The rot in the western world that has accrued in the last few years, revealed with particular clarity since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, showed its depth in a heretofore unparalleled manner this week in Washington, D.C. The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania appeared at a congressional hearing to face questions about the rise of antisemitism on their respective campuses (a phenomenon duplicating itself across the academic landscape).
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I watched the event unfold with the same sense of surreal disbelief that has surrounded me more and more frequently over the last decade, as the academic world and the broader culture it shapes have succumbed ever more completely to the faux-compassionate blandishments of the radical left.
Well give the devil his due, first, as is always appropriate. The three personages in question were most definitely subjected to intensely unfriendly questioning, particularly by U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.). They were put on the hot seat, while their politico interlocutor performed for the camera, and they reacted more defensively, angrily, resentfully and counterproductively than they might have otherwise. However, the same Congresswoman was for all her partisanship rather dreadfully effective in exposing the depth of narcissistic, moralizing, malevolent stupidity that passes for thought in our apparently-doomed institutions of higher education.
I make that latter comment with no pleasure whatsoever: the six years I taught in Cambridge, Mass. at the pre-eminent Ivy League campus in the United States served as a pinnacle point of my early career. Harvard truly lived up to its reputation in the early 90s. The senior faculty serving there were the most educated and able people I had ever met; their junior counterparts truly the hottest young researchers and teachers in the world; the undergraduates reliably the smartest, hardest-working and generally admirable young men and women imaginable. The great university did its job, and it did it well.
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I watched the demise of the University in Toronto over the twenty years I spent there as a professor. Every bloody time the ever-expanding administration put counterproductive pressure on the faculty (hiring more Deans, Associate Deans, Assistant Deans and Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity commissars) the spineless academics folded. I grew tired of objecting, one painful faculty meeting after another: Why are we allowing them to increase class size; place more restrictive rules on our research protocols; implement yet another delusional and false five-year plan; eliminate all year-long courses; subject us to constant ideological training, conducted by self-evidently unqualified frauds; etc., etc? We could just say no! What could they possibly do? The answer I received was always the same: Then they wont give us what we want. My objection They dont give us what we want now was continually met by the collective shrug of shoulders that over two decades handed the entire enterprise over to the encroaching bureaucrats.
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And that was by no means the end of it: first, the administration took over the universities, massively increasing costs and decreasing efficiency. Then the parasitical and predatory woke mob took over the administration. It took decades for the first catastrophe to unfold, and mere years for the second. And here we are and where that is, precisely, was what made itself known in D.C.
Rep. Stefanik pushed the three university presidents hard, each in turn, requesting at least by implication an affirmative response to the easiest question to answer: Does calling specifically for the genocide of Jews violate (your universitys) code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment? To understand what happened next, in all three cases, it is necessary to understand that these selfsame codes and rules have been a veritable shibboleth of the moralizing activists the three presidents concerned so directly condone, support and produce. For years, a continuous clamour has arisen from the snowflakes, allies, Marxists, post-modernists and generally psychopathological neurotics concerning the absolute danger of speech that could in any way imaginable cause offence to anyone imaginable under any circumstances whatsoever.
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But now, suddenly, this insistence one that has already destroyed the careers and even the lives of far more than a few appears to be fully disposable, as long as the speech in question is calling directly and viciously for the genocide of Jews. First to prevaricate was MITs president, Sally Kornbluth. Demented smile plastered firmly on animus-possessed face, this dangerous excuse for a human being claimed, for example, that the increasingly strident campus-protester calls for intefadeh (a word derived from the Arabic to shake offas in dirt from ones sandals) had to be interpreted in context. I presume that the same applies to from the river to the sea.
Despite the stunned disbelief this demented utterance immediately produced on the part of the questioner and the audience the next two president-marionettes mouthed the same propagandistic and apparently-rehearsed lines: Liz Magill of U Penn indicated that calls for Jewish genocide were only bullying and harassment if directed, severe and pervasive the diagnosis of which was a context-dependent decision. Then, even more unbelievably and after being warned that her answer would resound around the world Magill said that such speech would become harassment only when it became conduct. This dumbfounding response would have stopped a lesser questioner in her tracks, but Stefanik remained on course, immediately pointing out that such conduct meant actually committing genocide. Have we ever witnessed such things in our lifetime?
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Harvards supercilious Gay fared no better. The question was repeated: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvards rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no? Gay allowed the devil himself to speak through her: It can be depending on the context. Now, it would be one thing if Harvard was the absolutely staunch libertarian defender of free speech that Gay was implicitly claiming (the only stance that could possibly justify such a response) but her institutions bottom-of-the-barrel aforementioned recent score on that front rules out such a possibility.
The true situation is in fact quite clear: there is one set of rules, say, for saying something mildly sexually inappropriate at a drunken party if youre a callow frat boy and another if youre a raving mad postmodern meta-Marxist hellbent on the destruction of the Jews. Gay was, nonetheless and quite mercifully, granted another kick at the proverbial cat. Rep. Stefanik, who was to say the least both shocked and irritated by Gays first answer encouraged her in a follow-up to state clearly the yes that would have let the Harvard ruler off the hook. She doubled down, instead, as all would-be tyrants do, repeating her all-explaining-and-excusing clich: it depends on the context.
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It was good ole Karl who split the world into two camps: that of the proletariat, virtuous by the mere fact of their subjugation, and that of the bourgeoisie, the capitalist owners, upon whose heads were heaped all the coals of fire necessary to burn their profiteering, thieving houses and hides to the ground, along with the lives and property of their families. Victims and victimizers: thats the world, and all you need to know to master it. History, family, friendship, all possible social and economic relationships (the latter deemed fundamental by the bloody communists): all can be understood, and immediately, in terms of the dynamic of oppressed and oppressor, the ultimate of classes and categories.
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Pick a dimension of evaluation. Identify the oppressor (anyone successful; anyone with anything not owned or characterizing by everyone else). Claim allyship with the oppressed. Voila! You now understand everything, and have done all the work necessary to establish your reputation. Its a universal explanation, compressed into a single idea and more: a one-claim pathway to the highest strata of unearned moral virtue. Thats a deal too attractive to resist, allowing those who accept it to bask in their stupidity, glory in their hypocrisy and torture those they envy in good conscience.
The fact that such a theory allows the accusation of exploitation to be levied against everyone (as we all have something lacked by someone else somewhere or at some time), and that there is tremendous danger in that, can be all-too-conveniently ignored until the mob shows up at the once-accusers door, pitchfork and torch in hand. On second thought: Perhaps thats a feature, instead of a bug. The payoff for the dreadful simplification is just too high: all work necessary to understand the complexities of human psychological, economic and social function is no longer necessary (as a full explanation has been provided); furthermore, the goodness so long sought by serious contemplatives, mystics and saints exists right at hand. Mere stated pity for the oppressed makes you the best of all possible persons. And if that means to hell with everyone else, so be it even if that hell will envelop future you at some point in the now-thankfully-distant forthcoming years.
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I observed the spectacle of the university presidents with true dread. It was not only that they unthinkably, self-righteously and dangerously promulgated the most dangerous of claims: that power rules everything the very claim that justifies the use of power; the very claim that is put forward for precisely that purpose; the very claim that when sufficiently widespread (as it was in the U.S.S.R and still is in China and North Korea) turns everything and very rapidly to deep and endless misery. It was that they did so without even noticing or reflecting upon the fact that they were doing; without thinking at all about what they were doing meant.
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The fact that plunging snout-deep into the postmodern meta-Marxist academic trough will actually turn you, if not into a full-fledged Nazi, at least into someone who will testify in front of Congress on behalf of those promoting the deadliest of hatreds toward the Jews shouldnt that have given those presidents pause? And the fact that it didnt, while they simultaneously refused to notice the fact of their own possession, showing no shame whatsoever for it, failing even to be concerned with the potential effect on their own reputation shouldnt that give all of us watching pause? Is the bubble they inhabit truly that thick? And the answer is likely yes. Worse yet, it is that pervasive, in the general culture: I dont believe for a minute that these women will pay for their sin with their jobs, even though they should clearly be fired, given that they dont have enough sense to resign in well-deserved disgrace.
And I should point out in closing that the same bloody dread doctrine that poured itself out of the mouths of those pathetic excuses for intellectual leaders and thinkers in D.C. also fully possesses the leadership of our current government here in Canada, our own institutes of higher education and, increasingly, all the minds of the educated class. Luciferian presumption rules everywhere and the pride we now celebrate (or else) for a month if not a season inevitably goes before a fall.
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We will look back on what we are doing with great shame. The Jews today, blind fools: You and those you love tomorrow. So it has been since the dawn of history.
National Post
Read more here:
Jordan Peterson: Blame idiotic Marxism for the demented antisemitism oozing out of universities - National Post