The College Fix interviews Dr. J. Budziszewki on his Pandemic of Lunacy
Out of one pandemic came thoughts about another for a University of Texas at Austin professor.
Unlike COVID, however, the pandemic that philosophy professor and Christian author J. Budziszewski considers in his new book is a culture-wide sickening of the mind.
The book, “Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy,” published in February, confronts a wide variety of “lunacies.” It examines where culture has gone wrong on family, sexuality, happiness, religion, government, and more than 20 other topics. But it also offers a model for getting out — and hope for the future.
“Though I teach philosophy, ‘Pandemic of Lunacy’ is written for ordinary people. I simply try to model sane thinking,” Budziszewski told The College Fix.
A prolific Christian author, Budziszewski has been teaching ethics to college students – both in the classroom and through his writing – for more than four decades. His past books include “How to Stay Christian in College” and “What We Can’t Not Know.” He also runs the blog The Underground Thomist.
In a recent interview with The College Fix, the professor spoke in-depth about his new book, the educational system, and his advice to students who want to escape these “lunacies.”
The College Fix: What first gave you the idea for this book?
Budziszewski: We all passed through the terrible COVID pandemic. But there’s a much worse pandemic that people don’t talk about as much. It’s a pandemic of lunacy. Most people are able to identify one of the crazy ideas which are circulating, or even several of them. They don’t necessarily recognize that those crazy ideas are connected. Or perhaps they think these ideas are just silly, or that they don’t matter because they don’t hurt anyone.
COVID could make people sick. Well, some crazy ideas also can make you sick. For example, some people want to disfigure and mutilate children in the name of affirming them. The pandemic of lunacy isn’t spread body-to-body by means of viruses, but mind-to-mind by means of crazy ideas. They are contagious. They are dangerous. And they have to be taken seriously.
So that’s what the book is about. It’s to encourage people to reconnect with their common sense, and to give them some hope.
TCF: You make the point that it’s not just the left that swallowed these lunacies, and you have some strong critiques for conservatives and Christians as well. Talk to me about that.
Budziszewski: A lot of the lunacies in the book might be considered left-wing. But often, what people mean by calling themselves “moderate” is that they are only moderately lunatic, and what they mean by calling themselves “conservative” is that although they reject the newest lunacies, they want to conserve the ones they have already swallowed.
A few of the lunacies I discuss are actually more prominent on the right. For example, libertarians are more likely to fall for the idea that there is no such thing as the common good, just as people on the left are more likely to fall for the lunacy that the purpose of the government is to take care of all our needs.
I’ve tried to target both sides. I don’t target Christians directly, but I might be said to indirectly target Christians who haven’t thought their faith through, or who sit passively as lunacies spread through society, thinking, “It’s no skin off my nose. This doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
