Cathartic Selfishness

It is not often you will catch me agreeing with a New York Times columnist, so mark this date down. I completely agree with Frank Bruni's editorial, "The Dangerous Safety of College", wherein he states:

The moral of the recent melee at Middlebury College, where students shouted down and chased away a controversial social scientist, isn’t just about free speech, though that’s the rubric under which the ugly incident has been tucked. It’s about emotional coddling. It’s about intellectual impoverishment.

Somewhere along the way, those young men and women — our future leaders, perhaps — got the idea that they should be able to purge their world of perspectives offensive to them. They came to believe that it’s morally dignified and politically constructive to scream rather than to reason, to hurl slurs in place of arguments.

They have been done a terrible disservice. All of us have, and we need to reacquaint ourselves with what education really means and what colleges do and don’t owe their charges.

Physical safety? Absolutely. A smooth, validating passage across the ocean of ideas? No. If anything, colleges owe students turbulence, because it’s from a contest of perspectives and an assault on presumptions that truth emerges — and, with it, true confidence.

...What happened at Middlebury was this: A group of conservative students invited Charles Murray to speak, and administrators rightly consented to it. Although his latest writings about class divisions in America have been perceptive, even prescient, his 1994 book “The Bell Curve” trafficked in race-based theories of intelligence and was broadly (and, in my opinion, correctly) denounced. The Southern Poverty Law Center labeled him a white nationalist.

He arrived on campus wearing that tag, to encounter hundreds of protesters intent on registering their disgust. Many jammed the auditorium where he was supposed to be interviewed — by, mind you, a liberal professor — and stood with their backs to him. That much was fine, even commendable, but the protest didn’t stop there.

Chanting that Murray was “racist, sexist, anti-gay,” the students wouldn’t let him talk. And when he and the professor moved their planned interchange to a private room where it could be recorded on camera, protesters disrupted that, too, by pulling fire alarms and banging on windows. A subsequent confrontation between some of them and Murray grew physical enough that the professor with him sought medical treatment for a wrenched neck.

Later, Bruni nails it:

Protests aren’t the problem, not in and of themselves. They’re vital, and so is work to end racism, sexism, homophobia and other bigotry. But much of the policing of imperfect language, silencing of dissent and shaming of dissenters runs counter to that goal, alienating the very onlookers who need illumination.

We need to remember, it is ok to protest, but not ok to perform the Spanish Inquisition on people. You don't turn people into social pariahs just for being wrong, or even for being racist.

It isn't so much about the individuals or groups being accused, but about the onlookers watching you. Always treat people with the class and dignity they deserve as humans, even if they are behaving classless or undignified, because you are being watched by others with whom you are not interacting.

There is a phrase Bruni uses: "constructive engagement". If you cannot constructively engage someone's offensive viewpoint, then you either need to reassess your own views, or go back and figure out how to engage it properly. Resorting to physical or verbal violence makes onlookers question your motives, and does nothing to discourage the offending parties of their own incorrect views.

The emotional engagement of modern Leftists is nothing more than an act of cathartic selfishness caused by the inability to argue a point when they are wrong. Considering they are Leftists, being wrong happens to them a lot.