Readers will know that I have been caught up in the news about campus protests. Circumstances have had me reading lots of stories in the New York Times, many of which are of dubious authority as they tend to stress short moments of drama and confrontation that belie the generally static and indeed tedious aspects of the “sit-in” or “occupation” mode. Indeed, it is rather difficult to dramatize the “hours and hours of boredom” as opposed to the comparatively rare “few moments of absolute terror” that punctuate them. That was the formulation journalists came up with to describe the battlefields of the first World War. And of course it is fair to say that student protests have rendered some of our campuses battlefields of a sort.
Surely the large majority of student protesters are idealistic and passionately sincere. They are utterly convinced of the righteousness of their cause, which also means of course of their own virtue. They are prone to think that those who might disagree with them are bad people but that they are good people. But those are explanatory descriptions of a mind set, not Get-Out-of-Jail-Free cards. It has generally been a principle of American political protest when it manifests itself in the public realm that the protesters be frank and bold in their protestations—that they “claim ownership of them,” as the phrase goes. There is a famous story involving Thoreau and Emerson, the only inconvenience of which is its fictionality, illustrating the idea. In 1846 Thoreau was (very briefly) jailed for failing to pay his poll tax. As he later wrote in "Civil Disobedience," he believed "it is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and . . . not to give it practically his support." He did this to register his hostility to chattel slavery, tolerated by American law. That is the historical part of the story. The legend is that he was visited in jail by Emerson, who is supposed to have said, “Henry, I am very surprised to find you in this place of custody.,” to which the prisoner is supposed to have retorted, “Waldo, I am very disappointed that you are not in jail!” The moral: when the civil disobedience demanded by justice and conscience clashes with the law, break the law.
The large majority of the protesters at Columbia and several other places have masked their faces. This is not a fact without significance. There are various benign masked figures in our folklore—Robin Hood and the Lone Ranger come to mind. But in real life most masked brigands have not in fact robbed from the rich in order to give to the poor. Their masking is an effort to avoid identification and legal retribution. When cloaking violence and criminality, masking likewise heightens the terror effect. If you knew for a fact that that menacing sub-kleagle of the KKK was actually a balding guy who sells Fuller brushes you might at least have the slight comfort of knowing something about the banality of evil. Even if they do not fear the illegality of their actions—or even if they are performing no actual illegal actions—the protesters may fear the retribution of “doxing”. This English neologism, a child of the Internet age, is supposedly short for “documenting” or “dropping documents”—such as name, address, etc. “Doxing is a form of cyberbullying that uses sensitive or secret information, statements, or records for the harassment, exposure, financial harm, or other exploitation of targeted individuals.” It is another term for public identification. Demonstrators may well prefer that school authorities, or their parents and friends, or public safety officials, or their professors, political adversaries, or parole officers actually not know for sure who they are. Disguised identity, however, strikes me as sinister, and at the very least Civil Disobedience Light.
What captures my attention today, however, is a certain body of evidence of how the general public is reacting to the demonstrations. There is a feature of the on-line Times of special interest to a protest-watcher. That is the “Comments” section. For many stories it is possible for any reader to make a comment, and often some hundreds of readers do just that. The genre of the “comment” is not friendly to subtlety. “Both sidesism” is rare and sometimes execrated. The “Arab-Israeli conflict” provides a kind of political Rorschach Test in the American press. I think it is also safe to say that the Times readership tips decidedly left on the whole. Under these circumstances I find what seems to be a decisive majority critical of the protestors a fact of which Democratic Party officials may want to take note. Another feature of the comments of interest to me is that what I shall call the pro-Palestinian commentators, who though in a marked minority are still numerous, not infrequently invoke their own experiences as anti-War protestors in the late ‘Sixties and early ‘Seventies. What interests me most, though, is their frequent use of the phrase “the right side of history.” Does history have “sides,” and if so only two, heads or tails, right or wrong? As an historian of medieval religious movements myself, I have spent a fair amount of time studying “heresy”—deviations from orthodox religious belief or practice. I am afraid my study has left me with what must seem a cynical definition of heresy. Heresy is the side that loses. In 1972, Zhou Enlai, the premier of China under Mao Zedong, was supposedly asked the question: “What was the long-term impact of the French Revolution?” His answer: “Too early to say.” The anecdote is frequently treated as whimsical or facetious, but in fact it seems to me good Confucian wisdom.
Many professors, including myself, are happy to acknowledge the huge debt they owe to their generations of students over many years. Students are in many ways our teachers as well. But action born of youthful passion too often claims the authority of a spurious certainty. It is fairly easy to see that the situation in Gaza is absolutely horrible, and that the massive slaughter of a civilian population is unconscionable. It is much more difficult to see that the current campus protests will have any practical effect in ameliorating that situation. On the contrary, my fear is that their tendency is likely to further degrade the reputation of some of our finest institutions of higher learning in the eyes of the larger population in whose service they have been founded and to whose benefit they are dedicated.
