Besides using social pressure
and anger to purge words that a student or faculty member deems unacceptable,
the word police have found that they can get objectionable opinions
criminalized. This runs 180 degrees from the sort of openness to different,
even objectionable ideas that makes a college campus thrive with an academic
rather than passive-aggressive atmosphere. Sometimes, getting the law to go
against a pollical opinion that a fallible person deems to be intolerable can
show just how dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary the criminalizing of ideas
can be. Here I have in mind the case of Marianne Hirsh, a genocide scholar at Columbia
University. It is a sign of going too far that political corrective would be
weaponized with criminal punishments that such a scholar, whose parents had
died in the Nazi Holocaust, would think that she would have to teach at another
university to be able to continue teaching material from the notable twentieth-century
scholar, Hannah Arendt, who wrote on the banality of evil in that Holocaust
(and, were she still alive in the next century, would probably also write of
the Gaza Holocaust in such terms). Behind political correctness is the arrogance
and related intolerance that stem from the sin of self-idolatry: taking oneself
to be omniscient and omnipotent (but not omnibenevolent).
The full essay is at "Passive Aggression on Campus."
