By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I am wondering if The Atlantic magazine said more than it should have said from the point of view of its readers and ideological allies. It published an article in its online edition on March 25 by Jonathan Merritt describing the flip-flop that has taken place in the education establishment, away from the moral relativism it championed in the past to the strict codes of political correctness of today. I don’t think the left in this country wants us to become too aware of what happened in academia. It is hard to defend hypocrisy.
The Atlantic and the establishment liberals who read the publication have long been champions of an open-minded and a diverse society, leaders in the fight for academic freedom and against censorship and enforcement of orthodoxies based on traditional values. The odds are that your local librarian who proudly tacks up the poster for “Banned Books Week” is a longtime subscriber.
Those days are over, writes Merritt. Relativism is out. The “old bogeyman” of moral relativism, he writes, has gone “the way of the buggy whip.” Everywhere — from films to popular novels to politically correct protesters on our college campuses — we now see manifestations of a “shame culture” that has replaced the “subjective morality of yesterday” and replaced it with “an ethical code that, if violated, results in unmerciful moral crusades on social media.”
Nowadays, if you disagree with the left-wing consensus, you are not treated as someone with a different opinion that needs to be combated in the marketplace of ideas, but labeled a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a flag-waving bigot. Conservative speakers are shouted down on campus.
Merritt takes it from there. He tells us that defenders of traditional values should learn a lesson from the phenomenon of modern liberal intolerance: “From the Cold War to the War on Terror, conservatives have protested the ‘evils’ of moral relativism. They got what they wanted, but didn’t get what they expected.”
It strikes me that Merritt is either being too clever by half in an effort to tweak conservatives’ noses, or he has not thought these things through. Either way, he needs to be called out. He shouldn’t get away with this exercise in disinformation. It is preposterous to raise the issue of the new intolerance of left-wingers who once championed moral relativism, without noting the dishonest motivation for their flip-flop. It is not as if they deserted moral relativism after a long and serious period of reflection on the consequences of denying objective truth. Campus leftists were not moral relativists because of a commitment to a free exchange of ideas, but to get their way. Their new authoritarianism, their promotion of what Merritt calls a “shame culture,” is for the same purpose.
Whatever Merritt’s suspicions, defenders of traditional values are not scratching their heads these days and muttering to themselves, “Uh-oh, maybe it was wrong of us to argue against moral relativism. Look at what it has given us, all these left-wing authoritarians.”
Conservatives can see that the same people who once told us it was close-minded and intolerant to uphold the values of the Christian West are now demanding conformity to Marxist understandings of social justice, to the LGBTQ agenda regarding transgender bathrooms, to Al Gore’s theories about global warming, to same-sex marriage and a left-wing understanding of what is meant by hate-speech. And shouting down those who disagree.
Conservatives can see the same people who marched against school authorities who removed sexually explicit books from their library shelves now condemning the “micro-aggression” of campus speakers defending the rights of the unborn child and traditional marriage. They are aware that the American left was in favor of moral relativism when it served to cast doubts upon the legitimacy of traditional beliefs and when it could be used as a tool to remove from power those who defended those beliefs in our schools and societal institutions.
Conservatives can see that, once the left was in charge, the pursuit of free and open discussion in the marketplace of ideas was cast aside without a second look. Political correctness became the order of the day. Moral relativism was a tactic to get them into power. It was a part of a strategy, not a principle. The left wants what it wants, by any means necessary. The politically correct administrators of our modern universities are acting as authoritatively to protect and defend their views as a Puritan divine in charge of Harvard or Yale in the 18th century.
Am I sure that this maneuvering by the left was done deliberately? No, I can’t read the minds of the modern champions of political correctness. Perhaps they are so caught up in their ideological enthusiasms that they see nothing wrong with doing all in their power to defend their beliefs, including censorship. Perhaps they do not think back to when Americans on the left castigated anyone who cut off debate on a matter of intellectual or political concern.
It could be that the American left has suffered some form of collective amnesia that leads them to forget who led the Free Speech movement at Berkeley in the 1960s, the divestiture movements of the 1970s, the campaigns against university admissions policies, and the effort to disestablish the culture of “dead, white males.” They once told us to “never trust anyone over 30.” That has changed, now that they are over 30 and in positions of authority.
If it is not amnesia about these things that explains the flip-flop, then we are witnessing a scenario comparable to the calculated lying about what was said in the past by the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. I am not exaggerating to make a point: The left-wing tub-thumpers Jonathan Merritt describes in his column are pushing the proposition that some free speech is freer than other. Leftists exercising freedom of speech, good; conservatives exercising freedom of speech, bad.
On another topic: the frustration many feel over the state of our alma maters. It is easy to feel helpless, as if nothing can be done to halt the drift to the secular left in those institutions. But it is not hopeless. Walter Williams reported on a decision by the University of Missouri’s board of curators. It “is to be congratulated,” he writes, “for firing professor Melissa Click, who was videotaped intimidating a student reporter during demonstrations” by radical activists at the school. The shot of her calling for some “muscle” from fellow-demonstrators to intimidate the student reporter was widely seen on the newscasts.
“Her firing was not a result of administrator and faculty decency,” Williams continues. “Private donations had plummeted, and Missouri lawmakers were proposing an $8 million cut in the systems budget. That proves what I have always held: Nothing opens the closed minds of administrators better than the sounds of pocketbooks snapping shut.”
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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.
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