College Protests and the Limits of Virtue

“That is, virtuous striving now is something that seeks to turn our social paradigm on its head.“

It would be redundant to say that the students currently engaging in the pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas (but I repeat myself) campus protests are extremely ignorant. The fact that it started at an Ivy-League school, Columbia University, means absolutely nothing in that context. Education in the United States, including higher education, has been so consistently degraded over the last several decades, especially since the 1990s, that one can safely say that the students in question know nothing of the world. They are also for the most part anti-Semitic and oikophobic, that is, anti-American and anti-Western. But this is so obvious as not to require further comment, and many others have already discussed this. I want to focus, rather, on some more philosophical aspects.

The first thing to point out in this regard is that the students are suffering from what I would call “historical envy.” What that means is that they desire to live at a special historic moment, and they are envious of those who actually did. They, therefore, attempt to create such a moment themselves, no matter how destructive it may be, so as then to live it. This is sometimes referred to as “Selma envy” in an American context, but it is an international and thoroughly human phenomenon. People suffering this malady wish to display their struggle as ostentatiously as possible, and they want nothing more than to straddle history and reach the climax of human endeavor.

Related to this is the idea that universities, as intellectuals in general, consider themselves to be at the vanguard of human knowledge and progress. Intellectualism thus breeds disrespect for established ways of thinking. This can sometimes be a good thing, but it also leads to degrees of outlandishness that are less common in other segments of society. Already Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, has the Spartan king Archidamus II say: “We are wise because we are not so educated as to look down on the laws” (1.84). Similarly, his Cleon of Athens argues that “Intelligent people want to appear wiser than the laws… and thereby often end up overthrowing their cities” (3.37, my translations).