Ruddick’s essay, an abridged version of a chapter that appears in 2015’s The Future of Scholarly Writing: Critical Interventions, interestingly finds admirers in realms and websites geared toward everything from philosophy to gaming to ethics, with the Hannah Arendt Center comparing Ruddick’s description of academic joy in destruction to Arendt’s assessment of amoral attitudes among the war-time German elite. Fellow academics disturbed by English department inclinations to shake the value out of what, Ruddick writes, “seems alive, human, whole” find, if not hope, at least camaraderie in her call for “tiny acts of courage to say uncool things,” no matter how moralistic they’ll look to fellow scholars.
The religiously inclined, not surprisingly, also find affinity in Ruddick’s appraisal. Theologian John Stackhouse admires the courage it takes to say, “There is something morally, spiritually wrong—even perverse—at the very heart of what we do.” He compares Ruddick’s concerns with those C.S. Lewis articulated in The Abolition of Man, in which the constant debunking of values leads to a dystopian future in which a small elite prescribe morality based solely upon their capricious whims.
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