by Bruce Thornton
Dartmouth University President Sian Beiloc takes a stand for "brave spaces”.
Hamas’ savage attack on Israeli civilians on October 7 sparked “woke” leftist protests at prestigious universities. The protestors sided with the terrorists butchers, indulged antisemitic and genocidal chants and slogans, and threatened the well-being of Jewish students. Campus “cancel culture,” the silencing of dissenting opinions and ideas, ran amok.
Worse, many university administrators sided with what could only be described as “hate speech,” and refused to commit to a clear condemnation of the terrorists and their student cheerleaders. Instead, they relied on weasel words like “context” to avoid their students’ wrath. The First Amendment and academic freedom, long ailing in our premier universities, are now languishing on life-support.
One exception, however, was Dartmouth University. Its president, Sian Beiloc, has created the Dartmouth Dialogues program. “I don’t want safe spaces, I want brave spaces,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “The idea is to be around the brightest minds and to be pushed and to be a little uncomfortable. Even if you’re not going to change your mind, the ability to hone your arguments and to think differently from different perspectives, these are skills and tools of higher education.”
Universities have been so corrupted by “political correctness” and its “woke” iteration, that any university president who publicly acknowledges the importance of challenging students’ ideas and opinions is welcome. We need to encourage more academics to return to the traditions of liberal education before our heritage of political freedom and equality, under assault in this country for more than a century, descends further into despotism.
But we need more than just politely listening and pondering the “other side.” We must restore and strengthen the role of reasoned argument, empirical evidence, and truth as the premier arbiter of political opinions. These foundational metrics for evaluating political ideas and ideologies, however, have been deformed in our universities and replaced with various incoherent ideas like radical relativism and amoral utilitarianism.
For the truth is, there are defining differences between our country’s two major political ideologies that are more than just party loyalty, grubby self-interest, or the lust for material wealth and power. One faction––which supports our Constitutional limited government founded on the universal reality of innate human vulnerability to destructive passions––acknowledges tradition and common sense, the collective experiences of billions of human beings that over time and space provide evidence of human behavior and motivation.
The other faction is the ideal of endless progress and improvement brought about by “experts” trained in the “human sciences”––Stalin’s “engineers of the soul.” Such technocracies must concentrate and centralize power, and discredit all rivals, particularly family, faith, tradition, customs, and common sense that challenge the authority of the “managerial elite.” Only by discrediting and displacing these traditional authorities can the “guardians,” as Plato called them in his technocratic utopia, create heaven on earth.
Yet despite pretensions of “scientific” knowledge and rational debate, despite their Orwellian rhetoric of “social justice” and “equity,” the left’s ideologies are mere pretexts for seizing power and dominating others “by any means necessary.” Hence their penchant for violence, intimidation, “cancel culture,” and censorship. They respond to pleas for reasoned debate and open minds as did the young Nazi whom philosopher of science Karl Popper tried to reason with: “You want to argue? I don’t argue, I shoot.”
Next, today’s leftists share a cult-like, extravagant certainty of their moral superiority that brooks no challenges, especially from facts that clash with their political narrative, and offend their righteous self-esteem. Their recourse to hysteria rather than reasoned, empirically supported arguments, gives the game away, as do the preposterous, illogical, and mendacious claims such as “systemic racism” or “transgenderism.” For the “woke,” differing opinions are not opportunities for sharpening the mind or exposing weak arguments, but stages on which exorbitant emotional melodramas are performed with “passionate intensity.”
Searching for the truth, however, and weeding out empirically false claims have never interested the evangelical left. They want to change the world, not their own minds. Moreover, the abandonment of truth, traditional faith, and sound arguments has left a void in our mental landscapes, which abhor a vacuum no less than nature does.
Dennis Praeger recently described the consequences:
“Instead of good and evil, we now have a set of other ‘moral’ categories: rich and poor, white and black, colonizers and colonized, strong and weak, oppressors and oppressed. Those in the latter groups — the poor, people of color, the colonized, the weak and the oppressed (real or alleged) — are, by definition, good, while those in the former categories are, by definition, bad.”
This Manichean catalogue makes the idea of respectful, open-minded debate on contested political ideas nearly impossible. A generation nursed on therapeutic pabulum and intolerance of discomfort, along with a ridiculous sense of entitlement and self-regard, will not stand for any challenges to their “woke” doctrines and victim-based identities. Careful thought and reasoned language must give way to hysterical virtue-signaling, and often violence. As leftist determinism tells us, the “personal is political,” a question of power, status, and a spurious moral prestige rather than truth.
As the Journal points out, in April the Dartmouth Dialogues program’s ambitions will be “put to the test”–– “a moderated discussion between Samieh El-Abd, a former Palestinian Authority official, and Gilead Sher, who served as chief of staff to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.”
No doubt the organizers are thinking about the reaction of their “woke” students, which experience tells us will be as unhinged and disruptive as possible. It will be embarrassing if an event supposedly promoting the pedagogical value of hearing alternative ideas, becoming “a little uncomfortable,” and learning “to think differently from different perspectives,” as the university’s president said, ends up being shut down by a mob that disdains all those ideals.
Indeed, given the shameless indulgence of antisemitic tropes, celebrations of brutal violence, and genocidal slogans, one doubts the deranged protestors will benefit from being “a little uncomfortable,” nor will they be in the mood “to think differently.” In their minds, they are absolutely certain of their virtue and righteousness. Like Lenin, they believe, as Gary Saul Morson explains, “that there was no need to understand opposing views before denouncing them, since the very fact that they were opposing views proved them wrong—and what was wrong served the enemy.”
More important, the century-long conflict between the Jews and Palestinian Arabs has produced such an abundance of lies and bad history that they comprise their own dialect of Newspeak. Most of the discourse about the conflict comprises gross distortion or patent lies: “imperialism,” “settler colonialism,” “genocide,” “occupation,” “racism,” “disproportionate,” “Palestinian.” All that vocabulary serves political propaganda, which can never be the subject of the sort of critical “dialogue” that leads to truth, or at least identifies, as did Socrates, what is false or mere opinion.
And if there is no foundation of accepted facts, then there can be no rational conversation about issues steeped in such extravagant emotions. Without truth as our lodestar, no discussion can end in anything but intimidation, censorship, or violence.
No doubt, Dartmouth’s president is sincere, and she is right about free speech and its boons. But our “woke” battalions marching for Hamas are not interested in growing intellectually, or searching for truth, or changing minds through sweet reason. Like Goldfinger, they don’t expect their ideological enemies to talk. They expect them to die.
Bruce Thornton
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/truth-is-more-important-than-civility/
No comments:
Post a Comment