Genocide and the Academic Chairs of Virtue

I had meant “Stirring the POT” to be a monthly series, but my last one was back in March and it’s now July, so I guess the “monthly” promise was destined to be broken.

I wrote my last installment just after the talk I gave on institutional neutrality at APPE, and a couple of months before the one I was then scheduled to give at the Heterodox Academy conference in June. The Heterodox Academy talk ended up being significantly different from the APPE version or the version I put on the blog back in March. At any rate, the third version was the charm. The talk was well attended and went very well. There were a few skeptical or critical questions during the Q&A which I expected, but there was also some significant agreement, which came as a surprise. I’ll save all the squabbling for a separate post.

A room with a view: New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge

Setting aside Heterodox Academy’s own PR (which blankets social media), the conference was covered by four media outlets, Inside Higher Ed, Deseret News, The Bulwark, and Quillette. None of them covered my session, but both of the first two covered the University Presidential Panel just after mine, which featured a lively exchange on institutional neutrality between Sian Beilock, president of Dartmouth, and Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan.

Maybe “lively” overstates things: Beilock made a half-hearted defense of institutional neutrality; Roth raised a single objection to it; and Beilock then offered an implausible rejoinder in return. I found the exchange so irritating–so lacking in substance and beside the point–that I later went to Heterodox Academy’s Facebook page and offered publicly to debate Beilock on institutional neutrality at Dartmouth. Obviously, she has less of a stake in a debate with me than the other way around. I have yet to hear back.

Irritated at the selectivity of the coverage–any coverage that omits me is invidiously selective–I wrote somewhat ranting letters about it to the reporters at Inside Higher Ed and Deseret News. Deseret News’s reporter ignored me, but I eventually heard back from Ryan Quinn at Inside Higher Ed. Demurring a bit at my criticisms, Quinn told me that he was currently at work on an article on institutional neutrality for Inside Higher Ed that would feature more criticism of the doctrine than was visible in his Heterodox Academy piece. I gave him some input on the forthcoming article in the hopes that it has some effect on the final product. Meanwhile, I’ll be giving a version of the same paper on institutional neutrality at the APA Eastern this January in Baltimore, care of Roderick Long and the Molinari Society, to whom I owe an embarrassingly generous number of recent speaking invitations.

I generally hate conferences held at expensive hotels (as opposed to ones on college campuses), and got sick of this one pretty quickly. For all the talk of “viewpoint diversity,” there was discernibly less of it at the Heterodox Academy conference than at virtually any philosophy conference of comparable size, and something about the distance between PR hype and conference reality started to get on my nerves. I was an intern at the National Association of Scholars (NAS) back in its heyday, and the self-congratulatory atmosphere at Heterodox Academy reminded me of what I’d encountered so many times at NAS. I ended up heading out into the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn nearby, found a nice park to sit in (Cobble Hill Park), and did some reading. It was 100 degrees in the shade that day, but let’s just say that Brooklyn has a charm that defies mere climatic considerations.

Cobble Hill somehow vaguely reminded me of the Talbiya neighborhood in Jerusalem. In fact, Cobble Hill Park reminded me of a little playground at the corner of HaZefira and Azriel Hildesheimer in Talbiya where I randomly spent a hot afternoon just like this one, reading Locke’s Second Treatise. There were times when, living under occupation in the West Bank, I’d get sick of it all–sick of life under occupation, I mean–and so I’d exercise my prerogative as a privileged American passport holder, hop the 263 bus, and head to Jerusalem to leave it all behind. Since Jerusalem is one of the most walkable, or at least one of the most walk-worthy cities in the world, I’d traipse all day through the city, sometimes ten or twelve miles a day, stopping at random to read or just vegetate, perfectly content to do so in the mid-summer heat. Musing over this memory in Brooklyn, I lost myself in a pleasant reverie until an unpleasant parallel suddenly hit me.

100 degrees in the shade at Cobble Hill Park

It was always with some guilt that I’d get on the Jerusalem bus when I did. I’d do it when I got “sick” of the occupation, but there was a bit of self-indulgence in this claim of indisposition. What was I “sick” of, exactly? Some of it had to do with stereotypical features of the occupation–the guns and soldiers and tear gas and stun grenades–but most of it didn’t. Most of it had to do with tedium, the tranquil, tranquilizing tedium of confinement. If you sat still in your room, nothing would happen to you. And if you wanted nothing to happen, that was the best way of insuring it. I was well-provisioned with books and a computer, and the local market was just up the hill. So I was content, for long stretches of time, to insure that nothing happened, by sitting still and doing nothing.

You could live that way for quite a while. Eventually, something would disturb it, but even then, it was tempting to deny that anything untoward was really happening. I know it sounds absurd, but the first time my town came under full-fledged Israeli attack, the monotonous sound of the attack–boom, boom, boom for hours–lulled me to sleep until it finally wrenched me back awake. But the bottom line is that when the tedium of occupation finally got to me–when doing nothing became a bore rather than an expression of repose–I always knew I could ditch it for something more engaging. I had the passport to get through even if most of my friends didn’t. That’s what privilege is.

So I’d grab a good book, privilege and all, get on the bus, and go: one checkpoint, usually uneventful, and I’d be free. After eight or nine miles of walking, I’d settle down on the hilltop of Haas Promenade, often in the shade of an olive tree, and like some Jerusalemite Rip Van Winkle, hope to doze my troubles away–occupation troubles, girl troubles, money troubles, whatever troubles it was pleasant to face. In escaping the occupation, of course, I was obliged at least momentarily to set aside or forget the people I left behind on the other side of the Wall. But only momentarily. Soon enough, I’d board the bus and go back. And there they’d be. It’s not as though they had anywhere else to go.

So it was at the Heterodox Academy conference. What looked like a hive of earnest intellectual activity was in many ways an enactment of an academic version of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. As the occupation had become tedium to me, so Gaza has become tedium to the West, and so it had become tedium to the scholars at that conference. We all hear talk of genocide, of rape, of torture, of mass starvation and concentration camps and mass expulsion, to the point where it all becomes an annoying sort of background noise. But noise is tedious, and something one wants to escape. We have the privilege of escape, so we take it.

Gaza came up in passing at the conference, but few mentioned (much less wanted to discuss) “genocide,” or “torture” or “expulsion” or “concentration camps,” or anything of the sort. No one wanted to discuss the Gaza Solidarity Encampments, either, or Project Esther, or the campus movement, or the repression that followed, or the fallout today. They wanted to discuss anti-Semitism, for sure: “the anti-Semitic sociopolitical biases of medical and mental healthcare in America,” for instance, as spun out of a single ambiguous, under-described data point. But that’s about as much contact with Gaza as you were going to get. There’s a video of my talk online, and instead of commenting on what I said, one commenter focuses on my keffiyeh. “What’s your real message?” he asks. A keffiyeh is too much for some of these people. Genocide, I imagine, is a step beyond that.

The conference was meant as a reprieve from “genocide and all that,” a restful summer escape. There was instead the tacit sense that we smart, earnest Western academics all have the passport that confers the prerogative of escape: membership in Western Civilization. That civilizational membership card enables us to get on whatever vehicle transports us away from evil, grab a good book, and go. If only, like Rip Van Winkle, we could sleep our way through genocide, wake up after it was over, and be spared the task of having to look it in the face, or take a comparable look at ourselves.

Early on in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche devotes a chapter to the Academic Chairs of Virtue. It turns out that their area of specialization is sleep.

People commended unto Zarathustra a wise man, as one who could discourse well about sleep and virtue: greatly was he honoured and rewarded for it, and all the youths sat before his chair. To him went Zarathustra, and sat among the youths before his chair. And thus spake the wise man….

No small art is it to sleep: it is necessary for that purpose to keep awake all day.

Ten times a day must thou overcome thyself: that causeth wholesome weariness, and is poppy to the soul.

Ten times must thou reconcile again with thyself; for overcoming is bitterness, and badly sleep the unreconciled.

As a lifelong insomniac, I can sympathize. But if the unreconciled sleep badly, it’s worth asking what the reconciled are missing in their collective slumber.

People glibly tell us that the purpose of the university is “truth,” as though any truth would do. But the ideal of academic life now dominant goes out of its way to evade two sorts of truth: truths about the evils in which we’re complicit, and truths about our responsibility to do something about them. So much of what I heard at that conference was a desperate attempt at evasion and escape. Overcoming is bitterness, but life is not all sweetness and light. I was thrown out of higher education for saying that out loud; the only means of return, I suspect, is to stop saying it at all. But eventually you learn that some truths can’t be evaded except at the price of self-abdication and moral suicide. I don’t know what it will take to bring that truth home to higher education. But there’s no stopping until I do.

PS. I’ve made three attempts either to embed or simply to mention this post in the comments of Heterodox Academy’s YouTube page housing the video of the panel I was on. Each of the three comments has been taken down a few minutes after posting. Clearly, some pots weren’t meant to be stirred.

Thanks to Corey Robin, who unintentionally furnished the Rip Van Winkle trope.