§ Like so many leaflets before them, these talked about the scourge
of "privilege". And whom did these pamphlets identify as the people
with the most privilege?
§ At present, the people who preach tolerance in America and Canada
are turning out to be the least tolerant.
§ And the people who complain of discrimination turn out to be
leading practitioners of the oldest discrimination of all.
The free speech wars on North American
campuses appear to have arrived at their inevitable endpoint. For years,
American and Canadian students have played around with a new form of morality
in education. It is based not on a traditional concept of searching for truth
or investigating and analysing ideas, but rather on the concept that the
veracity of an opinion can be discerned by the person uttering it.
In this way, a considerable number of
people have apparently decided that a variety of "privileges" exist
that make some speakers vital to listen to and others unnecessary, unless they
agree to mouth a set of pre-ordained platitudes.
This concept, coupled with the idea that
minorities require special protection from speech, have now finally delivered
the moral breakdown that was always waiting for it. The warning signs have been
there for years.
In 2010, the former editor of the
left-wing magazine The New Republic, Martin Peretz, arrived to speak at
Harvard University. There he was greeted by a group of around a hundred
students and others who decided to shout at him as he arrived at their campus.
They decided to greet him with chants of "Hey hey, ho ho, Marty Peretz has
got to go." And so, a generation of American students who can have had
little, if any, knowledge of Peretz's career or left-wing interests, chose to
name him a racist and be done with him.
Being Jewish, a minority group, certainly
did not offer any protection, and may indeed have harmed his cause; it already
seemed that there were ordering-systems at work in the business of minority
priorities.
By the time, then, that the British-born
Milo Yiannopoulos was touring American campuses in 2016-17, protest movements
were busily trying to work out precisely what orders of persecuted minorities
should exist. As Yiannopoulos is openly gay, there was a slight queasiness
about shutting him down -- at first. People who are members of at least one
minority group have a certain protected status, and as such a certain
inevitably about ranking develops. But just as you can be marked up, you can be
marked down. Yiannopoulos may be gay, but he has been rude about aspects of
transsexualism. That view at least evened things out. However, his tendency to
criticise Islam and Muslims moved him lower -- indeed right down to the lowest
level, that of white heterosexual male.
|
Activist
and writer Milo Yiannopoulos, who is gay but has been rude about aspects of
transsexualism, was supposed to speak at the University of California,
Berkeley on February 1. That evening, a mob of 150 people, who opposed to
Yiannopoulos' presence, proceeded to riot, smash and set fire to the campus,
causing more than $100,000 of damage. (Image source: RT video screenshot)
|
As though to prove that it was not just
"provocateurs" who now incur the wrath of the Stepford students, this
year, the distinguished sociologist Charles Murray (no relation) was due to
speak at Middlebury College. The college authorities had warned students that
while protests would be allowed, any attempts to disrupt the lecture would be
looked at in a very different light.
Murray was due to address the themes of
his 2012 book, Coming Apart, a seminal analysis of the social
bifurcation and sense of being "left behind" that led to last year's
election results in America.
Students at a liberal college could
ordinarily do with hearing someone explain the social forces that are pulling
them and the rest of the country apart from each other.
But the students of Middlebury evidently
decided that they did not need to hear this. Instead of simply staying away
from the lecture, they chose to embed those divisions. Dozens of the students
at Middlebury decided, it seems, that Murray was a racist. They had also
decided, for reasons which nobody even bothered to explain, that he was
"anti-gay".
So, before and during Murray's thwarted
attempt to give a lecture, they bawled and chanted,
among other things, a variant of the national anthem of modern North American
campuses: "Hey hey, ho ho, Charles Murray has got to go."
Later the same month, it was the Canadian
professor and psychologist Jordan Peterson's turn. He was meant to be lecturing
at McMaster University. But students crowded around the front and sides of the
lecture hall as he attempted, in his learned and professorial way, to enlighten
the students on a variety of issues. Disruptive students, however, had
apparently decided that Peterson was "anti-trans", among other
things. So they let off sirens and banged tins
and repeatedly shouted, "Shut this down. Shut this down."
Peterson is, it seems to have been
decided, meant to be a person of privilege; trans people are meant to be part
of a persecuted minority.
Once again, therefore, the disruption and
intimidation were portrayed to seem justified.
As at Middlebury, the college authorities
seemed to have no desire to discipline students who know so little of true
liberalism that they should ordinarily have no place at an institution of
learning. But of course, at these institutions, as at so many before them, the
adults appear to have vacated the campus.
Students who want to protect their ears
from white men telling them anything with which they do not already agree may
cause these ugly and totalitarian scenes. They do not occur, notably, when
truly ugly and totalitarian views emerge.
Although students up and down the land
claim that words wound and even kill when they come from people who have never
wounded or killed anyone, it seems that these or other students remain silent
when, for example, a former Black Panther associate and supporter of
innumerable totalitarian regimes, such as Angela Davis, turns up to speak.
At the end of the same month in which Murray
and Peterson were prevented from speaking, Davis was invited to address
Marquette University. Because she does all the boilerplate stuff such as
stressing how various rights movements "make a positive difference in the
world", and otherwise telling students what many of them want to hear, her
lecture at Marquette
went off without interruption. Everyone in the packed hall listened politely and applauded her
sentiments.
In other words, the approved event was
not a lecture; it was a political rally.
Davis has certainly little or nothing new
to say that would educate or challenge a hall full of students. Her narrative,
like that of so many approved speakers, embeds the idea that there are people
with privilege and that they should be persuaded or forced to share that
privilege with everyone else.
So it is probably as well that people
realise where this narrative leads. When you consistently break down a society
along racial and sectarian lines for short-term political and personal gain,
there is bound to be a group that must in the end lose out. That group may just
turn out to be a minority as well.
Sure enough, the same month that Angela
Davis was applauded and Peterson and Murray were silenced, some pamphlets turned up on campus at the
University of Illinois at Chicago. Like so many leaflets before them, these
talked about the scourge of "privilege". And who did these pamphlets
identify as the people with the most privilege? Why, the Jews of course. Or, as
the pamphlets put it, "Ending white privilege... Starts with ending Jewish
privilege."
As with the Occupy Wall Street movement a
few years ago, which also ended up with anti-Semitism at its core, who could
seriously not have seen that this would be where all this would end? At
present, the people who preach tolerance in the United States and Canada are
turning out to be the least tolerant.
And the people who complain of
discrimination turn out to be opening the door to practitioners of the oldest
discrimination of all.
Douglas Murray, British author,
commentator and public affairs analyst, is based in London, England.
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