The hopeful life and wretched death of Claudia Gavrilovna Popova during a previous age of extremes should speak to us now. Popova lived in Siberia in the years before the Russian revolution. She was a liberal who opposed the Tsarist empire – then, as now, was the world’s great fortress of reactionary power.
Popova was a wealthy landowner in Krasnoyarsk on the Yenisei River, who thought any enemy of the regime couldn’t be wholly bad. She gave free bed and board to Lenin when he was an obscure Marxist agitator. From the 1890s on, she helped hundreds of other revolutionaries the Romanov regime sent into exile.
Extremists always want to establish a binary conflict
Popova and the communists were against Tsarist autocracy. They might not agree on everything, but they appeared to share a common cause.
In 1917 Lenin seized power. By 1921, the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution had brought famine to Krasnoyarsk. Popova was in her 70s. Her wealth was long gone, and she was living on handouts. Her friends petitioned the local communists to help her, as she had once helped them.
They then revealed what they really thought of their benefactor. Popova was an aristocratic enemy of the people, they declared, and left her to starve to death.
American academics fighting hard-left censorship have regarded conservatives much as Popova regarded the Bolsheviks. Looking at the list of professors who spoke out against ideological dragooning at the Stanford University Academic Freedom conference last November, I imagine some vote Republican. But most were like the great cognitive psychologist and free-thought campaigner Steven Pinker. He said he danced with joy when Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, and proved it by posting a formidable, and indeed incredible, dad-dancing video on social media.
However they voted, liberal-minded academics would acknowledge that at least conservatives still condemned the silencing of debate and the climate of fear in academia. They, too, appeared to be in a kind of alliance.
Until last week, that is, when liberal academia had a Popova moment of its own.
Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is hoping to beat Donald Trump in the Republican primaries for the 2024 election by outflanking him on the right. He is engaged in stunts that prove he is even more authoritarian and conspiratorial than his former leader, the better to appeal to the electorally significant halfwit faction of Republican primary voters.
On 13 December, DeSantis said he would call on the Florida Supreme Court to convene a grand jury to investigate ‘any and all wrongdoing’ with respect to the Covid-19 vaccines.
DeSantis didn’t say what wrongdoing he had in mind. He did not need to provide reasonable grounds because his intention was to ‘signal’ his support to all who believe vaccines are the instruments of a globalist plot by Bill Gates and George Soros to either poison them or insert microchips into their red-blooded bodies. As Trump had supported the US vaccine programme when he was president, this was a useful weapon to deploy against him. DeSantis was not endorsing anything, you understand, just asking the questions.
Say what you like about Donald Trump, he may have tried to overturn an election, but he never tried to seize ideological control of a university. Spotting an opportunity, DeSantis proceeded on 6 January to pack the board of the New College of Florida, liberal arts university in Sarasota, Florida, with Conservatives.
The leader of the pack is a man called Chris Rufo. When H. L. Mencken said in the early 20th century that, the ‘whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary,’ he might have had someone like Rufo in mind. According to his enemies Rufo is a grifter and loudmouth, who advances his career by inflaming conservative fear. To his friends, he is a brave political entrepreneur, who exposed the clear and present danger of critical race theory.
To any serious thinker, his politics are irrelevant. You cannot free academics or students by replacing left-wing taboos with right-wing taboos. The point of a university is that it should be a space where all taboos can be interrogated.
Steven Pinker tweeted that sentiment in a link to an article by Cathy Young of the Bulwark news site. ‘How not to fix academia,’ he wrote. ‘The always-wise @cathyoung63 exposes DeSantis & Rufo’s takeover of New College FL: ‘Stoking the culture wars, rallying the Trumpist base, and using the power of the state to defeat bad ideas is not the road back to sanity.’
If a reputable conservative movement still existed in the United States, it would pay attention to Pinker. In The Blank Slate, one of the most important books of the last 25 years, he demolished the notion that humanity could be reengineered.
Pinker has also opposed the intolerance of the hard left throughout his career, and it has repaid his scorn in kind. Two years ago, 638 academics with nothing better to do with their time, demanded that the Linguistic Society of America remove him from its list of distinguished fellows. Pinker’s offence was to tweet in 2015 that the US police did not kill a disproportionately large number of African-Americans. The trouble with the cops was that they killed too many Americans of all ethnicities.
Researchers analysing deaths at police hands might have settled the question. Instead, Pinker’s enemies wanted it settled by their heresy hunters, who had sniffed out evidence of him ‘speaking over genuine grievances and downplaying injustices.’
Conservatives once believed that they went with the grain of human nature,. They knew thatout of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made. They welcomed thinkers like Pinker, who showed that our minds are not blank slates ideologues could write instructions on to make us better and purer primates.
As I remember them, conservatives used to be all for free speech, as well, and wary of the state telling anyone what they could or could not think. The Linguistic Society of America still stands by those principles. It told the petitioners that it wasn’t its job to police Pinker’s thought. DeSantis and his supporters, on the other hand, are showing that the old conservatism is dead and gone in the Republican party. The authoritarian right is in charge now, and you’d better get used to it, pal.
‘Boomers like Steven Pinker presided over the decades-long collapse of standards in academia,’ said Rufo, sounding like a modern version of a Bolshevik sneering at weak and flabby liberals. ‘Now they want to lecture sanctimoniously about “how not to fix academia.” Sorry, buddy, we’re not going to listen to people who can’t even open their comments. We’re in charge now.’
Pinker was a busted flush: one of those boomers, who paraded their ‘Enlightenment values,’ while all the time ceding ‘institutional power to left-wing racialist bureaucracies. They want credit for their words, while ignoring their deeds. We shouldn’t give them a consolation prize.’
I phoned Pinker a few days later. His main concern was that DeSantis’s scheme was irrational.
‘These ham-fisted attempts from government to try to counter dogma with dogma, brute force with brute force, and partisanship with partisanship won’t work,’ he told me. ‘You can’t have a university of the anti-woke and the cancelled.’
Pinker found this for himself in 2021, when he became involved with the ‘classically liberal’ University of Austin. Pinker resigned from its advisory board within days.
Austin university had plenty of cancelled arts professors, but no strength in science and social science. ‘It wasn’t, coherent,’ Pinker said. ‘Our definition of an educated person in the 21st century needs to change. I think being able to quote Proust is very nice, but it is also important to understand Bayes Theorem.’
Pinker is more concerned with practical initiatives in existing universities than creating new right-wing institutions. In a few weeks he and colleagues at Harvard will announce an initiative to defend students and academics. They’ve dug up a statute showing that Harvard is committed to defending freedom of speech. They plan to make a thorough nuisance of themselves if academic bureaucrats ignore it: ‘If some spineless dean tries to punish someone because activists are being a pain in the ass, then we’re going to be a pain in the ass back and make their lives miserable.’
Having lived through the first wave of political correctness in the 1970s, Pinker knows these movements aren’t indestructible. They are not a boot stamping on a human face forever, but collapse eventually under the weight of their own absurdities.
It’s not that there are fewer people who believe in freedom of thought and freedom of speech than in the past, he believes. It’s just that they are frightened about speaking their minds. ‘Part of the problem is that the illiberal repressive left is often so ruthless. I don’t have to be worried about being fired but many do. We need a clearly articulated set of principles to defend ourselves from the radicalism from the left but also the Trump/ Modi/Orban right. We need to say this is the way you run a democracy this is the way you run a university,’ and that’s not the way DeSantis runs Florida.
You might think that the fate of a Florida university is barely worth talking about. But the point has a wider application. The right says it is against woke zealotry. If it is, they have a funny way of showing it. If the pushback means establishing reactionary universities, Pinker’s nervous liberals will not criticise the illiberal left for fear of playing into the hands of the illiberal right.
Extremists always want to establish a binary conflict. It makes life so much easier for them. Instead of having to defend their ideas, they declare that you are either a woke social justice warrior or a MAGA reactionary. Deviate from either extreme, by expressing doubt or affirming your own principles, and you will be accused of aiding and abetting the enemy in a time of culture war. The tribe will issue an expulsion order, and leave you isolated without anyone to defend you – like poor, abandoned Claudia Gavrilovna Popova. Remember her, because one day you may find her fate is your fate.
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