Liberal Passion
D. Rayner (the pen name of a professor at a Southern University)

"Where Is Liberal Passion?" is the headline in a recent CHE Review. "Who cares!" might be the non-liberal response. But the article (subscription required for access) illuminates the worm in the apple of U.S. higher education today. First, why liberal? It is, I suppose, obvious to most readers of the CHE that liberalism (the modern, not the classical kind) is received truth -- and that the rest of the country (those danged red states!) is immersed in a kind of medieval primitivism, a.k.a. Republicanism. No need to defend that point when all are of one view! Things might have been different if the article had been entitled "Where is the neoconservative passion?" -- a suggestion that is humorous because it is so patently implausible. Hens will have dentition long before any organ serving higher education in this country betrays a conservative bias.

Philosopher Lynch, the author, wastes little time defining what he means by "liberalism" (it's obvious, isn't it?). Liberals "prize reason and deliberation"; "they are suspicious of the blind emotion of tent revivals and military parades." But anti-war marches and sit-ins, with their typical tranquil emphasis on reflection and openness to dissent, are OK, I guess. Never mind, our author is comfortable with his position that liberals don't rush off like mad dogs in the fashion so typical of conservatives.

But there's more: "Two important liberal values, for example, are equality and tolerance. Liberals believe the state should treat its citizens with equal respect and therefore that the state -- and the individual citizens within that state -- should tolerate, as much as possible, a wide range of different ways of life." Equal respect: should we respect equally the wastrel and the responsible citizen? Probably, according to Prof. Lynch.

It's worth noting that toleration has reached new heights of absurdity in some European countries. In today's paper, for example, is a report that Greenpeace demonstrators, in full view of police guards, climbed to the roof of the residence of John Prescott, a UK government minister, and displayed a banner. His wife was inside their home, and it was not until she complained that the police, after several hours, arrested the demonstrators using a law intended for another purpose. Meanwhile, a few months earlier a violent group of Sikhs in a northern English town succeeded in shutting down a play distasteful to them (though not critical of the Sikh religion), and the government did nothing. Is this the kind of toleration we may look forward to in Prof. Lynch's liberal future?

But clearly the main liberal value is equality. Lynch quotes Michael Walzer: "Standard liberalism, he writes, is 'an inadequate theory and a disabled political practice.' It is inadequate, in part, because its values are not conducive to real conviction. It is disabled 'because the social structures and political orders that sustain inequality cannot be actively opposed without a passionate intensity that liberals do not (for good reasons) want to acknowledge or accommodate.'" Here is the core assumption: inequality is not intrinsic; it is not that some are cleverer, more energetic or even more beautiful, than others. No, the problem is "social and political structures" without which, presumably, we would all be equally clever, rich, and, possibly, even beautiful. This is not just wrong, not just nonsense: it is dangerous and potentially tyrannical nonsense. Because without a level of coercion not seen since the demise of the Soviet empire, there is simply no way we are all going to be equal. Human beings are not equal and any philosophy that will not rest until equality is a fact is a philosophy of the gulag and of 1984.

This is where Prof. Lynch's "equality" can lead. Perhaps my academic colleagues do not fully understand the implications of their liberalism. Or, more alarmingly, perhaps they do -- and think the game worth the candle . . .

NAS4:45 PM