Screeds
Saturday, December 11, 2004
An Unsatisfiable Criterion
December 12, 2002
From the University of Michigan, by way of the No Indoctrination Website comes this alarming tale:
All students who wish to be in the University of Michigan's ResStaff program (those who wish to be Residence Hall Assistants) need to take a class which is worth about half as many credits as a normal class. The class is Psychology 405, Social Psychology in Community Settings. ResStaff's website states that the course's purpose is to "enhance each student's ability to analyze... differences and commonalties among cultural groups and group foundations of justice and injustice..."The class instructors made sure to encourage that we voice our opinion on the discussion topics, but it soon became clear to me that this was not their preference. I spent the first half of the class avoiding trouble by keeping my mouth shut. We read many articles on victimization, oppression, etc. of minorities. But I had no choice when an activity called for full participation; we had to go around and talk about at least one way in which we have been/are oppressed. When my turn came up, and I answered that I have never been oppressed, the instructor corrected me, saying that I must have been, as I'm female. I persisted, saying that being female has never been anything short of a blessing for me. The instructor was relentless, insisting that I was necessarily oppressed at one point in my life.
The instructor asked to speak with me after class. He was visibly shaken and angry. He told me that my classroom behavior was disruptive in the least (although I was never voluntarily disagreeing), and that I would be kicked out of class and would thereby lose my job and my housing for the next year unless I learned to be more cooperative. An article exposing the class's leftist agenda was published in the University of Michigan's conservative newspaper, The Michigan Review, but there is no link available to the article online.
Regular readers of this column will not need to be told that students who experience pressures like this are many. No, what makes this an illuminating event is the "instructor's" demand for unanimity, coupled to the obvious threat he felt from the lone dissident in his indoctrination group.
I've written elsewhere about the sort of leftist who strikes his tent and withdraws at the first sign of resistance. Here we have the opposite pole of the syndrome: a determination to wipe out any trace of disagreement, lest it infect others with heresy and invigorate resistance to the "official line."
What sort of person, espousing what sort of political doctrine, feels so threatened by dissent that he cannot abide any dissent at all? To what sort of vulnerability does that testify?
Plainly, the weakness is severe: the indoctrinator described above "pulled the nukes" to whip the dissenter back into conformity. Moreover, the stakes must be very high -- for someone.
To this commentator, it seems improbable that we're witnessing a simple tactical weakness, such that the indoctrinator merely fears defeat. It seems much more likely that he felt an emotional underpinning giving way, a weakening in the floor beneath his politics and much else besides.
In his marvelous book The Vision Of The Anointed,Thomas Sowell explores the thesis that those who have propounded and defended the Leftist view of politics and society these past decades -- "the anointed," in Sowell's lexicon -- do so from a vision of themselves as superior creatures. They consider themselves intellectually and morally above the rest of us, and more important, obligated to herd us for our own good -- a sort of political noblesse oblige to which ordinary Americans, thankful or not, must submit. As leftist policy prescriptions have expensively failed to achieve their a priori objectives and have done much harm besides, rather than admit they'd been mistaken, the anointed have practiced rhetorical obfuscation and deliberate demonization of their critics.
Not pretty. To no purpose -- worse, to the purpose of confusion, degeneration, and dismay. So why do they do it?
Because the costs of their errors have been borne by others.
In the common order of things, you and I have to bear the costs of our own blunders. Those who wield power can create costs and destruction for all of us, while averting it from their own backs. Consciousness of this is rising. Anger at the arrogance of our power elite is rising with it, for leftist policies have suffered enough reversals, and have been insincerely defended enough times, that the ordinary American knows the power elite will do or say anything to deflect responsibility for error.
When our indoctrinator contemplates the effects of his gender-war gospel, he can't possibly be pleased. The doctrine he promulgates has created a huge mass of absolutely unnecessary bad will between the sexes. If he's not inherently evil, he must be secretly in agony over the damage done. The only shield for his self-regard consists in not confronting it, which any dissent renders impossible.
But God is not mocked. The universe takes no thought for our opinions of ourselves. There will always be dissent, especially from dogmas that lead men to destruction. The day of judgment can be delayed, sometimes, but the longer it's put off, the more terrible the reckoning will be.
All praise to the student who related the above story. Not only did she stand up for her convictions; she made it harder, for a little while, for a man to refuse to face an important truth -- from his reaction, a truth he urgently needs to see.
| <<- Unplanned Obsolescence | Untranslatable ->> |
