the New Pantagruel

Babel-On

by Blyvynand Screwtape

Translated from the Pandemoniac by Eric Miller

FROM: Blyvyn603@tartarus.org
TO: Screwtape663@tartarus.org
SUBJECT: PROJECT BABEL-ON UPDATE

y Dear Screwtape,

A happy V-Day to you, old friend. I’m just back from the CCCU’s 30th anniversary bash — ur, “convention.” But was it ever a bash for us! Things are going so swimmingly that I wanted to get right to this update while the exhilaration lingers. Then it’s off to the evening’s festivities, with marvelous tales to tell.

I can think of no better way to put it, Screwtape, than to say that Babel-On has become a spectacle, hellish comedy in high form. After three days of collective giddiness (along with those assigned to attend, many of our associates chose to take vacation there) I fear that we may need to take action to keep our confidence in check. But that is more of a disciplinary concern than anything, Screwtape, because, at the risk of sounding obsequious, your brainchild has become a self-perpetuating success, sure to keep rolling along in devastating fashion for years on end (or, more precisely, until the end). I’ll jot down some of my observations, though I’m sure you’ll have anticipated each. But the devil is in the details — and so the delight!

Pure and simple, our lingua franca has become the common parlance of this sector of the Enemy’s realm. Witness: Even our trainees at the conference, on hand mainly to learn their language, found themselves understanding so much of what was going on that their supervisors are scurrying to find another site for future training sessions. The mantras, of course, were amusingly chanted, as always. (“Integration!” “Faith and Learning!” “Christian Scholarship!”) But deep and serious exchanges in their own tongue were rare, confined to the occasional threesome commiserating in a bar outside of the hotel somewhere, so cynically self-absorbed that they pose no threat at all. Yes, their silly old dream of a widely shared Christian grammar is history.

Which is to say that the academic disciplines are thriving among them. Our Know Nothing epistemology is continuing to flower and bloom in unexpectedly useful varieties. When the evangelicals meet by discipline in their own “Christian” societies, their collective fervency is so amusingly sweet, as they unabashedly grope for blessing and promotion within the grand professional fiefdoms — a yearning, I might add, that we have intensified by playing on their isolation from the circuits of professional power. In short, the CCCUers are not only seeing through their disciplinary frameworks — they are feeling through them as well. You begin to sense the depth of our delight!

When they do come together for larger, collective purposes, like this convention, the only groupspeak they know, increasingly, is that which the university itself uses to remain intact: Christian ethics lite. If their disciplines provide the CCCUers with the means to communicate with fellow historians, psychologists, engineers, et. al., the academy (!!) provides them with an increasingly common tongue — and their accents are by now practically undetectable, perhaps the most heartening indicator of our recent gains. At occasions such as this conference they find themselves in a bedeviling quandary. They sense that the cacophony of their interfacing disciplines is potentially disruptive, so in order to achieve some semblance of unity (it is, after all, a “council”) they resort to that lovely combination of sentimental pieties and misguided ideals that intertwine to keep the university itself churning forward. Foucault, Pocock, Gramsci, Chomsky, Douglas, Bloom, Gilligan, Hawking, Lacan, Wilson, and company could never survive a conference together, at least when made present through this variety of proxy, and so these wannabes end up resorting to whatever ethical crusades we’ve got charging through the academy at the moment just to give themselves at least some sense of purpose and direction. At this convention we witnessed a baptizing of the academy’s pieties that was so energetic and sincere it made John himself look like an underachiever.

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