Settled philosophies

Via HuffingtonPost.

Warning: some of the language in this post may cause readers discomfort or even trigger feelings of helpless rage. For example, I may find myself quoting David Brooks:

Laura Kipnis is a feminist film professor at Northwestern University who wrote a provocative piece on sexual mores on campus that was published in February. She was hit with two Title IX charges on the grounds, without evidence, that her words might have a “chilling effect” on those who might need to report sexual assaults.

Indeed. What he doesn't tell us is about yesterday's report in Chronicle of Higher Education that Kipnis has been entirely exonerated, quite rightly, so that while she no doubt should never have been investigated at all, it could be worse.

Similarly, when the writer Wendy Kaminer used the word that begins with N in quotes, as it were (i.e., not to designate a person but to discuss the word itself) in a discussion of the annoying expression "n-word" at an event for the alumnae of Smith College (or an "alumni event" as Brooks ungenderedly calls it) and was roundly and probably not quite fairly criticized for doing so, she survived to write a Washington Post op-ed about her experience which is far more interesting than anything Brooks has to say today. It wasn't right, but she's going to be OK. She may well be OK already.

Brooks mentions a bunch of people who have suffered from aggressive campus speech policing, none of the other ones by name (weirdly, he names only those who sound like Jewish women, while the unnamed victims are gentiles, male, or both).

The "Brandeis professor" who uttered the term "wetback", again referring to it rather than using it, was Donald Hindley, in 2007, who objected when he was found "guilty of racial harrassment" and had a monitor placed in his class, but it didn't affect his career; what drove him out of teaching this January, eight years later, was that

he thought that his own department had become “far more conservative,” and  “far fewer … let me call them, activist, liberal-minded people” are at Brandeis. “I just could not tolerate anymore. It just wasn’t worth tolerating anymore what the place was becoming under Lawrence,” said Hindley in an interview with the Justice. 

As exemplified by the obnoxious offer of an honorary degree to professional Muslim-hater Ayaan Hirsi Ali, against whom he was one of the enthusiastic, and successful, protesters (Brooks, as faithful readers will recall, is one of Hirsi Ali's big backers). Making him a really lousy poster child for the Brooksian concept of free speech.

This researcher was unable to make a positive identification of the "university president" who was "pilloried" for allowing the campus atmosphere to become "unsafe" and "hostile", but context suggests that it must have been the college president of the Kaminer case, at Smith, Kathleen McCartney, who wrote an apology using the word "unsafe" (but not "hostile") after a somewhat mild form of pillorying, in which she was forced to receive an unpleasant letter:

some members of our community wrote to me to denounce Kaminer’s statement as racist as well as to say I should have criticized her views. I take such feedback seriously, especially from students, who are at the heart of our work here at Smith. I am deeply sorry that some students and faculty were hurt as a result of this event.... Students of color spoke powerfully about how the use of the “n-word” makes them feel unsafe, that they view it as a “hate word,” and that “people who aren’t Black don’t understand the word.” I saw and felt their pain in our conversation, not for the first time in my career as an educator...

Via University of South Florida.

The anonymous male Jewish George Washington University student who "wrote an essay on the pre-Nazi history of the swastika" didn't. In fact he posted an image of a (South Asian) swastika on the bulletin board of his (historically Jewish) fraternity, without explanation, at a time when there had been a number of (clearly hostile) swastika incidents on campus as well as on a number of campuses around the country. He later said he had been "hoping to have a conversation about the symbol and did not intend to offend anyone" and I can imagine that he could have been telling the truth, but that is some awesomely bad judgment.

If you can't understand how a bunch of Jewish students might want to report such a thing as a swastika appearing out of nowhere on their bulletin board as scary, you can't understand very much. And if you can understand it maybe you could try to understand how the sound of that word that starts with an N emerging from a white person's lips could also be, ah, startling. Even when the speaker totally meant no offense ("poison in jest, not the least offense i' the world").

But as an example of the kind of helpless fear that, according to Brooks, grips our college campuses nowadays—

you come across tales of professors whose lives are ruined because they made innocent remarks; you see speech codes that inhibit free expression; you see reputations unfairly scarred by charges of racism and sexism.

I don't think so. Other than Hirsi Ali not getting her (undeserved) honorary doctorate, nobody in this set of stories is really getting treated that badly. There may be some in the recent (Regnery Press!) publication The Silencing by "lifelong liberal" Kirsten Powers, but nobody I know (hi, Steve!) can find any.

And Brooks isn't even looking. He can't get one of his stories halfway straight.


The real subject matter of the column isn't even that, anyway. The political correctness thing is an excuse for a kind of début like that of Caitlyn Jenner, of the new Brooksy, who has arrived in the course of his recent researches at Character, and has become serene and flooded with compassion, even for the most liberal among us:

These students are driven by noble impulses to do justice and identify oppression. They want to not only crack down on exploitation and discrimination, but also eradicate the cultural environment that tolerates these things. They want to police social norms so that hurtful comments are no longer tolerated and so that real bigotry is given no tacit support. Of course, at some level, they are right. Callous statements in the mainstream can lead to hostile behavior on the edge. That’s why we don’t tolerate Holocaust denial.

I wonder if there's ever been a paragraph before using the verb "tolerate" three times.

But what our noble students lack is the benefits of "settled philosophies", which somehow makes me think of the bits of canned pineapple or pears or what have you your mother might slip in a tub of Jell-O as it got halfway congealed, or more accurately perhaps of a sedimentary rock like limestone:

the campus activists have moral fervor, but don’t always have settled philosophies to restrain the fervor of their emotions. Settled philosophies are meant to (but obviously don’t always) instill a limiting sense of humility, a deference to the complexity and multifaceted nature of reality. But many of today’s activists are forced to rely on a relatively simple social theory [according to which the] essential conflict is between the traumatized purity of the victim and the verbal violence of the oppressor.

It's not quite like settled science or settled law, in the sense that you can't really depend on it to work when you need it, "obviously". I imagine it restrains your fervor by weighing you down, settling your stomach, keeping you in your couch. "You get the doorbell, Edna? I just got my philosophies all settled down."

As for the "simple social theory" of the "essential conflict", that's not a straw man but a sort of cooked noodle man, so limp and starchy it can settle you right to sleep. Who on earth believes anything like that?

I'm pretty sure most activist college students would say that the things that cause trauma, such as sexual and political violence and abuse of power of all kinds, war, oppression, intentional starvation, enslaving workers, homelessness in Syria and homelessness in Los Angeles, poisoning whole populations, are more "essential" issues than "verbal violence". The only people who actually argue that manners are more important than laws are neo-Burkeans like Mr. David Brooks.

Noodle man image apparently once, though not currently, here.