The New Activism of Campus Life
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
(Not to get on a soapbox but the theatre prof joking “I’m thinking, Oh, God! I’m cast in one of my least favorite plays of all time, ‘The Crucible,’ by Arthur Miller!” gets to another issue I have. People don’t seem understand that the tools they use to oppose others should be applied with proportionality and good judgement, if for no other reason than that in another circumstance those same tools can be used against them as well. In general I think when people are ensconced in any ideology, they begin to overlook Kant’s reminder to “treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.”)
Not a whole lot, and that's by design.
Subjectivism of what is art in the modern art movement was annoying but didn't really affect most people's lives. Now, we have the same thing with the same rhetoric and tactics (well, with the added violence) happening on US campuses.
I often say that a "scientific temper" is something we should all strive towards - the scientific method is possibly the greatest achievement of civilization - but there are an inexplicable number of people (who have never heard of it) that simply claim that enlightenment ideals are Eurocentric and that my subscription to those (as a non-white) would count as internalized oppression.
By some, nuance is denounced, absolutism is glamorous. Some others cannot be argued with; they grow an argument for every exception to their blanket theories until the entire ideology is a tangled mess of patchwork, at which point the application of this monster to any real-world situation becomes intractable and the evaluation of new observations strongly correlates with in/out-group membership.
It is incredibly sad to see this dynamic being played out by otherwise smart people that I respect.
That you and I have to explicitly advertise our non-white status when saying this for it to hold any water is a travesty, and demonstrates how bad the environment has become.
I always feel that such arguments are extremely offensive, as they're denying you agency. Instead of recognizing you as an individual person, they're painting you as a member of a victimized group.
Although I've more often seen it as feminists denouncing other women's life choices, I think the mechanism is similar.
IMO, claiming that someone suffers from "internalized opression" is simply this new left's version of the "cuck" slur.
That was always the case.
Not at all. Identity politics is merely an "us vs them" game with identity only being used to call people sexist/racist/___phobic to force them to agree or be labelled a bigot.
If you're white and you support Trump you're a bigot. If you're black and support trump you're an Uncle Tom. If you're a woman and support Trump you have internalized misogyny. To people playing the identity politics game it doesn't matter what identity you have as a person because "you're wrong". There is no identity in which you can support Trump and not be "wrong" in doing so.
Once upon a time it was the Conservatives playing the identity politics game. Now it is the regressive left and oh boy did they tip the scale more than just flipping it.
We humans have been here many times before.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
(William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming")
Just because the facts were placed in our textbook by some culturally privileged Caucasian scholar doesn't mean that they are true.
Academia has a history of claiming things as objectively true, and then changing it's mind. It's healthy to question these things from the beginning. If you're doing secondary research then you ought to be asking who wrote what you are reading, what was their outlook on life, and why did they choose to write what they wrote. If you are doing primary research then you ought to be asking the same thing about your methodology.
There surely is such thing as 'objective truth', but it isn't to be found in textbooks written by human beings.
Really? The fact that a textbook was written by a human does not mean it cannot contain facts.
No amount of politics will change the fact that the Normandy landings occurred on June 6, 1944.
there ya go...just what the article is talking about. Sorry to have to clue you in, but nobody buys that weird leftist newspeak.
Plenty of progressive movements (including the original Progressive Era) did not make racial causes central or important.
I do think it's appropriate to think of this ideology primarily in racial terms. Virtually any issue supported by the left today is, in its essence, about stripping white people of power, identity, and autonomy, and giving that power to other groups.
Diversity, equality, multiculturalism, globalism, "one-world"-ism, pro-mass-immigration, all of these terms mean "not white". It's perfectly easy to see that, because all "white" cultures are treated differently in this paradigm, as "oppressor", "colonialist" nations/peoples, "majority/minority", "privileged", etc. These terms don't apply to other groups.
The amorphousness and formlessness of this ideology and its lack of coherent theoretical basis (as opposed to something more rigidly principled like Marxism, libertarianism, etc) is what provides cover for its true aim, which is political power for its adherents.
But see, their ideology is postmodernism, which teaches that all truth claims are not really true in any universal sense, but are only valid within certain sociological groups. It also teaches that all speech is about power, and only that. So they are in fact acting consistently with their ideology.
It certainly is amorphous and formless, and lacks a coherent theoretical basis, though, I'll give you that.
I don't think that the ideology people complain about actually exists; I think its a mélange of different things that the objecting parties don't like, that are held by different people, and not subscribed to as a whole by any coherent group.
> I do think it's appropriate to think of this ideology primarily in racial terms.
I think that's more telling about you than any coherent ideology.
> Virtually any issue supported by the left today is, in its essence, about stripping white people of power, identity, and autonomy, and giving that power to other groups.
Equal pay for women (and women's issues generally)? Raising the minimum wage (and economic justice issues generally)? Voting rights (and political reform generally)? LGBTQ rights and related issues?
If all you see of the left is racial issues, that's says a lot -- but more about how you look at the world, than about the left that actually exists.
> The amorphousness and formlessness of this ideology and its lack of coherent theoretical basis
...is a product of the fact that you are creating something out of things you don't like, and pretending its a single ideology. There's lots of different ideologies, many of which are rigidly principled, but "the Left" (like "the Right") is a big umbrella under which there exists lots of ideologies with a certain degree of commonality, not a single ideology.
lol. F=ma I don't care who wrote it :)
Science experiments like CERN have to go to great lengths to eliminate bias. It's easy to see how bias can influence softer sciences and arts.
The last time I sat in a philosophy lecture thinking about what the smart guys of yore said and whether it makes sense or not was basically all we did.
The fact is that these students are rebelling against the education they are paying for in order to gain more visibility for non-issues. Some of these issues are actually fairly fascist. They asked for a piece of artwork to be taken down because it insulted them. If we extend that argument, no art would be allowed, ever! Coddled is the word that comes to my mind.
I sometimes wonder if rebellion like this can cause another dark age someday if it gains enough support from young people. Or maybe a beginning of "Idiocracy" type dystopia.
When? How far back are we going?
I emphasized to my son when he entered college to always remember why he was there, and my expectations as the one paying for it. He's mostly lived up to that.
Who the hell has time to go out there protesting every little thing that bothers them? Don't they have classwork to do?
Similar cultural complaints and conflicts between academic and non-academic communities go back to the establishment of the first universities. (And the idea that "Today these kids...have too much free time on their hands" and that this is the source of all kinds of problems goes back into antiquity, and probably is documented nearly as far back as we have records at all.)
That seems really similar to this. I sympathize with what I'm reading here. Trigger warnings, for instance, seem like a good idea: we do the same thing for our movies (Deadpool is rated R, maybe your kids will have a Bad Time) and our food (has tons of carbs! lots of processed sugar!). And I think there's value in giving people the choice in what adversity they face day-to-day if they're already struggling (people with suicidal ideation don't need a lot of exposure to more suicidal ideation).
OTOH, I really agree with what Wendy Hyman from the article says. When you bend that far backwards you end up on the far right, circumscribing what people can think or say because you think you know better. For instance, outrage/call-out culture has made it a crime to be called a racist, so now everyone doesn't want to talk about race for fear of being called a racist. But if we can't talk meaningfully about race as an issue then it won't ever be untangled. It's okay to be angry about this stuff but using that as a foundation to halt all discussions forever just guarantees that the problem won't go away.
My mom is a Chicano activist and she's always warned about what she calls the "más que tus": people who used their identities and politics as cards in a game of one-upmanship rather than as ways of understanding and ultimately changing the status quo. I'm worried that we're feeding that now in our search for a progressive means forward.
Hyman started college in the eighties. Her generation, she said,
protested against Tipper Gore for wanting to put warning labels on
records. "My students want warning labels on class content, and I
feel-I don't even know how to articulate it," she said. "Part of me
feels that my leftist students are doing the right wing's job for
it."
It's not terribly surprising, then, that the current generation of leftists don't see liberal democracy as a solution. Rather, they expect a continuation of what they've grown up with, but applied to their particular ideological preferences.
Beyond that, right and left have no meaning anymore so it's best to read statements regarding them in the context they were made. Thus why I switched the language to refer to authoritarianism and liberal democracy in my comment.
Right and left, if they have any meaning, represent only a single dimension of a very complex space. Right can mean: fascism, anarcho-capitalism, libertarian, Republican (confused mix of various ideologies), religious authoritarianism (under an ostensible democracy or not), generally conservatism. Left can mean: libertarian, anarchist, socialist (various forms, including anarchism), communism, Democrat (confused mix of various ideologies), various green movements, etc.
It's far better to break out what we're actually wanting to discuss. Tipper Gore's motion, from the professor's perspective, was a right wing motion. Even if she is not right wing in general. Warning labels on records was seen as part of a paternalistic authoritarian attitude, that it happened to be coming from a left wing person did not make it a left wing idea. It really appealed to more conservative individuals.
It is bizarre, I agree with the professor, that modern college students might actually be in favor of such governmental mandates. It's not the warning label on records, or trigger warnings before a class, that are a problem. It's the mandate from on high. It's authoritarianism, it removes agency from individuals (producers and consumers), it's potentially anti-free speech (certain labels will, while being on good products or good lectures, turn many people away, so the material itself is avoided because the market is left barren of consumers).
Whether intended or not, that last part is the really frightening part, to me. Once we mandate ratings and warnings, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for people to even discuss difficult or challenging topics. It breaks the first amendment without actually having to do anything, society will censor itself. Individual speech, the press, etc.
There's no one to blame. There's no law to repeal. There's no argument to have. In fact, if you can make the punishment big enough, people won't even try to argue it. So there's no way to correct the situation.
It's brilliant. And scary.
Black is written with capital b in the middle of sentence like some title, while white is not. Nice to see that one race is finally being recognized as superior over the other. New "Aryan" race. Can't see anything wrong neither with it, nor all the other very meaningful and truthful terms told by this intelligent man.
Granted I don't think this particular strain of activism has such high stakes, but come on, impressionable youth-becoming-adults is a really lucrative demographic for "buy in" to lots of different ideologies (see also: "extremism" in the name of one cause or another). Those flames tend to burn out rather on the quick side, personal experience as my reference point.