I take it as a matter of divine justice
that redemption can elude a convenient, belated atonement, especially if the
atoning individual or institution does not really grasp the root of the
original sin and thus the sin continues under other manifestations even though admittedly
they may be less severe. I contend that when Peter Salovey, Yale University’s
president, apologized on behalf of the Yale Corporation for having oppressed
two Black men nearly two centuries earlier, he was not aware of the university’s
underlying exaggerated fixation on the insider/outsider dichotomy that was still
salient in 2023. To be sure, Nietzsche wrote that the strong should maintain a
pathos of distance from the weak, lest the latter beguile the former into voluntarily
renouncing their innate strength. Kant distinguished intimacy from difference
as together making up the dialectic of attraction and distance. When a customer
with the strength of having money naturally distances oneself from a rude
employee of a retail company who is resentful, such distance is hardly artificial.
Yet when a university whose administrators and faculty feel the emotional need
to distance themselves qua insiders from outsiders to such an extent
that even alumni who return to campus to work on academic projects, such as
writing a book, are relegated as outsiders—hence not “members of the community”—then
the distancing stems from a rather unnatural pathology. I contend that such a
pathology still plagued Yale like an invisible blanket in 2023, almost two-hundred
years after that university had refused to allow two black auditors to speak in
courses at Yale’s theological seminary (divinity school). That original sin,
although atoned for, still ran through Yale’s puffed-up veins in 2023, hence
intimacy and strength continued quite naturally to elude that university—the
redemption of which would require more of a mirror than an apology to two dead
Black auditors could provide. Although Yale appeared in 2023 to be self-confident to
external stakeholders and the general public, Nietzsche’s advice applied to people considering coming or giving to Yale nonetheless:
The strong should not get too close to weak, resentful birds of prey just as a
healthy person should not go to a hospital lest even such a person becomes sick too.
The full essay is at "Yale's Original Sin."
