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students at many colleges today are walking on eggshells, afraid of saying the wrong thing, liking the wrong post, or coming to the defense of someone whom they know to be innocent, out of fear that they themselves will be called out by a mob on social media.
“You’re right, my brother, you’re right. You are so right. All lives matter, right? But when a black life is lost, we get no justice. That is why we say ‘black lives matter.’ . . .
If we really want to make America great, we do it together.”
The human mind evolved for living in tribes that engaged in frequent (and often violent) conflict; our modern-day minds readily divide the world into “us” and “them,” even on trivial or arbitrary criteria, as Henri Tajfel’s psychological experiments demonstrated. Identity politics takes many forms. Some forms, such as that practiced by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Pauli Murray, can be called common-humanity identity politics, because its practitioners humanize their opponents and appeal to their humanity while also applying political pressure in other ways. Common-enemy identity politics, on
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campus can sometimes amplify tribal thinking and encourage students to endorse the Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Common-enemy identity politics, when combined with microaggression theory, produces a call-out culture in which almost anything one says or does could result in a public shaming. This can engender a sense of “walking on eggshells,” and it teaches students habits of self-censorship. Call-out cultures are detrimental to students’ education and bad for their mental health. Call-out cultures and us-versus-them thinking are incompatible
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When we dehumanise and demonise our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them.
Many of them came from local radical anarchist groups that call themselves “antifascists,” or “Antifa.”
Berkeley and its aftermath were the start of a new and more dangerous era. Since then, many students on the left have become increasingly receptive to the idea that violence is sometimes justified as a response to speech they believe is “hateful.”
lesson: Violence works. Unsurprisingly, the Antifa activists built on their success by threatening more violence in response to campus invitations to conservatives David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, and Ben Shapiro.
“Asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act.”
But if asking for peaceful dialogue is violent, then it seems that the word “violence” is taking on new meanings for some students. This is another example of concept creep.
30% of undergraduate students surveyed agreed with this statement: “If someone is using hate speech or making racially charged comments, physical violence can be justified to prevent this person from espousing their hateful views.”40
It also includes a rhetorical flourish that became common in 2017: the assertion that a speaker will “deny” people from certain identity groups “the right to exist.”60 This thinking is a form of catastrophizing, in that it inflates the horrors of a speaker’s words far beyond what the speaker might actually say.
The sight of Nazi flags and the murder of Heyer profoundly shook an already divided nation. It was a moment that brought together many Republicans and Democrats in leadership positions in a forceful denunciation of the white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
October 2017, she wrote a powerful essay in The Washington Post titled “Professors Like Me Can’t Stay Silent About This Extremist Moment on Campuses.” Here is an excerpt:
No one should have to pass someone else’s ideological purity test to be allowed to speak. University life—along with civic life—dies without the free exchange of ideas. In the face of intimidation, educators must speak up, not shut down. Ours is a position of unique responsibility: We teach people not what to think, but how to think.
But if you keep the distinction between speech and violence clear in your mind, then many more options are available to you. First, you can take the Stoic response and develop your ability to remain unmoved. As Marcus Aurelius advised, “Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.”
The Stoics understood that words don’t cause stress directly; they can only provoke stress and suffering in a person who has interpreted those words as posing a threat. You can choose whether to interpret a visiting speaker as harmful. You can pick your battles, devote your efforts to changing policies that matter to you, and make yourself immune to trolls. The internet will always be there; extremists will always be posting potentially offensive images and statements; some groups will be targeted more than others. It’s not fair, but even as we work to lessen hatred and heal divisions, all of
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There are two ideas about safe spaces: One is a very good idea and one is a terrible idea. The idea of being physically safe on a campus—not being subjected to sexual harassment and physical abuse, or being targeted specifically, personally, for some kind of hate speech—“you are an n-word,” or whatever—I am perfectly fine with that. But there’s another view that is now I think ascendant, which I think is just a horrible view, which is that “I need to be safe ideologically. I need to be safe emotionally. I just need to feel good all the time, and if someone says something that I don’t like,
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I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the
But what if the goal of a movement isn’t entirely peaceful resolution but, rather—at least in part—group cohesion?
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. ERIC HOFFER, The True Believer1
Historical and sociological analyses of witch trials have generally explained these outbreaks as responses to a group experiencing either a sense of threat from outside, or division and loss of cohesion within.
We are very good at being individuals pursuing our everyday goals (which Durkheim called the level of the “profane,” or ordinary). But we also have the capacity to transition, temporarily, to a higher collective plane, which Durkheim called the level of the “sacred.” He said that we have access to a set of emotions that we experience only when we are part of a collective—feelings like “collective effervescence,” which Durkheim described as social “electricity” generated when a group gathers and achieves a state of union.
and it is the function of religious rituals to pull people up to the higher collective level, bind them to the group, and then return them to daily life with their group identity and loyalty strengthened.
In 1978, the sociologist Albert Bergesen wrote an essay titled “A Durkheimian Theory of ‘Witch-Hunts’ With the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966–1969 as an Example.”7 Bergesen used Durkheim to illuminate the madness that erupted in Beijing in May 1966, when Mao Zedong began warning about the rising threat of infiltration by pro-capitalist enemies. Zealous college students responded by forming the Red Guards to find and punish enemies of the revolution. Universities across the country were shut down for several years. During those years, the Red Guards rooted out any trace they could find—or
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How could such an orgy of self-destruction have happened?
They arise quickly: “Witch-hunts seem to appear in dramatic outbursts; they are not a regular feature of social life. A community seems to suddenly find itself infested with all sorts of subversive elements which pose a threat to the collectivity as a whole. Whether one thinks of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, the Stalinist Show Trials, or the McCarthy period in the United States, the phenomenon is the same: a community becomes intensely mobilized to rid itself of internal enemies.”10 Crimes against the collective: “The various charges that appear during one of these
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Fear of defending the accused: When a public accusation is made, many friends and bystanders know that the victim is innocent, but they are afraid to say anything.
Siding with the accused is truly an offense against the group, and it will be treated as such. If passions and fears are intense enough, people will even testify against their friends and family members.
But in today’s culture of safetyism, intent no longer matters; only perceived impact does, and thanks to concept creep, just about anything can be perceived as having a harmful—even violent—impact on vulnerable groups.
The letter demanded that the article be retracted—not rebutted but retracted. The signers were not asking for a chance to respond to Tuvel and correct her alleged mistakes (a common practice in academia); they were demanding that the article vanish from the scholarly record (a very rare occurrence, usually reserved for cases of fraud or plagiarism).
They contended that the “continued availability” of the article caused “harm” to women of color and the transgender community.
All in all, it’s remarkable how many basic facts this letter gets wrong about Tuvel’s paper. Either the authors simply lied about the article’s contents, or they didn’t read it at all. Every single one of the hundreds of signatories on the open letter now has their name on a document that severely (and arguably maliciously) mischaracterizes the work of one of their colleagues. This is not the sort of thing that usually happens in academia—it’s a really strange, disturbing instance of mass groupthink, perhaps fueled by the dynamics of online shaming and piling-on.26
The reaction to Tuvel’s article fits well into a Durkheimian framework: it is a surprising, “out of nowhere” eruption of “mass groupthink” in which trivial things (such as using the phrase “male genitalia”) are taken as grave attacks on a vulnerable community. These attacks then warrant a collective, solidarity-boosting response: an open letter that recruits hundreds of people to publicly sign their names and collectively point their fingers at the accused witch. Singal even titled his essay “This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like.”
But anthropologists generally agree that cultures and subcultures instill different goals, skills, and virtues in their members,32 and it can’t possibly be true that
all cultures prepare children equally well for success in all other cultures. If we want to improve outcomes for immigrants and the poor in a free-market, service-oriented capitalist economy such as ours, Wax and Alexander argued, it would be useful to talk about bourgeois culture.
They did not do what scholars are supposed to do: use their scholarly abilities to show where Wax and Alexander were wrong. They simply “condemned” and “categorically rejected” Wax’s claims.34
Solidarity is great for a group that needs to work in unison or march into battle. Solidarity engenders trust, teamwork, and mutual aid. But it can also foster groupthink, orthodoxy, and a paralyzing fear of challenging the collective. Solidarity can interfere with a group’s efforts to find the truth, and the search for truth can interfere with a group’s solidarity.
“the ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action.”35
One of the most brilliant features of universities is that, when they are working properly, they are communities of scholars who cancel out one another’s confirmation biases. Even if professors often cannot see the flaws in their own arguments, other professors and students do them the favor of finding such flaws. The community of scholars then judges which ideas survive the debate. We can call this process institutionalized disconfirmation.
One of the strongest personality correlates of left-wing politics is the trait of openness to experience, a trait that describes people who crave new ideas
and experiences and who tend to be interested in changing traditional arrangements.
On the other hand, members of the military, law enforcement personnel, and students who have well-organized dorm rooms tend to lean right. (Seriously. You can guess people’s political leanings at better-th...
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Social conservatives tend to be lower on openness to experience and higher on conscientiousness—they prefer things to be orderly and predictable, they are more likely to show up on time for meetings, and they are ...
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A left-to-right ratio of two or three to one should be enough to sustain institutionalized disconfirmation. And that’s about what the ratio was for most of the twentieth century.
The loss of political diversity among professors, particularly in fields that deal with politicized content, can undermine the quality and rigor of scholarly research.
students in politically homogeneous departments will mostly be exposed to books and research studies drawn from the left half of the range, so they are likely to come down to the “left” of the truth, on average.
Sometimes the left-leaning view turns out to be correct, sometimes it’s the right-leaning view, but on average, students will get closer to the truth if they are exposed to debates among credentialed scholars who approach difficult problems from differing perspectives.
viewpoint diversity is necessary for the development of critical thinking, while viewpoint homogeneity (whether on the left or the right) leaves a community vulnerable to groupthink and orthodoxy.
