David Gelernter Transcript - Conversations with Bill Kristol

David Gelernter Transcript - Conversations with Bill Kristol

"Let's look at the generation after the Second World War. This is a cultural revolution, it seems to me to extend roughly from 1945 to 1970. So in 1970 everything is different. Things are radically different. And what happened during those 25 years? Colleges and universities became vastly, vastly more influential on American culture....

"Well, I think you saw these two processes just during the generation in which the Yale's and Harvard's and Stanford's became vastly more important than every before, because now everybody has got to get a BA. And journalists have to go to journalist school, and businessmen and teachers and all these guys. Law's a bigger profession than ever before. Medicine, suddenly doctors are making much more than anybody else - there was a period during which going to medical school was a frenzy.

"And during this same period, universities were being taken over by intellectuals and moving hard to the Left. Intellectuals have also been Leftist, have always been hard to the Left. So the dramatic steer to the Left coincides with a huge jump in the influence of American universities. We have a cultural revolution. And the cultural revolution is that we no longer love this country. We no longer have a high regard for this country or for the culture that produced it. We no longer have any particular feelings for Western Civilization....

"And we have a generational shift so that when we start in the 1970s and 80s, suddenly public schools' and college teaching went way down. ...

"So the schools were failing to teach but at least the parents had been educated before the cultural revolution. You know, they'd been educated in the 60s and the 50s, some by the 40s or the 30s. So they - When their children were taught garbage, when their children were taught nonsense, when their children were taught outright lies, at least the parents could say, "Hold on, not so fast, are you really sure about that?" Or "You know, there are Republicans in this country, too." Or, "You know, we've tried those policies, and they created catastrophes. Are you sure we should do this all again?"

"But what happened in - as we move out of the 90s and into the new century - the children educated in the first generation of the cultural revolution in the 70s, in the 80s, in the 90s, those children are now the young teachers. And then the not-so-young teachers. And they're the parents.

"And so the children who were being taught nonsense and garbage and lies in school, instead of going home and having the parents say, "Well, wait a minute, this is really idiotic, by the way." The parents say, "Yeah, that's what I was taught, too." You know, the same....

"So we have second-generation ignorance is much more potent than first-generation ignorance. It's not just a matter of one generation, of incremental change. It's more like multiplicative change. A curve going up very fast. And swamping us. Taking us by surprise."