By Chris Bray
Friday, April 21, 2017
On elite college campuses, the agonized swoon has become
the Hermes scarf of social gestures, the clearest way to instantly signal
status to an audience of acutely status-conscious peers. It’s familiar stuff.
In 1880, the New England physician George Miller Beard
published a treatise on the emergence of a new neurological disease, a kind of
nervous exhaustion that he called “neurasthenia.” That disease was little
understood, Beard wrote, because medical researchers mostly worked in
“institutions of charity”—where they could freely experiment on their patients.
Gathered to do research among the poor, doctors had overlooked “the miseries of
the rich, the comfortable, and intelligent.”
And it was a shame, because the very finest people were
the ones who were truly suffering, afflicted as they were with the most
exquisitely refined constitutions. Beard hoped to convince young colleagues
that “Fifth Avenue is in some features a very much better field for
pathological study than Five Points.”
The Rise Of
Rehabilitative Luxury
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, an entire
industry of luxury resorts arose to help the victims Beard had identified. In a
rapidly industrializing nation, the members of a new executive and professional
class found themselves absolutely devastated by the stresses of modern life,
often joined or preceded by their jittery wives and daughters.
Exhausted by their nervous disease, bourgeois moderns
were compelled to convalesce for entire seasons at the early equivalents of the
Four Seasons and the Ritz-Carlton. Their fragile health simply demanded it, and
the suffering residents of Fifth Avenue and comparable places were forced into
rehabilitative luxury by the pain of existence. Another physician, Silas Weir
Mitchell, developed the “rest cure” implied by Beard’s description, and whole
swathes of the haut monde retreated
into a therapeutic regime of naps, stillness, and more naps, with the
occasional plate of oysters and a medically necessary beer at lunch.
Writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman gave us the classic
depiction of the neurasthenic, “The Yellow Wallpaper”: a short story, first
published in 1892, that depicts a well-to-do woman forced by her nervous
condition to live in a rented mansion and do nothing. In Gilman’s telling,
forced leisure is a prison and a path to sickness; under-stimulated and
over-pampered, the cosseted patient descends into psychosis in her safe space.
The rich yellow wallpaper of her elegant cage begins to crawl.
So let’s talk about Yale.
Elite Colleges
Suffer Similar Psychological Tortures
On the campuses of elite colleges and universities,
students are somehow in deep pain. Terrifyingly, people sometimes disagree with
them, and say things they don’t like. It’s a form of psychological torture,
wounding students in New Haven and Claremont to their very core. Brutalized and
agonized by the fact that other people believe in the concepts of “truth” and
“free speech”—Eurocentric, white supremacist constructs—injured undergrads are
demanding protection from the horror of people saying things.
If you haven’t already, watch Yale students screaming and
writhing in the presence of Professor Nicholas Christakis, whose wife inflicted
pain on them by suggesting that they choose their own Halloween costumes
without the protective shield of the university’s administrative guidance.
Shaking, sobbing, and screaming, a generation’s victims line up to confront
their tormenter, who lashes into them with the white male weapon of talking to people.
Like nineteenth century neurasthenics, America’s
suffering college students are the people who can afford the pain. Jerelyn
Luther, the Yale undergraduate who infamously screamed at Christakis that her
residential college at Yale is “not an intellectual space,” grew
up in Fairfield, Connecticut, a town with a six-figure median income.
Jonathan Butler, the University of Missouri hunger-striker, is the son
of a railroad executive who pulls down seven-figure compensation.
Ziad Ahmed, the New Jersey teenager who was just
admitted to Stanford after sending that university an admissions essay that
consisted only of the words “Black Lives Matter”—repeated a hundred times—is
the son of a hedge fund manager. He apprenticed in the struggle for social
justice at Princeton Day School, where high school tuition is just under
$35,000 a year.
And so on; to say the whole thing in one example, I give
you Black Lives Matter protester and Occupy Boston veteran Noah McKenna. No
comparable stories of youthful struggle have arisen from the vocational
education programs at Bakersfield City College, where students have to worry
about getting to Applebee’s on time for their shift. Like neurasthenia, social
justice agony is a rich kid’s disease.
Today’s
Undergraduates Are Obsessed With ‘Self-Care’
Also much like the privileged Victorians who used resort
travel as medicine, undergraduates at elite colleges and universities are
obsessed with the concept of “self-care”—which starts with retreat and shelter.
Campuses respond to national elections and controversial campus speakers by
creating “safe spaces,” protected rooms “equipped with cookies, coloring books,
bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking
puppies.” They are in deadly earnest about this, and it will only take you four
minutes and 39 seconds to watch “Our Sound Our Silence: Self Care in Student of
Color Activism,” a Scripps College senior thesis presented as a documentary
film. The opening moments are…clarifying.
And then there’s the increasingly violent act of
silencing, as students riot to shut down speakers they disagree with (on the
vaguest and least-informed of terms): Charles Murray at Middlebury, Heather
MacDonald at Claremont, Ben Shapiro at Cal State Los Angeles. Taking a
shortcut, undergraduate social justice warriors skip the stage where they heal
from hearing that people disagree with them by making sure no one can say that
they disagree with them.
“Safe space” campus culture grows from three ugly roots:
Marcusian political strategy, the transition of higher education to a customer
service model in which undergraduates are relentlessly pampered and flattered,
and the emergence of virtue signaling as the key that opens the door to the
ruling class. Outrage is a positional good; writing that “Black Lives Matter”
rant to Stanford, the son of the hedge fund manager is demonstrating his social
breeding. He’s performing his objections to inequality to preserve his own
access to its benefits.
Campus Outrage Has
Gone Horribly Wrong
But the outrage maneuver has gone horribly wrong. College
campuses seethe with misery and insanity; at three of the five undergraduate
colleges in the Claremont University Consortium, administrators are the targets
of student strikes, protests, and demands for ritual self-humiliation. (At a
fourth, Claremont McKenna, SJWs already took down their victim.) Even mildly
heterodox professors are hunkered down, afraid of
their students.
We’re nearing the moment where the Red Guards turn from
attacking external class enemies to the internal policing of ideological purity
and zeal for the cause. If someone tries to hire you as the dean of something
at some point in the next two years, don’t.
Students will be enraged at the sight of your face before they’ve even heard
your name.
And the misery isn’t just social and institutional—it’s
distinctly personal. A series of surveys and reports have concluded that the
current cohort of undergraduates “has greater levels of stress and
psychopathology than any time in the nation’s history.” College students who
lived through the Great Depression and World War II have nothing on their
contemporary equivalents who have had to live through the cancellation of
“Girls.”
The pampered Marcusian neurasthenic has found her room
with yellow wallpaper, a hell you build yourself with some friends from Intro
to Sociology. Playing at relentless daily rage and sorrow, undergraduate social
justice warriors find themselves surrounded by (guess what) constant messages
of rage and sorrow, which lead to, amazingly, real feelings of rage and sorrow.
Consistent daily pretending turns into being. The fetal position, adopted as a
social gesture, sticks.
Pity those spoiled idiots gathered around Nicholas
Christakis: They’ve locked one another into their safe spaces, and the
wallpaper is starting to crawl.
No comments:
Post a Comment