patrick.net

At least one institution is standing firm against the mob of kneelers and capitulators and sentimentalizers ...

There are a few things to note about all such communications. One is how similar they are to one another. It’s as if all those college presidents and CEOs of woke companies are working from the same list of bullet points distributed some semi-literate affiliate of antifa or Black Lives Matter. You’ll see the same clichéd phrases dusted off and crammed together in drearily conformist globules of thought-free emotive sentimentality. ...

And I further conclude that the third thing to notice about all these declarations of solidarity is that the remaining one percent of genuine emotion stems from the underlying fuel of all these little displays of virtue-signaling: cravenness born of fear. The Mauds of the world are always kneeling in their souls. They look around at the mayhem and hope, like Odysseus in the cave of Polyphemus, that they will be eaten last. They could choose to stand up for the rule of law, without which civilization must perish. But they choose instead to stand with the mob, partly because they are seduced by the blandishments of its virtucratic slogans, partly because of that acrid taste of fear that always powers the mob. ‘But we’re on your side!’ they wail to the brick-throwers. It availeth not.

In many ways, the dichotomy resolves itself into mindless cacophony, on one side, and thoughtful silence on the other. I think of Edmund Burke’s great observation in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. ‘The vanity, restlessness, petulance, and spirit of intrigue, of several petty cabals, who attempt to hide their total want of consequence in bustle and noise, and puffing, and mutual quotation of each other, makes you imagine that our contemptuous neglect of their abilities is a mark of general acquiescence in their opinions.’

Not at all, Burke says.

‘Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shriveled, meager, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.’ ...

To its critics, Hillsdale’s silence, its refusal to join the mob of kneelers and capitulators and sentimentalizers, is a moral affront. Failing to issue statements about racism makes them complicit with racism. But wasn’t Hillsdale’s founding as an equal-opportunity educational institution in 1844 a statement? Hillsdale admitted blacks long before Williams or Yale or Harvard or Princeton or, indeed, long before any elite college. ...

The letter concludes by noting that there is ‘a kind of virtue that is cheap’. You see it everywhere today. ‘It consists of jumping on cost-free bandwagons of public feeling…and winning approval by espousing the right opinions.’ There is something stultifying and deeply repellent about the blanket of conformity with which freedom of expression is silenced, to the absurd point that even silence is silenced by being taken as evidence of Orwellian wrongthought. We are indeed flirting with the nightmare world of the Maoist ‘struggle session’ in which disagreements mutate into heresies that can be resolved only by ritual expurgation. Is that what we want?