 |  | | Mar. 25, 2014 |  | No. 164 | | By Jonathan V. Last | |  |  |  | | | | COLD OPEN |  | | | Before we begin: Here's a weird, fantastic, and engrossing essay about a Michigan farmer who got rich smuggling and selling rare Pez dispensers. (Who knew Pez originated in Austria?) And it's from . . . Playboy. I present this so that you can honestly say you were reading Playboy for the articles. (The link and the article are entirely safe for work.)
Now, if you pay any attention to the ways in which radicalism dominates the culture of the university these days, you're likely to feel as though you've gone through the looking glass. "White privilege." "Trigger warnings." "Rape culture." All of this (and much else) has turned academia into a bizarre, Orwellian simulacrum of itself. And not only that, but the radicalism has migrated outward into the broader culture, too. It's the kind of insanity we haven't seen in America since the bad old days of the early 1970s.
The good news is that these sorts of perversions always burn themselves out-they're too untethered to reality. Eventually people realize that the radicalism is really about just one thing: power. And once people begin to challenge the dogmas, they collapse in a cascade. Because as they lose their power to exact a price for criticism, they attract more of it.
The bad news is that these radical revolutions can deal out a great amount of harm before they are discredited.
But in any case, we may be witnessing the first dawning realization on the left about the problems inherent in their movement. Allow me to present three pieces, each from a liberal looking at contemporary campus politics.
The first is an essay in McGill University's student newspaper from last year. (Thanks to Rod Dreher for finding it.) It's by a student radical who has become disenchanted not with leftist political ideas but with the insanity of radical culture. Some highlights:
I'll be graduating soon, and I've been thinking about my years in Montreal with both nostalgia and regret. Something has been nagging at me for a long time. There's something I need to say out loud, to everyone before I leave. It's something that I've wanted to say for a long time, but I've struggled to find the right words. I need to tell people what was wrong with the activism I was engaged in, and why I bailed out. I have many fond memories from that time, but all in all, it was the darkest chapter of my life.
I used to endorse a particular brand of politics that is prevalent at McGill and in Montreal more widely. It is a fusion of a certain kind of anti-oppressive politics and a certain kind of radical leftist politics. This particular brand of politics begins with good intentions and noble causes, but metastasizes into a nightmare. . . .
There is something dark and vaguely cultish about this particular brand of politics. I've thought a lot about what exactly that is. I've pinned down four core features that make it so disturbing: dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality, and anti-intellectualism. I'll go into detail about each one of these. The following is as much a confession as it is an admonishment. I will not mention a single sin that I have not been fully and damnably guilty of in my time.
First, dogmatism. One way to define the difference between a regular belief and a sacred belief is that people who hold sacred beliefs think it is morally wrong for anyone to question those beliefs. If someone does question those beliefs, they're not just being stupid or even depraved, they're actively doing violence. They might as well be kicking a puppy. When people hold sacred beliefs, there is no disagreement without animosity. In this mindset, people who disagreed with my views weren't just wrong, they were awful people. I watched what people said closely, scanning for objectionable content. Any infraction reflected badly on your character, and too many might put you on my blacklist. Calling them 'sacred beliefs' is a nice way to put it. What I mean to say is that they are dogmas.
Thinking this way quickly divides the world into an ingroup and an outgroup - believers and heathens, the righteous and the wrong-teous. "I hate being around un-rad people," a friend once texted me, infuriated with their liberal roommates. Members of the ingroup are held to the same stringent standards. Every minor heresy inches you further away from the group. People are reluctant to say that anything is too radical for fear of being been seen as too un-radical. Conversely, showing your devotion to the cause earns you respect. Groupthink becomes the modus operandi. When I was part of groups like this, everyone was on exactly the same page about a suspiciously large range of issues. Internal disagreement was rare. The insular community served as an incubator of extreme, irrational views.
High on their own supply, activists in these organizing circles end up developing a crusader mentality: an extreme self-righteousness based on the conviction that they are doing the secular equivalent of God's work. It isn't about ego or elevating oneself. In fact, the activists I knew and I tended to denigrate ourselves more than anything. It wasn't about us, it was about the desperately needed work we were doing, it was about the people we were trying to help. The danger of the crusader mentality is that it turns the world in a battle between good and evil. Actions that would otherwise seem extreme and crazy become natural and expected. I didn't think twice about doing a lot of things I would never do today. . . .
Perhaps the most deeply held tenet of a certain version of anti-oppressive politics - which is by no means the only version - is that members of an oppressed group are infallible in what they say about the oppression faced by that group. This tenet stems from the wise rule of thumb that marginalized groups must be allowed to speak for themselves. But it takes that rule of thumb to an unwieldy extreme. . . .
Consider otherkin, people who believe they are literally animals or magical creatures and who use the concepts and language of anti-oppressive politics to talk about themselves. I have no problem drawing my own conclusions about the lived experience of otherkin. Nobody is literally a honeybee or a dragon. We have to assess claims about oppression based on more than just what people say about themselves. If I took the idea of the infallibility of the oppressed seriously, I would have to trust that dragons exist.
As Dreher notes, it's telling that this essay-which really is superb, you ought to read the whole thing-was published anonymously.
Exhibit B is a shorter piece from a university professor. Like the first essay, this writer seems to be generally left-ish. Like the first essay, the writer is anonymous. And like the first essay, the writer views the current university environment as something nightmarish:
Personally, liberal students scare the [$h*t] out of me. I know how to get conservative students to question their beliefs and confront awful truths, and I know that, should one of these conservative students make a facebook page calling me a communist or else seek to formally protest my liberal lies, the university would have my back. I would not get fired for pissing off a Republican, so long as I did so respectfully, and so long as it happened in the course of legitimate classroom instruction.
The same cannot be said of liberal students. All it takes is one slip-not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery-and that's it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and there's a twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance. . . .
There are literally dozens of articles and books I thought nothing of teaching, 5-6 years ago, that I wouldn't even reference in passing today. I just re-read a passage of Late Victorian Holocausts, an account of the British genocide against India, and, wow, today I'd be scared if someone saw a copy of it in my office. There's graphic pictures right on the cover, harsh rhetoric ("genocide"), historical accounts filled with racially insensitive epithets, and a profound, disquieting indictment of capitalism. No way in hell would I assign that today. Not even to grad students.
Here's how bad it's gotten, for reals: last summer, I agonized over whether or not to include texts about climate change in my first-year comp course. They would have fit perfectly into the unit, which was about the selective production of ignorance and the manipulation of public discourse. But I decided against including them. They forced readers to come to uncomfortable conclusions. They indicted our consumption-based lifestyles. They called out liars for lying. Lots of uncomfortable stuff. All it would take was one bougie, liberal student to get offended by them, call them triggering, and then boom, that's it, that's the end of me.
And for Exhibit C, we have an essay by Judith Shulevitz (I like to think of her as the Mickey Kaus of feminism) in-of all places-the New York Times. Shulevitz takes readers through a parade of horribles from Smith to Hampshire to Brown, with students braying about their "safety" being threatened by a stray word or a campus speaker with whom they disagree. She recognizes that the root of the "safety" claim is not about actual safety, but about power:
Another reason students resort to the quasi-medicalized terminology of trauma is that it forces administrators to respond. Universities are in a double bind. They're required by two civil-rights statutes, Title VII and Title IX, to ensure that their campuses don't create a "hostile environment" for women and other groups subject to harassment. However, universities are not supposed to go too far in suppressing free speech, either. If a university cancels a talk or punishes a professor and a lawsuit ensues, history suggests that the university will lose. But if officials don't censure or don't prevent speech that may inflict psychological damage on a member of a protected class, they risk fostering a hostile environment and prompting an investigation. As a result, students who say they feel unsafe are more likely to be heard than students who demand censorship on other grounds.
The "trigger warnings," "the safe spaces," the entire racket is just an expedient way to wield political power. It's a pretext for enforcing ideological censorship. To drive the shiv home, Shulevitz closes with a scene from the University of Chicago a few weeks ago:
A few weeks ago, Zineb El Rhazoui, a journalist at Charlie Hebdo, spoke at the University of Chicago, protected by the security guards she has traveled with since supporters of the Islamic State issued death threats against her. During the question-and-answer period, a Muslim student stood up to object to the newspaper's apparent disrespect for Muslims and to express her dislike of the phrase "I am Charlie."
Ms. El Rhazoui replied, somewhat irritably, "Being Charlie Hebdo means to die because of a drawing," and not everyone has the guts to do that (although she didn't use the word guts). She lives under constant threat, Ms. El Rhazoui said. The student answered that she felt threatened, too.
A few days later, a guest editorialist in the student newspaper took Ms. El Rhazoui to task. She had failed to ensure "that others felt safe enough to express dissenting opinions." Ms. El Rhazoui's "relative position of power," the writer continued, had granted her a "free pass to make condescending attacks on a member of the university." In a letter to the editor, the president and the vice president of the University of Chicago French Club, which had sponsored the talk, shot back, saying, "El Rhazoui is an immigrant, a woman, Arab, a human-rights activist who has known exile, and a journalist living in very real fear of death. She was invited to speak precisely because her right to do so is, quite literally, under threat."
You'd be hard-pressed to avoid the conclusion that the student and her defender had burrowed so deep inside their cocoons, were so overcome by their own fragility, that they couldn't see that it was Ms. El Rhazoui who was in need of a safer space.
Three stories. Three disaffected liberals willing to speak out. Three cracks in the power structure. It's a small start. But this is how regimes fall. | | | | LOOKING BACK | | | | | "So why wasn't it celebrated properly at the time? The answer has to do with the nature of cultural orthodoxy in 1972. Primarily, The Godfather couldn't possibly be great-indeed, it would have seemed crazy to apply the word "great" to it-because it was derived from a potboiling bestseller with dirty sex scenes (read aloud in every junior high school locker room, and in every summer camp bunk, from 1969 onward) that had sold as well as it did in part because its author's Italian surname suggested he had some deep inside scoop on the growth of the Mafia."
-John Podhoretz, "Forty Years On," from our March 26, 2012, issue.
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How IKEA conquered the world.
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Reminder: The airlines are intentionally degrading the customer experience in order to create new charges. | | | | INSTANT CLASSIC | | | | | "It's all my fault. I should have let the ball hit the rim. I take the blame on myself."
-SMU's Yanick Moreira sitting in front of the media and giving a master class on accountability after a tough first-round loss to UCLA, March 20, 2015. | | | | THE LAST WORD | | | | | While we're on the subject of the collapse of ideological movements, I'd direct your attention to a very smart series on the effects of marijuana legalization in the Colorado Springs Gazette. The four-part series began on Sunday and you can find the whole thing here. It's a great piece of reportage that takes a reckoning of one of the great leftist (and libertarian) policy experiments of recent years.
What the Gazette found was that marijuana legalization has delivered very few of the promised benefits at the same time that it created a host of unintended (but not unanticipated) consequences. For instance: Legalizing marijuana was supposed to drag the black drug market into the light. Instead, it's actually feeding black markets across the country:
More than 40 states have reported seizures of Colorado marijuana and THC products, according to the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. The federally funded task force also reports that seizures involving Colorado marijuana bound for other states have risen nearly 400 percent, from 58 incidents in 2008 to 288 in 2013 - the year before Colorado's marijuana retail stores opened. That is consistent with Denver police records showing a nearly 1,000-percent spike in the amount of marijuana officers have seized - 937 pounds in 2011 compared to a little more than 4 tons last year. El Paso, Denver and Boulder counties are the top three sources for out-of-state marijuana trafficking, the HIDTA reports.
"Colorado is the black market for the rest of the country," HIDTA Director Tom Gorman said. "Now, the state just has a so-called legal market competing with the cartels, which haven't missed a beat. All ships rose with this tide."
Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman spoke in similarly stark terms when meeting with fellow state attorneys general at a professional conference in February. She lambasted marijuana legalization advocates' linchpin argument that marijuana producers and users would play by the rules of law and significantly wrest control of marijuana sales from drug traffickers and cartels.
"Don't buy that," she told the room. "The criminals are still selling on the black market. ...We have plenty of cartel activity in Colorado (and) plenty of illegal activity that has not decreased at all." [END BLOCK]
Remember how legalizers also promised that tax revenue from pot sales would pay for treatment programs and schools and all sorts of other public goodies? Not so much. "The 15 percent excise tax dedicated for schools - projected alone to raise $40 million - has generated about one-third of original estimates," the Gazette reports. The original budget projected $100 million in marijuana tax revenues. The real number has been closer to $33 million. And it's not because people aren't smoking pot-they're growing their own or buying from "medical dispensaries" in order to get around paying taxes.
As Ben Cort from the University of Colorado Hospital's Center for Addiction Recovery and Rehabilitation at the University of Colorado Hospital tells the Gazette, "The ugly truth is that Colorado was suckered. It was promised regulation and has been met by an industry that fights tooth and nail any restrictions that limit its profitability. Just like Big Tobacco before it, the marijuana industry derives profits from addiction-state officials euphemistically call that heavy use-and its survival depends on turning a percentage of kids into lifelong customers."
In a just world, this amazing series would win a Pulitzer. Don't miss it.
Best,
Jonathan V. Last
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