ANDREW SULLIVAN: “Read A Book:” The circular, impregnable resilience of Higher Miseducation.

One of the more maddening aspects of the rise of wokeness in the last decade was how some of the younger advocates for “social justice” responded to criticism. “Read a book,” they’d tell me, and roll their eyes. I was twice their age, had relevant degrees from Oxford and Harvard, but I could obviously only believe what I believed because I had never “read a book.” No discussion was possible until I had “educated” myself — a task they refused to expend any “emotional labor” on. A few exasperated huffs, a slight panic in their angry eyes, and they were gone. . . . It wasn’t the differing opinion that upset me. One of my queerest character traits is that I love differing opinions. It was the assumption that none of this was opinion at all, but merely established empirical fact — of which I was blissfully unaware, probably because I was a bad-faith bigot, or had never picked up a book. This absolute certainty was also generally correlated with higher levels of education — just as “liberals” and “very liberals” were far more likely to have a college degree than those to their right. Over time, my friends began to wither among the educated classes, especially the newly minted and humorless “queers”, as I gravitated to normies, who had some strong views, were open to some others, and enjoyed a good chat and smoke sesh.

Higher education doesn’t produce value as advertised. It’s quite possibly a value-destroying phenomenon overall.