A dozen or so years ago, I took temporary leave from Georgetown University and moved to Iraq for two years to preside over The American University of Iraq-Sulaimani. Some of the young men and women enrolled in our fledgling university carried the double burden of having survived both the American invasion and the Kurdish Civil War that had occurred 20 years earlier. To give a sense of the difficulties the university had to contend with, we found it necessary to develop a scholarship category—“Anfal students”—for those whose parents had been gassed to death by Saddam Hussein’s cousin, nicknamed “Chemical Ali,” during the Kurdish genocide in Halabja and elsewhere. More than 175,000 Kurds died in that offensive, whose name, “Anfal,” means “the spoils of war.” Those who died in Halabja convulsed, fell to the ground, and choked in their own green vomit before succumbing. In America, we talk of “hardship” students. Few have experienced trauma of the kind our students in Iraq endured.
Teachers at the American University of Iraq were of two sorts. There were those who sympathetically said to their students: “We dimly understand what you have been through, but the only way we can help you is by upholding high standards, so that you can develop the competence you will need to live well.” And there were others whose guilt about the American invasion and its consequences was all-consuming. For these teachers, the development of student competence was of secondary importance. What mattered was that they be merciful and empathetic toward their students, who were, after all, innocent victims. These teachers did not require that their students hand in their work on time, or at all. They ignored cheating. An inordinate amount of their time was spent making tearful pleas, in the hope that administrators would be lenient when student grades fell below the level required to retain scholarships.
Iraq had its divisions, and the American University of Iraq had them, too. One faction consisted of tough-love teachers and their hungry students; the other consisted of teachers and students who were co-dependent on one another. The teachers in this latter group declared that their students could not succeed without softened standards, and their students depended on these softened standards, not hard work, to get the passing grades they needed. Imagine how these teachers would have responded if their co-dependent students came to class one morning and said: “Your tears on our behalf do us no good. We can and must succeed without your ‘help.’ Regardless of what has befallen us, we are not innocent victims. Our dignity is not measured by what we have suffered, but by how we will respond to it. Suffering is not an argument against standards. Treating us as innocent victims may bring meaning to your life, and it pays you well. But you may not purchase meaning in your life at the expense of our lives becoming whole, and decent, and good, which can only happen if we rise above our afflictions.”
When competence is your goal, neither guilt nor victimhood should have a place. Standards and goals must be respected and maintained. When the co-dependency of guilt and victimhood metastasize in your university, you ask of your students something anathema to education—that each day they deepen their awareness of their own victimhood, and that they pay ever more tuition to the army of mental health administrators and woke professors who fatten off of their misery. Seek to produce competent students, and you honor your commitment to higher education; seek to produce innocent victims, and you transform your university into an institution of higher infantilization—an exercise in therapeutic redemption, not education. “We, the Board Directors of this once-hallowed university, certify that you were admitted, not because of your grades or SAT scores, which are racist, but because you saw yourself as an innocent victim or knew what sort of social-justice-genuflecting would be necessary if you were not; and we certify that you graduated not more competent but more righteous than when you arrived. Now go forth and subdue the earth, enchained by your student debt and your frailty.”
Don’t the examples of our indigenous American Indians and a shamefully large swath of black America since the onset of the so-called Great Society Program in 1963 show that the best way to produce permanent co-dependency is for the state to overrun the mediating institutions through which citizen competence is developed? Systematic racism does not afflict our nation; the systematic undermining of the mediating institutions of our most vulnerable citizens by the state does. Such heavy-handed paternalism is “the bigotry of soft expectations,” as the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan called it.
Today, a fourth distinct group of innocent victims has emerged: the transgendered. Consequently, the term of derogation, “heterosexual,” once leveled at white men to cast light on the innocence of gays and lesbians, will no longer do. To indicate an even greater depravity that white men possess, and to highlight transgender innocence, the toxicity of the white man is being recast before our eyes: his toxicity now consists in being “heteronormative,” an abstraction with no clear meaning. His irredeemable transgression? He believes (as many gays and lesbians also do) that “man” and “woman” are natural categories, not to be trifled with. Adherents of identity politics believe otherwise. The idea of an enduring human nature is the enemy to be rooted out and discredited.
How this barbaric accounting system of identity politics—which, like slavery, evaluates human beings as if they were cuts of meat to be prized or discarded—ends, no one can say. In the interim, many Americans are spending a growing portion of their day anxiously determining what cut of meat they are, and how they might be prized if on the (white) face of things they do not make the cut. Their competence increasingly counts for nothing, and they know it. This is not a recent development, of course; our elites began outsourcing the making of things to other countries decades ago. (Today, we can’t even repair many of the things we import. When broken, our things are ground up or shipped whole back to China on diesel-fired freighters to be melted down in massive coal-fired smelters for yet more products we cannot fix.) Identity politics completes the destruction of competence that outsourcing began. We have reached the End of Days. Because there is nothing left for us to build together, developing competence has become an anachronistic aspiration. What alone matters now is your innocence or guilt, defined by surreal ideological categories.
This grim picture is not yet complete. That every day, across this extraordinary country, we privilege innocent victimhood over hard-won competence is a national catastrophe, for which we will pay dearly. Beyond these daily delusional choices being made to wreck our country lays the deepest of questions: Is America—indeed, is the West as a whole—suffering a crisis of guilt for which the only solution is the nihilistic destruction of its civilization? Not long ago, Christianity gave Western man a way to address his guilt—through repentance, forgiveness, and atonement. He could live for the future in hope because his guilt about his past behavior could be lifted. Today we feel the ever-increasing burden of guilt that identity politics piles on but see no way to lift its weight from our shoulders.
The officiants of identity politics do, however, offer absolution. For the burden of our guilt to be lifted, they merely require that we sacrifice our nation and every mediating institution through which we develop competence and live in freedom. “Your nation is tarnished by its past; so, too, is your heteronormative family and your homophobic church. Your civic institutions are systemically racist, as are your educational institutions, and your corporations. For your burden of guilt to be lifted, you must fully renounce them, as Christians once fully renounced Satan in order to be baptized into the communion of saints.” This a bleak world without hope or redemption, a world where self-loathing is the reigning principle.
In America today, millions have made this compact already with identity politics. They need absolution, and identity politics, unlike Progressivism and Marxism, promises to give it. They will do anything to free themselves of guilt—even destroy the institutions and ideas of their civilization. They will do anything, that is, except return to the transcendent God, who alone can lift their burden.