College campuses are once again alive with student protests.
At Yale, students are protesting against free speech in favor of being protected from potentially offensive Halloween costumes.
At Missouri, student protests – to be protected from rude and insensitive people and ideas – led to the university president’s and a popular professor’s resignation.
At Ithaca, students are demanding the resignation of their president. And according to insidehighered.com, students at Vanderbilt want a professor fired for writing an editorial in the student newspaper (perhaps I should stop writing now, as my job may be on the line.)
These protests come after multiple studies find that today’s university students are highly sensitive to being offended and need professors to provide “trigger” warnings so students may look or move away and not be “confronted” by potentially offensive material.
According to an article on the Washington Post, the former Missouri football captain told the students to “grow up.” Salman Rushdie has noted a university is where students should be challenged everyday says an article on thefire.org. Others have warned of the dangers of coddling students, according to The Atlantic.
And the ever-thoughtful, gay journalist Jonathan Rauch argues on nydailynews.com that every college course should contain this trigger warning: “Warning: Although this university values and encourages civil expression and respectful personal behavior, you may at any moment, and without further notice, encounter ideas, expressions and images that are mistaken, upsetting, dangerous, prejudiced, insulting or deeply offensive. We call this education.”
Solving the problem will require addressing some deeply held, albeit false, philosophies. The first is the belief that truth is impossible (or nearly impossible) to know so all evaluative judgments are presumptive and illegitimate. This philosophy is more popularly known as relativism. Relativism creates a problem. For if, as relativism claims, there is no means to identify true and false or good and bad, then what prevents the attitude that “anything goes” or my emotions are valid?
Those reared on relativism learn that emotion is indeed more real and valued than reason. Under relativism reason and truth are unknowable, but what is real, undeniable, and valid is one’s emotions. The consequence of relativism is it creates little emperors who believe that their feelings and emotions are the most important thing in the world, according to insidehighered.com.
Relativists counter that the solution is an unlimited empathy. That is respect, let live, and empathize with those who are different from yourself. This idea, proponents claim, will generate sufficient goodwill and living space for all to get along and do their thing without infringing on others.
Empathy, however, has a dark side – rather than making us placid and peaceful, empathy amps up aggression, according to The Atlantic. For when we empathize with a victim we also want justice for the culprit, and this requires aggression. It is no accident that when politicians wish to take their nation to war, the emotion they often stoke is empathy.
Relativism and empathy are a heady and toxic combination. For relativism justifies one’s ego, and empathy teaches that others should empathize with you as the disrespected victim. The result is aggressive self-righteousness against those who do not validate one’s emotional grievances – real or imagined.
The elites who proselytize relativism – unmoored from truth, morality, ethics and standards – profess an ideology that recognizes only power and manipulation as the basis of social cooperation.
The impossibility of the relativists and multiculturalists’ dream has been confirmed time and again. Consider the significant rise in ethnic-related crimes in the most multicultural (i.e., nonjudgmental and empathetic) of nations, Sweden and the Netherlands. Or consider the increasing backlash against teachers with the temerity to say “no”, “that’s wrong”, or who expect students to give good reasons and arguments to support their claims.
Such teachers increasing find themselves on the short-end of the student’s emotional wrath that burns until some victim is sacrificed on the alter of “validate me”.
The fruits of relativism and an unlimited empathy are not healthy, cooperative, and peaceful societies but discord, division and aggression.
Relativism and its demand to be non-judgmental towards others stands in stark contrast to Joseph Smith’s inspired translation of Matthew’s famous words, “Judge not, unrighteously.”
Learning to judge righteously is a fundamental component of excellent education and essential to life – for the one thing one cannot do in this life is not judge. Relativism is false, according to a post on Edward Feser’s blog. Truths exist and are knowable – at least sufficiently knowable that we can build buildings, bridges, schools, and moral and ethical codes that allow fulfilling lives and flourishing communities.
Truths, like gravity, hurt when we disregard them. But, at the same time, dancing is possible only because of gravity. Likewise, self-confidence, greatness and excellence are possible only by developing our capacities and seeking and accepting the truths that allow us to stand up to the exigencies of life so we may face them fully, squarely, and nobly.