Universities Vs. Liberal Democracy
A Christian in the University of Toronto community forwarded to me this e-mail, which went out to them all:
Date: January 29, 2020
To: University of Toronto Faculty, Staff, & Librarians
From:
Karima Hashmani, Executive Director, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, HR & Equity
Erin Jackson, Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO), HR & EquityRe: Remembrance and Action against Faith-Based Discrimination
This week, the University of Toronto joins communities across Canada to observe the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 and the Day of Remembrance and Action against Islamophobia on January 29.
On the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, we remember the more than six million Jewish men, women and children brutally murdered by the Nazi regime and its collaborators in the Shoah. We also honour the countless Romani, LGBTQ2 individuals, persons with disabilities and political dissidents who were killed as well as those who stood against the horrors of the Nazi atrocities.
On the third anniversary of the 2017 Quebec City Mosque Shooting, we reflect and remember this tragic event in Canada where six Muslims died and nineteen were injured after evening prayers at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City due to violence, Islamophobia, and racism.
Today is an opportunity for our community to reflect and consciously consider how we can continue to address and eliminate the many factors that perpetuate racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and other faith-based discrimination that continues to occur around the world today. We have a shared responsibility to dismantle stereotypes, acknowledge bias and challenge discrimination.
At the University of Toronto, our Anti-Racism & Cultural Diversity Office, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion offices at the University of Toronto Scarborough and University of Toronto Mississauga, Multi-Faith Centre, and Community Safety Office, in partnership with stakeholders across the tri-campuses, are key drivers of ongoing initiatives that address faith-based discrimination and racism, and its intersectional manifestations. These offices all provide support, services and education to our community.
Let us continue to work together to advance positive and safe environments for our diverse community at the University of Toronto. We encourage you to take the time to observe these days of remembrance and be reminded that there are a variety of safety and equity support resources available to all members of the University of Toronto should you require assistance.
The reader adds:
The cause is laudable. We should remember, and never repeat, crimes against people of faiths.I encourage you to read the email the administration sent and note who they include and who they exclude. One religion, in particular, does not merit inclusion. Christians. It’s outrageous. LGBTQ2 people died in Holocaust. They are mentioned in the release. Christians are not, however. Catholic saints, like Maximilian Kolbe, apparently weren’t subject to the Nazi’s cruelty.More outrageous is the failure to mention the mass murder of Christians across the world right now. It’s a near genocide of Christians in the Middle East. It’s real and it’s happening in real time. No mention.We need to ask why an institution like the University of Toronto is afraid to mention Christians in a release like this one. Is this because they feel that Christians are responsible for perpetrating crimes against other religions? Is Christianity “too white”?
According to a new Pew Research Center report, there are already more Christians in Africa than any other continent. By 2060, six of the top ten countries with the largest Christian populations will be in Africa, up from three in 2015.
But as Christianity grows in Africa, so does the persecution of Christians.
“Christians are increasingly seen as a threat to Muslim-dominated lands and governments,” said Dede Laugesen, the executive director of Save the Persecuted Christians, a U.S. charity.
“Mass territories of uninhabited, ungoverned regions provide easy cover for Islamic terror group activities. Combined with extreme poverty, joblessness and well-established routes for illegal arms dealing and the illicit slave trade, resource-rich African countries north of the equator provide fertile ground for Islamic State fighters fleeing the Middle East and looking for new territories to dominate,” he told Crux.
The fact that there is mass persecution of Christians by Muslims violates the rules of intersectionality. The fact that most of the world’s persecuted Christians are non-white people who are not being persecuted by white people, but by other non-white people, also violates the rules of intersectionality. Therefore, this fact does not exist.
How many students, faculty, and staff at the University of Toronto are aware of the mass persecutions of Christians going on in the world today? How many of them are aware that most of the world’s Christians are nonwhite? Does it occur to the people who run the diversity initiatives on that campus that these are important facts? Do the diversity officials at that college even see Christians, of all colors?
I could be wrong about this, but my guess is that there’s a kind of Law of Merited Impossibility at work here: “Christians are not being persecuted for their faith, and if they were, they would deserve it.”
It is not a surprise to me that Christians were left off of this mailing from the University of Toronto, because their exclusion — whether deliberate or accidental — is a sign of the Social Justice Warrior mindset that dominates human resources and diversity bureaucracies. This mindset is Leninist: it is entirely about gaining power, and regards the accumulation of power to be a zero-sum matter, with the Good extolled and the Evil vanquished. As long as there is Evil anywhere in the world, the Good cannot be free.
Working on this coming book of mine has been a profoundly eye-opening experience, teaching me about the mindset of revolutionary communists, and seeing overwhelming parallels with the way SJWs see the world. It is fundamentally a religious viewpoint, even if God doesn’t have anything to do with it. That is, it operates as a moral system based on a kind of identity-politics metaphysics.
Diversity, equity, inclusivity — all are ideals based in a humane liberalism, at least in theory. What they truly stand for is dispossession of the people power-holders in this system regard as deplorable oppressors.
Every week I hear, either by e-mail or in person, from people in this blog’s readership who work in academia, who testify to how it has poisoned the university. Universities have become ground zero for the revolution that is bringing soft totalitarianism to America. You think that’s a wild accusation? You should spend some time reading the history of the Russian Revolution. Back in the 1880s, the revolutionaries couldn’t get the time of day from the masses, or anybody else. But they kept working at it, and as social conditions changed — e.g., the tsarist government’s incompetence mounted, masses of peasants moved into the cities — they found a hearing. Crucially, they won over the adult children of many in the middle classes, who learned about the revolutionary ideals in college. Historian Yuri Slezkine recounts the words of a tsarist general who complained that his own adult children were heavily involved in sedition. Slezkine said the fact that Russian parents, despite their political sympathies, would not act against their children, was a major factor in the revolution’s success.
I wonder if populist voters and the politicians they elect will ever attempt to make universities pay for being engines of social revolution, bigotry, and dispossession. Here’s a highly provocative essay by Arthur Milikh, writing in National Affairs, calling for the prevention of “suicide by higher education.”
His argument is that it is time for the state to act to reform American universities, which have become destructive of the common good. He begins:
America’s universities have been progressivism’s most important asset, its crown jewel. For over half a century, they have served as the left’s R&D headquarters and the intellectual origin or dissemination point for the political and moral transformation of the nation, especially through the sexual revolution and the identity-politics revolution. Universities have trained the new elites who have taken society’s helm and now set its tone through the other institutions thoroughly dominated by the left: the mainstream press, mass entertainment, Fortune 500s, and tech companies. Universities have also brought to rural and suburban America these moral revolutions, converting generations of young people to their cause. Universities are arguably the most important institution in modern democracy — no other institution has such power to determine the fate of democracy, for good or ill.
Universities were meant be the one fixed place in democratic society insulated from the ceaseless motion of democratic life, with its petty passions, consumption, and moral and intellectual fashions. They were meant to serve as the guardian of the mind and its greatest fruits. In previous eras, segments of society (especially the clergy and the aristocracy) were devoted to protecting learning and a tradition of books. But democracy does not support such classes, and it was originally hoped that the universities would assume this role. Regrettably, they are no longer animated by their original purpose of serving republican self-government or the freedom of the mind. As such, they must be treated as political entities.
More:
In their confusion about or open rebellion against these ends [of serving the common good], America’s universities too often create students in the opposite vein: ideologues with technical skills, despisers of tradition without insight (not to mention wisdom), or scientists without perspective. These problems are hardly new and have been the centerpiece of the conservative critique of higher education for more than half a century. What is new, however, is the thoroughness of the corruption, the impossibility at this point of changing course through conventional means, and the extent of the pernicious effects of these institutions on the nation as a whole.
Here’s is the heart of it, from my point of view — the radical, illiberal source of the corruption:
The contemporary manifestation of commitment is called “identity,” and it is expressed especially through race and sexuality. Identity, as it is broadly understood today, is an unfalsifiable, self-created opinion of oneself or one’s group that others must recognize, accommodate, and celebrate. Identity has become sacred, placed beyond questioning or criticism. But the sacredness of identity applies only to allegedly oppressed or marginalized groups. These are allowed to possess an identity, while the alleged oppressors must not only be denied an identity but must perpetually atone for the oppression stemming from it. Herbert Marcuse’s goal of getting universities to teach that “history was the development of oppression” has not only succeeded — it is now publicly financed.
These doctrines stand in stark contrast to natural rights, the foundational teaching of America. Natural rights mean that human beings belong to a common humanity, not to an identity group. As such, all human beings have the same rights, which can be grasped rationally. Since all human beings possess rights, a political common good is possible, as is mutual understanding and rational persuasion. Deep commitments, to the contrary, imply real conflict.
A generation after Bloom’s writing, identity fanaticism, having first gained institutional support in the universities, and now in the Democratic Party, has turned to demanding conformity and punishing dissenters. The next logical outgrowth of identity politics is suppression of free speech, as speech is the expression of a free, questioning mind. An example of this fanaticism is captured in a letter written by Williams College students to faculty members who supported the adoption of the University of Chicago statement in defense of free speech on campuses. For these students, enforcing the freedom of speech is merely a reflection of “white fragility” and “discursive violence,” and is thus primarily supported by “white faculty,” the oppressor group. This letter reflects beliefs widely held by faculty and students across the nation’s universities. If universities once understood their purpose as seeking intellectual clarity, now rational questioning of identity theories is itself an act of violence.
One of the effects of ingesting this poison:
Moreover, asserting that human happiness is gained through non-rational identity creation — rather than self-exploration, attachment to one’s nation, family, or romantic love — creates no wisdom for life, let alone philosophic wisdom, and leaves many young adherents confused and unhappy. Future citizens, statesmen, and free minds cannot emerge from such teachings. For instance, neither love nor families form as a result of teachings about a global patriarchal conspiracy against women. What forms instead is a war between the sexes, an ethic of using and being used, which, in turn, fails to form the virtues of character that are the groundwork from which love grows. Having destroyed any sense of belonging to a just order, what remains is anger and vengeance, the satisfaction of which determines one’s self-respect. Students are often left to understand that there is no nation, love, or even gender — only open self-creation and, ironically, dogmatic conformity to this doctrine.
Read it all. There’s a lot more to the essay than I’ve quoted here. It’s one of the most important things I’ve read in a long time. We really have reached the point where we have to consider Milikh’s claim: “No society should be expected to subsidize its own corrosion.”
I have to tell you, working on that book radicalized me. You longtime readers know that I’ve been complaining about and documenting for years the harms Social Justice Warriors wreak on campuses — and throughout American institutions. I still wouldn’t have gone so far as to take Milikh’s argument seriously … until I started to see the world through the eyes of people who had lived through the destruction of their own societies by the same kind of radicals, in an earlier time. As Solzhenitsyn warned us, it really could happen here.
Go back and watch this emotional woke mob at Yale rolling over Prof. Nicholas Christakis, who tries bravely to be the voice of liberal rationality, and tell me that something big isn’t happening here. The Yale administration eventually caved to the mob.
