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?
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I think you’re giving the kiddos too much credit, Malcolm. They know what they’re doing, just as their Boomer predecessors also were aware of the score during the Sixties. If the university administrations simply went all Dean Wormer and bellowed to these Animal House morons “You’re out! Finished at — Columbia, University of Texas, Harvard, etc., etc., etc. — expelled! I want you off this campus at 9 o’clock Monday morning!,” these illegal occupations (heh) would cease in a nanosecond.
For instance, from what I gather this sort of pandemonium never seems to really occur at, say, the University of Chicago, which is also a fairly privileged place. Administrations just don’t put up with it there (although granted, perhaps the student body leans more Right or at least classically liberal).
Jason,
Well, that’s sort of my point, right? The adults that were supposed to civilize, discipline, and educate these fractious children didn’t do their jobs.
I’m not a frat guy, a fan of Israel or Hams but I couldn’t help donating to this… God Bless America. https://www.gofundme.com/f/pi-kappa-phi-men-defended-their-flag-throw-em-a-rager?utm_campaign=p_cp+fundraiser-sidebar&utm_content=share_ai_control&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
Has there been “murderous anti-Semitism” at the protests? Are the protesters saying that Jews should die simply for being Jews? (Aren’t there a fair number of Jewish protesters?)
I haven’t been following it too closely but it seems that the protesters think they’re protesting a mass murder of (Semitic) Palestinians. That seems like a pretty reasonable description of what’s happening, when tens of thousands of civilians are being starved and bombed for months on end.
If there are large numbers of protesters calling for the murder of Jews, that’s terrible. But there must be many who are simply calling for an end to the murder of Arabs. (Apparently something like 40,000 so far including many thousands of children.) Or, if “murder” is the wrong word, let’s say they call for an end to the mass killing of thousands of non-combatants.
Of course, I agree that many of these kids (almost all) are brainwashed idiots enacting a pseudo-religious script. Despite that, there’s probably also moral decency and human feeling.
As a thought experiment, imagine that no western kids had ever been subjected to woke indoctrination. Imagine that all of them were ideally rational and moral young people. How would we expect these kids to react to what the state of Israel is doing to the Palestinians? Would these rational and moral kids just shrug? Would they think it was entirely moral and decent to exterminate tens of thousands of civilians, including children, in the hope of killing a much smaller number of guerilla fighters? Would they have no objection to Israeli politicians referring to Arabs as “Amalek”? I think some of these imaginary ideal kids would be protesting too.
Hi Jacques. Good to see you here again.
You make fair points, but I think the key point is that “many of these kids (almost all) are brainwashed idiots enacting a pseudo-religious script.”
There are horrors unfolding all over the world; for example, the ongoing, genocidal civil war in the Sudan (just to pick one at random) is easily as brutal as what’s happening in Gaza, and you can be sure that the Israelis are far more cautious about avoiding unnecessary civilian casualties than the Janjaweed (or probably any military in has history that has been so grievously provoked as Israel was in October). But there isn’t a peep about any of that over here.
And yes, there has been plenty of enmity pointed directly at the Jews in these demonstrations. Even the most frequently heard rallying-cry — “FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!!” is a (barely) veiled call for the extinction of Jews in the region (not that any of these knuckleheads even seem to know what river, or what sea, they’re yelling about).
Clearly this is an operation; the evidence is the obvious coordination of preprinted placards, matching tents, slogans, etc. So as I said above, I don’t really blame the kids themselves; they are for the most part profoundly ignorant and excitable children. But there are some grownups who have a lot to answer for.
Seems to me Jews have been after Whites and Christians for a very long time. Anti-semitism, just like racism, means nothing anymore. Just sounds signifying nothing but pain to Whites.
Sorry, I no longer care to carry that burden any longer.
John Derbyshire comments, in this week’s Radio Derb, on what he calls “anti-Gentilism” (quoting, for example, Susan Sontag’s notorious opinion that “the white race is the cancer of human history).
Derbyshire (who has often described himself as either a “philo-Semite, or at least an anti-anti-Semite”) speculates that much of today’s anti-White zealotry is a lineal descendant of anti-Gentile sentiments imported in the great 20th-century wave of immigration from the shtetls.
That segment is here, starting at 22:27.
Hi Malcolm,
We seem to have our first real disagreement. I wonder how far it goes.
Yes, there are other horrors. But it’s not often that we see a modern army deployed against a trapped civilian population for six months straight.
I don’t agree that the Israelis are doing much to avoid “unnecessary” civilian casualties. It looks like their goal is maximal civilian casualties. (As you’d expect when Israeli leaders openly invoke “Amalek” and the genocidal moral code of the Jewish bible.)
After telling civilians to go to Rafa, the Israelis are bombing Rafa. The Israelis cut off food and power. They’ve killed over 100 journalists. There are many credible reports of civilians being buried alive with bulldozers. And many other atrocities.
I don’t understand how this could be considered a legitimate response to an attack that killed around 300 Israeli civilians.
In any case, the big difference between this situation and other horrors is that we don’t see the entire US establishment united in support of the Janjaweed, sending billions of tax dollars to arm the Janjaweed. We don’t have politicians telling us that the Janjaweed are exemplars of “democracy”.
Hi Jacques,
Well, that’s not a bad thing; I know from our long acquaintance that our postulates generally overlap, and so a little controversy gives us an opportunity to examine our theorems. Seeing eye-to-eye all the time, as so often happens in the little echo chambers that so much of our online lives have become, can be encouraging, but it’s also less interesting and helpful than productive disagreement.
So I’ll just review, and restate, what my own thoughts are about this, just for clarity — and to look them over again for my own sake.
(Before I do, though, I should say that the number I’ve heard for deaths in the original assault on 10/7 was over 1,200, not 300; there were more than 300 deaths in the IDF alone in that attack.)
I think I’ll do this in a new post, just to get it on the front page, and it will probably take me a day or so. (Forgive me for the delay, but I’m sure we can have an interesting discussion, as always.)
Also, just to prime the pump, here’s a thread on X arguing that the IDF has indeed done what it can — given the circumstances — to minimize civilian deaths. (I present it with the caveat that anything one sees online might turn out to be hogwash.)