Where is Francis Bacon when you need him? As the most influential philosopher of the English Enlightenment, Bacon wrote about the intellectual fallacies of religiously based science while pioneering the modern scientific method. He would roll in his grave to see the moronic swill that impersonates scholarship in today's American Endarkenment -- case in point, that of Mireille Miller-Young.

Mireille Miller-Young is the feminist studies professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara who was recently charged with battery upon a 16-year-old pro-life demonstrator. Miller-Young often compliments her “scholarship” as resulting from “rigorous research.” She promotes her soon to be published 400-page  A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography as an intellectually “transgressive” fruit of years of rigorous research -- which consisted entirely of immersing herself in pornography. Academic buffoons who think themselves geniuses sometimes perform a public service by being unwitting targets of mirth. But Mireille Miller-Young's morally toxic and dull prose offers no comic relief.

In Novum Organum, Francis Bacon identified four fallacies of thinking, which he termed idols of the mind, that inhibit the development of knowledge: idols of the tribe, idols of the den, idols of the marketplace, and idols of the theater.

The idols of the tribe are inherent in human nature and the very tribe or race of man; for man’s sense is falsely asserted to be the standard of things; on the contrary… the human mind resembles those uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects, from which rays are emitted and distort and disfigure them.

A foundational idol of Miller-Young’s feminist tribe is to impart to the unborn human being the property of being a disposable object, devoid of worth, whose right to exist should be subservient to another's convenience. The rationale needed to eliminate an objectionable or undesirable class of humans is such an unnatural idol of the mind it must harness a self-deceptive force that overwhelms every other hope and consideration. Miller-Young’s feminist tribe is a blood cult that kneels to this idol of its own imagination.

Bacon’s empiricism demanded that knowledge must be gained through direct observation of material forms.  The tribe of feminists loathes seeing the unborn in their material form because such images threaten their idolatry. It was photos of bodies of the killed unborn that unhinged Miller-Young, causing her to assault the pro-life demonstrator and call her a “terrorist.” In Films for the Feminist Classroom she writes, “The ethics of teaching pornography in the classroom includes … allowing teachers and students to experience and process the viewing of provocative images.” With consummate hypocrisy, when confronted with provocative images Miller-Young was so outraged she committed assault.

The idols of the den are those of each individual; for everybody (in addition to the errors common to the race of man) has his own individual den or cavern, which intercepts and corrupts the light of nature, either from his own peculiar and singular disposition, or from his education and intercourse with others, or from his reading, and the authority acquired by those whom he reverences and admires, or from the different impressions produced on the mind, as it happens to be preoccupied and predisposed…

Mireille Miller-Young’s singular disposition is to look at pictures of naked black girls and women and get close and personal with black pornography actresses and sex workers. Only in an academia gone mad could Miller-Young have transformed her sexual preoccupations with this corrupted light of nature into a prestigious academic sinecure.

There are also idols… we call idols of the market… words are formed at the will of the generality, and there arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind that … throw everything into confusion, and lead mankind into vain and innumerable controversies and fallacies.

The word “feminist” sounds as though it concerns the well-being of all girls and women. Just the opposite is true. As defined by academia, “feminism” insults the beliefs and degrades the humanity and dignity of all girls and women. Miller-Young teaches pornography in a department that focuses on undergraduate and graduate degrees in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer studies. The values and aspirations of the majority of women are disrespected, while the aberrant is emphasized.  For example, Miller-Young would like to see “queer femmegimp” pornography become a cause célèbre. One such film ends with the heroine stimulating herself with a crutch.

Another word of false significance is “choice.” The feminist tribe believes they have won the argument regarding unborn disposability because they hide behind the word “choice.” Life offers everybody the permanent “choice” not to murder the beings for whom they have no use.  But the unrelenting use of the word “choice,” with its patina of freedom, and without attention to its meaning in this context, has helped perpetuate the feminist foundational idol of abortion.

Lastly, there are idols which have crept into men’s minds from the various dogmas and these we denominate idols of the theatre: for we regard all the systems of philosophy hitherto received or imagined, as so many plays brought out and performed, creating fictitious and theatrical worlds.

Because idols of the theater arise in intellectual arenas such as theology, philosophy, and science, they tend to be generally accepted without question by the public, as well as by the mediocre members of their own recondite fields. The publishing later this year of A Taste for Brown Sugar by Duke University Press results from an idol of the theater known as deconstructionism. For decades, Duke has been in the forefront of deconstructionism, which has been the primary erosive force in academia, including the movement to replace the canon of great literature with “relevant” twentieth century writing. The bedrock tenet of deconstructionism is that the meaning of any “text” is a purely interpretive construct of personal experience, that truth and meaning exist solely in the individual mind, unrelated to external values.  (Roger Kimball has written an excellent refutation of deconstructionism.)

The sad, tawdry pages of Brown Sugar, held together by Miller-Young’s ungovernable lust for black nakedness, as well her puerile violence, are inevitable dead-ends of deconstructionist self-indulgence. On one of her websites, Miller-Young teaches that only by “desiring ourselves,” can black women fight the “colonization” of their bodies by white men. This blather is delivered amidst a slideshow of naked black women, including naked peripubescent and pubescent girls. In fact, she is supplying these images of children to pedophiles of every race around the world. Only in the idol of deconstructionism could such “research” be legitimized.

Sir Francis Bacon was instrumental in the English colonization of North America. His New Atlantis, published in 1624, is a utopian novel perhaps based on hopes for that newly settled continent. Its title page shows a winged Father Time liberating a female figure from a dark cave, depicting the resurrection of truth from the cavern of the mind. Bacon was a tenderhearted idealist. How incredulous, how heartbroken he would be to see the acquisition of knowledge in the New World, which began with brilliance, fall into the wreckage of degenerate lust.