I think the world has gone insane. My blogroll is overflowing with posts about the Leftist students who police each other and their professors for signs of anything they might find uncomfortable and politically unacceptable. Here is an example (linking to more examples). And here is another one. And here is the response to the previous one. And I have at least 30 more, if anybody is interested.
The whole thing is beyond weird. Where are these people hiding if they are managing not to notice that students on the Right behave in exactly the same censorious, nitpicking, fault-finding way?
There is no political division here. The “political correctness” scandal is entirely apolitical. For every anecdote of Leftie students freaking out over something minor and trying to shut everybody up, I can offer a mirror case of Rightie students doing exactly the same thing. This is the most bipartisan issue I can think of. The Left and the Right are offending very equally in this area.
This isn’t about politics, folks. This is about the society of consumers where people have been convinced by advertisement that any discomfort, no matter how tiny it might be, is entirely abnormal and should be immediately cured with a magic pill. These people are not called Leftists or Conservatives. Their name is consumers. And woe be unto you if you cause them any vague discomfort whatsoever. This discomfort might happen in the realm of political discussions but it can also be related to anything else. And when consumers feel discomfort, they descend on you like an herd of irate shoppers who have just seen the last 5-dollar waffle-maker escape from their grip during a Thanksgiving sale.
Have you considered that you only see Leftists engage in this obnoxious policing of everybody around them because you simply don’t meet enough people who are politically to your Right? I happen to be meeting them all the time, and they know how to be just as tiresomely whiny about anything that deviates in the slightest degree from their received pieties as the annoying idiot Lefties in Chait’s and DeBoer’s essays.
Clarissa's Blog 
I used to be a part-time anti-oppression (fancy term for “don’t be racist/sexist/homophobic”) training coordinator for my school, and that experience taught me that, for every story about a leftie student demanding censorship of class material, I’ve got about five stories of conservative/centrist students bursting into tears, stomping their feet, or threatening to sue me/the university/our organization for telling them innocuous little truths like “sexism is real”, “police brutality against black and Native people in Canada happens”, “people with disabilities face exclusion” and “there are more than two genders”.
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Exactly! I’m being told that my lectures about the Inquisition oppress people because this is badmouthing Christianity, and I’m supposed to believe that this is somehow an exclusively Leftist problem?
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Have you had any run-ins with the organization that calls itself “Accuracy In Academia?”
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“Accuracy in Academia”? I’m pretty sure that they don’t exist in Canada. If they do, I haven’t run into them. My university will probably be on their radar though, now that the BC Supreme Court ruled that the anti-choice club doesn’t have the right to harass students who are minding their own business on their way to class by shoving pictures of bloody fake aborted fetuses in their face.
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“Have you had any run-ins with the organization that calls itself “Accuracy In Academia?”
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Hmm.. a little hard to believe that many threatened to sue… “sexism is real” I can see many potentially on the right saying “bull shit”, or that is exaggerated, but really threatening to sue? I feel that is exaggeration. Surely the number threatening to sue was much less than those complaining about those statemetns right?
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I thought the righties were the “tort reform” people.
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two statements / ideas come to mind
The squeaky wheel gets the oil. Those who complain loudest are generally awarded in todays world (especially on the world)
Nixon’s silent majority. Basically those who you hear are often diametrically opposed to what most people want / desire.
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If people are not ready to stand up for what they desire, it means they don’t really desire it.
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In the shadow of the silent majorities, the jokester with the fart sounds machine is king. 🙂
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“Hmm.. a little hard to believe that many threatened to sue… “sexism is real” I can see many potentially on the right saying “bull shit”, or that is exaggerated, but really threatening to sue? I feel that is exaggeration. Surely the number threatening to sue was much less than those complaining about those statemetns right?”
Nope. Actually threatening to sue. And two groups, an anti-abortion student group and a homophobic Catholic students group, actually followed through on the threats to sue and sued my university for “infringing on freedom of speech”, as did two individual students for similar “complaints”, both of whom lost. Why do you find it so hard to believe that hysterical idiots come in all political stripes?
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“Where are these people hiding if they are managing not to notice that students on the Right behave in exactly the same censorious, nitpicking, fault-finding way?”
Maybe your blogroll skews heavily left so you’re reading people on the left with no real contact with anyone on the right?
From what I can tell there’s a difference between right and left status pissing contests (which is what I think this really is).
The right cares more about staying on message in public and a little less (not a whole lot less but a discernible amount) about what people think and do in private (so that the multi-divorced and childless make a big deal about how important it is to stay married and have kids, for example).
On the left there’s more of an effort to hunt down and root out thoughtcrime (shakesville is a very good example of a party member devoting her energies to being in a constant state of (impotent) fury at the proles’ failure to get with the program already).
You could call that hypocrisy on the part of the right (and I’dagree) but I prefer it a little as being less exhausting than what the left does.
Ideologically I’ve always struck people as being a weird extremist for whatever their values aren’t. So a conservative cousin thought I was a communist and university people (in the US) thought I was a republican…..
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[cough] Red Tories read this blog too … [cough]
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On the left there’s more of an effort to hunt down and root out thoughtcrime (shakesville is a very good example of a party member devoting her energies to being in a constant state of (impotent) fury at the proles’ failure to get with the program already).
Nah, she seems happy. Her comment threads are down, and there’s less editing of comments she needs to do for unspecified “visual processing disorders” and content notes. There were/are some counter reaction blogs/tumblrs. She tweets a lot.
I can’t comment on right wing pissing contests from an internal perspective because I’ve never been on the right.
Wait, no. I once was an active commenter on a blog/forum that ostensibly had nothing to do with politics. The owner set the forum/blog up to promote her business. She spent endless hours posting articles from right wing news sites, and would get into these cycles where she’d sulk and cry because someone objected to something she said and she’d make all of these blog announcements. She paid her her sister to post threads and make sulky announcements as well about how she wasn’t a racist etc. She didn’t have trigger warnings or anything like that but she’d jump all over people just the same.
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“Nah, she seems happy. Her comment threads are down, and there’s less editing of comments she needs to do for unspecified “visual processing disorders” and content notes”
She’s happy in her little fiefdom now that there’s no possibility of dissent within it, but she seems in a state of unending rage against a world that thinks so little of so many of the ideas she holds so dear.
The most stupid thing I’m aware of on the right might not be happening anymore (I don’t keep up with them or anything) but was very common 10 or so years ago.
The idea was that anything they liked had to be because it was fundamentally “conservative”. If someone liked Italian food it wasn’t because they like the taste, it had to be because it embodied conservative ideas of tradition and patriotism and self-discipline yada yada yada.
If someone liked …. oh let’s say surfing they had to justify it by attaching a bunch of conservative ideals to it. It was all pretty embarassing to read.
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See, well, yeah, I called those oversensitive complaining types “Westerners”, but I may now shift the terminology to “consumers” as it may make more sense. I only called them “Westerners” in the first case due to my deep culture shock. I just couldn’t believe it and still can’t. You can represent a historical fact or even an autobiographical detail and people will take this as an attack on themselves. They hide away in language, calling people fascists and colonialists, but they are afraid of direct reality.
Shocking, really.
But not as bad as this:
http://heavy.com/news/2015/01/kenji-goto-dead-dies-executed-execution-beheaded-video-wife/
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Right, it’s an entirely apolitical fear of direct reality. You can’t be political unless you step out of the imaginary world you inhabit and engage with reality.
The horror of what happened to the Japanese journalist is profound. I don’t understand why it’s proving so impossible for the civilized people to put their resources together and simply wipe out these bandits.
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It’s political on another level, though, in the sense that people do band together with like feelings and oust those whose feeling-sensations are different from theirs. The problem is they increasingly do this until all that is left is to oust themselves. The hair of acceptability becomes split all the more narrowly.
Anyway. as for Japan, this is a stoical nation but its feelings run deep belying the coolness it evinces in the surface. We will have to see what happens now.
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Yes, this is what we now have instead of politics: a battle of vague resentments. God, how I hate when people respond to arguments with stupid sulky grimaces of silent resentment.
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It’s like people haven’t grown adult teeth yet. That is how I see it. They can’t digest the meaty, complex material. They get angry if you give them adult food.
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Today’s word is “kidult” … 🙂
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I just have to remind myself that I am speaking to zombies most of the time. It means no reaction on my part is required. But I said they were infants, too, and that is what you experience if you get too close. You get into the “good breast” “bad breast” Kleinian reactions, and if you do not give them, immediately, the nourishment they need, they pronounce you evil and claim you have attacked them in some way. Remarkable,
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Gessh, I thought this was simple food, too.
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Yeah, true to form I heard that Abe declares that Japan will “never forgive”.
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Nobody else seems to be doing anything about it. Let’s hope the Japanese start pushing for a more active response.
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I am almost certain this will happen. Japan cannot lose face. They have this inheritance of aristocratic nobility. Also as a culture the Japanese are way more rational than the West. They’re not absorbed in navel gazing. They will act coolly and decisively.
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I’m not so certain of this — the BoJ has done a number of things that are fairly gutless over the years, for instance, including the present-day policy of slow QE that’s meant to keep the Japanese from sinking along with the Americans …
The NDP has also been the default party of gutlessness, and various corruption scandals have meant that the Japanese people don’t necessarily have its back.
While Abe might be a return to some kind of tradition, I wouldn’t necessarily look for it being a given in this case.
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Yes, there is an element in Japan of some element of retirement, but I think the global zeigeist is leaving a vaccum for them to step in.
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No, really. This is true.
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quote: The video, called “A Message to the Government of Japan,” featured a militant who looked and sounded like a militant with a British accent who has taken part in other beheading videos by the Islamic State group. Goto, kneeling in an orange prison jumpsuit, said nothing in the roughly one-minute-long video.
“Abe,” the militant says in the video, referring to the Japanese prime minister, “because of your reckless decision to take part in an unwinnable war, this knife will not only slaughter Kenji, but will also carry on and cause carnage wherever your people are found. So let the nightmare for Japan begin.”
This comes at a time when the right wing nationalists of Japan are aiming to reactivate their military so that it is no longer a mere self-defence force with limited powers.
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No, really, it is true. He did actually declare that. It’s not even up for dispute.
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Honestly. It’s in all the papers.
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God’s truth.
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I made a mistake. The no longer hide behind terminology but behind the down votes they render because they cannot articulate an idea.
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“This is about the society of consumers where people have been convinced by advertisement that any discomfort, no matter how tiny it might be, is entirely abnormal and should be immediately cured with a magic pill. ”
Yes, and heaven help you if you point out to this tracksuits and trainers-wearing lot that they look like overgrown kidults, and that if they had even the most remote shred of self-respect, they’d stop dressing as if they were over-indulged teenagers or would-be undiscovered fashion models on a “slumming down” break …
Because not only do they believe they shouldn’t feel any discomfort in their views, which Gasset correctly labelled as “non-opinions”, but also they believe they shouldn’t feel any discomfort at all, they have become the Revolt of the Masses that Gasset warned us about.
I suspect that if the Soma for the Revolt of the Masses does arrive, it will blanket these people in a sense of comfort not unlike being in a tres louche airport lounge, with the mental effect of having your brain scrubbed by a vodka martini wrapped in a gold-painted concrete block, with a touch of lemon so you don’t smell the blood loss from the concussion quite as readily.
Maybe it’s time for a re-reading of Gasset’s “España Invertebrada” as well.
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Actually what will happen is that they will create a mediocre destiny for themselves. They’ve been trying to bring the intellectuals down to their level for some time now, by insisting on such things as the essentialising of gender and the need for teachers only ever to show their nourishing side, but we are at a turning point where this not only isn’t working but is EVIDENTLY not working. We see the signs in the turning toward private education of more moneyed families so that their children can be subject to authority. We see it in the gravitation of the less educated toward forming ideological cliques where their views get affirmed by others of a similar mind, but where no actual intellectual growth is allowed to take place. These cliques expel the intellectuals, leading them to go elsewhere. We see that those who do not have a stomach for education, because they do not like having to submit to its discipline, renounce it. Why educate them if they are resistant? We have reached a turning point where infidels must simply be allowed to “go their own way”. Don’t stand in the way of flooding water. The genuine intellects do not form part of the main stream. Those who demand to be indulged will get exactly what they are looking for – on an intellectual level. On the level of compliancy with the requirements of the ideological dogmas they have embraced, (which they do not have the intellectual acumen to examine effectively), they will endure the amount of mental slavery that is suitable to them, along with its social and political ramifications. It’s not others who will choose that for them, but they themselves. Those capable of intellectual growth will stand aside and let them find their comfortable level, knowing full well that comfort and intellectual growth are in most ways the opposite.
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“We see it in the gravitation of the less educated toward forming ideological cliques where their views get affirmed by others of a similar mind, but where no actual intellectual growth is allowed to take place.”
The academy as refashioned in the mode of the television series “Friends” …
[shudder]
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I’m not sure academia has been completely overtaken yet, but the point of any authority is that it has to have the ability, which is to say the socially condoned power, to remain remote and detached. You cannot have any symbolic or actual sense of authority if the overarching principle of governance is not permitted to remain detached but has to become embroiled in any squabble.
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No, I think the image I had in mind was one in which a bunch of well-intentioned yet intellectually incapable people would contemplate the changing of automatically organising (autopoietic) systems, believing they stand even the merest possibility of a chance of changing them.
This they would do under the rubric of “solving the world’s problems” …
Hence the “Friends” imagery — there isn’t a clue of how impotent the people in these situations have become.
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Yeah, I’m not sdure about the “Friends” imagery, as I never had much time for that show, but what is clear is that we are moving out of thete social engineering rubrick, which has had some successes but has largely failed. That doesn’t mean that there are not theories of “human nature” circulating out there and formulating all sorts of rubrics, which are fundamentally as wrong as can be. Those who submit to nature get nature in return, which means nourishing mothers and authoritarian fathers but very much little inbetween — and certainly nothing beyond this. Nature reproduces itself in a rather predictable way, but it doesn’t let in any intellectual light. For that to happen one would have to oppose “nature” — even, to some degree, on principle.
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Actually … I think I just saw a ray of hope here. 🙂
The systems these people would like to control are most likely automatically organising (autopoietic), so they don’t have a chance at doing anything other than making the systems reconfigure themselves in a way that would let them survive another similar assault.
Academia’s been called the “ivory tower”, but why can’t the “ivory tower” be bristling with guns and other defensive measures?
I BELIEVE IN A WELL-ARMED CASTALIA!
(and I also believe in a cruel glass bead game, a cruel god, and so on, just as Iago would …)
[slightly menacing smirk] 🙂
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I don’t really believe in automatically organising systems so much as historically generated ones. For instance a young man of some considerable intellectual and emotional youth comes across a bunch of YouTube videos telling him that women are to blame for the problems in the world, He reaches down into his pockets and lo and behold he finds the remnants of his Sunday School lessons he has learned in yore. It all suddenly becomes apparent to him that what he is being faced with is the Truth of the Omnipotent God staring him in the face. Women are insidious Eves, all of them, and are evil. Thus he reformulates his notions into a pretty autopoetic circle and invites his friends. History repeats and everybody is very happy.
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If you’re curious, check out Maturana and Varela’s work on autopoietic systems — you might find there’s a considerable amount in common with what you’ve said in other postings.
I think there’s been an implication that these systems are somewhat cold, but the original theories came about in relation to biological systems. However, the idea applies to many systems that come about ab initio, as well as to systems that have overgrown the controls of people, becoming alive in their own sense.
I would prefer to think that history is not in the control of people to the extent that they can play games with it directly, or that if games are possible, only masters of the Game of Castalia are capable of playing them through indirect means.
[waves hello to the other Secret Squirrels who are playing the game …] 🙂
Insofar as your example goes, I prefer to think of the “fatal circle” as mentioned by Tocqueville in his writings about America, and that fortunately there’s usually someone who can act outside that “fatal circle” of self-reinforcing beliefs.
There’s nothing self-organising or self-sustaining about what you’ve mentioned — that system of mis-belief will eventually end, and good riddance to it …
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Ah, thank you for the information, but when I did my PhD I took in a lot of information, enough to form a system, and then I continued for several more years to refine that system and now I am weary of other ideas. The other thing is I have observed very closely the tendency of people to alight upon half-familiar stale thoughts with an air of surprised revelation, so I imagine this phenomena will keep occurring. People will keep rediscovering Christianity under the aura of new age ephinanies and they will keep reinscribing traditional notions about gender and reality because they just seem so goddam true. To me, one of the main illusions of our time is that we can just gravitate toward nice organic cultural circles according to our lights and according to our supposed intrinsic genius. What I see people do is gravitate toward Christian ideology hidden behind mystical theory or evolutionary psychology. The pull is much, much greater than the energy available to most people to make themselves free. Hence the importance of education. I’m sure these happy go-lucky fluffy bunnies who find new ways to live and look at life are temporarily satisfied with themselves, but to me they tackle everything on all too superficial a level. It’s not satisfying. And I can’t talk to such people. They are basically nutty.
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God, I love The Glass Bead Game. 🙂
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Have you also read “Untern Rad” (aka “The Prodigy” or “Underneath the Wheel”)?
Hesse did not have kind thoughts about what his country was capable of doing to the young geniuses in their midst …
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No, I don’t know this one. Do you recommend?
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As Brooke Shields used to say back when even I was young: “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins.”
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This message has been brought to you by the Zik Zak Corporation — “KNOW FUTURE” …
(wonders if anyone else remembers this dystopian British/American television series from the late 1980s, while we’re invoking the Way Way Way Back Machine …)
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About “Unterm Rad” (which I misspelled earlier — the N and M are next to each other on my keyboard, and I didn’t have my reading glasses near me) …
It’s a kind of Bildungsroman, although it’s really a narrative novel (Erzählung) about the main character’s coming of age in an education system that has an emphasis on academic achievement as an end in itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneath_the_Wheel
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unterm_Rad
The German Wikipedia page is considerably more thorough in discussing the characters and story.
The major difference between “Unterm Rad” and “The Glass Bead Game” is that the Glass Bead Game is meant to be a refinement of the arts for the sake of preserving them, whereas the academics in “Unterm Rad” are about perpetuating achievement for its own sake, leading to a considerably different vision in terms of what the characters could hope for.
I’d have to go find my Apple device, but I think it’s available on iTunes UK iBooks as “The Prodigy”, and I’ve also seen it as “Under the Wheel” or “Underneath the Wheel”, which is how you might find it in US e-bookshops.
Or you could simply swing down to your university’s library for the dead trees version, which I’m fairly certain they should have. 🙂
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The moment I heard it’s a Bildungsroman (and one I never even knew existed!) , I headed over to Amazon and found it there. The reviews are hilarious : many are from people who complain that they have to much homework at American high schools while other readers are complaining that their college professors don’t have any emotional attachment to them. I now really need to read the book that is causing all this.
Thank you for the reading recommendation!
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So much for their “pedagogy of the oppressed” … 🙂
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I agree completely with the author. Which sort of proves the point I have tried to make that I am not “right wing” for criticizing this political correctness phenomena. If only people realized political correctness was a policy designed by government agencies and large corporations to sweep under the rug race and gender inequities. I hear people say, college students are radical again like the 60s, yay it’s only conservatives that don’t like it, but they were protesting Vietnamese peasants being napalmed to death, and taking clubs and bullets for it. Todays freedom fighter protests the lack of fat women in fashion magazines and “offensive” Halloween costumes. Do people living on reservations who live twelve to a trailer and can’t afford heat in the winter, really care about the cultural appropriation going on at a campus they will never set foot on? I have been called a “class reductionist” by various social justice warriors, but aren’t they identity reductionists?
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