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+--- Thread: Today's Campus Crusaders: Thought police without a temperate philosophy? (/thread-939.html)
Today's Campus Crusaders: Thought police without a temperate philosophy? - C C - Jun 4, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/opinion/david-brooks-the-campus-crusaders.html
EXCERPT: Every generation has an opportunity to change the world. Right now, college campuses around the country are home to a moral movement that seeks to reverse centuries of historic wrongs. This movement is led by students forced to live with the legacy of sexism, with the threat, and sometimes the experience, of sexual assault. It is led by students whose lives have been marred by racism and bigotry. It is led by people who want to secure equal rights for gays, lesbians and other historically marginalized groups.
These students are driven by noble impulses to do justice and identify oppression. They want to not only crack down on exploitation and discrimination, but also eradicate the cultural environment that tolerates these things. They want to police social norms so that hurtful comments are no longer tolerated and so that real bigotry is given no tacit support.
[...] But when you witness how this movement is actually being felt on campus, you can’t help noticing that it sometimes slides into a form of zealotry. If you read the website of the group FIRE, which defends free speech on campus [...etc...] you come across tales of professors whose lives are ruined because they made innocent remarks; you see speech codes that inhibit free expression; you see reputations unfairly scarred by charges of racism and sexism.
The problem is that the campus activists have moral fervor, but don’t always have settled philosophies to restrain the fervor of their emotions. Settled philosophies are meant to (but obviously don’t always) instill a limiting sense of humility, a deference to the complexity and multifaceted nature of reality. But many of today’s activists are forced to rely on a relatively simple social theory.
[...] We’re now in a position in which the students and the professors and peers they target are talking past each other. The students feeling others don’t understand the trauma they’ve survived; the professors feeling as though they are victims in a modern Salem witch trial. Everybody walks on egg shells....
RE: Today's Campus Crusaders: Thought police without a temperate philosophy? - elte - Jun 4, 2015
I recall young years with a lack of behaviorally restraining philosophy. I can relate to those young adults having a similar problem. Now I try to keep in mind how we are all struggling against the harsh environment of the universe that coldly follows apparently unchanging physical laws.
RE: Today's Campus Crusaders: Thought police without a temperate philosophy? - Magical Realist - Jun 6, 2015
Because discrimination and dehumanization secure their power over us thru largely silent and clandestine means, speaking out against it always comes off as abit overreactive and preachy. Crying "fire" in a crowded theater afterall is rude and interrupts the movie. "Hey jerk! Keep it down!" The unspoken continuance of the status quo. of business as normal, is instilled in most of us, until you are actually made a victim of those complicitly-condoned thought patterns. I remember when I saw that video of those frat members singing their "no niggers" song on the bus and thought, "I could easily have been among those creeps, laughing along to ensure my acceptance in the gang." We need the outcriers to wake us all up to these sort of systemic transgressions. We need to give tolerance and respect a crowd-backed coolness that can counteract the coolness of being part of an established hegemony.