No one should have to pass someone else’s ideological purity test to be allowed to speak. University life—along with civic life—dies without the free exchange of ideas. In the face of intimidation, educators must speak up, not shut down. Ours is a position of unique responsibility: We teach people not what to think, but how to think. Realizing and accepting this has made me—an eminently replaceable, untenured, gay, mixed-race woman with PTSD—realize that no matter the precariousness of my situation, I have a responsibility to model the appreciation of difference and care of thought I try to foster in my students. If I, like so many colleagues nationwide, am afraid to say what I think, am I not complicit in the problem?83
* * *
• • • • •
Charlottesville was a national tragedy that sent shock waves through many American institutions, particularly universities. It occurred in the middle of the tumultuous first year of Donald Trump’s presidency. In the months afterward, there was a big increase in efforts by off-campus white supremacist organizations to provoke students and recruit members by putting up racist posters, flyers, and stickers on hundreds of campuses.84 We understand why so many students embraced more active and confrontational forms of protest. But because their activism is often based on an embrace of the Great Untruths and a tendency to attack potential allies, and because aggressive protests are often exactly what right-wing provocateurs are hoping to provoke, we believe that many student activists are harming themselves as well as their causes.
Why It Is Such a Bad Idea to Tell Students That Words Are Violence
Most students oppose the use of violence. When asked in a poll conducted by FIRE whether they themselves would use violence to stop someone from speaking, only 1% said yes.85 But there is a much larger group—roughly 20% to 30%, according to the two surveys we described earlier—that is willing to support other students who use violence, drawing on the sorts of justifications offered by the Berkeley students. The most common justification is that hate speech is violence, and some students believe it is therefore legitimate to use violence to shut down hate speech. Setting aside the questions of moral and constitutional legitimacy, what are the psychological consequences of thinking this way?
Members of some identity groups surely face more frequent insults to their dignity than do straight white males, on average. A free-for-all attitude toward speech that allows people to say whatever they want with no fear of consequences can therefore affect people with different social identities differently. As we noted in chapter 2, some portion of what is commonly called political correctness is just being thoughtful or polite—using words in a way that is considerate to others.86 But students make a serious mistake when they interpret words—even words spoken with hatred—as violence.
In a widely circulated essay in The New York Times in July 2017, the argument that words can be violence was made by Lisa Feldman Barrett, a well-respected professor of psychology and emotion researcher at Northeastern University.87 Barrett offered this syllogism: “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence.”
We responded in an essay in The Atlantic, in which we noted that it is a logical error to accept the claim that harm—even physical harm—is the same as violence.88 Barrett’s syllogism takes the form that if A can cause B and B can cause C, then A can cause C. Therefore, if words can cause stress and stress can cause harm, then words can cause harm, but that does not establish that words are violence. It only establishes that words can result in harm—even physical harm—which we don’t doubt. To see the difference, just rerun the syllogism by swapping in “breaking up with your girlfriend” or “giving students a lot of homework.” Both of these can provoke stress in someone else (including elevated levels of cortisol), and stress can cause harm, so both can cause harm. That doesn’t mean that they are violent acts.
Interpreting a campus lecture as violence is a choice, and it is a choice that increases your pain with respect to the lecture while reducing your options for how to respond. If you interpret a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos as a violent attack on your fellow students, then you have a moral obligation to do something about it, perhaps even something violent. That is precisely how trolls manipulate their victims.
But if you keep the distinction between speech and violence clear in your mind, then many more options are available to you. First, you can take the Stoic response and develop your ability to remain unmoved. As Marcus Aurelius advised, “Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.”89 The more ways your identity can be threatened by casual daily interactions, the more valuable it will be to cultivate the Stoic (and Buddhist, and CBT) ability to not be emotionally reactive, to not let others control your mind and your cortisol levels. The Stoics understood that words don’t cause stress directly; they can only provoke stress and suffering in a person who has interpreted those words as posing a threat. You can choose whether to interpret a visiting speaker as harmful. You can pick your battles, devote your efforts to changing policies that matter to you, and make yourself immune to trolls. The internet will always be there; extremists will always be posting potentially offensive images and statements; some groups will be targeted more than others. It’s not fair, but even as we work to lessen hatred and heal divisions, all of us must learn to ignore some of the things we see and just carry on with our day.
A second and more radical response opens up when you reject the “speech is violence” view: you can use your opponents’ ideas and arguments to make yourself stronger. The progressive activist Van Jones (who was President Barack Obama’s green jobs advisor) endorsed this view in February of 2017 in a conversation at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Politics. When Democratic strategist David Axelrod asked Jones about how progressive students should react when people they find ideologically offensive (such as someone associated with the Trump administration) are invited to speak on campus, Jones began by noting the distinction we described in chapter 1 between physical and emotional “safety”:
There are two ideas about safe spaces: One is a very good idea and one is a terrible idea. The idea of being physically safe on a campus—not being subjected to sexual harassment and physical abuse, or being targeted specifically, personally, for some kind of hate speech—“you are an n-word,” or whatever—I am perfectly fine with that. But there’s another view that is now I think ascendant, which I think is just a horrible view, which is that “I need to be safe ideologically. I need to be safe emotionally. I just need to feel good all the time, and if someone says something that I don’t like, that’s a problem for everybody else, including the [university] administration.”90
Jones then delivered some of the best advice for college students we have ever heard. He rejected the Untruth of Fragility and turned safetyism on its head:
I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym.
Jones understands antifragility. Jones wants progressive college students to see themselves not as fragile candles but as fires, welcoming the wind by seeking out ideologically different speakers and ideas.
In Sum
The “Milo Riot” at UC Berkeley on February 1, 2017, marked a major shift in campus protests. Violence was used successfully to stop a speaker; people were injured, and there were (as far as we can tell) no costs to those who were violent. Some students later justified the violence as a legitimate form of “self-defense” to prevent speech that they said was violent.
Hardly any students say that they themselves would use violence to shut down a speech, but two surveys conducted in
late 2017 found that substantial minorities of students (20% in one survey and 30% in the other) said it was sometimes “acceptable” for other students to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking on campus.
The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a white nationalist killed a peaceful counterprotester and injured others, further raised tensions on campus, especially as provocations from far-right groups increased in the months afterward.
In the fall of 2017, the number of efforts to shut down speakers reached a record level.
In 2017, the idea that speech can be violence (even when it does not involve threats, harassment, or calls for violence) seemed to spread, assisted by the tendency in some circles to focus only on perceived impact, not on intent. Words that give rise to stress or fear for members of some groups are now often regarded as a form of violence.
Speech is not violence. Treating it as such is an interpretive choice, and it is a choice that increases pain and suffering while preventing other, more effective responses, including the Stoic response (cultivating nonreactivity) and the antifragile response suggested by Van Jones: “Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity.”
In the quotation that opened this chapter, Nelson Mandela warned us against the danger of demonizing opponents and using violence against them. Like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other advocates of nonviolent resistance, Mandela noted that violent and dehumanizing tactics are self-defeating, closing off the possibility of peaceful resolution. But what if the goal of a movement isn’t entirely peaceful resolution but, rather—at least in part—group cohesion? What might we see if we take a sociological approach to the new culture of safetyism?
CHAPTER 5
Witch Hunts
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.
ERIC HOFFER, The True Believer1
Maoist,” “McCarthyite,” “Jacobin,” and above all, “witch hunt.” These terms are sometimes applied to the sorts of events we described in the last chapter. Those who apply such terms are claiming that what we are witnessing on campus exemplifies a situation long studied by sociologists in which a community becomes obsessed with religious or ideological purity and believes it needs to find and punish enemies within its own ranks in order to hold itself together.
From the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, Europe experienced multiple waves of witch hunts, driven primarily by religious wars and conflicts in the wake of the Reformation, and also by fears brought on by recurring plague outbreaks.2 Tens of thousands of innocent people—and possibly hundreds of thousands—were put to death, often after being “put to the question” (that is, tortured) with the aid of boiling oil, red-hot iron bars, or thumbscrews.3
The most famous witch hunt in U.S. history occurred in Salem, Massachusetts. In January of 1692, two young girls began to suffer from fits and tremors, which their elders attributed to witchcraft. In the following months, dozens of people claimed that they were tormented by witches or that they or their animals had been bewitched. Legal action was taken against at least 144 people (38 of them male) who were accused of practicing witchcraft. Nineteen were executed by hanging; one was crushed by heavy stones.4
Historical and sociological analyses of witch trials have generally explained these outbreaks as responses to a group experiencing either a sense of threat from outside, or division and loss of cohesion within. In Salem, a terrifying border war had broken out a few years earlier against the French and their Native American allies in what is now Maine (but was at that time part of Massachusetts). The townspeople were still anxious about attacks.5 Do the campus events making national headlines since the fall of 2015 fit into this sociological framework?
One of Jon’s favorite thinkers of all time is Emile Durkheim, the nineteenth- to early twentieth-century French sociologist. Durkheim saw groups and communities as being in some ways like organisms—social entities that have a chronic need to enhance their internal cohesion and their shared sense of moral order. Durkheim described human beings as “homo duplex,” or “two-level man.”6 We are very good at being individuals pursuing our everyday goals (which Durkheim called the level of the “profane,” or ordinary). But we also have the capacity to transition, temporarily, to a higher collective plane, which Durkheim called the level of the “sacred.” He said that we have access to a set of emotions that we experience only when we are part of a collective—feelings like “collective effervescence,” which Durkheim described as social “electricity” generated when a group gathers and achieves a state of union. (You’ve probably felt this while doing things like playing a team sport or singing in a choir, or during religious worship.) People can move back and forth between these two levels throughout a single day, and it is the function of religious rituals to pull people up to the higher collective level, bind them to the group, and then return them to daily life with their group identity and loyalty strengthened. Rituals in which people sing or dance together or chant in unison are particularly powerful.
A Durkheimian approach is particularly helpful when applied to sudden outbreaks of moralistic violence that are mystifying to outsiders. In 1978, the sociologist Albert Bergesen wrote an essay titled “A Durkheimian Theory of ‘Witch-Hunts’ With the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966–1969 as an Example.”7 Bergesen used Durkheim to illuminate the madness that erupted in Beijing in May 1966, when Mao Zedong began warning about the rising threat of infiltration by pro-capitalist enemies. Zealous college students responded by forming the Red Guards to find and punish enemies of the revolution. Universities across the country were shut down for several years. During those years, the Red Guards rooted out any trace they could find—or imagine—of capitalism, foreign influence, or bourgeois values. In practice, this meant that anyone who was successful or accomplished was suspect, and many professors, intellectuals, and campus administrators were imprisoned or murdered.8
Among the many cruel features of the Cultural Revolution were the “struggle sessions,” in which those accused of ideological impurity were surrounded by their accusers, taunted, humiliated, and sometimes beaten as they confessed to their crimes, offered abject apologies, and vowed to do better. Students sometimes turned on their own teachers. Over the next few years, tens of millions were persecuted, and hundreds of thousands were murdered.9
How could such an orgy of self-destruction have happened? Bergesen notes that there are three features common to most political witch hunts: they arise very quickly, they involve charges of crimes against the collective, and the offenses that lead to charges are often trivial or fabricated. Here’s how Bergesen puts it:
They arise quickly: “Witch-hunts seem to appear in dramatic outbursts; they are not a regular feature of social life. A community seems to suddenly find itself infested with all sorts of subversive elements which pose a threat to the collectivity as a whole. Whether one thinks of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, the Stalinist Show Trials, or the McCarthy period in the United States, the phenomenon is the same: a community becomes intensely mobilized to rid itself of internal enemies.”10
Crimes against the collective: “The various charges that appear during one of these witch-hunts involve accusations of crimes committed against the nation as a corporate whole. It is the whole of collective existence that is at stake; it is The Nation, The People, The Revolution, or The State which is being undermined and subverted.”11
Charges are often trivial or fabricated: “These crimes and deviations seem to involve the most petty and insignificant behavioral acts which are somehow understood as crimes against the nation as a whole. In fact, one of the principal reasons we term these events ‘witch-hunts’ is that innocent people are so often involved and falsely accused.”12
To Bergesen’s list we’ll add a fourth feature, which necessarily follows from
the first three:
Fear of defending the accused: When a public accusation is made, many friends and bystanders know that the victim is innocent, but they are afraid to say anything. Anyone who comes to the defense of the accused is obstructing the enactment of a collective ritual. Siding with the accused is truly an offense against the group, and it will be treated as such. If passions and fears are intense enough, people will even testify against their friends and family members.
Does Bergesen’s Durkheimian analysis of the Cultural Revolution help to explain the dramatic events that have been happening on campus since 2015, some of which we described in the previous chapter? As historical events, the two movements are radically different, most notably in that the Red Guards were supported by a totalitarian dictator who encouraged them to use violence, while American college students have been self-organized and almost entirely nonviolent. Yet there are similarities, too. For example, both movements were initiated by idealistic students fighting for what seemed to them a noble ideal: the remaking of society along egalitarian lines. Bergesen’s analysis captures the fact that both movements began with “dramatic outbursts,” which were followed by intense and rapid mobilization on college campuses across the country.13 It also captures the fact that large reactions are often launched in response to small acts, such as Erika Christakis’s email about Halloween costumes at Yale14 and Mary Spellman’s use of the word “mold” when reaching out to a student at Claremont McKenna College.15 Outside observers were often unable to comprehend how these two emails could have triggered mass movements demanding that the two women be denounced and fired.
The Coddling of the American Mind Page 11