Morality in the 21st Century: Is Society a Myth?

BBC Radio 4 - Morality in the 21st Century, Episode 7: Is Society a Myth?

"‘In the first program, we looked at the weakening of the idea of moral responsibility, leading to a loss of trust in big corporations and governments. In the second, we looked at the impact of smartphones and social media, and the rise of depression, loneliness, and the loss of meaning in our lives. Today, I want to look at society as a whole.

For most of history societies have been held together by a shared moral code. But half a century ago, the West embarked on a great experiment, a move from we to I. From, we're all in this together to I'm free to be myself. Recently, there's been a reaction against individualism in favor of the group. But what's returned isn't a sense of society as a whole, but rather, subgroups defined by faith, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. Hence the new phenomenon known as identity politics, which, according to its critics, focuses not on the common good, but on what's good for my group. And this is spread elsewhere, most notably to universities’...

‘You can have forms of identity politics that are very positive, that are calling on people to say, look, some of our brothers and sisters are not being treated with dignity. You can have identity politics that's appealing to nobler sentiments. And that's the kind that wins. That's the kind that won for Mandela. That's the kind that won for Gandhi.

But we have now various movements that are much more about common enemy. That is: the Bedouin proverb me against my brother, me and my brothers against our cousin, me, my brothers and cousin against the stranger. And so to take college students who are often young and hopeful, they come to a university campus, which is about as progressive and welcoming a place as could be, and to teach them to see it as a matrix of oppression where people are trying to marginalize them.

You're basically ramping up that tribalism and I think the point here is that we evolved to do us versus them. Tribal thinking, we're really, really good at that. That's our default. We shouldn't be ramping that up. We should be thinking about ways to turn it down.’

‘When I was a student university was of the essence of a non zero culture because we were engaged in a collaborative pursuit of truth. So academic freedom meant you listened respectfully to views opposed to your own, knowing and dignified by the fact that people whose views were opposed to your own would listen respectfully to yours. So we both gained, we both grew and to be able to win or lose in the pursuit of truth, we both thereby gained. And the essence of that was free speech and civil discourse. Now, tell us what you see happening on American campuses.’

‘There's been a kind of a spread of some new ideas since about 2013 or 2014. It began, and it's really quite striking how much it's related to a change in the generations. And what we see on campus is that the millennials were just like previous generations in really valuing free speech.

Now iGen, everybody says they value free speech. Nobody disvalues it. But the question is, what trade offs do you make? And those of us who are raised in the 20th century, for us words like freedom and liberty were really important. Growing up in America, you would often say, I can do what I want. It's a free country. And we also had the phrase sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never harm me.

Kids today do not say either of those. They don't say it's a free country. And they sure don't say sticks and stones, because that would be to be denying the pain that somebody else feels. They were raised under a rubric of inclusion. Now, inclusion is great. Inclusion is a virtue. This is not about good versus evil. This is a conflict of good versus good. And the young generation has been raised, again with good intentions to focus on diversity and inclusion. And that's good in many, many ways.

But if that is pitted against somebody else's speech, young people think that diversity and inclusion should always win. Now if it was really: should we allow racist speech, or should we be kind? Well, most of us would say, let's find a way to keep the racist speech out.

But we have what's called concept creep. So it's not, like an American campus. It's not about disinviting Richard Spencer, who's an actual Nazi. It's anybody who disagrees with the prevailing Orthodoxy is literally called a fascist. I mean, they're called actual fascists. And so since many people now on college campuses think it's okay to punch Nazis, and they think almost anyone who disagrees with us is a Nazi. Well, this kind of gets us into a bit of a culture change from what you described.’

‘So safe space is becoming seriously unsafe for anyone who disagrees with the consensus and verbal violence, real or perceived is leading to an increase in physical violence. So this is, to me a little bit frightening because it's the kind of thing that led for instance, in Europe, to the ghetto.

I mean Jews, for instance, in Frankfurt, even in the beginning of the 19th century, were not allowed to leave the ghetto and walk the streets of Frankfurt on Sunday because they might offend the sensibilities of Christians going to or from church. So safe space for Christians meant ghettoization for Jews. How on earth are intelligent people walking back to that really dangerous and quite evil part?’...

‘It's a return of the psychology of purity. That is, traditional societies pretty much all have really intense social practices around purity and pollution. Not pollution, like carbon monoxide, spiritual pollution, that sort of thing... traditional religions and hunter gatherer groups, they have incredible numbers of taboos... it is an advance in many traditions to put that stuff aside, to reduce the frequency of it.

And certainly Reformed Jews versus Orthodox Jews, that's one of the big differences is reformed gets rid of a lot of the washing stuff, the food stuff, but it's our default, our default way of thinking as human beings is with purity. And so if you have a very homogeneous community that is intensely passionate about certain goals, purity rules are going to come back.

And this is what we're seeing on campus as well. Again, this is not for most people. This is not at most schools, but at universities that are very politically homogeneous and politically intense, and generally in a left wing way, it could happen on the right to but we don't have much of that in American universities, you get purity laws.

And so there's certain things that if you were to question them, you would find yourself being a persona non grata, you would find yourself being marked as taboo. And anybody who defends you would then share in that taboo. So this is how it comes back to those medieval sort of practices…

I would say that human nature is to be religious. And it's very hard to keep all religion out of the human community. Now, if you have a lot of true diversity, that is diversity of thought, diversity of values, diversity of politics, then you don't get this consolidation. You don't get like all the electromagnets pointing in a single direction.

But what's happened in American universities is throughout the 20th century, they lean to the left. You know, by 3 to 1, 4 to 1, the students lean to the left. But that's fine. Leaning is no problem. But if you go from the 19, mid 1990s to 2010, it goes from leaning left to being almost entirely on the left in many disciplines. Not in engineering, not in the hard sciences, but in the social sciences and humanities, in most of them.

When you have that kind of uniformity, then you can get the reemergence of this tribal thinking. This is what we've seen happening on American universities since 2015. We have basically the dynamics of a witch hunt. I've been reading the sociological literature on moral panics and witch hunts.

When a community is very homogeneous in its religious moral beliefs, and it feels threatened from outside, then a little tiny thing can trigger a gigantic reaction. And that's what we've been seeing on campus.

Typically what happens is a person writes an email. It's often a left leaning woman. For some reason, it's especially happening to women, it seems. So a dean at Claremont McKenna writes a helpful email to a student. The student interprets in the worst possible way, forwards the email to all her friends. It's a long story, but basically she said she was trying to empathize and said for students who don't fit our mold, and she were trying to empathize as: yes. You know, you're an ethnic student who you say you don't fit in, and she sent this, but the student took this as oh, really, you're saying I don't belong. And so she sent this out and there were massive protests, hunger strikes demanding that she be fired.

So these sorts of things that make no sense to outside observers. actually match the sociological pattern of witch hunts that you see in Salem, Massachusetts, that you see that the right does it a lot, you know the McCarthy era. So left and right both do witch hunts, but it requires a kind of a moral homogeneity, in which you can get this craziness going.’"