Much has been said to remember the man whose body has now been returned home after a murderer’s bullet removed him from our sight. Much will be said in the days ahead about the suspect in custody and his motives. But in the wake of the political assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the worst act of its kind since the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, what must be discussed is the culture of sophistry whose proponents openly justify such acts of violence and what can be done in response to rebuild the culture of free speech oriented toward the truth in which Kirk flourished, taking stock of new political realities. Almost nine years ago, Kirk wrote, tellingly, that “you can tell a lot about a person by how they react when someone dies,” and what we see after his death is the best and, unfortunately, so much of the worst of our society emerging into the light.
In the age where podcasting and social media have become for many people sources of news considered more reliable than standard broadcast news networks, many pundits and influencers aspire for an audience, but few have become as much of a meme as Charlie Kirk. His “Prove Me Wrong” signs are a thing of legend, but more shocking is the sensation many encountered while engaging him: that this was truly a mind opened to being changed, if he encountered in his opponent the truth, which Saint Augustine wrote is not the property of any particular person but the “common bounty of all lovers of truth.” This understanding of truth is radically opposed to that espoused by the secular anti-culture growing for the last century in America, which Pope Benedict XVI accurately described as the “dictatorship of relativism.” The phrase is apt, because the dictatorship—evident in not only the violent (successful) attempts to shut down debates and lectures on college campuses, in the most extreme cases sometimes resulting in takeovers of the whole campus, but now also an assassination—depends on a conviction that common truth between all human beings is unattainable and that one’s mind should be changed by the force of force, rather than by the peace of truth attained through the force of reason.
As I have argued previously, the contemporary academy bears a great deal of guilt for this anti-culture. Its lineage can be traced back, in part, to Jacques Derrida’s criticism of the “logocentrism” of the West (the privileging of rational argument, particularly through speech), which itself has roots in Immanuel Kant’s rejection of the possibility of metaphysical knowledge (i.e., of the idea that we can know things as they truly are and not merely how they appear to be). Such anti-rational academic ideologies as feminist standpoint theory (the claim that so-called marginalized groups have a privileged relationship to knowledge) and the historicist epistemology of Michel Foucault argue, in the words of Roger Scruton, “by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies . . . that ‘truth’ requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the episteme, imposed by the class that profits from its propagation.” Such falsehoods about truth pervade the halls of universities, funded directly by taxpayers in state university systems and indirectly by federal student loan dollars.
The essence of sophistry is the “corruption of the word,” language very carefully designed and used contrary to its own twofold purpose, to “convey reality” “for someone.”
If the truth is not attainable by anyone who enrolls in our institutions of higher learning and works diligently at his or her studies, what could the purpose be of funding such institutions so extravagantly as we do but as engines for social change? Karl Marx set the agenda when he argued in his 1845 Theses on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” The role of the university is not, in this post-Kantian, Marx-inflected frame of mind, to provide a venue wherein students may be brought into the company of other inquirers, where, in the words of Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, “everything can be discussed—[and] not just discussed, but known as true or false,” but as places for what Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called “war of position,” the encouraging of subversion of the predominant culture, which he thought must proceed the “war of maneuver,” or “the physical overcoming and deposing of the ruling class.”
Thus the theory and practice of much of the contemporary academy has become part of what Noelle Mering has called “a violence-justifying movement.” While she rightly relates this to Marxist intellectuals in the United States behind much of the cultural revolution that took place in the 1960s, such as Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, to fully understand the unreal situation in which our country finds itself, we have to turn farther back in history to Plato’s Greece. In perhaps the most astute short book to discuss the dilemma of the West today, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, Josef Pieper argues that “Plato recognized, identified, and battled in the sophistry of his time a danger and a threat besetting the pursuits of the human mind and the life of human society in any era.”
What is that danger, that threat? According to Pieper, the essence of sophistry is the “corruption of the word,” language very carefully designed and used contrary to its own twofold purpose, to “convey reality” “for someone.” Such words are what he calls flattery, words used not to present the truth, a common good, to another but for an “ulterior motive,” such that “the other . . . ceases to be my partner. Rather, he has become for me an object to be manipulated, possibly to be dominated, to be handled and controlled.” While these words may seem shockingly strong, one can recall two examples: how Michael Knowles was treated in his Jubilee debate by LGBTQ+ activists and Jordan Peterson’s interview on Channel 4, which in hindsight seems the beginning of his popularity. In the former, the genial and intelligent podcast host and cigar salesman is treated as an illogical antagonist by provocateurs looking for their fifteen minutes of YouTube fame, and in the latter, the clinical psychologist is egregiously misinterpreted repeatedly, so much that it spawned a popular meme.
This misuse of language, the faculty fundamental to the reason that separates man from beast, is why the best of the Western literary tradition has recognized that sophistry is not simply equivalent to physical violence but is, in fact, worse. It is for this reason that Dante places the circle of the fraudulent counselors lower in his Inferno than the violent toward their neighbor, even those merciless tyrants such as Attila the Hun and Dionysius of Sicily. While this may shock us, another example helps us see the truth of this judgment. In Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, although the titular character commits the play’s physical act of tragic violence, it is the villain Iago who, by manipulating Othello, leads him to murder his own wife. Shakespeare’s depiction of the two men leaves no doubt about who the greater sinner is: the malicious deceiver who despises the idea of human nature and virtue, preferring to exercise his will to power over his fellow man by the strength of his rhetorical subtleties.
These kinds of verbal dehumanization led to the anti-culture Pieper prophesied and with which we are all too familiar, that full of “the obsession with slander, the frenzy to destroy, and the readiness to accept radical answers.” Pieper recognized that this flattery can infect “even philosophy, theology, and the humanities,” such that the academy and the mass media together produce a “public discourse,” which, when “separated from the standards of truth, creates on its part, the more it prevails, an atmosphere of epidemic proneness and vulnerability to the reign of the tyrant.” The corruption of such a debased public discourse depends on, as both Pieper and philosopher D. C. Schindler recognize, in the latter’s words, “epistemological relativism,” which Schindler finds Plato confronting in his dialogue Theaetetus. “By denying the difference between perception and knowledge, epistemological relativism makes the individual perspective infallible,” Schindler argues, but rather than this leading to an individualist, libertarian utopia, it leads to the strongest individual enforcing his opinions on all those whom he can conquer by force without any recourse to justice and objective truth on their side. Thus the apparent rhetorical force to the argument from so-called lived experience (what other kind is there?), even though, as the eminent literary critic Louise Cowan argued, “People do not learn from experience; they learn from reflection and interpretation.”
What is to be done to confront the anti-culture that has supported and even celebrated the murder of a husband and father for the grave crime of searching for the truth and encouraging others to do likewise is not a question that can be answered easily. Surely, our first answer as Catholics has to be prayer and fasting, because these are political actions, actions which remind us of our dependence on the city of God in heaven. But being so reminded, we must go forth, strengthened in our resolve to search for the truth and to help others do so, supporting those Catholic institutions of higher education that prioritize the truth rather than postmodern ideology, encouraging our legislators to reform our universities, founding worthy civics and liberal arts programs (particularly PhD programs that supply the next generation of faculty, prime targets for leftist ideological colonization), and supporting such para–academic institutions, which are oases in the ideological desert of mainstream campus life. For us the living, then, the task remains to mourn, to pray, to take stock, and then to act to restore the culture in which Charlie Kirk changed minds, including his own.