I wrote this in May, but forgot to post it. I happened to notice it today while cleaning out old files. It seems a fitting start to the academic year.

In Princeton, where I live, there are two kiosks on Nassau Street, the main drag, on which people put up up flyers of various sorts, sometimes announcements of cultural events, sometimes flyers of a more political nature. Most but not all of the political flyers tend to the left of the political spectrum, and some of these target either the municipality or the University. The kiosks are deeply resented by elites at both institutions, who regard them, with predictable hauteur, as “eyesores.” Despite determined public opposition, the local town council has voted to demolish the kiosks and replace them with something that it can (in the words of one proponent) “control.”

They’re still there for now. The stated rule governing them is that flyers are taken down on the first of every month. Today is the 22nd of May. And yet, as I walked through town this morning and then this evening, I found all of the flyers systematically taken down on both kiosks.

It all might seem a mystery until you realize that Reunions are taking place at the University between May 22-25. During Reunions, alumni from the University gather in Princeton for a few days of hard drinking, loud partying, and bad behavior. Though the event is billed as a voyage in nostalgia, it always involves a swim in the waters of Lethe, the mythical river of forgetfulness and oblivion: some dance to remember, but most come to forget. It’s hard to do that if, at every turn, you’re reminded of the world beyond your narcissistic preoccupations, one that demands engagement. Hence every reminder of such a world must be ripped down, rule or no rule. 

I think of this sort of thing every time people insist that “the Left has destroyed free speech.” No, it hasn’t. It’s not a matter of the Left, and not a matter of free speech. It’s a matter of an entirely non-partisan form of cowardice, something you can find anywhere on the political spectrum, and anywhere off of it.  We live, not in “woke culture,” or in “cancel culture,” but in a culture of desperate, delusional evasion. Cowardice is the wedge between the will to engage the world and the desire to evade it.

“They were careless people,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby, who “smashed up things and creatures, and then retreated into their vast money or their vast carelessness.”  It’s not an accident that Fitzgerald attended Princeton. He knew the place. So do its keepers and guardians. It’s the kept and the guarded who are and remain ignorant–mostly by their own choice, but with a little help from their friends. It can last a while. The question is how long.