Today, of course, the contention that some ideas are better than others—let alone that some deserve to be called “the best”—is rejected as an elitist crime against “diversity.”
The cult, the ideology of diversity—what we have baptized as “identity politics,” which represents the systematic rejection of everything connected with impartiality and objective, impersonal standards—is the enabling presupposition of the destructive cauldron of racialist obsession in which our society is now marinating.
The irony, as Allan Bloom understood, is that our current intolerance is the perverted progeny of the primary liberal value of openness. It used to be, Bloom noted in “The Closing of the American Mind,” that openness was “the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness … has rendered openness meaningless.”
Roger Kimball, “Franklin’s Admonition” (July 4, 2020)
R. Scott Clark
R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.
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Here’s a hopeful common-grace pushback on this trend by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and others in an open letter against cancel culture.