“When something becomes a religion, we don’t choose the actions that are most likely to solve [any particular] problem,” said [Jonathan] Haidt, the author of the 2012 best seller “The Righteous Mind” and a professor at New York University. “We do the things that are the most ritually satisfying.”
He added that what he saw in footage of the confrontation at Middlebury “was a modern-day auto-da-fé: the celebration of a religious rite by burning the blasphemer.”
The protesters didn’t use [Charles] Murray’s presence as an occasion to hone the most eloquent, irrefutable retort to him. They swarmed and swore.
The claim here is that a segment of intelligent American college students was – at least for the duration of a gathering – a tribe, swarming and swearing with the righteous, violent, ritually satisfying, ways of its tribe. This is the villagers of The Lottery, assuring themselves of an orderly world and a good harvest by stoning a chosen villager.
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If you’re going to go to college, and you have these tribal tendencies, they can fall roughly two ways – call them Football and Foliage. Foliage refers to private small landscaped tribal grounds, Football public large arena’d grounds. Here’s how one commentator describes and justifies the latter:
Look at the shirtless boys with faces and torsos painted in the school colors; look at the cheerleaders on the fields, the ‘waves’ surging through the stands.
American universities, those temples of reason (at their best), are tribes… If you want your students to become loyal, giving alumni, you must turn them into members of a tribe.
Paradoxically, the temple of reason, if it is to survive financially, must turn its students into a tribe. It must use all of its resources to do exactly the opposite of what universities are supposed to do — sustain and strengthen human reason. Tribal fraternities, tribal football teams, tribal fans — these are the often dangerous ritual actors some public campuses encourage.
Some private campuses offer the ritual satisfaction of enforced intellectual loyalties.
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Andrew Sullivan on religious aspects of the event.
If you happen to see the world in a different way, if you’re a liberal or libertarian or even, gasp, a conservative, if you believe that a university is a place where any idea, however loathsome, can be debated and refuted, you are not just wrong, you are immoral. If you think that arguments and ideas can have a life independent of “white supremacy,” you are complicit in evil. And you are not just complicit, your heresy is a direct threat to others, and therefore needs to be extinguished. You can’t reason with heresy. You have to ban it. It will contaminate others’ souls, and wound them irreparably.
… [At one point,] the students start clapping in unison, and you can feel the hysteria rising, as the chants grow louder. “Your message is hatred. We will not tolerate it!” The final climactic chant is “Shut it down! Shut it down!” It feels like something out of The Crucible. Most of the students have never read a word of Murray’s — and many professors who supported the shutdown admitted as much. But the intersectional zeal is so great he must be banished — even to the point of physical violence.
This matters, it seems to me, because reason and empirical debate are essential to the functioning of a liberal democracy. We need a common discourse to deliberate. We need facts independent of anyone’s ideology or political side, if we are to survive as a free and democratic society. Trump has surely shown us this. And if a university cannot allow these facts and arguments to be freely engaged, then nowhere is safe. Universities are the sanctuary cities of reason. If reason must be subordinate to ideology even there, our experiment in self-government is over.
Liberal democracy is suffering from a concussion as surely as Allison [Stanger] is.
March 13th, 2017 at 8:25AM
“When something becomes a religion, we don’t choose the actions that are most likely to solve [any particular] problem,” said [Jonathan] Haidt, the author of the 2012 best seller “The Righteous Mind” and a professor at New York University. “We do the things that are the most ritually satisfying.”
we can’t send social-psychology to the dustbin of history fast enough.
March 13th, 2017 at 8:50AM
You can be a tribe without a religion.
March 13th, 2017 at 10:09AM
and a tribe needs a way of identification. that’s the reason cars are plastered with those university stickers. i had one on my back window for notre dame when i was in hs. had no intention on attending,that was catholic breeding bleeding through.
what that proved was that you don’t have to be part of the tribe to think you’re a member….
March 13th, 2017 at 3:55PM
I would argue that those (subway alums, or whatever you want to call them) are, in fact, always the most dangerous, devout members of the tribe. Think about SEC football. Sure, the alums can be rabid, but it’s always rando dude with no actual affiliation with the school doing the real damage.
March 14th, 2017 at 11:49AM
Very interesting analysis. I do think there are ways of generating tribal identity that don’t depend either on tribal spectacles (viz football) or enforced intellectual loyalty. One of these ways is to develop a sense of collective accomplishment.
For example, see this Portuguese teacher who has developed an intensive Classics program for high school students in the Azores:
http://www.city-journal.org:8080/html/republic-atlantic-14956.html
I would be willing to bet that the students participating in this program would be happy in later life to contribute for its continuation.
March 14th, 2017 at 11:52AM
David: Totally agree. I suspect a very small and very unusual school like St John’s in Annapolis generates in some of its students/faculty a cultural/intellectual “tribalism” that has few regressive tendencies.