The Intellectual Roots Of The Authoritarian Academic Left That's Killing Speech On Campus
Crispin Sartwell explains in the WSJ that today's violent campus mobs have post-modern roots:
We are witnessing the second great era of speech repression in academia, the first coming during the "culture wars" of the late 1980s and early '90s. One force behind the new wave is a theory of truth, or a picture of reality, developed the first time around. This theory, which we might call "linguistic constructivism," holds that we don't merely describe or represent the world in language; language creates the world and ourselves. A favorite slogan of our moment, "Words have power," reflects that view.Back in the day, "postmodern" intellectual figures such as my teacher Richard Rorty were accused of relativism. In his 1998 book, "Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America," Rorty wrote that "objectivity is a matter of intersubjective consensus among human beings, not of accurate representation of something nonhuman." He had many ways of deflecting the charge of relativism. But perhaps it is more notable that his "consensus reality" was to be achieved through telling stories. He held that reality was a matter of widely accepted narratives--in particularly narratives of social progress.
...Fixing the language, by formal and informal social sanctions on one another, turned out to be much easier than addressing material conditions of segregation or poverty. A position like Rorty's, however, permits no criterion of truth outside the language, no appeal to the "material conditions" beyond our descriptions.
For Rorty, truth is nothing but a story we will all come to accept together--a progressive story in which inequalities of race, sex and sexuality are being steadily ameliorated. The positions articulated by opponents of this narrative are false by definition, false from the outset, known to be false before they are even examined. It is then well within the values of academia--devoted to the truth--to silence those views.
"It is doubtful whether the current critics of the universities who are called 'conservative intellectuals' deserve this description," Rorty writes. "For intellectuals are supposed to be aware of, and speak to, issues of social justice." That is, opponents of the leftist consensus in academia do not even count as intellectuals because of the positions they take. By that logic it is defensible to eliminate such people from graduate programs, to deny them tenure, even to shout them down.
Ugly stuff. And a denial of what fosters growth in society and reflects a respect for science and individual rights -- and that's a culture of debate instead of a culture of silencing.
And hey, why just shut these wrong people up? Shouldn't they be caged so their dangerous ideas can't get out to infect other minds?
Or, as a commenter put it at the WSJ:
ENID HINKES
Of course conservatives are being silenced for the "greater good" and for "truth." And that is exactly what Robespierre, Stalin, Mao and Hitler said about why their opponents should not be allowed to talk - or live.
via @yeyoza
Fascism is always falling on America, but landing in Academia.
Alternatively, 1984 wasn't meant to be a instruction guide.
I R A Darth Aggie at March 27, 2017 7:46 AM
When I was in high school, I used to wonder how it was that the Left, at that time, had such an anti-technology attitude. A lot of the Left's rhetoric at the time focused on banning computers and condemning people who worked with computers. (And that wasn't all; then as now, restricting access to automobiles was a primary focus.) This was back when the public's image of "computer" was a big mainframe, associated with big corporations and the military. The school I went to had a minicomputer, and I was one of a handful of students who had access to it. This was known about the school, and I caught a fair amount of grief about it, not only from students but from some teachers too.
I used to think that this was something that had come about in the 1960s. However, I know that it goes farther back than that; it's part and parcel with Marxism's rejection of objective reality. If "reality" is merely something that we perceive, if the universe is merely figures in the shadows of our minds, then what is there to hang on to? Why pursue goals if they are all just figments of our imaginations? Indeed, why live at all? It's a straight line to nihilism. And as I like to point out in by nihilism's own rules, "nihilism sucks" is a valid and irrefutable argument.
Screw that. What use is it? Who wants to live under that oppressive mental weight? We humans developed a means to suss out what reality is, allowing for the fact that our senses are imperfect at perceiving it. We call it the scientific method. We take a few things, based on everyday observations that we all agree on -- two plus two equals four, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, some other stuff. And then we build from there. We do experiments to determine if what we suspect or perceive is true. And then from that, we can make predictions. Observing whether or not the predictions come true provides validation (or refutation) for our theories. And over time, we build a picture of what objective reality looks like.
The results are hard to argue with. Over the millennia, there have been two things that have provided meaning for human life. The traditional one is spiritual philosophy of love and friendship, and its cousin, religion. The modern one is the scientific method. The first imbues us with a sense of purpose; the second makes us realize what is possible. Marx, for whatever reason, decided to reject both of those things. He certainly wasn't the first, but for whatever reason, his philosophy struck a chord of resentment and jealousy in the circumstances that existed at the time. And the world is worse off for it.
It's a short and direct walk from contemporary Leftism to nihilism. Don't fall for nihilism. It is not fun. It does not pay the bills or get you laid. Nihilism does not grant you love, or compansionship, or purpose. It does not even give you the satisfaction of wallowing in your own misery -- after all, the misery is just your own perception. It's not real either. Do you ever wonder why today's leftists are such a bunch of angry, humorless killjoys? Nihilism is why.
Cousin Dave at March 27, 2017 8:01 AM
Narratives are not subject to being refuted, and can be totally out of touch with reality. Not being refutable, they can lead a society off a cliff or to genocide. Lies can not be proven because it is "just a narrative". So one can insist that all problems of minorities are due to white racism, even if there is no proof. Proof doesn't matter. Hitler claimed the jews caused Germany's problems and this narrative was the reality. A reality-focused society can fix problems. One based on narratives cannot. This is why relations between the sexes and the races is rapidly getting worse--a fixed false narrative casting blame. The 77cent/dollar narrative is false but can't be killed for example, and causes resentment and discord. These things are not harmless.
cc at March 27, 2017 9:20 AM
A narrative that is irrefutable is a catechism. Academia has become a farce.
Shtetl G at March 27, 2017 9:53 AM
IMO this stuff can only survive in academia and under dictators. It can not thrive anywhere else.
Bob in Texas at March 27, 2017 10:43 AM
This is just your bog standard Marxism. It's just that this time, they'll get it right! And the New Soviet Man will usher in an age of utopia.
I R A Darth Aggie at March 27, 2017 11:47 AM
When you are reality-focused, you don't have to have your story perfect because reality will remind you if you stray. You don't care that much if everyone understands and repeats every detail.
But if you make up a narrative, it is arbitrary. Being arbitrary the only way to keep everyone together on it is to severely punish defectors.
cc at March 28, 2017 2:32 PM
An excerpt from
They Thought They Were Free
The Germans, 1933-45
Milton Mayer
But Then It Was Too Late
"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."
Jay J. Hector at March 28, 2017 6:06 PM
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