The spectacle unfolding at elite universities these in these last weeks has dominated the news.
On one hand, it’s been gratifying to watch the coalition of the Left coming apart, and to see factions that used to march in step now turning against each other. Writing seven years ago, I compared the tensions that would form within the Left as they spiraled deeper into their ideological gravity-well to the tidal effects that rip moons apart as they get too close to the planets they orbit:
I (and others) have argued that because of the radical skepsis at the heart of the modern Left — the legacy of the Enlightenment, in which nothing is exempt from the most withering and critical scrutiny — that there is no limiting principle, no bedrock, upon which this implacably descending ideological movement can ultimately come to rest.
(Two years ago I likened this to the collapse of massive stars. We might also borrow a different astronomical metaphor: it’s as if the Left, as it approaches its own singularity, is now crossing its Roche limit, where tidal forces begin to tear it to pieces.)
If, as the process accelerates, the Left continues to delaminate and disintegrate, perhaps only a smaller and smaller core will tumble into the abyss — as others … find bedrock, at last, below which they cannot descend.
I also wrote about this using a different metaphor — that grievance is “fractal” — back in 2014:
You start with the most basic grievance of all: everybody else against white males. That works for a while, but soon the fractal process gets to work, and next thing you know it’s blacks and hispanics against homosexuals — and if you let the algorithm run for while, and crank up the magnification a bit, before you know it you’ve got black women vs. gay men.
So yes, it’s nice to see dissension in the enemy’s ranks. (Auron Macintyre argues that the Right should just stand back and let the campuses fester, as an example for all.) On the other hand, though, the murderous anti-Semitism nakedly displayed at these events is horrifying, and I can hardly blame local authorities for using actual force to quell these disturbances. (It would have been nice, and might have prevented billions in property damage and a good deal of injury and death if they had also seen fit to do so in 2020, but that’s water over the dam at this point.
It’s important to understand what these kids are doing. Having grown up under the spell of our contemporary secular cryptoreligion, they have a gaping hole where all previous generations had a sense of a transcendent order to which they are connected — and because human nature, like Nature itself, abhors a vacuum, they needed something else to take the place of the sacred, and a way to order the world into good and evil. In this truncated, Earthbound universe, then, evil becomes Oppression, good becomes The Struggle, and the Victim the holiest of beings.
Just as in other religions, in this one the path of spiritual advancement is to move toward the sacred. And lacking anything genuinely transcendent to offer as a model, the shabby, sawn-off “religion” these crusaders follow impels them to become one with the sacred Oppressed. And so this is the posture they must adopt. On with the keffiyehs, comrades!
Donning the mantle of the Oppressed really takes some doing, though, if you’re a pampered student at one of the world’s most prestigious universities; in your heart you know you aren’t the real, sacred thing at all — and so you have to LARP with extra ferocity. (You have to do things like, having taken over a college building, start demanding that people provide you food as a matter of “humanitarian aid”.) This is why all of this zealotry is burning its hottest in citadels of privilege like Columbia and Harvard.
I have to say, though, that despite the outpouring of disgust from every corner of the Right, I actually feel kind of sorry for these kids. It isn’t their fault that they were brought up in such an educational, spiritual, moral, and political dung-heap; they’ve had nothing to guide them toward anything real or true or lasting or genuine, nobody to teach them how to be adults instead of spoilt children, and they’ve had none of the social and behavioral scaffolding that helped all previous generations find their place in a harmonious social order. How can we really expect them to behave like civilized men and women, if nobody’s ever shown them how?