"To Be a Member of the Liberal Elite Today Is to Live a Life That Is as Regulated as an Orthodox Jew's and to Possess a Conscience That's as Tortured as a Calvinist's"

"Into this vacuum stepped the rationale that was always also operating underneath the higher ones, and that the ideology of neo-liberalism, which took hold in the 1980s, elevated to a philosophical principle: the commercial. Students went to college now for the exclusive purpose of maximizing their future earnings, and the public supported the enterprise for the exclusive purpose of supplying the needs of the labor market. This was secularism at its worst: materialistic, individualistic, transactional, devoid of moral or spiritual content, hostile to ideas and ideals. It left unaddressed the ineluctable hungers of youth: for purpose, for meaning, for belonging, for belief in something larger than the self. And so, into that vacuum, has lately stepped the ideology of 'social justice,' with all the certainties and all the furies of a new religion on the march. Not only students but their institutions, which had been equally in search of purpose, have been quick to take the hint. With stunning speed and unanimity, colleges and universities have rebranded themselves en masse as seminaries of social action, places where you go to learn to 'change the world.'"

William Deresiewicz at Salmagundi discusses "the inadequacies of secularism."