Rothman wary of shift in culture; scholar Stanley Rothman says there has been a change in society and a breakdown in the social order that one day will turn around, but he does not know when

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 1, 2002 | by Stephen Goode

Insight: Yet the percentage of American academics who at least give lip service to leftist ideas is much larger than 3 percent or 5 percent, isn't it?

SR: There's been some work done on American universities, a questionnaire, and it indicates academics are somewhat more conservative than you might think they are from first impression.

Most tend to be opposed to quotas and to timetables, that sort of thing, for example. A majority believe that there is such a thing as objectivity. Yes, a very large minority think there isn't any such thing as objectivity, but at least there is a majority that still believes objectivity [in scholarship] is possible.

Scientists on the whole are not on the academic left. Social-science and humanities academics are pretty far left compared to almost any group--lawyers, businessmen, bureaucrats, judges, even journalists if my memory is correct.

Insight: Did the radicals of the 1960s become college professors? Is that why the left is so strong on American campuses?

SR: Of course it is tree that we now have in place people who grew up in the sixties. Some think the radicals plotted a march through the universities to take control. That's a lot of nonsense. What happened is that people on the left tend to become anthropologists and sociologists and, by their very nature, want to get into professions that give them a chance to do well. I was much more on the left when I went into the profession to save humanity by spelling out the truth.

Insight: You see the problems we face as bigger then that group of radicals who got jobs on university faculties to advance revolutionary ideas?

SR: I think there has been a change in society, a breakdown in the social order, the reasons for which I don't understand. But one might point out that [Alexis] de Tocqueville believed democracy could be self-destructive unless a people had good habits backed up by strong religious commitments.

We've lost our strong religious commitments, even though America is supposed to be a religious society. And the ideology of liberalism is so self-aggrandizing and selfish, with its emphasis on self-development, self-realization, that it is unsatisfying. The problem is the breakdown of reason. This has been attended by pressure put on people to conform and the loss of a sense of what things are important and aren't important or maybe less important. It is a shift in the culture which I find distressing.

Insight: Is it possible for society to reconstruct religious commitment?

SR: Everything is possible and I suspect, frankly, in the long mn, people will turn around. Why? The survival motive. We change or we will all be dead.

But you never know. We're moving along so rapidly, technology is taking us along so fast, we just don't know. Will they be cloning all of us in 20 years? Will we any longer be speaking about that thing called "human nature"?

There are very positive things in our society that have come about because of the advances in science. We live longer; we're healthier while we live. It's the cultural life, the personal life, that somehow got screwed up. In time it will turn around. And after that, it will turn again.