FROM: Blyvyn603@tartarus.org
TO: Screwtape663@tartarus.org
SUBJECT: PROJECT BABEL-ON UPDATE
My 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.
I can hear you cackling, Screwtape. Read on — it gets better. At this particular gathering the Diversity Charge was serving as the social glue of choice. One particularly ardent moralist went so far as to exhort her colleagues to “crush the tyranny of the c.v.!” (yes, churlish revolutionist tones and all!), and make “Diversity” the aim and end of hiring! Hell’s bells, it was a blessed moment! They are actually beginning to buy Diversity as an epistemological solution, a way to give their colleges (and “universities” — ha!) a more consequential role in the Enemy’s realm. My respect for your vision grows deeper by the week, O Shrewd One. We have now effectively shielded their eyes from seeing that the language, the only language, that could possibly assimilate Gramsci, Derrida, and friends into their own enterprise is only in the most shallow of ways connected to that pious blather that we, quite successfully, have termed “evangelicalism.” (If only Luther could see all of this — he’d bolt back to the monastery in a heartbeat!) And it is precisely their self-conscious “evangelicalism” that will keep them from seeing the obvious, salient fact: that “diversity” without a deeply unifying grammar, studied intensively and spoken easily by all, leads to, ahem, just more diversity, with all of its delicious fruits. Yes, old boy, the banquet we are spreading before us is growing more and more rich. If we continue to divert them from gaining a genuine knowledge of their own tongue (with the usual time-honored tactics: huge teaching loads, accreditation requirements, professional allures, committee work, intra-denominational anarchy, doctrinalism, and so on) they don’t stand a chance of glimpsing that common vision that could turn “diversity” into a real weapon, enabling the Enemy to infuse his power more fully into their efforts.
I shudder to ponder that possibility. But trust me, Screwtape, they are a long way from that sort of dangerous movement, and the gap is widening all the time. Carl Henry is no doubt turning over in his recently dug grave. Those particularly dangerous Enemy seers — MacIntyre, Milbank, Hauerwas, let alone Augustine, Luther, and Edwards — seldom make it out of the “Bible Departments,” if they even make appearances there. Even that old fool Lewis is becoming less and less harmful, as the evangelicals clutch at him as an icon rather than as an example of what they might become. So successful have we been in divorcing theology from “spirituality” that even if one of these CCCU academics were to crack open an Edwards or a Hauerwas they would no doubt find the texts impenetrable — or, better yet, uninteresting!
I could go on and on, but you get the picture. They are, truly, just babbling on, happy to be on their merry evangelical-professional ways, conditioned as they’ve become to the rewards that therein lie and reduced, unwittingly, to either the most pragmatic or the most sentimental of binding ties. They oscillate between a collective mushiness and a hard-headed “realism” that grasps for some means, any means, to maintain their continued raison d’être. And it’s only this most holy union of America pragmatism and evangelical sentimentality that keeps them from simply dissolving into the blessed state of nature that the academy itself is fast becoming, the Hobbesian holy war of all against all.
You may by now find yourself asking, How far are they from what they would perceive as catastrophe? It is indeed near, but so dim have their eyes become I doubt there is any chance of their detecting it. We never forget your rallying cry: “MISPLACED HOPE!” And so we continue to feed them enticements that they, in their soppy American way, find irresistible: not just Diversity, but Technology! Outcomes! Community! Service! Distance Learning! Assessment! — anything to keep those touchingly naive hopes burning. We’ll keep them busy trying to keep themselves intact under the illusion that they’re actually pushing us back — the very definition of farce!
They are, at present, so harmless that we might as well keep them around for the near future rather than allowing them to disintegrate, if for no other reason than for their exquisite entertainment value. There’s nothing quite so amusing, after all, as a follower of the Enemy who thinks she’s accomplishing something when she’s not. Their continual quiet preening at the convention gave rise to frequent and riotous fits of hilarity among us all — as if articles in “professional journals” were moving the tectonic plates themselves! They decry their own “enclave” tendencies, with earnest, unctuous hand-wringing, while failing to see that the real enclave (so pivotal for our purposes) is that of their own location in the professional class! The thrill it gave me to see how much they actually despise the actual communities in which they live — hankering like moon-eyed adolescents for Berkeley, Cambridge, Oxford, Manhattan — is well nigh indescribable. Their condescension? Almost enviable. They mouth “Christ Transforming Culture” rhetoric while snootily turning aside from the only real “cultures” (you were on the day you came up with that splendid little piece of jargon, old boy) that they will ever really have a chance to “transform.” Fortunately, they can’t see that, in the words of one of their own shrewdest observers, one can be “regional without being provincial.” As you might guess, they dismiss him as near-kin to the Amish. Such obtuseness, in the name of the Enemy himself, is truly what makes our work so rewarding — and our final victory so certain.
Yes, this crowd, and the millions they represent (if these are their best and brightest, may their kind increase!) are much more than harmless. Their usefulness to us, in fact, is steadily on the rise. The “students” they produce, after four years of that welter of “theory,” “method,” and schlocky piety, are excellent fodder for The Economy — not to mention effective builders of it. After such conditioning what else could they be? Their high levels of cognitive congestion, coupled with their sappy and shallow sense of identity and purpose, blinds them to the Final Solution. Not surprisingly, they can’t see the obvious: that as the earth goes, so goes the race. Slightly more remarkable is the fact that most of their own leaders are actually embracing the Final Solution as their own, going so far as to dignify it with euphemisms like “globalization”! (They fancy themselves “realists” — how right they are!) Order itself will soon be dissolved like so much styrofoam in fire. Triumph is at hand!
You are no doubt wondering if all is sweetness and light. I could point to a few troubling nuisances—the fact, for instance, that some CCCU colleges have begun to welcome Catholics and Orthodox into their numbers—irksome because these lonely souls at least have communal recourse to the tradition of their realm. And, yes, the loud-mouths from Grand Rapids continue to spout off, although I think we’ve sufficiently diverted their attention away from their own realm so that they are often beyond earshot of their own potential followers. Many of the big shots don’t even bother to attend the conferences of the CCCU-related professional societies (attending such a conference would, happily, feel embarrassing to most of them). The departures of these “stars” into the “real” academy actually works to our advantage because it perpetuates the subtle, commonly believed if not actually spoken lie that it’s in “the academy” that the real action is happening. And of course once their stars make it to the academy our homogenizing and fragmenting pressures begin to do their work with even more success.
In fine, Screwtape, the level of danger has never been lower. In my judgment, we have eliminated this threat. The CCCUers are babbling on to Babylon, as planned. In fact, I am pleased to report that we are able to reduce the number of our associates in these districts even beyond what you requested, freeing larger numbers of them to move into more needy areas. It is truly a day for jubilation, dear friend. We continue to stand at allegiance, inspired by your example and nourished by your large and looming presence. I shall lift a toast to you tonight, for I remain,
Yours Truly,
Blyvyn
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 2.1.