Looking for courage and strength

Eliot A. Cohen writes at The American Interest,

Harvard and Yale are the products of Old New England.

...In 1692 a witch craze swept Salem, Massachusetts, triggered in part by hysterical children, fed by stern divines who sincerely believed in witchcraft, and permitted by a community too terrorized to stand up for due process, let alone prevent hangings and, in one case, the crushing of an innocent man to death by heavy stones because he refused to confess to an absurd, imaginary crime. There is something not entirely different going on today. Appoint assistant deans to take charge of witch hunting, and they will uncover horrifying stories of naked women flying on brooms at midnight and performing obscene acts with the goat devil Baphomet. Thought police will always find thoughts that require policing, and report dolefully that the problem of malign cogitation is even more pervasive than they had suspected. When one rewards, or merely fails to oppose, a culture of reckless incrimination and denunciation, the craze, and the persecution, will persist.

...That insolent teenagers behave the way they do is unfortunate. What is menacing is when they become a mob. If their teachers can get them to understand that they are in fact acting as a mob; that by calling for the persecution of those who do not conform they are the heirs not of Martin Luther King, Jr. but of Joe McCarthy, it may be the start of their awakening. The students might even, with assistance, discover the respect that liberal thought once accorded to the lonely individual who stands up for what he or she knows is right — someone like the principled doctor in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People or the retiring sheriff in High Noon.

The pervasiveness of social media makes the act of standing alone, of being one’s own man or woman, much harder than before. We all wish to be “liked” and we know that the best way to be “followed” is to “follow” others. Retweet and you shall be retweeted.

...The shrill petulance of today’s college protestors depresses observers because these talented young people see themselves as weak, vulnerable, psychologically frail, desperately in need of coddling. In another age these students’ demands to be cushioned against every one of life’s psychic blows would, properly, be seen as contemptible, and their willingness to bully anyone who gets in their way as a threat.

In my time as an assistant dean I saw some serious hardship cases: students who were the only effective individuals in dysfunctional families, desperately ill themselves, or facing the trauma of real tragedy among friends and relatives, including death. I do not remember one of them insisting that they be shielded from unkind words or ambiguous gestures, let alone potentially distressing Halloween costumes, as was the case at Yale. They had much to teach their fellows about the courage to bear life’s numerous injustices with fortitude. The adults nominally in charge of universities should take the example of today’s young people who have shown such courage — wounded veterans, for example—to heart, and use them to teach those who have suffered little yet feel deeply aggrieved the value of imperturbability in the face of adversity and the virtues of Emersonian self-reliance. Who knows? In such an exercise the faculty just might awaken a little courage in themselves as well.

Read more here.