There is a twitter account called @StopTrumpAtEmory making moderately ridiculous demands. I’m assured by a reliable source that it’s a parody account, but Poe’s Law applies. Some “demands” are obviously satirical, but other demands are in earnest. If one was to craft a parody of the absurdity of student demands, it would look much like marginalized and oppressed students of Harvard Law School.
What stands out is that students are making demands. Demands? By what power do they think they are in a position to make demands? There is the tacit “or else” that floats behind a demand, that if you fail to accede to a demand, there will be a consequence. Do the students at Harvard Law School think that if they don’t get their way, Harvard will fall into the Charles? Lose its panache? Burn through its endowment until it goes bankrupt?
What, kids? What power do you have to back up your demand? What is the “or else” if your school, your dean, your professors, your mommies, just say “no”?
The answer, of course, is that they believe in the righteousness of their cause, and the tacit threat is to reveal that their schools, deans, professors and mommies are racist, or sexist, or enablers, or whatever bad word applies. The students’ clout comes from their self-assessed authority to deem whomever fails to comply the appropriate flavor of evil.
In a New York Times op-ed, Notre Dame philosophy professor Gary Gutting argues that voting one’s self-interest isn’t inherently unethical. But being a philosophy prof, rather than a realist, he can’t get out of his own way:
It seems that, contrary to what many think, self-interested voting is sometimes ethically justified. But the question of whether we can be morally justified in putting our own interests over the interests of others — and if so, when — needs a lot more thought.
Few people give a damn. One of the fundamental precepts here is that people don’t care about an issue until it touches their life. They may ponder the ethics, even the morality, of an issue, in their spare time, provided it somehow manages to get on their radar, but ultimately, their attention returns to the mundane issues that affect their life. The why is simple: it’s their life.
In the context of criminal law, this is why there are parallel arguments about reform, one based on the hypothetical sense of propriety and principle, and the other on cost. While cost is the less principled concern, the cost of excessive incarceration and wrongful police killings touches the lives of people who otherwise wouldn’t lose sleep over it. If you want to get them on board, you frame the issue in a way that touches their lives. Self-interest is a powerful motivator.
So it should come as no surprise that students make demands in their own perceived self-interest. The demands are hypocritical, counter-productive, trivial, foolish? So what? That’s what they want, and so that’s what they demand. Their rationalizations are bizarrely unpersuasive? That’s because you can’t see it through their eyes, blinded by self-interest to the point where they believe their own nonsense. And, of course, their immaturity and naiveté allows them to draw comfort against the storm of ridicule. They can’t, they won’t, be taught otherwise.
But self-interest is a double-edged sword. They have theirs. So too do others. And this is where the fact of being in the minority becomes important. Most people would readily say that it is wrong to be prejudiced based on race, gender or other immutable characteristics. Most would concede that our nation has a sordid history of prejudice, and that we have yet to get past it. So far, so good.
Yet, if you put the question to a parent, “are you good with the idea that your child will not get admitted to college, or get a job, so that a person of a different race, gender, ethnicity, can have the place he or she would otherwise get,” the answer is obvious. Take this question down the line, “are you good with his losing a physics course to take a queer inclusion course,” or “are you good with his prof being hired because of her skin color rather than her scholarship,” and you get the same answer.
While most people won’t struggle with the question of whether it’s acceptable for police to kill a young black man for no reason, it’s because they won’t balk at the price to be paid for it. We don’t want it to happen, and so we buy the pitch to self-interest by police unions, that we have to accept a few dead black men if we’re to be safe, if the cops are to feel sufficient respect and safety to do their job. Our fear isn’t severe enough to make the cost unacceptable. And if it is, then we let cops do whatever they please, with the caveat that it’s not us getting shot and killed.
It’s basic cost-benefit analysis. These student demands, however, fail for this reason. Your perceived clout of shaming the majority into acquiescing to your will isn’t nearly as powerful as you wish it were. Calling people names like “racist” and “sexist,” particularly when connected to puny claims of harm, isn’t going to change the calculus. The cost of your demands far exceeds the benefit to the majority. Yes, it’s the tyranny of the majority, but the majority is still going to act in its own self-interest because acting in your self-interest comes at too high a price.
No, this doesn’t mean that the law will allow you to endure a detriment. You still get equal protection of law, due process, free speech, even if your demands are to deny that to others. But it does mean you don’t get the benefits to which you think you’re entitled just because you demand them. As you push your agenda of demands, you seek ever-greater cost of the majority.
You demand that the universe be recreated around your feelings, your needs, your desires. Your demands require the majority to give up what you characterize as “privilege.” You expect the majority to forego its self-interest in favor of yours. You expect too much.
Some of your demands may be met to pacify you. Some out of that peculiar mindset in academia, like Gutting’s, that conflates scholarly pondering of morality with the banal concerns of hungry kids, college admissions, future careers and a happy, comfortable life. You are not in a position to demand that the majority give up its self-interest, and if you push too far, too hard, your cries of how oppressive it is to be in the minority (particularly when you are enjoying the huge privilege of an elite higher education) may well be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ultimately, self-interest will prevail, and yours will lose.
You can characterize it any way you want. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have the power to make your demands prevail. Your expectation that the majority will willingly suffer the loss of its self-interest so that yours can prevail defies reason and experience. If you’re smart enough to be in college, in Harvard Law School, you ought to be able to understand why this won’t happen. It’s in your self-interest to recognize that absurd demands, exceeding your grasp, will make things worse.
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Well said, your point on the majority looking after its own self interest first is something for these students to ponder.
Demanding change doesn’t do it. You have to convince others that it is the correct course of action. Shouting in their face, hardly counts as an intelligent argument. You typically get the opposite reaction of what you hope to achieve.
It goes a lot deeper than convincing others that it’s the correct course of action. When you ask someone to give up their self-interest for yours, there has to be sufficient benefit to be worth the cost. There may be with some demands. There isn’t with others. But demand too much and you get a backlash, where the majority has had enough of the demands to sacrifice its self-interest for the benefit of the minority, and it goes from bad to worse.
One thing everybody keeps forgetting, is that demands for reform doesn’t mean things will get better, or even stay the same. It can always get worse.
Silly Putty can’t copy an image needing some distortion off a smart phone and the sound of the Slinky will be missed nearly as much as the carefuly nurturing movement of its helical springs.
If I had a dime for every time someone said that to me, I could be a Harvard law prof.
“One of the fundamental precepts here is that people don’t care about an issue until it touches their life”
This does make me sort of wonder how we ever, finally, got around to even considering sentencing reforms.
I’m sort of thinking full weekends of Lockup Raw episodes have more of an effect than unempowered inmates/defendants and their relatives.
It could be, convict enough people and eventually it touches enough lives. But more likely, tax enough people and it definitely touches enough lives.
“Some of your demands may be met to pacify you.”
Consider that making the demand is its own reward. An extension of the proposition that “resistance” is best forged through language of exclusion. Circling the wagons to leave one nice and comfy, no longer subject to the forces of oppression. And if what matters chiefly is the subjective experience of support, then being confronted isn’t just a matter of disagreement with what someone thinks to be righteous and true, but what is perceived as the very concept of a chosen self-hood.
(So no big surprise that feminist language “theorists” reject much of the work of the 60s and 70s, on language as an open platform through which we share common experience and ultimately an absorption of self-hood into the greater ocean of awareness, etc., as a vehicle to insure the continued dominance of the patriarchy, etc.)
And if an outrageous demand reinforces the sense of a protected/united by the exclusion of the mainstream, that could explain how these who make the most outrageous demands tend to leap-frog over one another in moving groups to the far edges of the bell-curve; cause this push ain’t about quantifiable results, not nearly so much as it is defining identity in the making of the demands in the first place.
The irony of complaining about gibberish by writing gibberish would be compelling if that was your purpose. Somehow, I suspect it wasn’t.
But on the utility of self-interest in teaching freshman the value of free speech, see, “Op-Ed Don’t mock or ignore students’ lack of support for free speech. Teach them,” Howard Gillman and Erwin Chemerinsky, LA Times, March 31, 2016 (on teaching a freshman seminar on freedom of speech):
“The students were surprised to learn that people went to prison for speech criticizing the draft during World War I, or for teaching or espousing communism during the 1920s and 1930s and in the McCarthy era. The effect of the 1st Amendment’s strong protections for ‘dangerous’ and ‘offensive’ speech allowed oppressed and marginalized groups to challenge indecency laws, segregation, patriarchy and declarations of war.”
I appreciate that it’s hard to stay up to speed, but compounding it with a comment like this is not appreciated, particularly since this was linked in the post. Don’t do this.
Speak of getting toughened up through as-kicking, I didn’t see any answer you found satisfactory to the question of why do what isn’t reinforced? (Take this second bite at an old apple as an example.) So how about if I make it simple: sometimes people are motivated to do what they think is right. Virtue as it’s own reward in the hope that – over the long haul – “justice” will prevail.
Whether or not it appears “rational” to outsiders. And as to “micro-aggression” etc., I agree that in the end any victory would be self defeating, at least in anything other than the nearest of terms.
Now I can explain how that fits in my earlier gibberish but it would be beside the point. Question is, unless the question posed was purely rhetorical, what’s your best answer?
Often, people write comments that make perfect sense to them, but aren’t nearly as clear as they think they are. Some of us get tested for clarity 10,000 times a day. Some don’t. Most of the time, they get away with it, because no one says anything as it might be offensive. So they never know. But then, it’s not important since no one cares all that much about what they have to say, or no one feels inclined to take them to task over it. If they never figure it out, no big deal.
Virtue is its own reward is a tad simplistic. Deny your children college because you spent their education fund on some poor kid. Let me know how that works for you. Everybody loves justice, so long as the price is right. Fortune cookie philosophy is for kids. Real life requires harder choices, and in the end, nobody lets their kids starve in the name of someone else’s desire for their own self-interest. And that’s my best answer.
Understood. Thanks.
It makes them feel better about themselves.
> Some of your demands may be met to pacify you.
Kipling wrote a poem about that. Google “Dane-Geld”.
TL;DR version: If once you’ve paid the dane-geld, you’ll never get rid of the Dane.