E-Pluribus | May 13, 2024

Funhouse-mirror morality on campus; the real threat to democracy; and is the First Amendment enough?

A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:

Jeffrey Bilbro: Higher Ed’s Fragmented Morality

The goal of higher education to prepare students for the real world involves confronting them with a variety of worldviews they may not have considered before. But, Jeffrey Bilbro argues, that does not mean it must be carried out in an amoral context. Via The Dispatch.

Every few years another seismic tremor roils American educational institutions: DEI and critical race theory, transgender bathroom use and sports participation and library books, ChatGPT and AI tools, and now protests over the war in Gaza. The ferocity that characterizes these disputes is sometimes seen as the result of increasing political polarization, and that’s no doubt part of the story. But the underlying cause of such fierce and incommensurable disagreements is that America’s secular schools have increasingly set aside transcendent questions about human purpose and responsibility.

This claim may seem counterintuitive given common intuitions that see religion as a source of conflict, but in the absence of a shared, robust understanding of human purpose, the educational enterprise will inevitably founder. As the varied and often conflicting moral claims advanced by Gaza-war protesters indicate, as the inconsistent and often draconian actions of college administrators suggest, the divorce between knowledge and its ends isn’t sustainable. American schools used to be able to function without explicit theological missions because there was a largely shared moral and religious consensus within the communities they served. Needless to say, that’s no longer the case.

[. . .]

I teach at a Christian liberal arts college that aspires—imperfectly, of course; it’s an institution populated by fallen persons—to carry on such inquiry. When I teach our first-year writing course, we consider rhetoric not just as the art of persuasion, but as the art of persuading another of truth. Quintilian’s famous adage, that rhetoric is the good man speaking well, names this inherent connection between a writer’s character and purpose and the effectiveness of the argument being made. If you bracket all questions about the former, you end up with sophistry. Similarly, in my environmental ethics course this spring, we approach fraught questions through our shared affirmation of the biblical narrative. This doesn’t neatly resolve difficult issues of what we owe other creatures, and it doesn’t mean we read only Christian authors. In our class discussions of Peter Singer, Martha Nussbaum, George Monbiot, or Robin Wall Kimmerer, we allow these authors to put our tradition to the test and expose its shortcomings, but we do so as participants in and adherents of the Christian moral tradition.

At a panel discussion last fall to mark the release of a book I co-edited, The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education, one of the audience members asked whether liberal arts education can survive if we don’t take religion seriously. Roosevelt Montás, a faculty member at Columbia who served for a decade as the director of its core curriculum program, replied that while it depends on how religion is defined, “I do think that liberal education necessarily involves a question of ultimate values.” While he and other panelists noted the possibilities for such education to occur in pluralistic, non-confessional institutions, that window of opportunity seems to be narrowing.

Situating education within an explicit religious tradition isn’t a panacea for navigating our culture’s bricolage morality. Many religious colleges struggle to maintain their missional commitments in the face of politicized criticism. And many more religious colleges allow rifts to open between their public confessions of faith and their de facto educational culture and practice. But if the aspiration to “traditioned inquiry” isn’t a sufficient condition for healthy educational institutions, it’s at least a necessary condition.

[. . .]

Elite private colleges and big state schools will stagger on. They have too much money to fade easily. But their moral authority will continue to erode, and more and more people may turn to smaller institutions with clear missions. When small colleges are in the news, it tends to be because they are downsizing or closing their doors. But micro colleges are also springing up around the country. In the same way the tragic dysfunctions of K-12 public schools are fueling the incredible growth of classical schools, many of which are explicitly religious, the moral decadence of prominent universities may generate a parallel wave of interest in religious, liberal arts colleges, colleges oriented toward an explicit vision of human purpose. These institutions will still be sites of intense and necessary debate, but they can offer a context in which disagreements might promote learning and moral clarity. Many American universities can apparently no longer provide such contexts.

Read it all.

Winston Marshall: Populism Is The Voice Of The Voiceless, The Real Threat To Democracy Is From The Elites

Musician Winston Marshall recently squared off with former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a debate over populism at the Oxford Union across the pond. While populism may have its pitfalls, Marshall made clear where he believes the greater danger lies.

WINSTON MARSHALL: To me, populism is not a dirty word. Since the 2008 crash and specifically the trillion-dollar Wall Street bailout, we are in the populist age, and for good reason. The elites have failed.

Let me address some common fallacies, some of which have been made tonight. If the motion was that demagoguery was a threat to democracy, I would be on that side of the House. If the motion was that political violence was a threat to democracy, I'd be on that side of the house. January 6th has been mentioned -- a dark day for America, indeed. And I'm sure Congresswoman Pelosi will agree that the entire month of June 2020, when the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon was under siege, and under insurrection by radical progressives, those too were dark days for America.

[[. . .]

Populism as you know, is the politics of the ordinary people against an elite, populism is not a threat to democracy. Populism is democracy, and why else have universal suffrage, if not to keep elites in check?

Ladies and gentlemen, given the success of Trump, and more recently, Javier Milei taking a chainsaw to the state behemoth of Argentina's bureaucratic monster, you'd be mistaken for thinking this was a right-wing populist age, but that would be ignoring Occupy Wall Street. That would be ignoring Jeremy Corbyn's "for the many, not the few," that would be ignoring Bernie against the billionaires, RFK Jr. against Big Pharma, and more recently, George Galloway against his better judgment. Now all of them, including Galloway, recognize genuine concerns of ordinary people being otherwise ignored by the establishment.

[. . .]

WINSTON MARSHALL: What about the mainstream media? Let me read you some mainstream media headlines. The New Yorker the day before the 2016 election, "The Case Against Democracy." The Washington Post, the day after the election, "The Problem With Our Government Is Democracy." The LA Times, June 2017, "The British Election Is A Reminder Of The Perils Of Too Much Democracy." Vox, June 2017, "Two eminent political scientists say the problem with democracy is voters." New York Times, June 2017, "The Problem With Participatory Democracy Is The Participants."

Mainstream media elites are part of a class who don't just disdain populism, they disdain the people. If the Democrats had put half their energy into delivering for the people, Trump wouldn't even have a chance in 2024. He shouldn't, he shouldn't have a chance. You've had power for four years. From the fabricated Steele dossier, to trying to take him off the ballot in both Maine and Colorado, the Democrats are the anti-Democrat party. All we need now is the Republicans to come out as the pro-Monarchist party.

Ladies and gentlemen, populism is not a threat to democracy, but I'll tell you what is. It is elites ordering social media to censor political opponents. It's police shutting down dissenters, be it anti-monarchists in this country or gender-critical voices here, or last week in Brussels, the National Conservative Movement.

Read or watch the whole thing.

Jay Caspian Kang: The Radical Case for Free Speech

The ACLU has faced increasing competition from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE, or ‘fire’ as the following article refers to it) as the leading defender of free speech, but not everyone is sold on it. At the New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang points out what he sees as FIRE’s shortcomings in the current crisis. He also addresses broader issues with free speech in the internet-social media age.

The First Amendment has its stewards, and, for better or worse, the conversation around free speech tends to revolve around what they say. Among the most prominent are the American Civil Liberties Union and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Both organizations are devoted to the freedom of speech, and both maintain that they are nonpartisan. But the A.C.L.U. has long been associated with progressive politics, and fire, which has received much of its funding from right-leaning foundations, is sometimes pigeonholed as conservative, though it strives to remain neutral. Both groups not only provide legal support for people whose First Amendment rights have been violated but also engage, to varying degrees, in free-speech advocacy, seeking to expand the parameters of acceptable speech.

[. . .]

This dual burden of championing free speech and adjudicating First Amendment cases isn’t easy to navigate, in part because many people will, perhaps rightfully, detect political motivations behind the cultural, nonlegal arguments that Creeley mentioned. For the past decade or so, the most well-publicized incidents of shouting down speakers have taken place on college campuses and have involved the deplatforming of conservatives. Creeley, for his part, is aware that the public perception of his organization will be shaped by the cases it chooses to take on. “My hope for fire is that sooner or later, we have a case for everyone,” he wrote. “A case in which everyone sees us defending speech they like or vindicating the rights of a speaker they empathize with.”

The A.C.L.U. has done more advocacy for the ongoing student protests than its counterparts at fire. The Southern California branch of the organization sent an open letter to the chancellor of U.C.L.A. to denounce “efforts to suppress the peaceful right to free expression and dissent”; in response to a crackdown at Emory University, which included the violent arrest of an economics professor, the A.C.L.U. of Georgia issued a statement invoking the history of Atlanta as a “place where citizens could freely exercise their right to protest.” According to Ben Wizner, the director of the A.C.L.U.’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, most of the organization’s interventions in the recent campus controversies have addressed instances in which there was no clear violation of First Amendment rights. These are cases—such as the University of Southern California’s decision to cancel a commencement address by a Muslim student, on account of unspecified safety concerns—in which the A.C.L.U. saw a need to intervene for the cause of free expression.

Wizner, like Creeley, believes that any commitment to free speech must remain viewpoint-neutral. But he also said that defenders of free speech should have priorities. “The reason why I come to the First Amendment is a distrust of government power,” he told me. “The most obvious abuse of government power is disproportionate use of force on peaceful protesters. So you have to lead with that in moments like these.”

[. . .]

The A.C.L.U. and fire may have a complex set of responsibilities, but the matter is simpler for the rest of us who consider ourselves free-speech advocates. We are unencumbered by procedural questions, and can simply look to protect every nonviolent act of dissent from government interference. Civil disobedience, which includes both the occupation of a campus building to call for a ceasefire and the breaking of covid lockdowns to hold an anti-vaccine rally in a public square, needn’t be discussed only through the lens of the First Amendment. We can also make a moral appeal, pointing to historical events, from the Boston Tea Party under British rule to the lunch-counter sit-ins throughout the South during the civil-rights movement. What I am proposing is not novel, simply a disentangling of some ideas that I believe have been caught up in years of fruitless debate: a free-speech radicalism that grounds itself in widely held beliefs about American liberty and tries to build a broad moral consensus around the universal right to dissent and the importance of civil disobedience—even the type that might get someone thrown in jail.

Dissent involves genuine confrontation, which is why, although social-media posts may spread quickly and even get people into the streets, they should be seen for what they are: a precursor to the real thing. Social media has undeniably become the public square, but those platforms have actually served to dull dissent and turn legitimate protest into an individualistic meme war in which people pick a side and add to a junk pile of online ephemera. Speech is an act that occupies physical spaces, and, in doing so, forces people to look up from their phones and respond rather than simply scroll past it. I do not believe there is much potential for political change in purely online dissent, and it appears that today’s young people, who protested en masse in 2020, are coming to a similar conclusion. Democracy requires a healthy form of dissent, and nothing is more innervating than standing with other people on a sidewalk or on a campus quad or in a public park. Real communities and political possibilities are shaped much more quickly in those spaces, and the free-speech advocacy that I am proposing should always remind its adherents of that. The encampments sprouting up on campuses around the country—and the counter-protests that sometimes accompany them—suggest that much of the public understands this. A modern free-speech movement should, perhaps counterintuitively, direct its focus away from the Internet and, instead, actively encourage dissenters to take their messages to the streets.

Read it all here.

Around Twitter (X)

This Wesley Yang post was triggered by a Dave Chappelle comedy routine, but the reality is anything but funny:

Via Steve McGuire, the Princeton Gaza Solidarity Encampment has invented a great new tradition: “rotary hunger strikes.”

And finally, Jonah Goldberg suggests an alternate headline for the Jerry-Seinfeld walk-out at Duke’s graduation: