Beware the contagion of postmodernist campuses

From We All Live on Campus Now by Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan is an odd duck. He can write with great clarity and yet, from one paragraph to the next switch from clear, expository thinking to tropes and unfounded assumptions. But that is not entirely a bad thing. You have to have tension with your assumptions in order to test them.

He starts out with an outline of the possibly existential threat of postmodernism, an issue which I agree we have inadvertently ignored.

Over the last year, the most common rebuttal to my intermittent coverage of campus culture has been: Why does it matter? These are students, after all. They’ll grow up once they leave their cloistered, neo-Marxist safe spaces. The real world isn’t like that. You’re exaggerating anyway. And so on. I certainly see the point. In the world beyond campus, few people use the term microaggressions without irony or an eye roll; claims of “white supremacy,” “rape culture,” or “white privilege” can seem like mere rhetorical flourishes; racial and gender segregation hasn’t been perpetuated in the workplace yet; the campus Title IX sex tribunals where, under the Obama administration, the “preponderance of evidence” rather than the absence of a “reasonable doubt” could ruin a young man’s life and future are just a product of a hothouse environment. And I can sometimes get carried away.

The reason I don’t agree with this is because I believe ideas matter. When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges — your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression — will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.

And, sure enough, the whole concept of an individual who exists apart from group identity is slipping from the discourse. The idea of individual merit — as opposed to various forms of unearned “privilege” — is increasingly suspect. The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment — untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights — are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites. Any differences in outcome for various groups must always be a function of “hate,” rather than a function of nature or choice or freedom or individual agency. And anyone who questions these assertions is obviously a white supremacist himself.

Over the past couple of decades, we have had a surfeit of zombie movies and it has always been a little bit of a mystery why they have become such a cinematic mainstay. Perhaps they were some subtle warning from a secret cabal of the campus crisis where students are emerging as cognitively incapacitated, absent any domain of knowledge, and rhetorically inarticulate zombies but with a craving to eat out the cultural brains of the host civilization. Sounds plausible. Heh.

Sullivan ends his essay with an exercise that is so rare in journalism. He tries to understand the data and refuses to let emotion dictate his interpretation.

Are we living through a huge crisis of anti-gay prejudice in this country? Organizations whose funding depends in part on such a crisis — like GLAAD (the “LGBTQ” media watchdog) and now the NCVAP (National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs) — insist there is. GLAAD’s evidence was a small shift, potentially within the margin of error, in polls measuring “LGBT” acceptance. NCVAP’s evidence is more impressive at first blush: a staggering 86 percent increase in “anti-LGBT” homicides in 2017. One commentator — unimpressed by this number — points to a number that is part of this stat: a 400 percent increase in “hate-motivated” killings of cis-gendered gay men (i.e., 5 to 20).

My friend Wally Olson alerted me to the study behind these claims. The first thing to note is that the studies are just of those murders discovered by or reported to the NCVAP — by no means a representative sample of anything. The second caveat is that the numbers do not count the 49 homicides in the Pulse nightclub killing in 2016. If you did, 2017 saw a 32 percent decline in such homicides, from 77 to 52. The third thing to note is that the details of only 34 of the 52 murders are known — and so we simply do not know the motive for 18 of them. Even of that 34, evidence of “hate” is very murky. I read each profile of each murder NCVAP provided and only a handful had solid evidence of bias. What we do know is that of the 34 victims, around a third were related to an online or personal ad hookup, and a third related to someone the victim knew. Maybe these were about homophobia. Maybe they were incurred during an attempted robbing or burglary. But NCVAP does not know. Murders of gay people are not the same as murders of gay people for being gay. Of the several thousand male homicides a year, wouldn’t some of them have to be of gay men?

Making sure that the problem is real before attempting to solve it? It sounds obvious but among our chattering classes, it is rare.