Discriminating Tolerance

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK

It has become routine for commentators on the right to criticize the hypocrisy of campus leftists who shout down conservative speakers. The charge is that leftists were in favor of freedom of expression when they were a minority on campus, but now, after gaining control of the administrations and faculties at our colleges, demand conformity to their politically correct views.
It is a valid point, and one that deserves to be made. But we should not forget that there is a difference between students shouting down speakers such as Charles Murray (as happened at Middlebury College in early March) and left-wing professors at those schools urging the students on. The former may be caught up in youthful enthusiasm and know not what they do. The latter are in a different category. Their radicalism is informed and calculated.
New Left Marxists would not be at a loss for words if someone like Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh accused them of operating under a double standard that extols the merits of freedom of expression in some circumstances, but intellectual conformity in another. The Marxist professors have a term for their double standard. They call it “discriminating tolerance.” And they are proud to be associated with it. They teach it to their charges.
They learned the concept from Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), often referred to as the “guru of the hippie movement.” Born in Berlin, Marcuse became a prominent member of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. He dedicated his professional life to undermining capitalism and Western culture, in books such as Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964).
Odds are that the young co-eds with the looks of an aspiring social worker or librarian that we saw shrieking at the top of their lungs, “Shut it down!” — in reference to Charles Murray’s speech at Middlebury College — had been instructed in one version or another of what Marcuse meant by discriminating tolerance.
Marcuse taught that there are times when it is tolerant to be intolerant; that forces that stand in the way of a just society — judged in Marxist terms — deserve to be censored, denied the opportunity to spread thoughts and words that endanger progressive values, to be shut down.
In Marcuse’s words, “Discriminating tolerance would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior — thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives.”
No beating around the bush, for Marcuse. He holds that there is no need for socially conscious men and women to “tolerate” those who support “reactionary” ideas. A true understanding of freedom of thought necessitates rigid restrictions on freedom of thought — of certain people; censorship of teachers and public speakers who threaten to corrupt the minds of members of society who may be vulnerable to their harmful words.
This is why modern leftists see it as virtuous for individuals such as Charles Murray, Pat Buchanan, and Ann Coulter to be shouted down, mocked, and threatened with violence. It is tolerant to be intolerant of people like this: There is no contradiction in saying that for the disciples of Marcuse. This is why you will find abortionists, supporters of Muslim radicals, and Black Panther leaders welcome to speak on campus, while right-to-life speakers and supporters of Donald Trump are shouted down.
Yes, it sounds like Orwellian Doublespeak, but it is alive and well on our campuses these days. It is what permits free-thinkers to deny free thought as an exercise in high-mindedness.
Fred Bauer focuses on the troubling implications in an article on Marcuse in the March 11 online edition of National Review: “The question of which ‘thoughts and words’ really promote ‘destruction, bigotry, racism and deprivation’ is itself a topic for debate.” But, instead, the modern campus leftists act as if they have a monopoly on truth; as if the debate is closed and that their side won.
The campus champions of political correctness refuse to recognize, writes Bauer, that “many opponents of abortion, for instance, might argue that support for legal abortion is a movement in favor of the destruction of human life. Conversely, feminist defenders of abortion might argue that opposition to abortion is a form of bigotry against women. Or take racial preferences. Some might argue that state-sponsored racial preferences extend racism and bigotry; others see contemporary racial preferences as an anti-racist remedy to the legacy of racism.”
The need to debate issues such as this in a calm and reasoned manner used to be seen as the purpose of a university. No more. Instead, the modern campus leftists want to end the discussion. Bauer:
“To note these disputes is not an invitation to nihilism or a suggestion that there are no right answers to the questions. But the controversies do suggest that, on many important issues, there is not an immediately obvious, universally agreed-on viewpoint. Serious people have taken diametrically opposed positions on significant moral issues.”
It should also be noted that Marcuse is the “godfather” of the sexual revolution at our colleges. In Eros and Civilization, he argued that sexual restraint, monogamy, and notions of sexual purity are artificial inhibitions on our freedom that we have been brainwashed to accept by capitalist overlords who are looking for docile and dependable workers.
And, more important, Marcus was convinced that capitalism could be undermined by a rejection of those inhibitions in what he called an explosion of “polymorphous sexuality,” “a transformation of the libido from sexuality constrained under genital supremacy to eroticization of the entire personality.”
Having given up on blue-collar workers as the vanguard of a Marxist revolution (he thought they had become flag-waving patriots), Marcuse’s hope was that capitalism could be overthrown by a generation of hipsters and the flower children on a hippie commune. He saw them as a generation that had adopted a lifestyle that was the polar opposite of the ambitious, clean, self-disciplined family men that industrial leaders encouraged to staff their corporate operations. Timothy Leary, the old LSD guru, was promoting this message when he called upon young people in the late 1960s to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Quite a legacy. Every time you hear a sloppy, body-pierced, tattooed, drug-addled college student proudly proclaiming his determination to never sell out to the “establishment,” while at the same time shouting down speakers who defend traditional values, you are looking at a creation of left-wing professors who cut their intellectual teeth in the counterculture milieu shaped by Marcuse and his allies in the Frankfurt School.
Do they still make millstones?

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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.