My professor of logic drove a painted-up VW bug, dressed like a hippie, did drugs, and proclaimed himself to be an apostle of Karl Marx. Looking back, it seemed mostly like an act. The substance of the class was as strict as any I’ve taken.
He was brutally insistent—as logic would require—that every argument made internal sense. That didn’t make the conclusion true but at least the argument itself needed to add up without dangling fallacies and mismatched steps in thinking.
That was the first time in life when I discovered that there were rules for thinking and arguing. No one had told me that before. I wondered why logic classes were not the norm. They used to be but sometime in the 20th century, it all just fell out of favor.
Looking back, that class was one of the most important I ever experienced. And he was a great professor. He had his values and I had mine but at least there were rules of engagement. And we respected each other. He welcomed my ferocity and we became friends. I learned from him and, perhaps, he from me and my colleagues.
My philosophy professor was similar if perhaps more flaky. He went on about situation ethics and how love, and not rules, is all we really need in life, as if we should all be flying by the seat of our emotional pants forever and nothing should ever be systematized. His lectures drove me so crazy that I spent hundreds of hours in reading to refute every word.
His was the best class I ever took, if judged by how much I learned outside the assigned readings. And by the way, I’m pretty sure he was communist but someone who not only loved argument; he actively sought it. And he darn sure got it from me.
Yes, in those days, we all got along. We disagreed with passion but we all still respected each other.
When my own intellectual interests drifted toward anarchism, I found even more interlocutors on the right side of the political spectrum. They would talk about homogeneous communities of religious unity, plus a dictatorship by established truth, and I would balk and preach about the great liberal revolutions of the 18th century.
And so on it went. To be sure, you could criticize these times as when intellectuals merely played parlor games with each other, never really taking seriously the possibility that their ideas would actually be implemented and affect lives. And to this criticism, I would plead guilty for myself and everyone. We just didn’t fully understand the stakes, nor the adaptability of the world.
We never imagined that we would be today on such a precipice.
Still, I miss those times. Through confrontation with others who held different views, we honed our own and sometimes changed our minds. We gained clarity on issues. Ideas were a prism through which we saw the world and our communities were turning that prism always. We would think and write. It was an adventure.
Something dramatic has changed. My own vague recollection is that it began with identity politics. One day, we were all typecast by sex and race. Ideas were reduced to biology. It was a method of silencing people. Suddenly my thoughts were automatically deprecated by who I was biologically. Nor did it matter to cite others of different biology; they were dismissed as betrayers of their own people and class.
I can recall one salon where there was a university-based administrator of diversity or something who shut me up by saying that I simply could not and would not understand because I’m a white male. And that was the end. It was a dehumanizing experience, and all the more so because it came from a person who seemed very nice.
Was that ten years ago? Perhaps. But of course it was just the beginning. Later came the extremely strange obsession on the left with “cultural appropriation” as if certain races and peoples own their culture as property and no one can somehow borrow anything from it. This was a fundamental attack on modernity. It reversed the whole progress of civilization for at least 1,000 years or perhaps forever.
It struck immediately as a longing for segregation and worse. It was a pining for tiny tribes of hunter-gatherers who never traveled, never learned, never changed. This is a vision worse than fascism or communism. It was a lurch toward pure primitivism. Any attempt to impose this view would result in an indescribable calamity for civilization.
Of course it got worse. Today we have what is called woke ideology. Elon Musk characterized this as consisting of two main parts: a complete rejection of meritocracy and of the free exchange of ideas. That’s it in its most reductionist form. It doesn’t matter what you do; it only matters who you are. And even then, if you think the wrong things, you should shut up.
This seems like the main driving force of the left today. This causes quite a bit of discomfort. I realized this weekend that I find myself a bit sensitive to the question of whether a person with whom I’m socializing is woke. This is because if they are, I know for sure that I risk being demonized by them when they find out that I am not.
The left in the old days were just people with interesting views. They were ready to take on anyone. They had confidence and were ready to debate. Today it is different. The left is intolerant, judgmental, ready to pounce, and even to cancel. So now when one detects even a hint of this in a person, the tendency is to clam up and plot an escape as soon as possible.
This is tragic for all sides. It denies people like me serious intellectual interlocutors. And it denies them any real challenge precisely because they have shut themselves off to them. And as a result, those on the left have largely retreated to their privileged hovel of isolation among other educated elites, unsullied by the opinions of others they expect to serve them.
This was never so obvious as during the COVID crisis. There was an invisible virus out there and great questions about how we should respond to it. If you weren’t fearful, you were not among them. If you declined to mask, you outed yourself as possibly a Trump supporter. If you didn’t go for the vaccine, you were on the wrong team.
They used the entire pandemic not as a means to improve medical knowledge but as a means of separating the clean (them) from the unclean (everyone who had questions about the government/corporate response.) It was an extremely weird case of woke ideology meeting the microbial kingdom and landing them all in an authoritarian/anti-science cabal of compliance and censorship.
I miss those days of the heterodox professor with the iconoclastic views who loved engaging with students and professors. Looking back now, those very professors I spoke about above would themselves face cancellation because they insisted on two things: you had to make sense and you had to debate. The modern left wants neither of those things.
Now it’s nothing but a mindless tribe drifting from one cause and slogan to another, regardless of common sense or contradiction. Each member burns with fiery passion to keep the group together and daily confirm the rightness of their cause while vanquishing enemies. They seem to be getting more extreme as the world ever more resists their demands.
And that’s what makes them uniquely scary and why all regular people want nothing to do with them. And that’s tragic because part of me really wants us all to be friends, to work together to build great lives and a great civilization. They are making that impossible.
