"a cheap and easy way of being 'critical'"

From Wikipedia

"where once they sought to transmit to each new generation the wisdom of past ages, today most within the universities equate critical thinking with a simpleminded repudiation of the past.  A lodestar of the European spirit has been the rigorous discipline of intellectual honesty and objectivity.  But over the past two generations, this noble ideal has been transformed.  The asceticism that once sought to free the mind of the tyranny of dominant opinion has become an often complacent and unreflective animus against everything that is our own.  This stance of cultural repudiation functions as a cheap and easy way of being 'critical.'  Over the last generation, it has been rehearsed in the lecture halls, becoming a doctrine, a dogma.  And to join in professing this creed is taken to be the mark of 'enlightenment,' and of spiritual election.  As a consequence, our universities are now active agents of ongoing cultural destruction."

     "The Paris statement: a Europe we can believe in" (7 October 2017), no. 21.