CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Another Contribution to Campus Dissident Studies  Wed Jan 07, 2015 3:32 am | |
| Flagg (below) is back, and with a very original and important contribution. As the world’s leading authority on “dissident studies,” he notices that the method of the new political correctness is the much the same as the method of the old Communists. It’s not persuasion or even relativistic reveling in the irreducible charm of interesting and diverse opinions. It’s domination though humiliation and ostracism.
I wrote an article over a decade ago that told conservative professors to stop whining and be proud dissidents living in the truth. I’m sticking with that. I remember, of course, that being denied tenure is not quite the same as being thrown in the Gulag. Conservative professors may not be, on the whole, less whiny or risk-averse than professors in general are. The first step down the road to freedom is not to be a careerist and to be as indifferent as you can be to the rubrics of assessment. The second step nuances the first; use the rhetoric of your oppressors ironically and so in a genuinely disruptive way.
Let me add, in passing, that Flagg followed up nicely on Carl’s attempt to understand reestablishing our relationship with Cuba from the perspective of that country’s resolute anti-Communist dissidents. We no longer insist that those Communist change or stop being haters and using, well, very extreme forms of bullying. As Carl says, there is a case for what the president did. But there’s no denying he screwed those dissidents.
Now a big difference between the Communists and today’s politically correct is that the (typically perverse) nobility of the Old Left was that it was moved by the plight of people who had little to no property. And so they wanted to use the power of government to redistribute resources from one class to another. There’s still some of that idealism on campus, and even some professors who claim that they have the duty to be socialists to counter the capitalist propaganda that they say dominates the media and so much of ordinary life in America. The genuinely throwback socialists often love liberal education, and I often think I have more in common with them than with libertarian economists, despite the fact that the astute libertarian futurists have a better handle on what the future will probably bring.
Richard Rorty complained that when the Left went from being Old to New it lost interest in the issue of economic injustice and got about the business of eliminating every trace of cruelty and indignity — all the aggressions both macro and micro — from American discourse. Justice became making everyone — rich and poor, black white, straight and gay, and so forth and so on — absolutely secure in his or her freely chosen personal identity. Some of that progress has served the cause of decency, but it’s way out of control. Because the new political correctness reaches its height of self-righteous self-consciousness on campuses, it becomes pretty much unsafe to say anything judgmental or controversial or against reigning democratic and “extreme autonomy” prejudices.
One irony is that ordinary American discourse is getting more routinely vulgar and an offense against ordinary decency. There’s, to begin with, the absolutely promiscuous and unreflective use of the the F-word, typically prefaced by mother. And that phrase just isn’t placed into the same hateful category as the n-word and similar degrading terms referring to women and gays. I’m not completely against the f-word, but it should be saved for very special cases and almost always used without calculation. Twice students have said it in my class. One time, I made the young man apologize to the class, because his utterance was calculated and a form of bragging. The other was when a student was surprised at his desk collapsing beneath him. His use was appropriate.
So I return to my bottom line: It’s absolutely impossible to create a safe space for free thought and reasonable disagreement when virtue is reduced to safety and consent supplemented by hyper-nonjudgmentalism.
I also think that those who oppose political correctness are too complacent in their understanding of liberty on campus as protection of individual rights. They, as I said before and Flagg repeats, share the politically correct foundation in autonomy. And our libertarians, after all, have their own form of political correctness. Finally, they share the lack of concern for the conditions in which the free and relational life of those born to love and die can flourish. Society at large probably shouldn’t be understood as a “community” in a free country, but a campus has to be in some measure. There’s a good in common there, as the motto of Animal House’s Faber College reminds us.
We should, after all, be concerned with the poor. Many or most government policies aimed at alleviating their plight are, in fact, counterproductive. But the most fundamental form of poverty is being lonely or isolated. Sure, gays and transsexuals have suffered that., and it’s progress that they don’t so much now. But there are also those failing men who can’t get jobs that allow them to live in relational dignity and so pass their time diverted by the screen.
http://www.nationalreview.com/postmodern-conservative/395815/another-contribution-campus-dissident-studies-peter-augustine-lawler
|
|
