeker’s piece from Le Figaro on December 30, 2022, published in English translation on TelosScope here.
In a notable comment in The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud compares Oedipus Rex with Hamlet in order to describe what he calls “the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind.” Between Sophocles and Shakespeare, civilization underwent an enormous increase in the control of affect and a withering away of the formerly unmanaged space of some original freedom. Of course Freud was talking about widely separated historical moments, ancient Greece and Elizabethan England. Today, through hyper-acceleration in a much shorter period, we are undergoing a comparable quantum leap of control (see: surveillance) accompanied by restrictions on free speech and free thought unthinkable only a few decades ago.
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By Robert Redeker · Monday, January 2, 2023 The following text originally appeared in Le Figaro on December 30, 2022, and is published here in English translation with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.
In 1793, the great German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte discovered what the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris does not know today, if one can judge by the complaint that he filed against the author Michel Houellebecq, i.e., that freedom of thought is divine. Let us listen to Fichte: “It is both a human and divine truth that man has inalienable rights and that freedom of thought is one of these rights.” What does that mean? It means that denouncing and opposing freedom of thought is blasphemous; that this sort of anger simultaneously offends the divine part of humanity and, indirectly, God himself; and that this sort of attack is dehumanizing because it attempts to tear out of the human conscience what God himself gave it.
Through its legal action, the Grand Mosque of Paris poses two risks, for the writer and our country: the risk of forcing the writer, a candidate for the Nobel Prize, to live under close police protection or, in other words, to become a sort of prisoner of conscience in his own country, and the risk of inciting a fanatic ready to spill the blood of the man targeted as an “Islamophobe.” Let us recall that since Islam is not the state religion of France, one has the right to speculate, perhaps erroneously, that it is wrong and alien to the soul of French civilization. One similarly has the right to discuss this idea, as long as one stays at the level of general ideas and refrains from defamations or direct calls for violence.
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By David Pan · Monday, October 3, 2022 Telos 200 (Fall 2022): The Place of Truth at the University is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 The place of truth at the university has always been elsewhere. Scientific conclusions are after all hypotheses, subject to continuing examination and critique in a process that forever defers the arrival at a final truth. In addition to this unbridgeable temporal distance from truth, there is a spatial distance to the extent that the university is subject to a larger purposive context that stands outside of scientific activity itself. A researcher can be objective by being non-prejudicial in collecting facts and weighing arguments but can never be neutral in terms of the goals of the research, which must always be established before the research begins and from outside of the research project itself.[1] Research cannot begin until an interest in some question has been expressed, and such an interest has generally not been up to the researcher to decide. Whether the goal of medical research will be to protect humans from a virus or attack humans with a virus will be determined by the sponsor of the research rather than the researcher, who at best may decline to take part in some forms of research. If the determiners of the goals of the university are not the professors themselves but the society that sponsors their work, it is within this external values framework that the truth of the university must be found.
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By Russell A. Berman · Tuesday, October 12, 2021 It is probably prudent to start with a clear affirmation that the pandemic is real, that COVID-19 has taken many lives, and that public health measures have been necessary to try to limit the devastation of the disease. No denying here.
But it is also evident that the messaging by health authorities has often been confusing, and that has undermined their own credibility: for example, in the shift from initial advice against wearing masks to the current (if inconsistent) mandate to do so. If the science on a particular question is not fully settled, it might be better for the authorities to be honest about that indeterminacy rather than to lay claim to an infallibility they cannot maintain. That clarity, however, would mean a willingness to trust the public to think on its own and to act in the spirit of individual responsibility, instead of issuing orders and vilifying critics.
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