Andrew Sullivan’s latest missive on New York Magazine includes some coverage on the latest craze showing up on a few college campuses. I’d heard about it showing up at Cal State – Northridge when a group of Armenian students shutdown a lecture by a Turkish scholar, as reported here (and by many others) by the Cal State Northridge Sundial:
Scholar George Gawrych got through no more than five sentences during his presentation on his book about Turkish army officer Mustafa Kemal Atatürk before students raised their voices in protest Thursday at the Aronstam Library in Manzanita Hall.
Over 20 protesters stood up from their seats, turned their backs on Gawrych and repeatedly chanted “Turkey guilty of genocide” and “genocide denialist.”
Gawrych waited briefly as other attendees voiced their opinions to let him speak, until he began walking up and down the aisle trying to get the protestors to face him.
I wrote it off as an isolated incident by a group frustrated by either Turkish obstinance or bad history. But now it appears it was a precursor to a more general movement (I’m not sure how many incidents may be tied to it, so I have no estimate on size), as Andrew analyzes:
Source: Middlebury College
Here’s the latest in the assault on liberal democracy. It happened more than a week ago, but I cannot get it out of my consciousness. A group of conservative students at Middlebury College in Vermont invited the highly controversial author Charles Murray to speak on campus about his latest book, Coming Apart. His talk was shut down by organized chanting in its original venue, and disrupted when it was shifted to a nearby room and livestreamed. When Murray and his faculty interlocutor, Allison Stanger, then left to go to their car, they were surrounded by a mob, which tried to stop them leaving the campus. Someone in the melee grabbed Stanger by the hair and twisted her neck so badly she had to go to the emergency room (she is still suffering from a concussion). After they escaped, their dinner at a local restaurant was crashed by the same mob, and they had to go out of town to eat. …
“Intersectionality” is the latest academic craze sweeping the American academy. On the surface, it’s a recent neo-Marxist theory that argues that social oppression does not simply apply to single categories of identity — such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. — but to all of them in an interlocking system of hierarchy and power. At least, that’s my best attempt to define it briefly. But watching that video helps show how an otherwise challenging social theory can often operate in practice.
It is operating, in Orwell’s words, as a “smelly little orthodoxy,” and it manifests itself, it seems to me, almost as a religion. It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained — and through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., “check your privilege,” and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay. The sin goes so deep into your psyche, especially if you are white or male or straight, that a profound conversion is required.
Like the Puritanism once familiar in New England, intersectionality controls language and the very terms of discourse. It enforces manners. It has an idea of virtue — and is obsessed with upholding it. The saints are the most oppressed who nonetheless resist. The sinners are categorized in various ascending categories of demographic damnation, like something out of Dante. The only thing this religion lacks, of course, is salvation. Life is simply an interlocking drama of oppression and power and resistance, ending only in death. It’s Marx without the final total liberation.
And, as university students and professors (a few were part of the semi-lynching at Middlebury), they should have an allegiance to the free and open exchange of information which is at the very heart of Western higher education. Instead, they have indulged in intellectual and physical violence, attempting to inflict their views by force.
This is surely grounds for ejection from their institutions.
But, on a very fundamental level, this also allies them with the white supremacists. Not on the common level of violence – that’s too general.
No, I’m talking that other, dishonorable trait, which I talked about before.
Laziness.
In essence, these folks are attempting to inflict their view on the world, not through the hard work of research and logic and communications, but quickly, if uncleanly, through some simple violence. For them is not the way of hard work. They want this to be quick, without having to actually justify through reason anything they’re doing.
I can understand the frustration that views they oppose don’t simply disappear, but humanity is not a rational species – it’s merely capable of being rational. By engaging in irrational behaviors themselves, they succeed only in encouraging their critics and opponents to do the same. By abandoning their allegiance to truth and reason, they encourage their opponents to do likewise.
And that’s just not good for anyone. Just as the current GOP dash to the right is destroying the GOP – and possibly the world – this incident shows the left is fully capable of madness as well.
