By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, February 23, 2021
The latest controversy in the world of American wokeness
reads like a parody of the phenomenon.
This week, the online publication Slate indefinitely
suspended without pay one of its most well-known podcasters, Mike Pesca, after
it became known that he had a private conversation with a fellow employee about
the controversial firing of New York Times staff reporter, Donald
McNeil. McNeil was let go after the outside world became aware of a
conversation he had with students in 2019 when he was asked for his thoughts on
whether it was appropriate to impose professional consequences on someone who
uses a noxious racial slur. During that conversation, McNeil used that slur
(which he was encouraged to do) to illustrate his point. And for that, he was
fired. “My points,” Pesca
told his colleagues in an internal chatroom discussion, “are his internal
conduct was in a grey area, you guys don’t think it was.” This offense resulted
in Pesca being consigned to professional limbo.
To summarize this ponderous case, Pesca was fired for
discussing in a private conversation the firing of someone who, also in a
private conversation, was prompted to reference a slur in an academic context.
If it wasn’t clear before, it should be now: We are in
the midst of a moral panic. This episode represents yet another assault on
discourse which now includes shared frames of reference. It is of a piece with
the mission to “disrupt
texts,” which posits that we should not contextualize literature that is a
product of its time; instead, we should bowdlerize it or even ban it. It is the
same mission that would tear down statues of Abraham Lincoln as readily as it
would statuary memorializing Confederate dead because it is disdainful of the
norms that prevailed in his lifetime. It is the same censorious, power-mad
cultural ethos that has transformed even the pedagogical
exploration of offensive subject matter a fireable offense.
This is an utterly uncompromising assault on context, the
study of history, and the value of unfettered intellectual debate. It is a
wonder that the executors of this cultural revolution are shocked to find that
some people don’t take too kindly to the effort. What’s more, some of those who
aren’t comfortable with this campaign of historical revisionism helm some
rather powerful institutions. And those institutions, some of which are not
beholden to America’s constitutional protections on speech and expression, are
fighting back.
The government of France, for example, has all but
declared war on the woke. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual
matrix from American universities,” French President Emmanuel Macron averred.
In France, a nascent intellectual movement alleges that some of the tenets of
modern social justice, particularly the activists’ view that racial
characteristics are linked to immutable habits of mind, are an assault on the
preferred French conception of race as a subjective condition. In the view of
its opponents, these uniquely American ideas poison the water, sow discord, and
give comfort to an “Islamo-leftism [that] corrupts all of society.” And now,
the heavy hand of French cultural policing has
descended on universities that lend credence to these views.
A similar backlash is underway on the other side of the
Channel. “I am deeply worried about the chilling effect on campuses of
unacceptable silencing and censoring,” British Education Secretary Gavin
Williamson declared in a speech last week. “That is why we must strengthen free
speech in higher education by bolstering the existing legal duties and ensuring
strong, robust action is taken if these are breached.” The speech was
accompanied by a declaration of the British government’s intention to impose
legal mandates on universities to actively promote free expression and fine
those institutions that fail to uphold this charge.
Framing the issue in no uncertain terms, Secretary of
State and Housing Robert Jenrick vowed to “save Britain’s statues from the woke
militants who want to censor our past.” The government’s move has been
bolstered by private British institutions, which are ramping up their efforts
to petition courts for redress on behalf of those who face professional
consequences for violating social justice’s tenets.
It shouldn’t be, but it is somewhat surprising that the
most aggressive defenders of social justice’s campaign of intimidation are
horrified by the counterattack.
“In reality, the biggest threats to academic freedom and
free speech come not from staff and students, nor from so-called ‘cancel
culture,’ but from ministers’ own attempts to police what can and cannot be
said on campus,” mourned Britain’s University and College Union general
secretary, Jo Grady. London’s initiative, she continued, will rob
academics of their ability to “speak truth to power.”
In France, the academic community has lashed out at
Minister for Higher Education Frederique Vidal’s investigation into researchers
whose work looks “at everything through the prism of wanting to fracture and
divide” and blur the distinctions between scholarship and “activism and
opinion.” A statement from the National Center for Scientific Research accused
Paris of seeking to “delegitimize different fields of research such as
post-colonial studies.”
The world of woke political commentary is particularly
incensed by this censorious assault on their own censorious values. “This is
very worrying,” one French academic told
VICE News. “This is a political attempt to control knowledge.” Another
added that the French government had committed itself to a course of action
precedented only by the Vichy regime. And as VICE chronicled, academics and
university-affiliated researchers have been bombarded of late by “threats from
France’s far-right,” which are largely supportive of the government’s move.
In the U.K., Guardian columnist Zoe Williams accused
London of creating “more divisions” in pursuit of “monoculturalism” at the
expense of more “productive discussions.” Historian David Olusoga agreed,
charging Boris Johnson’s government (and Donald Trump’s) with promoting a
“vision of the past is simplistic, reductive and ahistorical.”
These concerns are perfectly valid. Indeed, they are
precisely the accusations leveled by opponents of social-justice maximalism. In
service to a shallow and revisionist account of human events, one which seeks
to distill complex narratives and even more complicated people down to one
unified theory of history, a tyrannical contingent of cultural revolutionaries
are attacking the foundations of our shared cultural understandings. Those who
resent the severe reaction their activism has produced in France and Britain
are staring into their own reflections, and they don’t like what they see.
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