Moral Clarity part 14: Emotional stakes

Unbelievably, yesterday we learned from the presidents of three of the most prestigious Ivy League universities in the US that calling for the 'genocide of Jews' does not violate their school's code of conduct. I'm referring to the testimony given to House Committee on Education and the Workforce by Harvard president Claudine Gay, University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, and MIT president Sally Kornbluth. Specifically, when asked a direct question, the presidents hedged, answering that unless it was directed at an individual, or it was acted upon, a call for 'genocide' would not constitute a violation of rules of conduct. Magill and Gay called it "a context dependent decision." Calling for the genocide of Jews needs 'context'? Seriously?! One can only wonder what 'context' would make it acceptable. Or better, it has to be acted upon. Genocide? And we wonder why antisemitism on university campuses has exploded virtually unchecked, especially since October 7th. The university presidents demonstrated the mechanism through which antisemitism has been mainstreamed as a kind of moral relativity and obtuseness promoted by the academic institutions that we rely on to educate the next generation of supposed leaders. It's a shameful abdication of responsibility. It might also have something to do with recent reports of American universities receiving $billions from Arab governments. Tracking the ways in which this money has influenced the decisions made by academic institutions is certainly worth pursuing.   

I didn't think I'd have more to say about this, and then, sure as snow in winter, I got a message from my daughter who is in university (graduating this month thank god, it's not soon enough.) Among other things, she wrote that she felt ashamed of being Jewish and her unwanted association with a 'genocide' being perpetrated in Gaza. She even used the term 'holocaust' to describe it, saying that the Jews were doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis had done to them. I realized quickly that there was no point in trying to correct my daughter's misconceptions. She was not receptive. I did however try to answer her, in a way that would keep the channels of communication open. I tiptoed around the issues of what actually constitutes a 'holocaust' and 'genocide'. I wrote, "What concerns me most is when taking a viewpoint about an issue, which everyone is entitled to do, that it can become so emotionally charged when others disagree, that it changes the way you see others to the point of demonizing them. You start seeing them as morally deficient, even as an enemy. Demonizing people who disagree with you is one of the biggest problems we face in my view. It's the source of intolerance that tears families apart, and even nations, and leads to autocracy and fascism." Our exchange felt like my daughter and I were sleepwalking, arms locked, into a house on fire and we would both be consumed in flames. That's what happened. After some increasingly heated exchanges, she wrote that I lacked 'moral goodness' in her eyes, and she doesn't want to 'associate herself' with people like that (meaning me). 

My daughter clearly has a lot emotionally invested in her opinion. And that's the crux of my greatest fear. For a while I've been trying to pinpoint exactly when rational discussion and healthy debate became replaced with feelings of offense and being personally threatened? I figure it relates to the lens through which most subjects of a liberal education have been taught in our higher education institutions for several decades; as a function of the way the powerful dominate the powerless, the oppressor oppresses the oppressed. Our 'white privilege' (read: victimizer) is to blame, which relates to the ascendancy of identity politics in all its forms, religious, racial, gender etc., and the inherent moral righteousness of minority groups by virtue of their victimization.   

But I've also thought that there must be something else to it. An ingredient in some people that makes questions of politics emotionally charged in the extreme and overly personal. People like Gabor Maté, himself a child-survivor of the Holocaust, in whom their politics merges with their personal trauma and shame. These people seem to have a grandiose sense of self (probably related to an inherit insecurity), so that their opinions about politics become a matter of moral rectitude, and opposing viewpoints aren’t debatable on the merits, but rather represent an affront and are reprehensible and need to be scorned. To them it's not a question of policy, of political right and left, but a matter of moral right and wrong. To acknowledge an opposing perspective is tantamount to being personally invalidated.

I don't think I'm imagining it, but there was a time when a difference of opinion was just that. You could agree to disagree, let bygones be bygones, and do it over drinks. I know the informational siloing of social media also plays a part in the breakdown of civil discourse. Not to mention the depersonalization of social interaction that attends our contact mediated through screens in more and more domains of everyday life. The net result is that we are becoming emotionally ever more fragile and less resilient as our exposure to difference becomes increasingly filtered. We are hardening like glass, and our democracy is at risk of shattering. 

In response to backlash, the presidents of the Ivy League universities have made statements since their debacle before Congress. Liz Magill said that in the moment she was focused on the thorny issue of First Amendment Constitutional free speech rights, and wasn't thinking about how a call for genocide actually meant a call for mass-murder (I paraphrase). When we lose sight of the meaning of a word like 'genocide' - whether it's in the flippant way my daughter used it, on the one hand, or in the way the president of an Ivy League university neglected to consider the obvious because she was intellectually trying to dodge legal and political land mines, on the other - we're all in trouble.