So our Flagg Taylor, through the cleverly indirect method of the book review, has identified our academic political correctness as “totalitarian.” That might be an exaggeration in practice. (I haven’t been rounded up yet, and thank God or the AAUP that Flagg has tenure.) But it’s true enough in theory: Both the Communists and progressives (of whom there is more than one kind) all believe they have the wisdom that comes with being at the end of History, at the end of an unfolding story that culminates in the whole truth about human liberty as something other than merely biological existence.
(Among the kinds I could lay out: socialist, Justice Kennedy’s, and techno-libertarian transhumanism.)
We find in the admin-speak of higher education the word “microaggression,” which seems to mean that anyone who takes me outside my comfort zone with a challenging opinion is out to get me. I want to be secure in however I identify myself as a particular person, and I’m convinced that anyone who criticizes or even disagrees with me is driven by irrational animosity. One irony of the word microgression is that it refers to aggressions that can only be seen by a microscope or are invisible to the naked eye. To purge the campus of microaggressions means to make it place where there’s absolutely no controversy at all. That means taking out even the aggression that most people couldn’t actually see until the experts call it to their attention.
How is that possible? The big questions of life have to be regarded as settled — or beyond controversy. We sometimes now say they’ve been settled by History, and those who say otherwise can be dismissed as being on the wrong side of History. That would mean, if you think about it, that we’re at the end of History, and that we achieved wisdom when it comes to liberty and justice and all the relational “issues” characteristic of free, interpersonal life. Because we know what justice is, we can limit academic freedom by academic justice without losing anything real or true.
Why do claims about the end of History lead to repression? Because they’re not true! And so they can become true only by purging those who say otherwise from liberal conversation or what counts as rational discourse.
That’s why the Supreme Court has said that said opinions, lacking as they are in reason, must be driven by irrational animosity. One problem with saying something like that is that you’ve told lots of people you can’t have real conversation with them, because settled issues don’t have two sides. That’s bound to lead to more animosity, because reason has been taken off the table as a legitimate weapon. The real claim, as the Communists used to say, is that the critic is blinded by something — has some kind of mental disorder — that prevents him or her from seeing the truth of the “insight” that governs our privileged time. Another view, of course, is that it’s “insight” that leads the thinker beyond the prejudices that govern any time; the insight is always that what fashionable people believe is only a partial and distorted view of what’s really true. That insight can come from philosophy or faith or poetic intuition or some combination thereof.
So the dissident replaces “History” with “living in the truth,” which is that the one true progress is not Historical but personal. And there’s no political or technological solution to the problems faced by the being born to know, love, and die (at least as a biological being). That leads to a tricky issue: Is it proper these days to write esoterically, to feign compliance with reigning dogma while subtly subverting it in the name of the truth? That’s what anti-Christians used to do. And maybe that’s what Christians (and Socratics and Stoics) now have to do. But probably not. I do agree with Melzer and others that we do have to show students that plenty of first-rate writers used to write esoterically, just to show them that thought and thinkers aren’t imprisoned by their location in a certain place in History.