Harvey Silvergate established the “Foundation for Individual
Rights in Education” some 15 years ago to combat what he says is censorship on
the university campuses. But from what he has been reporting, his efforts are
failing, and things are getting worse when measured by the criteria he put down
to assess progress.
He is saying this much in the article he wrote under the
title: “Liberals Are Killing the Liberal Arts,” and the subtitle: “This is how
bad censorship is getting: Discussions of what can't be said come with a
'trigger warning.'” It was published on November 10, 2014 in the Wall Street
Journal. Now the question: Why is he failing?
The quick answer is that he is not seeking to solve a
problem; he is trying to sugarcoat an old trick that has gone sour. His
apparent intent is to use the trick differently this time, and make it work
better. But in case this is a false accusation and he is innocent, he should be
able to solve the problem in no time at all. What he needs to do is tell the
history that has led to the current situation … honesty being the magic that
cures this sort of ills. This done, he must repudiate that history, an act that
will clear the confusion it has created in the minds of people, young and old.
Silvergate can then watch the problem solve itself without him having to lift
another finger.
The telling of history has always presented the narrator
with the difficult choice of where to begin. I suggest he begins with the
Jewish campaign to “educate” the American public as to the “sensitivities” of
the Jews. That's because the problems he says he wants to solve started at that
point in time. And while he mulls over this suggestion, I shall look at the
larger issue of what is good and what is bad. To do this, I must go back to the
beginning of time.
Before we became human beings capable of reasoning, we
sensed what was good and what was bad by what the instinct made us do or avoid
doing. As animals, we avoided danger, socialized to insure safety in numbers,
foraged together or separately for sustenance and mated to perpetuate the
species. As individuals, we lived and died by those principles, hanging on to
what was embedded inside us, having not the ability to judge what the other
members of the species were doing or failing to do.
Then, there came a time when we started to reason, and two
major developments followed. First, our interest in what we do or avoid doing
increased exponentially. Second, we embarked on a journey to invent tools by
which to assess what was good and what was bad. We used those tools to measure
the intensity of our instincts, and measure the value of the new behaviors we
were adopting. We used these measurements to assess and regulate what we did as
individuals, and used them to judge the appropriateness of what the other
members of the species were doing or failing to do.
In time, that development caused the parents to see the need
to instruct their children as to the rules by which they are expected to live
while growing older. The parents had to do this lest the children be judged to
have violated the accepted norms set by society, and be punished for their
behavior. At the same time, however, the human species – being on a path of
progress that saw it increase its interests – also saw the proliferation of the
rules by which it had to live. And this development is what mired the species
in the complexities of a life that was becoming ever more artificial.
Overwhelmed by a system they could not put their arms
around, people made a short list of what was illegal, and used it to remind
them of what they must do to stay out of trouble. The counter-reaction among
the young has been to indulge in everything else – what was not expressly
labeled illegal. The thing, however, is that as they grew older, they carried
with them those habits, making virtues of what used to be stigmas to their
parents.
Needless to say that this has caused an even greater
confusion in the generations that followed, leading to a kind of “anything
goes” approach to life. This started the age of permissiveness where breaking
long established rules without being outright illegal was viewed as possessing
a great talent called self-reinvention. In no time, the people so endowed were
highly esteemed by others, and considered leaders to look up to and emulate.
And that's when the opportunists entered the fray to exploit the new order by
planting their own shifty rules in society. And no one succeeded at this game
as much as the Jews who invented a new rule for every new day and every new
occasion.
No matter how many rules were invented, however, they were
all put together according to a formula whose purpose was to confuse society
and make it dependent evermore on endless Jewish explanations and
clarifications. In fact, everyone of these served to make the situation murkier
than before. The most famous situation came to be expressed like this: Today
you are antisemitic for saying Jewish lobby instead of Israeli lobby. Tomorrow
you'll be antisemitic for saying Israeli lobby instead of Jewish lobby.
It is no wonder that university students of the liberal arts
chose to revolt against this assault on their power to reason. They told the
likes of Silvergate to go ply their twisted logic somewhere else … maybe in the
Congress of the worn-out and the useless where they may even receive 29
standing ovations.