248. "Check your privilege"

 
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How put-downs change!  Especially in political discussions.  In the forties, in the student joints around Tulane, a big one was, "Are you home?"  It suggested that you hadn't been following the train of argument.  "Is your brain in gear?  Are you keeping up with the rest of us?"  There you were, the only one too dumb to see that Socialist contradictions could only lead to....

In our decade, in the joints around Princeton, the big one, apparently, is "Check your privilege" (see NYT 5-3-14).  It suggests that you look into your attitudes.  Are your statements tainted by your class or race status?  There you are, too biased to be trusted.

I know how easy it is to read great sea-changes in a little flotsam washed up on shore but here I think we've got something.  Princeton has given us a clue to what happened, what most deeply happened, in American college classrooms in the decades leading up to ours: the ideal of objectivity was replaced.  By an ideal of goodness.  It was better to be morally upright than to be intellectually sound.  Facts became less important than attitudes.  If there are sea-changes in education, that's a sea-change.

Students get their notions of what's cool, intellectually, from their profs, and in 1946 the profs behind the coolest intellectuals at Tulane, those from New York, were not far to seek.  They were Morris Cohen, of CCNY, and Ernest Nagel, graduate of CCNY (who went on to Columbia), authors of the textbook Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method.  If you wanted to dispute the finer points of cool, the justification for a put-down, you could go through that book:

  Bob says, "That's just what you'd expect a plantation-owner to say." 

"Whoa," says Nathan.  "Definitely not cool.  Look, here it is.  Argumentum ad hominem. "

As a matter of fact, there was a plantation owner (or member of a plantation-owning family) among the arguing leftists at Tulane, Al Maund, whose radical novel, The Big Boxcar, I notice, has just been reprinted by the University of Illinois Press.  I can imagine trying to put him down in the 2014 way.  Remember, you're idealizing the proletariat, so it would come out as, "Check your lack of privilege."  Say that to an Old Leftist who has just nailed down the case against Norman Thomas's social program and your irrelevance silences the table.  Who cares about Al's proletarian credentials?  Anybody home up there?

Who are the profs behind the students who argue politics today, as at Princeton?  I can't identify their persons but I have already (in Post 97) categorized them.  They're in a class with the Smothers brother who, to the statement, "Your shirttail is out," replied, "Why do you hate me?"  They put attitude ahead of fact.  What your words show about you — your values, your politics — is more important than what they refer to.  Measure a prof's distance from Tom Smothers and you've measured, inversely, his responsibility for today's undergraduate cool.

It doesn't have to be a prof, though.  Consider Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.  She (see Post 207) gives you the easiest measurement you could make.  She blesses a woman in the Bible (Acts 16:16-34) simply because she is different.  Ignoring the fact that the woman is a fortune-teller and a vessel of demons, a person we disapprove of, a person presented for our disapproval, she turns our disapproval into a moral deficiency, making it part of our "long history of discounting and devaluing difference, finding it offensive or even evil."  That's about as close to Tom "Attitude is All" Smothers as you can get.

Schori has a better justification for her position than profs do, though.  She's a Christian preacher, and Christian preachers, moving out from the Sermon on the Mount, are bound to put values ahead of facts.  The kingdom of God is within you.  That's her tradition.  The prof's tradition, up to now, has been to put facts ahead of attitudes.

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So, no sea-change up in the pulpit.  But a sea-change at the lectern.  And the interesting thing is, we're winding up with very much the same thing, judging by the behavior of the audience.  How did it happen, in a few decades, that pulpit and lectern drew so close to each other?  How did we reach the point where, sometimes, we have a hard time distinguishing a prof from a preacher?  Culture warriors on the right have been asking that question for some time, and here we see what they're talking about.