2. Given increased enrollment and smaller budgets, how can we maintain and improve student success and retention?

We cannot. Improving student success and retention — especially when we are planning to let in more students, which necessarily means letting in more students who are less qualified than current students — requires more resources, not fewer resources. Even in industry, the efficiencies of large scale production have limits (the law of diminishing returns), and producing educated citizens is much more resource-intensive than producing widgets. The non-stop demands (throughout the country, not just in our state) that public university faculty “do more with less” have been going on for years: If there truly ever was a time when increases in efficiency, redirection of resources to teaching from less central tasks, and other transformations of how we do things could improve student education even while reducing budgets, that time has long since passed. I can think of several ways I could improve my teaching this semester — more frequent feedback on smaller assignments, for example. But since I worked 36 hours just in the first three days of this week, and don’t foresee working any less in the remaining two days and will also work over the weekend, I cannot imagine where I would find the time and energy to create and produce meaningful feedback on additional assignments.

The board of regents and state legislature can demand whatever they want — they can demand that faculty alter time and space, suspend gravity, and invent perpetual motion machines — but we cannot meet demands for what is simply impossible. When someone insists that you do something impossible, the only correct and sane answer is, “No.” Any response to their demands other than honestly telling them how and why their demands are impossible would simply reinforce their deluded conviction that they can create the results they want by simply insisting that the people and institutions they have power over produce them. Real-world results cannot be produced by fact-ignoring fiat, and hard problems cannot be solved by insisting that someone lower down the totem pole solve them — especially when that insistence is accompanied by a reduction in the resources available to carry out the work needed to fix those problems. Even the attempt to meet these impossible demands would be a gross disservice to all those additional students they expect us to educate with ever-shrinking resources, and to existing students whose education will be diminished by resources (and faculty members) spread ever more thinly.

I have no objection to performance-based funding. In fact, the strangest thing about this situation is that the concept of “performance-based funding” could not be more clear about the logical and causal connection between funding and performance — yet somehow the state legislature and board of regents keep insisting on more performance with less funding. It is a fundamental principle of ethics (my field of study) that “ought implies can,” which simply means that one cannot be obligated to do something that is not in one’s power to do. Surely at some level the powers that be must be aware of the self-contradictory nature of their demands, and that those demands cannot be met — but if they are not aware, that does not obligate us to nevertheless try to meet those demands. If we are obligated to do anything, it is to make them aware that their demands *are* impossible, and to explain why. In other words, we are obligated to educate them — which, after all, is our calling.

While Marsh’s essay is well worth reading, it is also long — and since my own remarks won’t make sense without context, I’ll try to avoid tl;dr-inspired confusion by quoting the key paragraphs of Marsh’s conclusion:

Within the last few years, a number of critics have begun to challenge our unexamined faith in “college for all,” as one economist has put it. Unlike those critics, mostly conservatives, I do not argue that too many students are going to college (Charles Murray), that the United States has overinvested in higher education (Richard Vedder), that more young people should enter the trades rather than attend college (Murray, Vedder, and Matthew B. Crawford), or that since college teaches “few useful job skills,” a degree, as the economist Bryan Caplan puts it, merely signals “to employers that graduates are smart, hardworking, and conformist” (Murray, Vedder, Crawford, and others too numerous to mention). Nor, as other critics have begun to argue, do I believe that a college degree has ceased to offer a good return on a young person’s investment of time and money. As nearly every economist and journalist who has studied this manufactured controversy has shown, college continues to pay off. Even those like me foolish enough to major in English or some other supposedly irrelevant humanities or fine-arts discipline still earn, on average, more than those with only a high-school degree, and more than enough to offset the costs of tuition and forgone earnings needed to earn a degree. Indeed, today the starting salary for someone with a degree in English ($37,800) is higher than the average income of all those, including older and experienced workers, with only a high-school degree ($32,000).

Yet we find ourselves in an unusual position. The advice we would offer every halfway intelligent young person with a pulse—go to college—is not, I argue, counsel we can offer a whole generation of young people, let alone adults like those who might have enrolled in the Odyssey Project. An is (“Education pays”) is not an ought (“Everyone ought to get an education). Some people may escape poverty and low incomes through education, but a problem arises when education becomes the only escape route from those conditions—because that road will very quickly become bottlenecked. As the political scientist Gordon Lafer has written, “It is appropriate for every parent to hope that their child becomes a professional; but it is not appropriate for federal policy makers to hope that every American becomes one.” As Bryan Caplan has also put it, “Going to college is a lot like standing up at a concert to see better. Selfishly speaking, it works, but from a social point of view, we shouldn’t encourage it.”

Unlike others who argue this point, however, my concern is not with the inefficiencies that come from everyone standing up to see better but, rather, with the injustices that result. That is, my concern is with those who cannot stand up, those who, because of lack of ability, lack of interest, or other barriers to entry, do not or cannot earn a college degree. Insisting that they really should is neither a wise nor a particularly humane solution to the problem those workers will encounter in the labor market.

Nor is it a particularly feasible one. The U.S. economy, despite claims to the contrary, will continue to produce more jobs that do not require a college degree than jobs that do. A college degree will not make those jobs pay any more than the pittance they currently do. As some of my colleagues from graduate school could confirm, a Ph.D. working as a bartender earns bartender wages, not a professor’s salary. What will make those bartending and other jobs outside the professions pay something closer to a living wage—if not a living wage itself—constitutes, to my mind, one of the major public-policy challenges of the 21st century. Education, however, is not the answer.

In terms of educational and economic policy, we may have even put the cart in front of the horse. As it stands, we seek to decrease inequality and poverty by improving educational enrollment, performance, and attainment. A good deal of evidence, however, suggests that we should do just the opposite. Only by first decreasing inequality and poverty might we then improve educational outcomes.

And how, I challenge Professor Marsh, do we decrease inequality and poverty? The unrelenting growth of poverty and inequality in the United States over the last 30-plus years are the product of federal legislation, executive branch policies, and judicial decisions all purportedly intended to accomplish other goals, but which have in fact contributed to the trickling-up of prosperity to the top fraction of a percent of the population at the expense of the overwhelming majority. I could name many of the most harmful of these legislative, executive, and legal policies with ease: The inch-by-inch gutting of the National Labor Relations Board until unions have been all but neutered, no longer able to protect America’s workers from unrestricted corporate greed. The push for financial industry deregulation that not only allows but encourages modern robber barons to destabilize our economy for their own massive profit, with any costs redirected to the rest of us. The continued corruption of the political system by money, which has degenerated to the point where the position that money is speech and corporations are speakers on par with individual citizens is enshrined in law by Supreme Court precedent. And so on and on, indefinitely and appallingly.

The point of such a list is not simply to bewail how we got here from there, but to emphasize the fact that inequality and poverty are the direct (and indirect) consequence of public policy decisions, not some inevitable consequence of natural laws that public policy is helpless to prevent. And those policies are originated and enforced with the assent, or at least the acquiescence, of the American citizenry: We elected the legislators who passed these laws; we elected the presidents who enacted these policies; we elected the presidents who appointed and legislators who confirmed the judges who warped the Constitution beyond all recognition to protect those policies.

And why do citizens consistently elect those who betray them? Why do citizens again and again embrace the most outrageous lies of right wing demagogues who blatantly mislead them about what our most pressing problems are (stopping gay marriages and legislating mandatory pregnancy won’t help our floundering economy) and how they might be solved (spending cuts in a recession only worsens the recession and do nothing to create jobs; tax cuts for the rich have demonstrably and repeatedly failed to trickle down any benefits to the poor and middle class)? Why do citizens believe the implausible, unsupported, feel-good lies of purportedly left wing demagogues who talk about change but actually engage in more business-as-usual (illegal detention, torture programs carried out in secret bases in third world countries, unconstitutional invasions of privacy, and more of the same economic policies that have created the current crises)? Why, in other words, does the citizenry of the United States of America as a whole continue to be complicit in and supportive of their own destruction?

The answer, I think, is ultimately simple: Because they don’t know any better. For the most part, they don’t even know that it is possible to know any better, or how one might come to know any better. And the citizenry’s ignorance is not simply a matter of failing to grasp basic economics (although that is certainly the case) or lacking any real understanding of how government works (although that’s also true). The real problem is that it’s exceedingly rare for anyone to leave our education system — primary, secondary, and higher education, public or private — with any genuine skill in or even real exposure to critical thinking. Even those who do learn the basic tools of critical thinking — scientists, for example — are encouraged to apply those tools only in narrow and increasingly specialized contexts. By and large, anyone who manages to acquire the skills and the habit of critical thinking in a broad way does so more in spite of their education than because of it. To put it bluntly: We are, as a nation, an ignorant and gullible lot.

If bad public policies created the current situation, only better public policies can get us out of it — and those better public policies are not in the narrow, short-sighted self-interest of the plutocrats who currently hold the reins of power in this country. Those better public policies, therefore, only have a shot at being enacted if the citizenry actually recognizes and uses their ability to take the reins of power away from those who currently wield them for their own exclusive benefit — and our citizenry is, as a collective, clearly too ignorant and deluded to elect better leaders and hold those elected leaders accountable. (If you don’t believe me, check out the statistics on how overwhelmingly likely incumbents are to be re-elected no matter how unpopular Congress as a whole is during a given election cycle.) If we want better governance, we need a better citizenry — and a citizenry that is better in a very particular way: a citizenry that is capable of seeing through bullshit, capable of grasping and advancing their own best (individual and collective) interests. A citizenry, in other words,with the capacity and the will to think critically. We need a nation of doubters, not a nation of believers.

Of course, critical thinking is not a cure-all for ideological and emotional blinders of various sorts — but the lack of it guarantees the inability to see beyond those blinders. People without the skills and habits of critical thinking are ill-equipped to recognize emotional manipulation, rhetorical misdirection, and outright lies for what they are. As Thomas Jefferson would and did tell anyone who would listen, a well-educated citizenry is the foundation of a successful democracy — and he was right. We can only save our nation by fundamentally transforming public education into a process which not only teaches critical thinking skills in some narrow sense, but which inculcates an entire generation with the habits of asking tough questions and not settling for easy answers,

Unfortunately, our education system is also a product of public policy — and it has suffered immense damage in the past three-to-five decades, both as an indirect consequence of the growth of poverty and inequality and as a direct consequence of attacks deliberately intended to undermine it (like the misleadingly named No Child Left Behind act). From kindergarten through graduate school, the American education system has become increasingly structured in ways that enforce habitual conformity and acquiescence to authority rather than encouraging habitual doubt and questioning authority. (I’m not saying American education didn’t always have some tendencies towards enforced conformity and authoritarianism — it surely did. I merely contend that the tendency has been greatly exacerbated by education policy.) The corollary to Jefferson’s stance on education is that a mis-educated citizenry — in our case, a citizenry that has been willfully and deliberately mis-educated to a significant degree — is the foundation for a democracy on the road to disastrous failure and collapse.

Depressingly, I don’t have any answers. I don’t think widespread education reform is possible in the current corrupt and degraded state of our democracy, and I don’t think significant improvements to the current corrupt and degraded state of our democracy are possible without widespread education reform. Nevertheless, I think Marsh is wrong in a broader sense. He may be right that education is not the panacea for economic problems in the particular context that he addresses. But education IS the panacea for economic and other social problems in a broader sense. A genuinely educated citizenry — not just citizens who know more stuff, or who are better trained in specific job skills, but citizens who can truly think for themselves — would never put up with the self-serving, short-sighted, socially destructive policies that our elected officials (Republicans AND Democrats) have been inflicting on us for decades.

Eventually, when they are oppressed and humiliated for long enough, even the most ignorant and deluded populace will revolt against a sufficiently onerous burden of poverty and inequality. But those revolutions rarely result in a better society, as history amply demonstrates: Robespierre’s French Republic, Lenin’s (and later Stalin’s) Soviet Union, Iran’s current theocracy. As physicist and thoughtful political cynic Mano Singham commented earlier this very day, I cannot pretend to predict when or how this country will collapse in an ugly fashion — but I have little hope for any other outcome.

And on that cheery note, I will conclude today’s somewhat rambling thoughts.

On my admittedly still shallow first analysis, it looks like the best-case scenario for the torture promoters is that the torture of two highly-placed al Qaeda figures may have led to negative corroboration: That is, they lied about the name/importance of one of bin Laden’s trusted couriers, a name acquired through interrogation of a more cooperative prisoner who was not tortured. Of course, there’s no reason to doubt that these highly-placed al Qaeda leaders would also have lied about the courier had they not been tortured: It was the cross-checking information from multiple interrogations that led to intelligence with real potential value, not the torture-extracted misinformation.

Update: A commenter here and numerous facebook friends have also directed my attention to this interview with a professional military interrogator who supports my claims that torture is ineffective. He also argues that the use of illegal and immoral torture methods by the Bush administration was not only a great recruiting tool for al Qaeda (and like-minded terrorists), but that it actually slowed down the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Another update: Somehow, I missed this Forbes interview with a current top U.S. military interrogator in Afghanistan, who says that…

torture played no role in locating Osama bin Laden, and that claims to the contrary by former Bush administration officials recently amount t0 “propaganda [that] degrades our intelligence operations more than any other factor I can think of.”

It is widely claimed that torture “does not work”—that it produces unreliable information, implicates innocent people, etc. As I argue in The End of Faith, this line of defense does not resolve the underlying ethical dilemma. Clearly, the claim that torture never works, or that it always produces bad information, is false. There are cases in which the mere threat of torture has worked. As I argue in The End of Faith, one can easily imagine situations in which even a very low probability of getting useful information through torture would seem to justify it—the looming threat of nuclear terrorism being the most obvious case. It is decidedly unhelpful that those who claim to know that torture is “always wrong” never seem to envision the circumstances in which good people would be tempted to use it. Critics of my collateral damage argument always ignore the hard case: where the person in custody is known to be involved in terrible acts of violence and where the threat of further atrocities is imminent.

Harris is simply wrong in thinking that “torture does not work” necessarily means that torture never works or always produces bad information, nor is a critic of his argument logically compelled to take any such extreme and probably unjustifiable position. Rather, the perfectly plausible and evidence-supported claim that torture is massively unreliable is sufficient, because there is no way for an interrogator to know at the time of interrogation whether the information extracted by torture is even remotely true, or in contrast is deliberately misleading. The problem here isn’t that torture always produces false information, but that it often does, so that [1] there is every reason to think that torture is as likely or more likely to produce bad information or no information than good information, and [2] there is no way of knowing in any particular circumstances whether this is an occasion where torture will produce good information that will help alleviate a threat, rather than bad information that will exacerbate a threat by wasting time and resources investigating phony leads or mobilizing forces in the wrong fashion.

That torture has on some past occasions produced good intelligence is something that was determined after the fact, just as the fact that torture has resulted in false confessions and other sorts of harmful misinformation on many, many occasions was determined after the fact. The problem, however, is that we don’t have access to that after-the-fact knowledge until, well, after the fact: Interrogators are unable — and almost certainly always will be unable — to determine whether any particular occasion where torture might be considered, including the most radical ticking time bomb “hard case” scenario conjured by Harris or the fevered imaginations of the writers of 24, will after the fact prove to be one of those occasions where torture provides good intelligence rather than harmful misinformation. We cannot know the future in this way except based on probabilities, and the probability of getting misleading and even positively harmful misinformation from torture is high, quite possibly higher than the probability of getting useful intelligence.

Harris not only fails to compare the chance of getting useful information to the chance of getting harmful misinformation, he also fails to compare torture to the obvious alternative: When Harris talks about a scenario in which “even a very low probability of getting useful information through torture would seem to justify it,” the appearance of justification is only preserved by failing to compare torture to non-torture interrogation. It simply isn’t sufficient that torture has some probability, however low, of getting information that could save many innocent lives: To justify its use, torture must have a demonstrably higher probability of getting useful information than non-torture interrogation methods — and it does not.

We know for certain that torture is unreliable. We also know for certain that non-torture interrogation techniques are also unreliable. But there is no good reason to think non-torture interrogation is less reliable than torture, and many reasons to think that it torture is in fact the more unreliable technique by far. What we do not and probably cannot know is whether any particular interrogation situation which confronts us right now, in a given moment, is one where torture would more reliably provide useful intelligence than non-torture interrogation.

If the justification for torture is to commit a moral evil to prevent a greater evil, we must have a reasonable basis for believing that the evil we commit is genuinely worth it. Given our imperfect knowledge of the future, we can only make such a calculation based on probabilities, and Harris utterly fails to consider the appropriate comparisons between probable outcomes. We cannot consider the possibility that torture will net us information that can be used to prevent great harm in isolation, we must compare that possibility to the possibility that torture will net us information that exacerbates the harm or makes it more difficult to prevent the harm, and we must also compare it to the possibility that we could get equally reliable or even more reliable harm-averting information by using well-established interrogation techniques that do not involve torture. Harris’ argument fails to make either comparison, and fails to recognize the need to do so.

In summary, we cannot possibly be justified in committing one moral atrocity to prevent another without having good reasons to think that the moral atrocity we commit has both [1] a better chance of preventing than exacerbating the atrocity we seek to prevent, and [2] a better chance to prevent the atrocity than any other action we could take that does not involve committing an atrocity of our own. I think it is highly dubious that we have good reason to think [1], that torture is more likely generate useful information than misleading misinformation: Certainly, Harris has not made this argument convincingly, nor even perceived the need to make it. I think that the preponderance of the evidence already shows that [2] is false, although I am open to evidence to the contrary if anyone can produce it: Again, Harris has not provided evidence for [2], nor even perceived the need to make a case for it. With good prima facie reasons to think that [1] and [2] are false, and in the absence of any convincing arguments I am aware of that both [1] and [2] are true, universal and unqualified moral opposition to torture is wholly justified. It is justified without relying on any absolutist assertion that torture never produces reliable intelligence, but only on the theoretically coherent and empirically supportable (and I think already quite adequately supported) claim that torture produces less reliable intelligence than well-established interrogation techniques which don’t involve torture.

The error Sam Harris has made here is very much akin to recommending a drug by citing only data comparing the efficacy of the drug to a placebo, and ignoring data comparing the efficacy of the drug to other drugs which are already established as being effective against the same condition and have fewer side effects. This is an error so basic and obvious that someone who is scientifically trained should not miss it — and I think Harris would not miss it, if it weren’t his own flawed reasoning he is defending.

Eric and I have been having very interesting and mutually enriching conversations (well I can’t speak for him, but I know *I* get a lot out of them) ever since he started his own blog. In fact, some of our great conversations go back a few years to comment threads at Ophelia Benson’s Notes & Comments blog on Butterflies & Wheels, long before either of us started blogs of our own. Eric is very smart and writes very interesting things — but more than that, he’s an all around terrific human being, passionately fighting the good fight. You should be reading his blog regularly, if you’re not already. And Butterflies & Wheels. (Plus, they both post a lot more than I do.)

The Christian tradition to which [school name redacted] remains committed recognizes God as the source of all truth, and believes that Jesus Christ is the revelation of that God, a God bound by no church or creed. The loyalty of the college thus extends beyond the Christian community to the whole of humanity and necessarily includes openness to and respect for the world’s various religious traditions. [redacted] dedicates itself to the quest for truth and encourages teachers and students to explore the whole of reality, whether physical or spiritual, with unlimited employment of their intellectual powers. At [redacted], faith and reason work together in mutual respect and benefit toward growth in learning, understanding, and wisdom.

It is my considered (and rigorously argued) opinion that faith is by its very nature the enemy of reason, and therefore the enemy of genuine, intellectually honest scholarship. While well-meaning ecumenical faith makes for better scholarship (and better neighbors) than fundamentalist dogmatism, that’s an awfully low standard to rise above: For example, see the implicit logical self-contradiction in the first sentence of the quoted paragraph.

Even if the hiring panel never thought to Google-stalk me and thereby discovered my outspoken atheism — which I imagine would impede my chances, to say the least — I cannot imagine what would induce me to sacrifice a year of my life to such an institution. My intellectual integrity is worth more to me than whatever fiscal or professional benefits any such job could possibly offer. I’d rather commit myself to adjunct wage-slavery. (Fortunately, there are other options on the table; hopefully, one of those will pan out.)

Yes, we sometimes have to compromise in the short term for the benefit of the long term. Yes, we must make some sacrifices now to get where we want to go. But the future is unwritten: It offers no guarantees; it signs no binding contracts. Compromise too much today for the promise of tomorrow, and what will you have if that promise is not fulfilled? A life filled with compromises and empty promises. When today is too often sacrificed on the altar of tomorrow, tomorrow never comes.

Maybe I have sometimes erred on the side of present happiness over future gain, and in doing so set back my plans and undermined my own goals. Hell, no maybes about it – I surely have, probably more often than I think I have. But I am content that in doing so, I at least erred on the right side of things. Why? Because there’s no assurance that I’ll reach my long-term goals anyway: I could die tomorrow. But if I die tomorrow, I will die having enjoyed my life much more often than not. I will die having done many things I judge worthwhile: having shared life and all its joys with the many people that I like and the few that I truly love; having shared my passion for the pursuit of truths with friends and students and fellow seekers; and having done much more of both – more in quantity, and more in quality – than I would have if I erred in the other direction.

I thought it might be a nice summary of these thoughts to conclude, “I’d rather be an underachiever than unhappy,” but that’s not quite true. Stated that way, baldly and unqualified, it’s just part of the trap that the world lays for us, defining “achievement” in terms that have little to do with fulfillment. Status, title, money – we’re all presumed to value those things, but I truly don’t. Yes, I value stability and the day-to-day satisfaction of my wants and needs, and that’s a lot easier with a long-term employment contract and a decent salary. But loving what I do for a living on a day-to-day basis is much more important to me than the living I make at it – or I wouldn’t have a PhD in Philosophy, of all things! So with the caveat that I haven’t achieved all that I could by the standards of my chosen profession, and moreover that I haven’t achieved all that I could even by the standards of what I actually want from my profession rather than what others might suppose I want from it…

I’d still rather be an underachiever than unhappy.

Yes, I am career-driven. Yes, I am pursuing that nebulous dream, the ideal tenure-track job at a small liberal arts college in congenial surroundings. But I’m not making myself miserable on a day-to-day basis in pursuit of that goal: I often work only 40-50 hours a week instead of 60-70, and I don’t spend as much time keeping up with the literature and working on my pubs as I should. There are other things I should be doing right now instead of composing this meditative essay to cast out upon the ether.

Yet here I am, thinking out loud and sharing my thoughts instead of analyzing an argument or refining a publication or prepping for class or grading some papers. I am content with that choice, because I live here and now, not in that nebulous, hoped-for future. Of course, I don’t just hope for that future; I work for it, often and hard. I wouldn’t have a PhD if I didn’t work for the future. But I try not to work for it so much that I forget to live here and now, nor to work for it so little that I undermine the chances for its realization. It helps that I genuinely enjoy most of that work most of the time, but even so – it’s a balancing act, and I know I don’t always find the right balance. But if I must tilt one way or another, I know which way I’d rather tilt…

Because I refuse to be miserable today on the hope of some future reward. The time for joy is always now. Anything less is death by inches.

Don’t try to tell *me* what the worth or dignity of *my* life consists in.
Just. Don’t.

You haven’t the right. No one has that right but me.

Those who lay claim to that right — those who would limit my choices and options on the basis of *their* view of what makes *my* life worthwhile, and why (almost always on religious grounds, of course) — are not only profoundly mistaken, they are presumptuous beyond all tolerance. There is no quicker way to inspire — and to deserve — my rage and contempt.

There are, of course, rigorous philosophical arguments to be made on these matters: Eric cites Ronald Dworkin, whose philosophical and legal arguments about euthanasia and assisted suicide are superb. However, I don’t feel particularly philosophical about the subject today. Instead, I feel angry — enraged on behalf of all those who have suffered needlessly, all those whose dignity has been stripped from them in the name of God.

Of the many, many evils perpetrated in the name of God and “justified” by faith, denying people the right to live and die as they see fit is the one I take most personally. Today is just a few weeks shy of the twenty-seventh anniversary of my father’s death. His welcome end came only after a long, slow, incredibly painful, dignity-shredding dissolution of body and mind. I know exactly how bad it was, because for the last few months of his life I was his primary caretaker  — when I wasn’t in school. I was 16 years old.

My father need not have died that way, but for the political stranglehold of religious authoritarians claiming to know the will of God who self-righteously force their conception of God’s will on the rest of us whenever they can. Their ignorance is complete, and their arrogance is boundless. They are the enemies of human freedom, the only basis for any sound conception of human dignity. They condemned my father to a slow, torturous death.

I will not forget that, nor forgive it.

The details of Critchley’s essay aren’t interesting enough in and of themselves to address. I’ve seen it all before in many forms, and frankly a point-by-point analysis is wasted effort when each “point” is so thoroughly nebulous and insubstantial: When one cannot or will not define a single key term — faith, god, love — in any sort of clear, consistent, and/or coherent fashion, when every central concept one addresses can only be couched in metaphors and gestured towards rather than analyzed, what one is engaging in does not in any way resemble genuine, rigorous, truth-seeking argument. Without any fixed conceptual anchors — never mind facts; at this point I’d settle for one precisely defined term — the tools we use to justify claims through reasoned argumentation simply cannot be used: no deduction, no inference, no evidence, no examples, no counter-examples, etc. Such musings give an appearance of profundity, but they start from nothing, add nothing, and go nowhere. I can’t even call them intellectual masturbation; at least masturbation has a payoff.

I’ve read many variations on this theme over the years: discussions which purport to redefine ‘faith’ and ‘God,’ but in reality only obscure the meanings of such words as they are commonly used, and in the end utterly fail to offer any definitions at all, new or old. Whatever the intended purpose of the authors, such writings have no effect in the world but to provide intellectual cover for ‘faith’ as more ordinarily defined and manifested, wherein people believe claims about the world to be true — primarily religious claims — in the complete absence of legitimate evidence, or even in the face of clear counter-evidence. Defenders of traditional religious thought and institutions, even those whose views are most explicitly rejected by thinkers like Critchley and Kierkegaard, feel free to co-opt their musings nevertheless: The very Christians Kierkegaard criticizes borrow his prestige, and that of other respected academic theologians, to claim that their sort of faith and religion are intellectually respectable; they toss around Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith” language as if it were coined in support of their religious views, even though it springs from a critique that rejects so much of what they embrace. So not only do such writers fail to justify their own claims — because those “claims” are not claims at all, but rather evocative poesy without substance or definable meaning — they advance the cause of those whom they theoretically oppose.

If it weren’t for the broader social context in which this process of willful gibberish-production and disingenuous co-option occurs, I suppose I would dismiss it as harmless. But unlike many academics, I pay attention to the role religion actually plays in the world around me. Academic theologians like Critchley seem willfully blind to the pernicious real-world consequences of faith beliefs: the widespread oppression of women and persecution of non-heterosexuals, the perpetuation of all sorts of real-world economic and political injustices because the attention of so many people is cleverly misdirected from their lack of adequate health care and employment security and educational access to faith-based distractions like “defending marriage” and prioritizing fetuses over women and already-born children. To call religion the opiate of the masses is to praise it with faint damns; religion’s human consequences are far more widespread and devastating than heroin’s. But, instead of turning their intellects to honest assessment and analysis of faith and religion, academic theologians — from their positions of vast social privilege — muse about faith and god and religion in ways that ultimately empower and support the traditional religious beliefs and institutions they purport to oppose, their efforts building rather than chipping away at the massive bulwarks that protect religious claims and institutions from legitimate and well-deserved criticism.

While I don’t find it particularly surprising when privileged academics slather intellectual whitewash over systematic oppression to which they are not subject, I must not be completely overwhelmed by cynicism just yet: I still find it disappointing.