Like most of the questions, it was backed up by a sea of finger snaps — the sort you can hear in the infamous Yale video, where a student screams at Prof. Christakis to “be quiet” and tells him that he is “disgusting.” I had never heard the snapping before. When it happens in a large auditorium it is disconcerting. It makes you feel that you are facing an angry and unified mob — a feeling I have never had in 25 years of teaching and public speaking.
You will find me posting quite a bit on Roger Scruton’s recent book, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, which is mostly about left-wing European philosophers. I am inclined to dismiss the significance of these characters. However, their totalitarian impulses are frightening, and the way that they have permeated part of the academic culture is depressing.
These finger-snappers and their friends will be running the country in 10 or 20 years. You should take them seriously and be afraid.
I don’t take many people very seriously and I’m not about to start with these ones.
Maybe what you mean is “respond effectively?”
That would be a colossal mistake. You know that they are petulant, childish, and utterly ridiculous, but they don’t know that, and they’ve learned they can shout down anyone who dares to tell them.
When he says “run the country”, understand more specifically what he means: These sorts of people are obviously completely unsuited for any commercial role in a for-profit enterprise, but unlike 40 or 50 years ago, there are now sufficient ways to go through life without having to adapt yourself to such responsibility. There are legion stories from Boomers who went through a radical phase in college but subsequently wised up when they got into “the real world.” But for Millenials, the non-real world is sufficiently large, powerful, prosperous that one can never step foot outside of it if one so chooses. From big-corporate HR and Compliance departments, university & school administration, professional activism, and the “nonprofit space”, there are plenty of gigs that allow you to go through life working exclusively with people who “share your commitment to social justice” and which pay just well enough to make one deeply bitter and resentful at being at the low-end of the professional class. Few of these people will have to grow up.
In 10 years they will be the HR commisar reading your emails and writing the head HR commisar ” to express concern that xes persistent use of gendered language raises questions about xes commitment to the core vision of the company and xes continued suitability to remain in a team environment that requires the ability to communicate effectively with a supportive posture and strong emotional aptitude. Please be advised that in the future this may raise the risk the company could find itself in a problematic situation regarding its brand image and possible even legal compliance.” That’s a parody, but not an extreme one. In 20 years they’ll be the head HR commisars that read such notes and then inform you and the company will “unfortunately have to part ways.”
How do you intend to “respond effectively” to that situation?
In 20 years, these kids will be bureau chiefs at DOJ, state attorneys general, district attorneys, partners at Wall Street law firms, and federal judges. That’s what’s really scary.
People of this ilk already constitute the staff of the State Department.
Who…whom? These people understand it, anyone who doesn’t is living in a dream world.
You want free speech amongst your in-group? Defeat the out-group. They certainly won’t stop till they defeat you, and they don’t play by the rules.
So, I’d heard there was a video and didn’t even want to watch it. What I hadn’t realized is that it is way more idiotic than I’d assumed. I had assumed it was in a lecture/discussion (what are these liberal arts people up to where student “discussion” is seen as a good thing let alone intrinsically educational…how ’bout now?). Turns out the students are protesting a professor because of an e-mail his wife wrote in response to a front-running, sniveling, pandering, CYA administration missive.
This comes up all the time in comment sections, though moderators are almost universally (present company excluded) just as oblivious as university adminstrations. The response to bullying is to figure out who is being bullied and allow them to defend themselves. This is the only response- all else will be co-opted by CYA and become an adjunct to bullying. The trick is knowing the difference and not succumbing to the CYA impulse.
Under the theory every action is a reaction, I wonder if this isn’t just the response to the closed minded, reality denialists, affinity believers, and demagogues, and this an attempt to turn freedom of speech into freedom from its consequences.
Good question and the answer is no. When you lobby somebody to prevent others from hearing something based on their relative monopoly (e.g. universities) that is where it crosses over into freedom of speech.
BTW, this particular instance of social media flash mobbing is not over just any old conservative opinion being shouted down, it is over an e-mail about censorship. Go ahead and read it.
https://www.thefire.org/email-from-erika-christakis-dressing-yourselves-email-to-silliman-college-yale-students-on-halloween-costumes/
Going after the ability to even discuss censorship respectfully on campus is a little too on-the-nose even for them don’t you think?
Is Jonathan Haidt a demagogue or “reality denialist?” Are Erika and Nicholas Christakis? How about Mary Spellman, the dean at Claremont McKenna who was recently forced out? I mean, clearly, conservatives are awful people who deserve whatever social opprobrium we can manage to heap on them, but it is concerning when this same opprobrium is visited on decent, well-meaning liberals, is it not?
> I mean, clearly, conservatives are awful people who deserve whatever social opprobrium we can manage to heap on them…
Is it fair to assume that this is sarcasm?
Is the pope Catholic?
It’s impossible to tell.
The gender divide Haidt mentions is interesting. I would not have expected our little play-Maoists to skew female the way he describes, but I guess it’s a brave new world we’re living in. Still, I wonder if this isn’t a product of being a private school, where they can kick you out for whatever they feel like, because it wasn’t [i]that[/i] long ago that I was in high school (public), and the idea that the girls there could “bully” the boys en masse, even if they wanted to, would have been considered patently ludicrous by everyone present. And I went to a good public school, too (college town, so the local high school was filled with faculty brats).
Too much Coddle U curriculum being fed to these lads in middle/high school, such that they allow themselves to be bullied by the girls? Not sure what you can do to combat that. If people permit themselves to be pushed around, there probably isn’t much to be done, and my sympathy is much reduced, anyway.
Bullying takes the form of what the authorities tolerate.
Not just tolerate, but enable and enforce. The boys are worried about turned into the campus ‘equality police’. Without that threat, bullying would not be possible.
Social Justice is weaponized female competition.
“…whose social cognition is limited to a single dimension of victims and victimizers…”
On the bright side, I have to adjust down my estimates on Yale signaling admissions.
It’s always profitable to draw sweeping conclusions about entire generations of people from, say, ONE video of ONE person. Using those same logic “skills”, I might conclude that the proprietor of this site is a tendentious hack who picks evidence to suit his prejudices.
Somehow I think you won’t quite grasp the analogy.
I guess you didn’t read the Haidt article.
Except you are wring so there is no analogy. He didn’t generalize about a generation or anything so your witty little analogy is nonsense.