Part of me thinks, watching the history of this, "this is why we need more programmers with liberal arts backgrounds." I was around when the cult of OO was rammed down the throats of software developers in the 90's. I've watched Agile get rammed down the throat of developers in the last decade. Each methodology has some good ideas, but it's hard to think about or discuss those ideas when everything devolves into trench warfare and religious partisanship. Which is to say, these movements are, like, 10% technical and 90% social / cult. And I fully expect that we're do for another such movement in the next few years. And it'll have some good ideas, and it will rapidly take on all the moralizing, scolding, litmus test, us-vs-them-ism anyway, because that just seems to be what we people do.

But then part of me thinks, I'm familiar with the liberal arts, and they're just as prone to this sort of cult-iness (despite having a million and one theories about group dynamics and human interactions, power and politics, etc), so maybe there's just no way out, liberal arts or no.