The New York Times' Fascinating Definition of "Open-Mindedness"

From a piece in the NYT today on Peter Thiel, Trump, and Silicon Valley (emphasis mine):

A bigger problem than Mr. Trump’s policy ideas was his tone. Though Silicon Valley has well-known problems with diversity in its work force, people here pride themselves on a kind of militant open-mindedness. It is the kind of place that will severely punish any deviations from accepted schools of thought — see how Brendan Eich, the former chief executive of Mozilla, was run out of his job after it became public that he had donated to a campaign opposed to gay marriage. Mr. Trump’s comments about immigrants, women and so many other groups have made him a kind of kryptonite in Silicon Valley.

As a friend observes, nothing says "open-mindedness" like "severely punish[ing] any deviations from accepted schools of thought." We're moving quite fast from in loco parentis to, well, something else.

Churchill or Coolidge?

My purpose in this post is to ask what kind of statesmanship is needed to rescue the American Right. Does the GOP need Calvin Coolidge, or does it need Winston Churchill?

Coolidge is at first the obvious choice. The only president to fully confront the Leviathan of government, Coolidge and his seriousness, humility, and constitutionalist conviction are indispensable antidotes for the vacuity, celebrity, and grotesque caesarism of our political present. As Amity Shlaes, Coolidge’s most eloquent contemporary champion, reminds us, Silent Cal not only governed with a fiscal discipline and dedication to the rule of law that is sorely missed today; his modesty and Cincinnatian refusal to pursue personal power and fame embody the very principles of limited government and constitutionalism.

In words that could not be imagined in our strongman problem-solver fetishizing present, Coolidge explained that our system of government rests not on the charisma or brilliance of the president, but on the strength and wisdom of its institutions:

It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man. When a man begins to feel that he is the only one who can lead in this republic, he is guilty of treason to the spirit of our institutions.

It is easy to see why conservatives might pine for a Coolidge, a student and servant of the constitution, to take the reins in a time of such fiscal profligacy and social instability. But whom would Coolidge inspire?

On one reading, the sordid state of the American Right is the product primarily of poor policy choices and political betrayal by a cartel of corporatist elites. The problem is that Republican after Republican has paid lip-service to Coolidgeian principles, while governing as Wilsonian progressives—invading the world, inviting the world, and relentlessly expanding the size of the state. What’s needed is a true man of conservative principle, a man who is capable of resisting the siren call of statist public choice incentives. Only through such a man can conservatism restore the classical (but ordered) liberalism of an imagined past.

On another view however, the plight of the American Right draws from a far deeper cultural crisis. A profound change in America's reigning orthodoxy and cultural dogma plagues American society and has brought about the rightwing populism of the day. Now is not the time for a withdrawn, committed constitutionalist. As Tocqueville famously exclaimed, a new political science is needed for a world altogether new. What is needed in our broken world today is an active, energetic leader who can simultaneously harness and tame these most vitriolic of populist impulses.

In a 1941 lecture on "German Nihilism," the great German émigré political theorist, Leo Strauss, sought to diagnose the conditions which gave rise to the “German Nihilism” of the 1930s and 40s. He sought to examine the spirit of reactionary anger which festered throughout the Weimar Republic and exploded in the form of Nazism and Hitler. Surprisingly perhaps, Strauss argued that this nihilism did not ultimately arise from nationalism or a militarist love of war. Those were merely symptoms of a profound act of moral protest against the new de-moralized world of “cultural bolshevism” and liberalism.

The new populism of the right stemmed not from a rejection of the ethical life, but from a “love of morality” and a sense “of responsibility for [an] endangered morality.” The new orthodoxy of a “pacified planet, without rulers or ruled, of a planetary society devoted to production and consumption only”—in other words, the empty orthodoxy of contemporary cosmopolitanism—was “positively horrifying” to a generation of young Germans. Arising from the moral debasement of the Enlightenment and French Revolution, the new nihilists rebelled against their elites' deflated conflation of the moral life with merely “an attitude of claiming one’s rights, or with enlightened self-interest, or the reduction of honesty to the best policy.” This modern “mercenary morality” and its hackneyed teachers had nothing to offer. As such, the young nihilists became the dedicated enemies of modern civilization, turning instead to a new coterie of post-Nietzschean philosophers who sought to purify the land of its putrid, liberal pieties.

What then could have saved these young nihilists from Nazism? To Strauss, the answer is Winston Churchill. Only a Churchill could have quenched their thirst for vigorous, virile leadership. A Coolidgeian dedication to quaint 19th century ideas could not have tamed their Nietzschean angst. But by embracing aristocratic means in service of a threatened constitutional order, Churchill succeeded in humanizing rule in a liberal democracy. Paradoxically perhaps, the man who saved a Whiggish political order did so not through a reinforcement of enduring constitutional institutions, but through an act of spectacular, political will.

Only an aristocrat, Strauss suggests, can save democracy from itself. Only Churchill, a man steeped in the heroic, militaristic ethos of an earlier age, could productively channel the irascibly nihilistic impulses brought on by the new democratic orthodoxy.

This leaves us with a puzzle for contemporary politics. Who best can preserve the principles of our liberal order? Do we need a Coolidge, a man who in every respect embodies political restraint and a quiet respect for the law? Or do we need a Churchill, a man who vigorously preserved English liberty through the flamboyant pursuit of his own heroic kleos?

I’m not quite sure what the answer is, but one thing is certain: the GOP won't be nominating a Coolidge or a Churchill any time soon (though Mr. Trump is likely closer to one than to the other).

(NB, the above of course is not sustained, rigorous argument of any sort. It is instead a brief, fanciful reflection concerning a *highly* stylized contrast).

Update: It has come to my attention courtesy of Professor Shlaes' twitter feed that this sort of dichotomy was not lost on Coolidge's opponents in the Democratic Party, who in 1924 called for a "Paul Revere" instead of a "Sphinx" to be the next American president.

Trump, Tocqueville, and the Leveling of America's Mediating Institutions

In the current cover story for The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch—consistently one of the commentariat’s most original voices— diagnoses the causes of America’s “insane” political present. On Rauch’s basic story, contemporary political dysfunction follows from well-intentioned, democratic reforms meant to eliminate corruption, weaken the power of parties, and make the political process more transparent. By undermining the elitist influence formerly wielded by shadowy elites, it was precisely these reforms that have devastated the only institutions capable of rendering coherent the chaos of mass politics:

It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.

There is a great deal of truth in Rauch’s account. So much truth, in fact, that the article can fairly be described as a variation on a Tocquevilliean theme. For just as Tocqueville saw 150 years ago (and Montesquieu 150 years before that), the destruction of intermediary institutions is a sure path to political turmoil. But in a sense, Rauch does not go far enough in examining the nature and effects of the decline of American institutional life. His piece emphasizes how electoral and institutional reforms have undermined Congress’s sausage-making ability to reach needed legislative compromises. To that end, he carefully and compellingly describes how weakened national political institutions like parties lost their once sacrosanct power to mediate and moderate the wishes of the many. What Rauch neglects, however, is the hollowing out of American institutions not merely horizontally at the highest levels of national government, but at all levels of contemporary social and political life. It is this hollowing out which has made possible the collapse of once impregnable American institutions, and which must be explained in order to understand the perversity of our political moment. 

Our constitution, both in its parchment barriers and in its unwritten localist premises, has traditionally served to check the more pernicious tendencies of mass politics. In serving as trusted authorities, habituating men in the norms of political self-rule, and limiting the sweeping conflation of the people with the state, institutional life has historically safeguarded the sanity of American politics. As these institutional barriers are swept aside, we not only undermine sorely needed mechanisms of aristocratic lawmaking—the phenomenon Rauch describes—we lay the groundwork for an ever-more empowered, bureaucratized, administrative state. 

But what is it about contemporary American politics that is so inimical to intermediary institutions? To Tocqueville, the explanation lies in the great paradox of democracy, which sees everywhere the twin forces of egalitarian individualism and despotic consolidation march hand in hand. Democratic men are taught from a young age to “despise all outward forms,” and to trust only their own judgment in all things. Thinking themselves inferior to no man, such democrats refuse to accept any external men or institutions as epistemic authorities. As Tocqueville explains, however, the philosophical skepticism in the judgment or authority of any particular man leads Americans irresistibly to place absolute trust in the judgment and authority of all men. From the basic premise that all men are equal in their access to the truth springs a deep faith in the collected judgments of the great mass of mankind:

As citizens become more equal and alike, each individual’s penchant to believe blindly in a certain man or certain class diminishes. The disposition to believe in the mass increases, and the world comes increasingly under the sway of public opinion. … In times of equality, men have no faith in one another because of their similarity, but that same similarity gives them almost unlimited confidence in the judgment of the public, because it seems unlikely to them that, everyone being equally enlightened, truth should not lie with the greater number.

In this respect, the unquestioned authority of majoritarian judgment derives straightforwardly from individualistic and egalitarian moral convictions. The unrelenting logic of such convictions leads not to the sacred defense of each individual’s judgment, but to the ascent of the people—with the definite article­­—as the ultimate source of all power and authority. And where there is a singular people, there is a singular embodiment of popular sovereignty. "L'état c'est moi" becomes the faceless, bureaucratic administrative state, and ultimately, perhaps, "L'état c'est Trump."

Intermediate institutions—or “partial associations” as Rousseau dismisses them—are anywhere and everywhere the enemy of the people. Such institutions introduce hierarchy and order in political life, but are incompatible with the irresistible effort to establish a singular embodiment of popular sovereignty. 

Local political practices, for example, are described by Tocqueville as the indispensable “primary schools” of freedom. Through local political participation the citizen “habituates himself to the forms without which freedom proceeds only through revolutions … gets a taste for order … and finally assembles clear and practical ideas on the nature of his duties as well as the extent of his rights.” This habituation thus tempers the citizens’ otherwise crude, populist impulses, just as our system of political representation was designed to “refine and enlarge the public views.”

Organized religion, too, once played a central role in guiding citizens’ political judgments. In establishing legitimate authorities independent of majoritarian opinion, such religious leaders and institutions were capable of constructively curtailing the celebrity of the vulgar and base. A symptom of the phenomenon termed “Bad Religion” by Ross Douthat, the decline of organized despite persistently high levels of personal theistic belief has led to a whole host of adverse social outcomes. One of those outcomes, as JD Vance points out, is the extraordinary political divergence between observant and non-observant self-described evangelicals. Evangelical populations that regularly attend church were far more likely to support Cruz, while evangelicals who rarely attend church were far more likely to support Trump. If that isn't evidence of the civilizing force of organized religion, I don't know what is.

Robust local government and organized religion are but two of the many intermediary institutions relentlessly swept aside by the democratic and egalitarian leveling of anything that stands between the citizen and the state. This leveling not only lays fertile soil for celebrities-cum demagogues to flourish amidst unchecked national populism, it also aggregates more and more power to an administrative state that speaks merely in the name of the people. The people, no longer to be represented through a diffuse, patchwork set of political and cultural associations, must now be represented intact through the bureaucratized state. In Barney Frank’s immortal words, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” In the new political landscape, there are no mediating institutions of civil society, there is only the individual and the state.

While he recognized the threat of a conventional demagogic tyrant (seen especially in the form of Andrew Jackson), Tocqueville was primarily concerned with a new form of essentially democratic despotism. True self-government requires the active, difficult work of participation channeled by political institutions and civic associational life. Once those mediating institutions are dismantled, however, political rule falls exclusively to a removed, distant, depersonalized state, which purports to rule in the name of the people while stripping them of all real agency:

The sovereign, after taking individuals one by one in his powerful hands and kneading them to his liking, reaches out to embrace society as a whole. Over it he spreads a fine mesh of uniform, minute, and complex rules, through which not even the most original minds and most vigorous souls can poke their heads above the crowd. He does not break men’s wills but softens, bends, and guides them. He seldom forces anyone to act but consistently opposes action. He does not destroy things but prevents them from coming into being. Rather than tyrannize, he inhibits, represses, saps, stifles, and stultifies, and in the end he reduces each nation to nothing but a flock of timid and industrious animals, with the government as its shepherd.

The state becomes "de jure a subordinate agent but de facto a master."

Rauch’s incisive lament of the loss of power-brokers, political parties, and aristocratic secrecy helpfully points us to the central role mediating institutions play in a free society. But the leveling of such institutions in the name of democratic equality has done far more than render national politics more polarized and dysfunctional. It has inaugurated a new era of democratic despotism perhaps even more insidious than the most dangerous of demagogic tyrannies.

Happy Bastille Day!

Deprived of the old government, deprived in a manner of all government, France, fallen as a monarchy, to common speculators might have appeared more likely to be object of pity or insult, according to the disposition of the circumjacent powers, than to be the scourge and terror of them all: but out of the tomb of the murdered Monarchy in France has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end, unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims and all common means, that hideous phantom overpowered those who could not believe it was possible she could at all exist. 

-- Edmund Burke as quoted in the opening pages of Alexis de Tocqueville's Ancien Regime. 

Marxism and America’s Contemporary Public Philosophy

What follows is an edited version of an email I sent to a discussion/reading group on The German Ideology some friends of mine are running.

  

The division of labour offers us the first example of how … man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic … out of this very contradiction between the interest of the individual and that of the community the latter takes an independent form as the State, divorced from the real interests of individual and community. (The German Ideology, 160)

My Argument in Brief

I make three central claims in light of this justly celebrated passage. The exegetical claim argues that the German Ideology is a work essentially concerned with a theory of human emancipation and freedom. The sociological claim argues that despite explicit protestations to the contrary, this Marxian vision of freedom is the central normative aspiration of America’s public philosophy today. And the normative claim argues that this underlying vision of freedom constitutes a deeply insidious dogma and sociological menace in contemporary society.  

My argument, in summary: (1) The German Ideology is about freedom; (2) Most liberal Westerners have come to endorse something very close to the Marxist vision of freedom; and (3) This vision of freedom must be rejected.

My hope is that these three crude, overly-simplistic propositions is to challenge some of the standard-fare conservative instinctive critiques of Marxism. Indeed, an implication of my argument is that many American conservatives unknowingly share this basic Marxist normative vision.

Mercy Otis Warren and the Great American Wall

Mercy Otis Warren, the great polemicist historian of the American Revolution, warned in typical republican fashion that the young American state had grown far too large to maintain a civilized republic. As an antidote, she proposed the building of a great "Chinese Wall" along the Appalachian Mountains not so much to keep the Indian tribes out, but to forcibly restrain the American lust for conquest and expansion. As a friend of mine remarked, no word yet on whether the Indians were to pay for the building of the wall.

From her regrettably under-read History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution:

Those subsequent circumstances in American story which have been cursorily mentioned above, suggest the reflection, that it might have been happy for the United States, and happier for the individual “who weeps alone its lot of wo,” if, instead of extending their views over the boundless desert, a Chinese wall had been stretched along the Apalachian ridges, that might have kept the nations within the boundaries of nature. This would have prevented the incalculable loss of life and property, and have checked the lust of territory, wealth, and that ambition which has poured out streams of innocent blood on the forlorn mountains. The lives of our young heroes were too rich a price for the purchase of the acres of the savages, even could the nations be extinguished, who certainly have a prior right to the inheritance: this is a theme on which some future historians may more copiously descant.

The acquisition and possession of territory seems to be a passion inwove in the bosom of man: we see it from the peasant who owns but a single acre, to the prince who commands kingdoms, and wishes to extend his domains over half the globe. This is thought necessary at some times to distance troublesome neighbours, at others to preserve their own independence; but if the spring of action is traced, it may generally be found in the inordinate thirst for the possession of power and wealth.

"Consider What Nation It Is Whereof Ye Are" - Brief Thoughts on Brexit

Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governours: a Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, suttle and sinewy to discours, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to. Therefore the studies of learning in her deepest Sciences have bin so ancient, and so eminent among us, that Writers of good antiquity, and ablest judgement have bin perswaded that ev'n the school of Pythagoras, and the Persian wisdom took beginning from the old Philosophy of this Iland. And that wise and civill Roman, Julius Agricola, who govern'd once here for Cæsar, preferr'd the naturall wits of Britain, before the labour'd studies of the French. Nor is it for nothing that the grave and frugal Transylvanian sends out yearly from as farre as the mountanous borders of Russia, and beyond the Hercynian wildernes, not their youth, but their stay'd men, to learn our language, and our theologic arts. Yet that which is above all this, the favour and the love of heav'n we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending towards us. ... Behold now this vast City: a City of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompast and surrounded with his protection; the shop of warre hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed Justice in defence of beleaguer'd Truth, then there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and idea's wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty the approaching Reformation: others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. What could a man require more from a Nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge. What wants there to such a towardly and pregnant soile, but wise and faithfull labourers, to make a knowing people, a Nation of Prophets, of Sages, and of Worthies. 

So John Milton exhorted the British parliament in 1644 in his canonical defense of a free press. And so too, perhaps, do the British people need reminding just a few days away from their historic vote on Brexit.

What Does Islam Teach? A Methodological Inquiry

Following every act of terrorism perpetrated by some radical Islamist comes the inescapable debate over the character and identity of Islam as a religion and as an ideology. Each time, left and right rework the same familiar old tropes. On one side, Islam properly understood is a “religion of peace” and we should not let the fanatical few distort our understanding of the world’s second most popular faith. On the other, Islam is a “nihilistic cult of death,” the essential values of which are simply incompatible with those demanded by a free, tolerant, liberal society.

I am not interested here in taking a particular side in this debate. My hope is rather to find some methodological clarity in understanding how we should approach the question “What does Islam teach?” in the first place. (Though my particular object here is Islam, the same sort of analysis could apply to any religion).

There seem to me to be two main answers to the question. The first answer, which I term the “interpretive approach,” attempts to discern the “true” philosophical and theological principles of Islam by appealing to the religion’s history and scriptural tradition. The second, which I term the “sociological approach,” is agnostic on such matters of interpretation, and proceeds instead by equating the question of “what Islam teaches” with the question of “what do today’s Muslims believe Islam teaches?”

Neither of these approaches maps perfectly onto one or another normative assessment of Islam. Apologists and critics both are wont to appeal to what “millions of Muslims believe,” thereby practicing the sociological approach. Likewise, apologists and critics often invoke scriptural evidence of Muhammad’s teachings from the Qu'ran and Hadith, thereby practicing the interpretive approach. Nor is either of these approaches “wrong,” as they both have value if employed in the appropriate context.

But what are the appropriate contexts? My argument in what follows is that the interpretive approach is most appropriate for Muslim commentators fighting over the soul of their religion and academics committed to understanding the historical richness of the Islamic tradition. However, in debates over public policy cultural differences, commentators would do well to limit themselves to the sociological approach.

After all, if you aren’t a Muslim (and virtually all American practitioners of the interpretive approach aren’t), you must believe that Islam is a social construction the most fundamental tenets of which are completely wrong. Of course, there are better and worse ways of evaluating and interpreting any belief system, all of which are constructions. But we must not forget that to the non-Muslim the particular construction of Islam relies on axiomatic scriptural and theological principles which are often unacceptable. There is still some room for interpretation—the non-Muslim is surely justified in disregarding any reading of Islam in which Muhammad plays no role as a bad interpretation, just as the most secular of observers is capable of recognizing the absurdity of modern Christian theology. 

But setting extreme-cases aside, it is difficult to understand how a non-believer could possibly go about the project of constructing the “best” interpretation of Islam.

In the context of political theory, Marxists, for example, may be interested in formulating the best interpretation of liberalism, just as liberals are deeply interested in formulating the best interpretation of Marxism. But in this context, “best” means most intellectually charitable or philosophically convincing. Liberals too ought to develop the most intellectually powerful interpretation of Marxism in order to take seriously the true insights of the competing tradition. In other words, the criteria for interpreting “best” in matters of secular philosophy involve serious consideration not merely of doctrinal accuracy, but of an external standard of coherence and truth.

This is very different from the project of interpreting a foreign religious tradition. The “best” interpretation of Islam need not be the one that most convincingly aligns with our independent convictions about morality or metaphysics. Unlike the interpretation of a competing ideology, the project of religious interpretation does not aim for “intellectual charity," which is why we ought to be deeply skeptical of any interpretation of the “true” meaning of Islam that magically identifies a foreign faith tradition with virtually every dictate of contemporary Western morality. There is no prima facie reason to believe that true Islam aligns with the ideological convictions of contemporary Western, liberal society.

Perversely, this version of the interpretive approach to Islam tends to embody a narrow-mindedness and disrespect of a foreign tradition. While we are free to engage to argue about respects in which Islamic principles are inferior or superior to our own, the implicit assumption that proper Islam will converge on the pieties of our own post-Christian liberal age manifests a deep arrogance toward and ignorance of the impressive diversity of human thought.

There are some respects in which the interpretive approach remains important and valuable. Academics (even those who take Islam’s fundamental assumptions to be untenable), do us a service in considering the broad range of Islamic thought in contemporary society and throughout history. By bringing to light schools of thought that have been lost from sight, and by carefully reconstructing past paradigms of thought that don’t fit well with contemporary conceptual categories, they challenge us to broaden our own thinking by taking seriously past and foreign wisdom. The interpretive project is even more important to the Muslim, who, far more than the secular academic, has a genuine interest in fighting for the soul of his own religion. Following a Walzerian model of interpretation, debate and interpretation within a common tradition is an indispensable part of navigating the complexities of the moral life. To the Muslim, moreover, there is such a thing as a “true” Islam—a truth which inheres not merely in faithfully following from first principles and scriptural assumptions, but in manifesting a loyalty to God's plan for humanity. Winning the war of interpretation thus matters far more to them than it ever will to non-Muslims.

But caution must be exercised by the non-Muslim observer interested in understanding the teachings and principles of Islam. As with all religions, Islam is not simply a set of beliefs, but a sociological phenomenon that shapes the lives of hundreds of millions of people. To the vast majority of Muslims, Islam is not a great exegetical debate. It is not an academic pursuit of theological consistency, historical depth, and logical coherence. It is what they have been taught and how they have lived their entire lives. In light of this, the most humble, respectful way for the non-Muslim to consider the question “What does Islam teach?” is to ask actual Muslims. It's their religion. Let’s do them the basic dignity of taking them at their word. Indeed, there is precious little that is as patronizing as a Western secular academic explaining why hundreds of millions of Muslims misunderstand their own religion.

To understand Islam—not the great disputative tradition of a millennium—but the religion of millions of people in the world today, let’s start by asking Muslims what they actually believe. “Muslim values” are the values representative polling tells us Muslims hold, not the values Western bourgeois elites wish that they held. Making sense of the sociological truth of Islam might not immediately resolve complex public policy challenges, but at the very least, it will help Muslim and non-Muslim observers alike develop an accurate understanding of reality.

The Problem of Normative Expertise

Were a student with absolutely no knowledge of the subject to enter into a debate with an expert over the intricacies of cancer treatment, the appropriate response may well be to tell the ignorant student to shut up. While it would be admirable were his ambition to better understand the complex subject by respectfully listening to the explanation given by one who knows better, it would be entirely inappropriate for him to contradict or argue with an expert when he has nothing of substance to contribute.

But imagine now that this student were to enter into a debate with a leading philosopher over the morality of the death penalty or euthanasia. It may be immediately clear that the student’s views are under-thought and confused whereas the professor’s are well-developed and systematic. Nonetheless, we would think it perverse to insist that the student should withdraw from the debate and defer to the judgment of the professor. Whereas in technical fields the lack of requisite knowledge or study disqualifies one from the debate, nothing of the sort can be said of normative questions. Everyone, it would seem, has a right to participate in debates over justice, morality, and aesthetics.

What explains this asymmetry between technical and normative expertise? Is the very concept of "normative expertise" even coherent? Why is it that the consensus of moral philosophers in matters of ethics seems to lack the authority commanded by the consensus of civil engineers in matters of bridge-building?

Among the most intriguing answers to the question is articulated by Socrates in Plato’s Protagoras. There, in the midst of a debate over whether virtue can be taught, Socrates explains that because all men have a stake in the good life, all men are entitled to give an opinion on normative matters, regardless how poorly formed.

He continues with a somewhat challenging analogy to flute playing. He notes that it is entirely appropriate for a poor flutist to inform the world of his lack of skill. But it would be utterly inappropriate for the dishonest man to loudly declare his dishonesty. Because honesty is part of living well, and because all men are invested in the project of living well (whether they realize it or not), all men must at least identify with the virtue of honesty. Though the reasoning here is somewhat strange, this is taken as a further proof of all men’s right to share in virtue and to participate in debates over virtue.

And this is the reason, Socrates, why the Athenians and mankind in general, when the question relates to carpentering or any other mechanical art, allow but a few to share in their deliberations; and when anyone else interferes, then, as you say, they object, if he be not of the favored few; which, as I reply, is very natural. But when they meet to deliberate about political virtue, which proceeds only by way of justice and wisdom, they are patient enough of any man who speaks of them, as is also natural, because they think that every man ought to share in this sort of virtue, and that states could not exist if this were otherwise. I have explained to you, Socrates, the reason of this phenomenon. 

And that you may not suppose yourself to be deceived in thinking that all men regard every man as having a share of justice or honesty and of every other political virtue, let me give you a further proof, which is this. In other cases, as you are aware, if a man says that he is a good flute-player, or skillful in any other art in which he has no skill, people either laugh at him or are angry with him, and his relations think that he is mad and go and admonish him; but when honesty is in question, or some other political virtue, even if they know that he is dishonest, yet, if the man comes publicly forward and tells the truth about his dishonesty, then, what in the other case was held by them to be good sense, they now deem to be madness. They say that all men ought to profess honesty whether they are honest or not, and that a man is out of his mind who says anything else. Their notion is, that a man must have some degree of honesty; and that if he has none at all he ought not to be in the world.

I was recently reminded of this passage by Michael Walzer’s elegant explication of the character of the moral life in Interpretation and Social Criticism. I suspect that the Walzerian vision of moral thinking as interpretation, not discovery or enlightenment or instruction, poses a poignant challenge to what I have described as the new faith in an authoritative moral pedagogy demanded by contemporary campus activists. (I quote from Walzer's Tanner lectures, not the book they later became)

The claim of interpretation is simply this: that neither discovery nor invention is necessary because we already possess what they pretend to provide. Morality, unlike politics, does not require executive authority or systematic legislation. We don’t have to discover the moral world because we have always lived there. We don’t have to invent it because it has already been invented — though not in accordance with any philosophical method. No design procedure has governed its design, and the result no doubt is disorganized and uncertain. It is also very dense: the moral world has a lived-in quality, like a home occupied by a single family over many generations, with unplanned additions here and there, and all the available space filled with memory-laden objects and artifacts. The whole thing, taken as a whole, lends itself less to abstract modeling than to thick description. Moral argument in such a setting is interpretive in character, closely resembling the work of a lawyer or judge who struggles to find meaning in a morass of conflicting laws and precedents. 

… 

There are moral facts of that sort, but the most interesting parts of the moral world are only in principle factual matters; in practice they have to be “read,” rendered, construed, glossed, elucidated, and not merely described. All of us are involved in doing all these things; we are all interpreters of the morality we share. That doesn’t mean that the best interpretation is the sum of all the others, the product of a complicated piece of survey research — no more than the best reading of a poem is a meta-reading, summing up the responses of all the actual readers. The best reading isn’t different in kind, but in quality, from the other readings: it illuminates the poem in a more powerful and persuasive way. Perhaps the best reading is a new reading, seizing upon some previously misunderstood symbol or trope and re-explaining the entire poem. The case is the same with moral interpretation: it will sometimes confirm and sometimes challenge received opinion. And if we disagree with either the confirmation or the challenge, there is nothing to do but go back to the “text” — the values, principles, codes, and conventions that constitute the moral world — and to the “readers” of the text. 

… 

Morality, in other words, is something we have to argue about. The argument implies common possession, but common possession does not imply agreement. There is a tradition, a body of moral knowledge; and there is this group of sages, arguing. There isn’t anything else. No discovery or invention can end the argument; no “proof” precedence over the (temporary) majority of sages.

The New Campus Faith in Authority

I have already outlined what I take to be the broad structural parallels between the contemporary campus left’s attitude toward the university and the more traditional conservative doctrine of in loco parentis. Over the coming weeks, I hope to fill in the contours of what remains a rather crude sketch in identifying the similarities and differences between the two campus phenomena.

This post attempts to begin that process by considering the new faith in authority implicit in both the institutional demands and language employed by today’s campus activists. To be sure, the contemporary left’s defense of authority is in important respects radically different from that traditionally espoused by lower-case c conservatives. Authority traditionally was essentially personal, attached to particular men whose status and title demanded respect and deference. Such personalized authority is captured well by the phrase in loco parentis itself. The university is likened to the person of a parent, and is correspondingly charged with the moral obligations of the parent. Yet today’s campus activists are uninterested in reinvigorating the offices or personages of president, provost, master, and professor with new-found personalized authority. The new authority, it would seem, is essentially institutional. Faceless administrators and amorphous bureaucracies are needed to direct sensitivity training programs, issue guidelines for acceptable conduct, and design mandatory courses in ethnic studies.

Moreover, despite serving quite clearly as authorities over students’ lives, the new institutional authorities are imagined to derive legitimacy from a kind of democratic ethos. The bureaucracies invested with power are not spoken of as an elite few governing the many from above, but as more properly representing the students themselves. This conceptual transformation of the idea of authority is outlined with unparalleled clarity and force in Alexis de Tocqueville’s diagnosis of the peculiar character of “democratic despotism.” The new tutelary state is justified as emanating from the people, when it is in reality merely another master in many respects more vicious than the tyrants of old. The new despotism is “de jure a subordinate agent but de facto a master.” This dialectic plays itself out in the economic sphere as well, as the decline of feudalism and rise of industrial capitalism marks the collapse of traditional personal webs of dependence and authority, and the rise of depersonalized, anonymous forms of institutional control. The same pattern of thought makes sense of the new university administrators, whose legitimacy inheres in the purported representation of all students’ voices, but who govern no differently than did the straightforwardly elitist administrators of the ’50s.

I hope to expand upon the depersonalization of social authorities in further posts, but in the space that remains I turn to briefly defending my more basic claim that today’s campus radicals have abandoned the radical skepticism of the ’60s, and have replaced it with a renewed defense of authority. I point to two central pieces of evidence. The first concerns the institutional reforms explicitly demanded by the contemporary campus left. The second concerns the hidden assumptions underlying and in turn reified by the language employed in campus activism.

1. The Institutional Appeal to Authority

The most obvious way to assess the campus left’s attitude toward authority is to consider its explicit institutional demands. At schools across the country, campus activists’ demands are variations on a basic theme: the university administration must do more to protect students of color and to educate all students on how to appropriately interact with their peers. To this end, demands range from mandatory sensitivity training to a university-wide database to record instances of racial misconduct to a new core curriculum consisting of courses on ethnicity and gender.

The most obvious question all this raises is who will do the educating? Who sets the new core curriculum? Who designs and administers the mandatory sensitivity training? Who supervises and regulates the racial misconduct database? Though inflected with modern meaning, these are not new questions. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Or more apt for the university: Who educates the educators?

The aristocratic answer to these questions is very simple: the best should guard the guardians, the best should educate the educators, and the best should set university policy to regulate student conduct. To the radically democratic spirit of the ’60s, however, such answers are anathema. First, those in positions of power cannot possibly be trusted to exercise judgment when so dominated by singular class, racial, and gender interests. But more fundamentally, the critique holds that no elite should have the power to regulate student conduct. No authorities can trusted with the shaping of students’ lives. To do so would be to infringe upon the most basic demands of autonomy and authenticity.

The first of these critiques to some degree survives today, as demands for a more diverse administration are commonplace in student manifestos. But the second has been lost entirely. The very premise of mandatory courses was once rejected on the grounds that no one should have the power to dictate from above what students should learn and what students should value. Likewise, university-wide reporting systems and databases would have horrified an earlier generation of student radicals as the most vicious, panopticonic of social developments. But today, leftist skeptics of an empowered administration are few and far between. What we find instead is a generation of campus activists committed to the expansion of administrators’ bureaucratic oversight, coercion, and control over student life and values.

2. The Linguistic Appeal to Authority

Perhaps even more telling than the campus activists’ explicit institutional demands, is the language they use to advance their agenda. Last fall, a Facebook group, “Overheard at Yale,” emerged as a campus-wide forum for debate during the peak of campus turmoil. The group remains irrefutable evidence of social media’s insidious propensity to promote vile, anti-intellectual, tribalist calumnies and barbarisms, and it may well be an invaluable resource for future cultural historians interested in documenting the events of the past few months.

In a particularly memorable post made at the high-point of campus protests, a female Asian student explained why she was uncomfortable with the label “person of color.” The response was unrelenting abuse. A few respondents provided civil, thoughtful defenses of the utility of the term. But by far the most popular response (as measured by likes, the ultimate measure of truth in Facebook debates) opened by denouncing the original post as “so fucking ignorant” and concluding “On behalf of Asian Americans who are proudly people of color, go learn something.” That response came after an earlier comment explaining that the ignorance implicit in the original post was a “great argument for why we need a larger Asian American studies program at Yale.”

The language of “ignorance” employed in the thread is characteristic of a broader linguistic pattern within campus discourse. Those with whom the protesters disagree are described as ignorant and in need of education. They are encouraged to attend “teach-ins” where they are instructed to listen quietly so as to better understand.

This topos of education casts contemporary campus debate as a conflict between ignorance and enlightenment, between superstition and reason. It correspondingly vitiates the possibility of genuine, reasoned moral disagreement. The suggestion that disagreement is rooted in mere ignorance and can be cured by proper instruction articulates an essentially authoritarian model of learning. Against the seminar, which posits that learning arises from argument and the mutual exchange of reasons, the language of ignorance demands the lecture, in which an intellectual authority graciously shares enlightenment with her students. 

There are of course cases in which relevant non-moral facts are best disseminated in this hierarchical fashion. But moral disagreement since Socrates has been thought to be best pursued through dialogue and debate. Moral understanding was traditionally thought to be attained through argument, not instruction delivered from above. The inversion of that paradigm, and the suggestion that dissenters ought to educate themselves by enrolling in the necessary classes and attending the relevant “teach-ins,” betrays a new faith in the epistemic authority and wisdom of the campus administrators designing the new educational regime.