(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The liberal Enlightenment is being threatened all over the globe, mostly from the right. In American elite colleges, however, the threat is coming from the left — as the “consumer’s college” gives way to the “comfort college.”
The aim of the consumer’s college was to train a broad range of students for different forms of success. The primary goal of the comfort college? Diversity and inclusion.
While these, and the accompanying call for social justice, are noble aspirations, what happens when they eclipse critical inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge? What happens when they outweigh everything else?
If one adopts social justice as the primary goal of a college, there emerges a paradox that resembles what philosophers call the hedonistic paradox. It goes something like this: Many hold happiness as the goal or purpose of life. However, the surest way to make sure you never attain happiness is to always hold it as the goal and to ask yourself constantly, Is this making me happy?
Related: The Rise of the Comfort College
As John Stuart Mill notes in his autobiography: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life.” If you want to be happy, then immerse yourself in ballet or baseball or breaking the chains — if happiness is to come, it will follow from that. It turns out that sometimes the best way to pursue something is not to do it directly. For a college interested in training its students to fight for social justice, the paradox holds.
By raising the pursuit of justice over the pursuit of knowledge, the comfort college discards the very tools needed to achieve true justice.
At the beginning of Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates leads a dialogue centered on the question of whether there are alternatives to force. One of the participants, Thrasymachus, challenges Socrates and gives his own famous definition of justice: “I say that justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger.” In other words, might makes right, but this requires some unpacking.
The key distinction is between power and authority. Suppose, in some weird version of Prohibition-era Chicago, I want to open a speakeasy on the corner of 57th and Ellis. Both Al Capone, whose turf it is, and Eliot Ness, the famous G-man, can stop me, but the first with power (I’m afraid of machine guns) and the second with governmental authority.
What gives the government the authority to stop me? This is one of the foundational questions of political philosophy, and something we’ve been trying to answer for the last 2,400 years. The divine right of kings was the most popular answer for centuries; now “the consent of the people,” as seen through the prism of social contract theory, dominates. Thrasymachus, however, is saying there is no such authority at all: It is simply an illusion propagated by the strong. It is power all the way down.
Here is another way of looking at it. Suppose I ask someone for the reason he or she believes something — anything. Without further context, the word “reason” is strictly ambiguous. Am I asking for the motive, the cause or the justification? If the question is “What is the reason a person believes in God?” the answer could be a motive (to find comfort at 3 a.m.) or a cause (his parents raised him that way). A justification would take the form of a rational argument.
Notice, though, that while motive and cause are subjective — that is, they only hold depending on the individual — justification is objective; if it holds for one, it holds for all. Only justification is directly tied to the truth. As the ending of “1984” brutally demonstrates, one can be motivated and caused to believe 2 plus 2 equals 5. For all the techniques of Big Brother, however, it still equals 4.
Thrasymachus, a post-modernist a couple of millennia ahead of his time, denies there is such a thing as justification — there is only motive and cause. There’s only one answer to the question Why should I be just? Swords and spears.
It took 2,400 years, but Thrasymachus has won in the comfort college. When objectivity is scorned, when justification is considered only subjective, when reason and logic are taken to be only the tools of oppression and the province of the oppressor, then all that is left is power.
To ask the reason for something can only mean to ask for the motive or cause. The study of logic has a name for what happens when we confuse the origin of a belief with its truth, or the origin of an argument with its validity. It’s called the genetic fallacy.
The comfort college’s acolytes make the figurative fallacy literal. It is the arguer’s genes that determine truth and validity, not facts or reason. That is why, in the comfort college, testimony has come to substitute for rational argument. When students (and more and more faculty) demand a new policy, their arguments often begin as (and rarely go beyond) accounts of victimization; the account is justification enough.
This ritual institutionalizes the denial of rational justification. It corrupts the healthy multicultural idea, built on Enlightenment universalism and cosmopolitanism, that different perspectives matter, and that what one sees often depends on where one stands — and that we are all better off from listening to those who stand in different places, who see the part of the truth that is blocked from our particular vision. The liberal ideal of the pursuit of knowledge is that by cooperating we all can see and understand better. But identity politicians reject the Enlightenment’s hope of mutual understanding and reason’s path to get us there. In the fragmented comfort college, the only tool is power — the power to enforce the dogma.
William Deresiewicz notes:
To take the most conspicuous issue around which questions of free expression are being disputed on campus, the disinvitation of outside speakers always reflects the power of one group over another. When a speaker is invited to campus, it means that some set of people within the institution — some department, center, committee, or student organization — wants to hear what they have to say. When they are disinvited, shouted down, or otherwise prevented from speaking, it means another set has proved to be more powerful.
Why is there such opposition to free speech? Why, of all the issues, is this the one that inspires the masses to the barricades? Perhaps an answer can be found in this example.
When a Williams College department is given permission to create a new teaching position, the dean of the faculty assigns the search committee to read, among other works, “‘We Are All for Diversity, But …’: How Faculty Hiring Committees Reproduce Whiteness and Practical Suggestions for How They Can Change.” The authors say:
Another unnamed logic of Whiteness is the presumed neutrality of White European enlightenment epistemology. The modern university — in its knowledge generation, research, and social and material sciences and with its “experts” and its privileging of particular forms of knowledge over others (e.g., written over oral, history over memory, rationalism over wisdom) — has played a key role in the spreading of colonial empire. In this way, the university has validated and elevated positivistic, White Eurocentric knowledge over non-White, Indigenous, and non-European knowledges.
Recognizing and learning from non-Western sources of knowledge is one thing — and the incorporation of these sources was one of the great achievements of the multicultural movement in the consumer’s college. But abandoning knowledge and objectivity is another. Without them, we are left only with power. When the possibility of objectivity is rejected, all that is left is to attack the arguer and not the argument. It is no accident, then, that comfort-college protests are often aimed at destroying the careers of individual professors who commit the sins of liberalism. Only the woke deserve to be comfortable. Cancel culture is a feature of the comfort college, not a bug.
In Plato’s “Apology,” Socrates distinguishes between philosophers and sophists, truth and persuasion, logic and rhetoric, authority and power. The comfort college is the sophists’ college. As Plato saw deeply, though, the relationships between the seeming dichotomies are not so simple.
Some of American higher education’s persuasive power has come from the authority of reason. There were those who were often appropriately skeptical, but for some of the people some of the time, at least, colleges and universities were considered to be the American institutions best dedicated to the unprejudiced pursuit of knowledge. Thus, even disheveled professors were listened to, and reason and evidence had their roles. The far and populist right has already abandoned its respect for science, attributing climate-change science to a worldwide liberal conspiracy. But now much of the public is seeing that the comfort college values dogma more than knowledge, that it is responsible to agendas, not to truth. The comfort college, while rejecting all of President Donald Trump’s beliefs, has adopted his epistemological style.
Some of the power and authority of a university stems from the belief in its truth-seeking mission. When that dissolves, the elitist gatekeeping function will remain (at least for a while and at least for some), but its deliberative role in American democracy will be diminished.
This accompanies another loss. It has always been part of the ideology of residential liberal arts colleges, and part of the justification for their special treatment and privileges, that they educate citizens for democracy. The elite colleges, in all their stages, have traditionally prided themselves on preparing their students to occupy leadership roles in American democracy. The battle of Waterloo may or may not have been won on the playing fields of Eton, but at least in romantic rhetoric, democracy was nourished in the seamless connection between the late-night bull session and the afternoon (not morning!) class. In the continuous interplay of recursive learning and joy, one learned the tools of democratic deliberation. One learned both the difficulties and joys of self-governance. In order to win, you had to appeal to evidence, not to deans.
It's not unreasonable to expect that this loss will stretch beyond the political realms.
Two decades ago, I was chair of the Williams faculty’s Diversity and Community Committee. My aim was straightforward: to increase the number of faculty of color. I had a meeting with some members of the Board of Trustees — alumni who were good, solid Republican business leaders. They were critical of our hiring practices.
At first I thought they were conservative culture warriors, objecting to the takeover of the college by radical professors. But, as it turns out, they were far more aggressive about minority recruitment of both professors and students than the administration or faculty. Their businesses were increasingly multinational and, in the U.S., multicultural. Their clients, customers and employees spoke a multitude of languages, worshiped a multitude of gods and had a multitude of cultural practices. We need a diverse faculty and student body, they argued, so our managers will be comfortable with and know how to deal with the broader economic population.
I then realized that these trustees wanted to increase minority representation at Williams because it made sound commercial sense. The trustees were not more liberal than the faculty or administration; they just understood capitalism better.
Will businesses jump to hire students who spend their time in college chronicling microaggressions, demanding separate housing for each identity group and, like the Jacobins and Red Guard, calling for the destruction of anyone to their political right? We’ll see. But I have my doubts.
It is true that the reality of what went on within the ivy-covered walls never matched the rhetoric of the mission statements and brochures. The pursuit of knowledge was never pure in the Christian college, the gentlemen’s college or the consumer’s college: It was always situated in the particular milieu of class aspirations and expectations of each college’s time. But that doesn’t mean the rhetoric didn’t matter; it expressed the attitude of the college and gave a sense of common purpose to disparate activities. The physics professor in the lab, the student writing a history thesis in the library, the artist in the studio — all were working together.
The physics professor and the thesis student will still search for truth, the artist for beauty, but in the fragmented comfort college, they will do so separately. The college may comfort the individual, but the community’s sense of a search for the common good will disappear, covered over by the forces not of reason, but of force itself.
Part 1: The rise of the comfort college.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Shipley at davidshipley@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Steven B. Gerrard has taught philosophy at Williams College since 1992.
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.