On the rapidly accumulating pile of writing that consists of Jewish leftists now fretting about the overreaches of campus Political Correctness (aka “JAPCAT“), we can add Robert Boyers’ “How ‘Safe Spaces’ Stifle Ideas“. Boyers is himself a Leftie who has described himself as a “working-class Jewish kid in a largely black Brooklyn neighborhood” and his paper is chock full of references to Jewish liberals and leftists (e.g., Tony Judt, Susan Sontag, Philip Rieff, etc.)
JAPCAT has now reached the point where Jewish Marxists are throwing out Jewish proverbs to critique Marcuse’s handmaiden of P.C. Oy, vey!
The very notion of diversity is now increasingly understood to refer to anything but differences of outlook, which we are urged — by the newly enlightened and militant — not to protect but to suppress and eliminate so that no delicate sensibility need be challenged or unsettled. A Jewish proverb says, “Don’t wish too hard, or you’ll get what you want.” So you want to make things safe enough to protect yourself and others not only from shock and awe but also from potentially disturbing thoughts and ambivalences? Don’t be surprised if you end up with more than you ever bargained for…
Herbert Marcuse, by no means alone in this, stirred a generation of radicals to consider whether tolerance might itself be an instrument or symptom of repression, thereby converting the benign idea celebrated by John Stuart Mill and other liberal thinkers into something else…
To those who spend much of their time in academic settings, the phenomenon I am associating with missionary regimes will be instantly recognizable. More and more in such settings, the learning agenda is controlled by cadres of so-called human-relations or human-resources professionals and their academic enablers, who, as the Yale English professor David Bromwich has described them, regard “learning as a form of social adjustment,” and believe that it is their business to promote “adherence to accepted community values.” Ideas thus are esteemed only insofar as they ordain a safe and accredited direction that we can learn, all of us, to follow. Dialogue is encouraged so long as it is rooted in approved suppositions and clearly headed where we must all want it to go. The atmosphere has about it, as Bromwich sharply observes, the qualities of “a laboratory that knows how to monitor everything, and how to create nothing” and “a church held together by the hunt for heresies.”…
I loved this passage, which demonstrates the Tribe’s collective hostility to all things “middlebrow” (codespeak for white, middle class, Christians):
My old friend Irving Howe once wrote that “every current of the Zeitgeist … every assumption of contemporary American life favors the safe and comforting patterns of middlebrow feeling.” We don’t use expressions like “middlebrow” any more, but the words “safe and comforting patterns of middlebrow feeling” do accurately identify a good deal of what we contend with. Don’t care for “middlebrow” as a handy term of derogation? Bracket it if you like, but also consider that the lock-step march of the new commissars setting up to take control of our cultural institutions, from the universities to the mainstream media, has much to do with creating what Howe called “safe and comforting patterns” of feeling.
