By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
It seems like every week there’s a new horror story of
political correctness run amok at some college campus.
A warning not to wear culturally insensitive Halloween
costumes sparked an imbroglio at Yale, which went viral over the weekend. A
lecturer asked in an e-mail, “Is there no room anymore for a child to be a
little bit obnoxious . . . a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes,
offensive?”
Students went ballistic. When an administrator (who is
the lecturer’s spouse) defended free speech, some students wanted his head. One
student wrote in a Yale Herald op-ed
(now taken down): “He doesn’t get it. And I don’t want to debate. I want to
talk about my pain.”
Washington Post
columnist (and Tufts professor) Daniel Drezner was initially horrified by the
spectacle but ultimately backtracked. Invoking Friedrich Hayek’s insights from
“The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Drezner cautions outside observers that “there
is an awful lot of knowledge that is local in character, that cannot be culled
from abstract principles or detached observers.”
As a Hayek fanboy and champion of localism, I should be
quite sympathetic. But this time, I think Drezner’s initial reaction was closer
to the mark. The notion that the Yale incident is an isolated one defies all
the evidence.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, and Greg
Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education,
recently wrote a sweeping survey titled “The Coddling of the American Mind” for
The Atlantic, in which they cataloged
how students are being swaddled in an emotional cocoon.
Taco bars at sorority fundraisers are considered
offensive. A group at Duke University deemed phrases such as “man up” too
horrible to tolerate. And so on.
The suggestion that the tempest at Yale is an isolated
incident reminds me of my favorite line from Thoreau: “Some circumstantial
evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”
So what is going on?
Well, a lot. Many conservatives want to put all the blame
on political correctness or cultural Marxism. And though I think such
ideologies certainly belong in the dock, political correctness is now quite
old.
Lamentations about it were commonplace when I was in
college 25 years ago. Does anyone, other than a few campus hotheads, actually
believe universities are more intolerant, bigoted, and racist than they were a
generation ago?
What has changed are the students. Yes, there has been a
lot of ideological indoctrination in which kids are taught that taking offense
gives them power. But, again, that idea is old. What’s new is the way kids are
being raised.
Consider play. Children are hardwired to play. That’s how
we learn. But what happens when play is micro-managed? St. Lawrence University
professor Steven Horwitz argues that it undermines democracy.
Free play — tag in the schoolyard, pickup basketball at
the park, etc. — is a very complicated thing. It requires young people to
negotiate rules among themselves, without the benefit of some third-party
authority figure. These skills are hugely important in life. When parents or
teachers short-circuit that process by constantly intervening to stop bullying
or just to make sure that everyone plays nice, Horwitz argues, “we are taking
away a key piece of what makes it possible for free people to be peaceful,
cooperative people by devising bottom-up solutions to a variety of conflicts.”
The rise in “helicopter parenting” and the epidemic of
“everyone gets a trophy” education are another facet of the same problem. We’re
raising millions of kids to be smart and kind, but also fragile.
And what happens when large numbers of these delicate
little flowers are set free to navigate their way through life? They feel
unsafe and demand “safe spaces.” They feel threatened by uncomfortable ideas
and demand “trigger warnings.” They might even want written rules or contracts
to help them negotiate sexual relations.
In other words, this is the generation the mandarins of
political correctness have been waiting for.
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