Darwin summed up the world as a story of monkeys on their way to a waxing appointment. More recently, however, Kierkegaard speaks of knowledge as recollection—as time past—and of repetition as a gaze toward the future: making what has already been come to pass again in a present that is never quite the same.
Speaking of monkeys, we might recall Koko, a gorilla from the San Francisco Zoo who died of natural causes in 2018 and was even granted an obituary in the New York Times. Koko enjoyed her fifteen minutes of fame and vanity because a psychologist taught her sign language. She learned over a thousand words across four decades. The forced conclusion drawn from this was that the capacity to acquire such an extensive vocabulary blurred the line between humans and non-human primates. Yet, what Koko never did was ask a question. Humans, as Baron-Cohen puts it, look at the world, ask questions, and systematize what they see. What the New York Times, the psychologist in question—Francine Patterson—and the rest of the academic chorus were attempting to do was confirm the premise that everything is a matter of learning and, therefore, as predictable as a Mercedes-Benz engine.
Turning to the headlines, we find two recent paradigmatic cases illustrating the moral and intellectual decay and rot of our universities—and of society at large. These are merely the latest examples, yet both are directly linked to a view of the human being as a system designed for predictable outcomes, where environmental manipulation ensures the desired and intended behavior. Such predictable results obliterate human agency and freedom, ultimately denying our very own humanity.
Consider the case of nurse Lindsay Clancy: on January 24, 2023—while her husband was running errands she had asked him to do—she strangled her three children one by one with resistance bands in the basement. She then kind of attempted suicide by slashing her wrists, throat and jumping from a second-story window. The trial, like many in America, has turned into a circus orchestrated by feminists who have transformed the case into a diatribe about patriarchal oppression and hormonal turmoil—a spectacle in which, among other things, over $1,000,000 has been donated to the killer, who has confessed to her crime. The defense’s strategy relies on claims of postpartum depression and the nullification of free will, aiming to absolve the killer of all legal and moral responsibility. Once again—as with Koko—we reduce the human being to predictable mechanisms, like the engine of that Mercedes.
Another recent case, equally tragic and intellectually contemptible, involves the con artist, fraudster, swindler, cheat, and rogue (to borrow a term from the Spanish picaresque tradition) Jason Arday. He was a sociology “professor” at Cambridge—a position he secured despite his inexperience and limited academic track record, solely due to the color of his skin and fake academic achievements. His academic career was riddled with plagiarism; his doctoral thesis contained over 100 passages copied from texts published six years earlier. Despite this, the corrupt Liverpool John Moores University—which had awarded him the doctorate—dismissed these passages as “honest and reasonable errors.” There is absolutely no evidence to support the athletic feats he boasted about, such as running 30 marathons in 30 days or covering 600 miles (965 kilometers) in six days. The same applies to his stories of racist abuse within academia, including claims of knife attacks and even a pig’s head being sent to his home—incidents the police never confirmed. A charade! Ultimately, unable to face the reality of his own story, he took his own life, leaving behind a widow and two children. In the end, the greatest tragedy lies with those two children and his widow. The official memorial fund for Professor Jason Arday raised over $300,000 before being permanently closed. As is always the case in such instances, this is yet another example of structural racism and the oppression exercised by “white” power. Human agency is denied, and everything is explained away by circumstances.
However, this empathy is reserved for specific categories; the premise does not apply to everyone equally. Take, for instance, the case of John Battaglia, who murdered his two daughters during an episode that forensic psychologists described as psychosis stemming from severe bipolar disorder. The jury deliberated for just 19 minutes, and he was executed in 2018. His crime? Being a white male. The concept of a lack of agency does not apply to the male sex or to white people in general.
The abandonment of a worldview where the human being is the master of his own destiny—through his capacity for moral choice, and transcendent sense of life has been a long time in the making. The “man of the future” envisioned by Julián Marías, the hopeful, transcendent man has been erased. We shall focus here on the last hundred years of this deconstruction of western civilization.
The Frankfurt School—officially the Institute for Social Research—was founded in 1923. In 1934, it relocated to Columbia University. The intellectual decline of American universities has been a long yet inexorable process. Over the ensuing decades, members of this school—most notably Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Benjamin—formulated arguments intended to dismantle the Western civilization that had given rise to them; these arguments were not only false but also betrayed a deliberate ignorance of that civilization’s fundamental principles. Their writings sought to dismantle the civilization’s infrastructure, including reason, the family, tradition, and authority.
They called it “Critical Theory”: they built nothing, yet they criticized everything. Horkheimer and Adorno argued that Western reason—the very reason that explained the mechanical and material aspects of the universe—contained the seeds of Auschwitz. They did not merely claim that reason had been misused; rather, they asserted that reason itself leads to concentration camps. Horkheimer held Christians and the concept of transcendence in contempt; lacking a basic understanding of the world, he believed that the freedom found in sacrifice and self-denial ran counter to nature—to the material mechanics of the world.
Adorno (in The Authoritarian Personality, 1950) coined the term “authoritarian personality,” classifying religious faith, patriotism, conservatism, and the traditional family not as political or philosophical stances, but as symptoms of a proto-fascist personality. In this context, politics becomes therapy, and disagreement is treated as a pathology. Marcuse wrote the essay “Repressive Tolerance” (published in 1965, reviewed here elsewhere), arguing that tolerating erroneous ideas constitutes oppression in itself. True tolerance, he claimed, consists of suppressing intolerant ideas—but who is the judge that determines what constitutes an intolerant idea? The Left decides which ideas are fit for social consumption. Since then, in any political discussion, the Left has branded any idea alternative to its own positions as morally abject. Divergent policies are no longer viewed as alternatives within the framework of democratic discourse; instead, they are deemed morally reprehensible ideas unworthy of dialogue—and must therefore be silenced. Consequently, political debate over the last sixty years has devolved into a contest of infantile morality. The purely materialist perspective of the Frankfurt School employs concepts of social good and evil yet fails to articulate the concepts of good and evil themselves—notions that are inherently moral, and thus individual and transcendent.
The students who imbibed these ideas went on to become professors at Columbia, Yale, Berkeley, and Harvard; they became career officials at the State Department and joined the media, all the while propagating anti-Western ideas from the comfortable positions afforded to them by the very ideologies they claim to “combat.”
The French had their own distinct brand, a mix of baguettes and the likes of Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault. For them, the political agenda morphed into a cultural sensibility—something impossible to debate, given that sensibility is merely… a breeze in the air. Knowledge became stigmatized, for knowledge is power. As a telling instance of this intellectual and moral degeneration, some of these intellectuals signed petitions in France—alongside figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir—calling for the reform of age-of-consent laws and the decriminalization of non-violent sexual relations between adults and minors. Grounding their arguments in their theory of the critique of power, they opposed the medicalization of the body and state control over it.
This demonstrates that, as a society, we have the memory of a goldfish, and that the issues currently being brought into the public square are nothing new.
Western civilization—a civilization that is Christian (not Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, or Buddhist)—rests on premises that are fundamental yet unique to it: truth is objective and accessible to reason; good and evil can be distinguished; and human beings are capable of moral action through the exercise of free will in choosing between the two. Each life is precious and irreplaceable because God placed each person in the world for a specific purpose.
And this shared vision of our civilization has produced beauty in the form of cathedrals—such as Amiens or the Monastery of Iranzu—which stand as geometries of stone and hope; sculptures like Michelangelo’s Pietà, which breaks the heart; paintings by Rembrandt, such as The Return of the Prodigal Son, with its poetic truth; and the poems of Verlaine and dramas of Shakespeare, which delve into the ephemeral, unique, and fleeting nature of the human condition.
And so, we have arrived at a world where mothers who murder their children are not held culpable because a couple of hormones supposedly strip us of our freedom; where liars bear no responsibility for their falsehoods because—despite reaping all the rewards of meritocracy—the world is viewed as a system rigged against minorities. Yet, amidst this moral and intellectual morass and decay, there is cause for hope, and I found that spark within my own family. In the throes of the greatest tragedy a parent can endure, one of my paternal aunts taught me a lesson about life—and even about faith. While grappling with the most profound agony, and without ever having read Saint Thomas, Saint Augustine, the School of Salamanca, the Frankfurt School, or Kierkegaard, she told me: “This is the test of faith God has sent us; He has given us everything, and now He is testing us.” There is no greater insight into life, nor a better summary of our Western civilization, than that simple phrase. Umbral put it this way: “I found only one truth in life, my son, and it was you.” Truth does not lie in words; it is an intuition by the soul.
For Ángel!
References
The meaning of your life by Arthur C Brooks 2026
Teoría tradicional y teoría crítica by Max Horkheimer 1937.
The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen 2020
Rinconete y Cortadillo by Miguel de Cervantes 1613
La repetición by Soren Kierkegaard 1843
Antropología metafísica by Julián Marías 1970