Robert Boyers : The Tyranny of Virtue

In my freshman year at Queens College, I had a strange awakening—strange in that the attendant, overmastering emotion was a combination of humiliation and pleasure. My English professor had called me to his desk and handed me the A+ paper I had written on Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and suggested that I make an appointment to see him. This was no ordinary suggestion at the City University of New York, where professors never scheduled regular office hours and only rarely invited students to private conferences.

I was uneasy about the meeting, though I imagined that Professor Stone wished simply to congratulate me further, perhaps even to recommend that I join the staff of the college literary magazine, or to enlist my assistance as a tutor. Delusions of grandeur. Modest grandeur.

Professor Stone’s office had been carved out of a warren of rooms in the fourth-floor attic of the English Department building, where I was greeted with a warm handshake and a “delighted you could come.” Though the encounter took place almost 60 years ago, I remember everything about it—the few books scattered on a small wooden table, the neatly combed silver hair on the professor’s head, his amiable, ironic eyes. Most clearly I remember the surprising moment when another professor named Magalaner was called in and stood next to Professor Stone, both men smiling and looming ominously over me. It was then that I was asked to describe—in a few sentences, or more, don’t hesitate—the paper I’d written on Orwell.

Which of course I did, picking up steam after the first few sentences of diffident preamble, until Professor Stone asked me to stop, that’s quite enough, and then turned to his colleague with the words “see what I mean?” and Magalaner assented. The two men only now pulled over two chairs and sat down, close enough that our knees almost touched, and seemed to look me over, as if taking my measure. Both of them were smiling, so that again I speculated that I was to be offered a prize, a summer job, or who knew what else.

“I’ve a feeling,” Professor Stone said, “that you may be the first person in your family to go to college.”

“It’s true,” I replied.

“You write very well,” he offered.

“Very well,” said Magalaner, who had apparently also read my paper.

“But you know,” Stone went on, edging his chair just a bit closer to mine, “I didn’t call you here to congratulate you, but to tell you something you need to hear, and of course I trust that you’ll listen carefully—with Professor Magalaner here to back me up—when I tell you, very plainly, that though you are a bright and gifted young fellow, your speech, I mean the sounds you make when you speak, are such that no one will ever take you seriously. I repeat, no one will ever take you seriously, if you don’t at once do something about this. Do you understand me?”

I’ve told this story over the years, starting on that very first night with my teenage sister, explaining what I understood: namely, that a man I admired, who had reason to admire me, thought that when I opened my mouth I sounded like someone by no means admirable. It was easy to accept that no one close to me would have mentioned this before, given that, presumably, we all shared this grave disability, and failed to think it a disability at all. Professor Stone didn’t sound like anyone in our family, we may have thought, simply because, after all, he was an educated man and was not supposed to sound or think like us.

In any event, my teacher moved at once to extract from me a promise that I would enroll in remedial speech courses for as long as I was in college, and not “so much as consider giving them up, not even if you find them tedious.” The proposal left me feeling oddly consoled, if also somewhat ashamed. Consoled by the thought that there might be a cure for my coarse Brooklynese, as my teacher referred to it, and that the prescription was indisputably necessary. Unsure whether to thank my interlocutors or just stand up and slink ignominiously away, I agreed to enroll immediately in one of those speech courses, ending the meeting with an awkward, “Is that all?”

A former student, hearing my story a few years ago at our dinner table, after telling her own tale of a recent humiliation, asked, “Who the fuck did that guy think he was?” and added that he was “lucky you didn’t just kick his teeth out.” She was concerned, clearly, that even after so many years, my sense of self might still be at risk, the injury still alive within me. And yet, though I’ve often played out the whole encounter in my head, I had decided within hours of my escape that I had been offered a gift. An insult as well, to be sure, but delivered not with an intention to hurt but to save and uplift. It would have been easy to be offended by the attempt to impress upon someone so young the idea that he would undoubtedly want to become the sort of person whose class origins would henceforth be undetectable. But I had not been programmed to be offended, and was, in my innocent way, ambitious to be taken seriously, and though I rapidly came to loathe the speech exercises to which I was soon subjected, I thought it my duty and my privilege to be subjected to them. Night after night, standing before the mirror in my parents’ bathroom, I shaped the sounds I was taught to shape, and I imagined that one day Professor Stone would beam with satisfaction at the impeccably beautiful grace notes I would produce.

A long story, perhaps, for opening an essay on privilege. But the idea of privilege has moved many people to say things both nonsensical and appalling, and it is worth pointing out what is often ignored or willfully obscured: that privilege is by no means easy to describe or understand. Say, if you like, that privilege is an advantage, earned or unearned, and you will be apt to ask several important questions. Earned according to whom? Unearned signifying shameful or immoral? The advantage to be renounced or held onto? To what end? Whose? Privilege, the name of an endowment without which we would all be miraculously released from what exactly? Is there evidence, anywhere, that the attention directed at privilege in recent years has resulted in a reduction in inequality or a more generous public discourse? Say privilege and you may well believe you have said something meaningful, leveled a resounding charge, when perhaps you have not begun to think about what is entailed in so loaded a term. What may once have been an elementary descriptor—“he has the privilege of studying the violin with a first-rate music instructor”—is at present promiscuously and often punitively deployed to imply a wide range of advantages or deficits against which no one can be adequately defended.

Is privilege at the root of the story I have told about my freshman-year adventure? Consider that Professor Stone was himself the beneficiary of the privilege, so-called, that allowed him to deliver a potentially devastating message to a boy he barely knew, and with little fear of contradiction. The protocols lately associated with what the writer Phoebe Maltz Bovy, author of The Perils of  “Privilege,” calls the “privilege turn” in contemporary culture would demand that the professor acknowledge his privilege and proceed with greater sensitivity to the feelings of his student. If he had been challenged at the time, the professor would have noted that his action reflected his concern for his student, and he would not have felt that any special privilege had been involved in the exercise of his authority. That our positions were unequal would have seemed to him natural but in no way problematic—in the very nature of the teacher-student relationship—reflecting, moreover, only a temporary arrangement, requiring of me no permanent resignation to my fate as a subordinate, consigned for all time to yield to the whims of a master.

In short, the very notion of privilege in his case would have seemed to him—quite as it seems to me now—of little or no importance. Of course, if I were so inclined, I might now level the charge at my teacher, retroactively, as it were. After all, inequality is today often regarded as unjust or intolerable, even criminal, even though in most situations we have no particular reason to feel aggrieved. During a brief period when I saw a psychotherapist, I noted the inequality built into our situation. I know nothing at all about the emotions of my palely imperturbable therapist, I thought, whereas he is forever asking me personal questions and drawing astounding conclusions about my so-called motives. Our ritual meetings were designed to make me feel that our relations were anything but reciprocal, and he had the privilege of treating everything I said as suspect, or symptomatic, whereas I was required to treat the few things he said as mature and reliable. The inequality was built into the situation, and there was nothing for me to do but nurture my resentment or accept that I enjoyed the very different privilege of placing myself in the hands of someone who might help me.

Privilege, then, like inequality, is not usually a simple matter. Not in the past, not at present, not even in the domain of male privilege, with all that particular species of entitlement and inequality entails. I suppose it fair to say that I know as much, and as little, about my own exercise of male privilege as most men who have enjoyed its benefits without sufficiently acknowledging them. But I suppose, as well, what it is also fair to say: namely, that the exercise of privilege among men is no unitary thing. My own working-class father had the privilege, after all, of working, through the best years of his adult life, in a Brooklyn dry goods store for six days each week, from 8 A.M. to 9 P.M., 50 weeks each year. Would he have agreed, if alerted to the fact, that he was also the beneficiary of male privilege? I like to think that I could have persuaded him to accept that this was so, much though the two of us would have gone on to reflect that his “advantage,” in that respect as in many others, was almost comically limited.

 Certainly it is not a simple matter to speak of privilege in the domain of race relations. A few years ago, I found myself embroiled in an argument at a symposium, where one speaker had referred to “white privilege” as a self-evident phenomenon. Was it really necessary, I asked, to point out that there is privilege and privilege, whiteness and whiteness? If my white colleague felt that she had a great deal to apologize for, and thought a public symposium a suitable occasion for a display of soul searching, that was well and good, so long as she did not also suggest that we must all follow her lead and all feel about our own so-called privilege exactly what she felt. Was it reasonable to suppose that whiteness confers, on everyone who claims it, comparable experiences and privileges? Was my own background as a working-class Jewish boy, growing up in a predominantly black community, remotely similar to the background or disposition of a white colleague who had never known privation, or had no contact at all with black children? Did it matter, thinking of ourselves simply as possessors of white privilege, that one of us had written extensively on race while the other had devoted herself to scholarly research on metaphysical poetry? Was it not the case, I asked, that what Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda call in The Racial Imaginary “the boundaries” of our “imaginative sympathy” had been drawn in drastically different ways? How could whiteness, or blackness, signify to us the same things?

To consider either of us primarily as white people, deliberately consigning to irrelevance everything that made us different from each other—and different from the kinds of white people who regard their whiteness as an endowment to be proud of—was to deny what was clearly most important about each of us. Rankine and Loffreda rightly challenge those who “argue that the imagination is or can be somehow free of race,” and they mock white writers “who make a prize of transcendence,” supposing that the imagination can be “ahistorical” or “postracial.” But to insist that elementary distinctions be made, as between one experience of race and another, would seem indispensable to a serious discussion of privilege.

Though whiteness was not an active or obvious factor in my encounter with Professor Stone, it is possible that, had I been a black student in his class, he might have resisted the impulse to call me in and inform me, in effect, that my speech seemed to him low or disreputable. In this sense, the fact of my whiteness would have conferred upon me the inestimable advantage of having been chosen for the insult he directed at me. A peculiar advantage, to be sure. When I told my story to a half-dozen student assistants recently, the two black students at our dinner table showered me with sympathy and asserted that they would have found the professor’s admonition offensive and perhaps “done something about it.” Though I attempted then to explain my own sense of the privilege afforded me, my students were by no means persuaded, and the white students were sure only that things are different now, that today “respect” would happily ensure that no professor would dare to do what my teacher had done.

A good many of my students, white and black, are in thrall to the idea that they are required to portray themselves as beautiful souls. Even those with little feeling for polemic or posturing are ever at the ready to declare—like their academic instructors—their good conscience and their attachment to the indisputably correct virtues. Thus they find in the idea of privilege an ideal vehicle. It seems at least to provide, to anyone who climbs on board, an opportunity to arrive at a sort of moral high ground that costs nothing. The students at our table were at one in feeling superior to my old teacher. He had, they felt, been oblivious to his privilege, and they were secure in their conviction that they would never be as oblivious as that. Their comfort lay in their unambivalent commitment to a species of one-upmanship. Theirs was the empty affirmation of an ideal they had no need to articulate with any precision, but which amounted to the certainty that, above all things, we are required to be and to remain perfectly guiltless. Nor did they recognize—not so that I could tell—that their immurement in good conscience was itself a privilege that could only be secured by finding others guilty, in one degree or another, of privilege.

During a panel discussion on political fiction convened at the New York State Summer Writers Institute two years ago, a graduate student in the audience said that she associated works in this genre mainly with male writers. In response, I suggested that much of the best political fiction was in fact written by women, and I named Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Ingeborg Bachmann, Pat Barker, Anita Desai, Joyce Carol Oates, and others about whom I had written in books and essays. At that, another graduate student raised her hand and, quivering with indignation, asked me whether I was aware of the privilege I had exercised in addressing the question. Privilege in what sense exactly? I asked. Your authority, she said, your presumption, the sense of entitlement that permits you to feel that you can pronounce on any question put to you. Not any question, I said. Only a question about which I actually have something potentially useful to say. But then of course, I added, I want, like you, to be alert to my own power, when I have any, and to be able to acknowledge that each of us, in a civilized setting like this one, is the beneficiary of several different kinds of privilege.

Though no further fireworks then erupted, it was clear to pretty much everyone present on that occasion that privilege had been invoked as a noise word intended to distract all of us from the substance of our discussion, and from the somehow unpleasant spectacle of a male writer intoning the names of great women writers, as if this were, in itself, a flagrant violation of a protocol. More, the invoking of privilege was oddly intended to punish the speaker of the offending words—my words—by making him into a representative of something he could not possibly defend himself against.

Privilege, then, is increasingly hauled in as a weapon, though wielded, in the main, by persons attached still to the conviction that, whatever their own bristling incivility and the punishing quietus they clearly intend to deliver, they remain in full possession of their virtue. Can those who come on as investigating magistrates really hope to regard themselves as generous and tolerant people? The privilege turn has made the examining magistrate role enticing to large numbers of those whose being-in-the-right is to them an article of faith.

In a recent interview, the novelist and essayist Zadie Smith speaks of her friendship with the writer Darryl Pinckney, describing him as “a model of … active ambivalence. He is as well read on African-American issues as anyone could imagine being,” she goes on, and he “is absolutely aware that there is such a thing as having been subjected to the experience of blackness, which causes all kinds of consequences.” Even so, “and at the same time, he claims the freedom of just being Darryl, in all his extreme particularity. I haven’t met many people like that.”

No need to observe—though I will—that the words “he claims the freedom of just being Darryl” denotes the exercise of a privilege to which others would likewise hope to stake a claim, or that Smith is right to note that not many are now equipped to be “like that.” There is privilege, of course, in the refusal to accede to someone else’s view of you, the refusal to emit the affirming noises that declare unequivocally your willingness to be what others take you to be and insist that you remain. It is not at all surprising that Smith has often described what she calls the “cartoon thinness” of many of the identity images we employ to certify who we are, or that a character in her recent novel Swing Time calls upon his friend to reevaluate her sense of reality with the words “you think far too much about race—did anyone ever tell you this?” Pinckney—in spite of the great opening line of his novel High Cotton (“No one sat me down and told me I was a Negro”)—has devoted virtually all of his writing to the study of race, and yet he has refused to think of himself principally in terms of race. Though he is “absolutely aware,” as Smith says, that race has marked him, his brave determination has been to affirm his “extreme particularity.”

Black writers who have challenged the standard racialist orthodoxies about color have often come in for withering criticism from other black intellectuals. When Ralph Ellison complained that black writers “fear to leave the uneasy sanctuary of race,” he generated a firestorm of hostility. Even James Baldwin received considerable criticism, much of it having to do with his efforts to have it both ways—that is, to insist upon his estrangement from the “white centuries” of Western culture while refusing to pretend that those centuries did not shape and define him. Baldwin famously wrote,

  ‘’I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa … I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt … a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history … At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use—I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine.’’

Baldwin wears his ambivalences and refusals with the cunning of a man who is ever in search of what will suit him. He accords to himself, as he should, the privilege of fashioning what he calls a “special attitude,” a “special place.” Baldwin knew that he could not be the man he wished to be, or write the books he had to write, unless he found a personal way to declare “appropriate” affinities. He could not operate from a doctrinaire idea of ethnic solidarity and thus was bound to provoke disappointment in quarters where solidarity was regarded as an indispensable virtue.

It’s tempting to say of Baldwin that he was, after all, a great writer, and that he was therefore singular in ways we ought not to claim for ourselves. But the drama he enacted, rooted in his own extreme particularity, is not so very alien to the condition to which most of us aspire, however limited our courage and our gifts. Rankine and Loffreda note that “we wish”—all of us—to “unsettle the assumption that it is easy or simple to write what one ‘is.’ ” But then, they say, when we “keep familiar things familiar,” we inevitably miss what is most important about ourselves. Baldwin’s “special attitude” required that he repudiate familiar assumptions about what did and did not define him, and he accorded to himself the privilege of appropriating what he needed.

Baldwin thought of the special place he was required to make for himself in terms peculiar to him and his situation. And why not? Yet, when I read the words “these were not really my creations,” I find it impossible not to think that they apply as well to me, growing up in an inner-city apartment without books or other cultural artifacts. I note too that the words—Baldwin’s words—“I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself,” are somewhat misleading, in that, like myself, he would early discover reflections of himself even in works far removed from his own family setting.

But what burns through every page of Baldwin’s writing is the truth of his own intense subjectivity and his contempt for provincial slogans and categories, provincial a word notably absent from discussions of privilege, which rely upon an impoverished idea of identity and, by extension, of what rightly belongs to each of us. The charge of privilege, as leveled even in ostensibly sophisticated critiques, carries with it the presumption that people are readily intelligible, their natures and motives determined by accidents of color or class. When I read sentences that begin with the words “white persons think” or “whites can only know,” I feel at once the fatal absence of any intimation of radical uncertainty. The agitation we want to feel in confronting others—or in confronting what is opaque or impenetrable in ourselves—is denied, banished by the impulse to define and diminish by resorting to accusations of privilege—as if the work of understanding might thereby be accomplished.

Does privilege exist? Of course it does. Only a fool would deny that advantage is real and that some people have what others lack. Though advantage is unevenly distributed in any population, or within any racial or ethnic group, it is legitimate to assert that whiteness—like maleness—has long been an advantage, however little some wish to acknowledge it. Just so, other kinds of privilege often determine, unfairly, the way people live, and suffer, or thrive. But then these are commonplaces, and if not everyone is as yet prepared to accept them, that is hardly a good reason to employ privilege in the way it has lately been used. The culture of grievance that has taken shape in recent years has led to what Phoebe Maltz Bovy calls “the fetishization of powerlessness” and the not always “polite bigotry” that makes it acceptable to target groups or persons not because of what they have done but because of what they are.

The most promising feature of the privilege turn was its focus not on the kinds of privilege everyone can see for themselves—expensive private schools, 10-bedroom vacation homes, inordinate tax breaks or deductions available only to the wealthy—but instead on advantages unacknowledged and pernicious. For a while it seemed a good idea to dwell upon the hypocrisies that allowed us to proceed as if class inequities were not major factors in the system that supported our habits and assumptions. We were moved to learn things we wanted somehow not to learn: that housing laws designed to help returning GIs discriminated against black veterans; that college admissions boards, even where inclined to diversify their student bodies, continued to rely upon protocols that would ensure acceptance mainly for the wealthy or the otherwise privileged; that apparently trivial slights or insults might conceivably affect people in disastrous ways, while allowing those responsible for the insults to proceed as if nothing consequential had transpired. Rankine and Loffreda argue that “whiteness has veiled from them their own power to wound,” and though what they call the “recourse to innocence: I did not mean to do any harm” has rightly been called out within the framework of “privilege,” it is surely legitimate to ask where this initially promising thrust has taken us.

For one thing, it has taken us to the domain of cliché and pure assertion. Nothing is easier than to wield the charge of privilege and thereby to win instant approval, nothing easier than to beat oneself up now and then for enjoying privilege while pretending to solidarity with the disadvantaged. There is comedy in the rush of the well-heeled and enlightened to affirm their virtue by signaling their guilt and their difference from those who have not yet mastered the rituals of self-disparagement and privilege bashing required of them. And there is temptation, surely, in the prospect of constructing a privilege-free profile: in my case, for example, by citing my own less-than-exalted childhood in Bedford-Stuyvesant, my struggles in three years of remedial speech courses, not to mention the fact that I could never have succeeded in life by virtue of good looks or an impressively masculine baritone voice. Thus, competitively speaking, in the precinct shaped by the privilege obsession, here I stand, nearly virtuous, though white, to be sure, and though not completely powerless, near enough to having been so to qualify for a modicum of sympathy.

The absurdity inherent in all of this should not obscure the damage it has wrought: damage in sowing confusion even about the obvious—about the difference between what is important and less important, between doing what is injurious and being deficient in doing what is positively good, between sponsoring injustice and simply living more or less modestly in an imperfect world. To be unable to make these kinds of elementary distinctions is to be radically impaired, and there seems to me no question that the tendency to invoke privilege has exacerbated that impairment. There was, at the heart of the privilege turn, an aspiration to enlightenment. But the partisans committed to promoting the privilege critique are mainly interested in drawing hard lines separating the guilty from the saved, the serenely oblivious from the righteous, fiercely aggrieved, and censorious.

It is hard not to see in all of this the operation of garden-variety envy, though the online diatribes denouncing the guilty are necessarily loath to mention that sentiment, even where it is impossible to miss. At my own college, younger faculty members have complained publicly about the “privilege” exhibited by colleagues who speak at length and “with confidence” about controversial matters. The charge carries with it the wish, sometimes the suggestion, that those “other” faculty members find a way to be ashamed of this privilege, which so many of their colleagues do not enjoy. Thus forthrightness and self-assurance can be made to seem as offensive and illegitimate as the Bentley parked ostentatiously in a well-tended driveway. Again, the rage to call out privilege is often an expression of a simple desire to have what others have, or to cast aspersions on those who have it. It is not at all surprising that the most brilliant and accomplished of my colleagues should lately have inspired criticism that cites her “relentless articulacy” and her “always having something to say.”

One consequence of the obsession with privilege is the growing divide within communities otherwise united by shared principles. The emphasis upon so-called microaggressions—that is, upon what Rankine calls “slippages,” including the failure to acknowledge privilege—has created a climate in which many people have withdrawn from active participation in public or political life. Many faculty members at my college have intimated, or declared, that they will no longer become involved in controversial debates or speak on the floor at faculty meetings. Why get involved in efforts to raise consciousness among students by enlisting in voter registration campaigns when some students will likely accuse you of exploiting your power and your privilege? Why join your local Democratic Party and work to field a slate of electable candidates in a swing district when you are apt to be pilloried for the privilege entailed in championing moderation and electability? After all, only someone privileged enough (and clueless enough) to embrace a gradualist approach to politics would counsel incrementalism. Better to stay out of politics entirely, with the privilege charge always apt to erupt and make you feel guilty.

For that matter, why attempt to find common ground in situations where envy for your good fortune and resentment of your advantages are sure to make everything you do an expression of your “identity”? For all of the intensity unleashed by proponents of the privilege critique, they would seem to have little interest in real politics—that is, in coalition building and respect for difference. The tendency to think of potential allies as inevitably tainted by the habits and perspectives of their racial, ethnic, or gender cohort is unlikely to issue in an effectual politics. The privilege turn is part of a new fundamentalism built on a willful refusal to accept that the most obvious features of our so-called identity are the least reliable indicators of what may reasonably be expected of us.

None of this is to suggest that identity, as usually conceived, counts for nothing at all. “I am born,” writes the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, “with a past, and to try to cut myself off from that past … is to deform my present relationships.” At the same time, he goes on, “rebellion against my identity is always one possible mode of expressing it.” We are always, as it were, “moving forward” from the condition and the tradition we inherit. A culture is in good order only when its people are engaged in conducting a continual argument about the assorted virtues—MacIntyre calls them “goods”—they hope to pursue. The fundamentalism central to the privilege turn is predicated upon the assumption of deficits inherent in groups and persons who are condemned to reflect those deficits and to apologize, however inadequately, for embodying them. That assumption is not only ungenerous. It is also simply untrue, given that rebellion against aspects of identity is a feature of ordinary cultural evolution. The envy and resentment that would deny to Pinckney his particularity, or to Baldwin his wayward appropriation, or to W. E. B. Du Bois his will to “summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will” are no less vicious than promiscuous assertions of privilege deployed to deny the complex particularity of others. Proponents of the privilege turn have adopted a sanctimonious rhetoric to create an “us” an a “them” that answers not at all to the reality of our common life.

The Privilege Predicament.  By Robert Boyers.    The American Scholar ,  March 5, 2018

The American culture war continues apace, with increasingly high stakes, between the right and left. But over the past several years, especially online and in academia, a parallel conflict has been taking place between liberals and progressives. Robert Boyers, the editor of the literary journal Salmagundi and a professor of English at Skidmore College, fits neatly, although not reflexively, within the liberal camp. In his new book, “The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt For Political Heresies,” he reflects on “trying to square your liberal principles with your sense that people who are with you on most things—on the obligation to move the world as it is closer to the world as it should be—are increasingly suspicious of dissent.” Boyers comes to the conclusion that an unwillingness to hear non-progressive points of view, an obsessive focus on “privilege” (a term he thinks is being used indiscriminately), and an unwarranted concern about the idea of cultural appropriation are occurring across the country and posing a danger to the ideals of the academy.

I recently spoke by phone with Boyers. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the difference between political correctness and virtue signalling, why he thinks that we are too focussed on the idea of “privilege,” and whether we are becoming more or less mature in judging works of art.

Isaac Chotiner :

Your book begins by connecting the increasing focus on the concept of privilege with the idea of virtue. Can you explain how you think the two are connected?

Robert Boyers :

Privilege is a term that has come more and more to be sounded in the culture, and there is no question that it has a meaning we all know—that there is such a thing as privilege, which has to do with advantage. The advantage can be earned or unearned, but certainly there is such a thing as earned or unearned advantage. What’s happened is that the term “privilege” has come to be used promiscuously, so that it has become something of a noise word which is invoked to prevent conversations from heading in directions that people would rather they not go in. So that when a person is making a comment that you don’t like, you raise your hand and you say something like, “Oh, do you realize that you’re exercising a privilege in speaking this way?”

And, of course, when certain epithets are attached to the word “privilege,” like “white privilege” for example, or “male privilege,” they exacerbate or intensify the charge, so that, in many cases, “white privilege” is a term that now is used to signify something that all white people enjoy in the same way, simply because it can’t be enjoyed by anyone who is not white. The problem with that, and I think it’s fairly obvious, is that not all white people are the same. Not all white people enjoy the same privileges. Not all white people have the same backgrounds and experiences, and to think of white people in this sort of indiscriminate way and to invoke the term “privilege” to talk about what they enjoy is to be completely misleading about the lives of white people.

IC : What’s the connection between that and virtue?

RB : Well, if you constantly speak about people in that way, you are signalling your own virtue by indicating that you are alert to the privilege that people enjoy, with the implication, of course, that all of the privilege they enjoy is unearned—even if these privileges that you’re speaking about are, in fact, earned, or earned by people who have worked hard, people who have spent many years in educational institutions to get where they are. And so you’re signalling your virtue by accusing people of privilege in that way. And there are many other ways of signalling your virtue by pointing out to people things that they should not have said, things that they should not have thought, and, in that sense, virtue signalling has become a common feature of life and the culture, most especially in academic culture.

IC : I think we are all aware of seeing someone tweet something because they want to signal that they have some point of view. But it does seem, in a way, that the term “virtue signalling” is a backhanded compliment, because it’s essentially saying there is some virtue to it, or that it acknowledges an awareness of racism or misogyny or a history of discrimination. So when you say “virtue signalling,” are you saying that bringing up these issues in a discussion is frustrating or annoying, even if somehow true? Or are you saying that you think that these things are not actually accurate in some way? Or both? If that distinction makes sense.

RB : The distinction makes sense. I think that there’s a difference between [virtue signalling] and pointing something out when, in fact, there is reason to do so. If I’m in a room in which someone calls another person a horrific name, and I say, “I’m sorry, but I can’t sit quietly by when you use a word like that to speak to this person,” or if I say to a student, “I’m sorry, but in our workshop we don’t speak to one another that way”—when we’re talking about someone’s story that she’s written for this week, we don’t say, “I’m sorry, I think that story’s stupid”—I don’t regard that as virtue signalling. It might be virtuous for me to call the person on the thing that’s been said, but I don’t do it to signal my virtue.

But there’s a whole realm of discourse in which people call people out in order to signal their own virtue, and that’s a very different sort of thing. Let me give you an example. If someone confuses the names of two people who are black or Asian-American, calling one by the name of the other, and you want to make a very big deal of that instead of regarding it simply as a mistake, well, then, it seems to me you are signalling your virtue. You’re making a great deal of something which may simply be no more than a mistake.

I have a whole chapter in my book about ableist language. If you make a big deal about the use of expressions like, “We ought to learn to walk in someone else’s shoes,” and you make a big deal about that because you’re afraid that people who can’t walk will be offended or that their feelings will be hurt, it seems to me you’re engaging in virtue signalling. That’s very different from calling people out when there is actually a legitimate reason to do so.

IC :

It often seems to me that there is too little awareness of historical injustices and present-day injustices, and of how those injustices shape the world we live in. It is the paradigm under which a lot of us operate, or all of us operate. But, still, individual people should be able to talk about what they want and should be judged on the content of what they say, not their specific experiences of race or gender or so on.

RB : I think you’re taking us in the direction of what I would call the distinction between identity and identity politics, which seems to be a very important distinction. We all know that there’s been a great deal of talk in the culture in recent years about identity, which is an important and legitimate idea to talk about. And it’s something that each one of us is concerned with, in our own peculiar ways. I think about where I come from, who I am, how I got to be the person I am, why I think the way I do, and so on. That’s entirely understandable.

But when we enter the realm of identity politics we’re talking about a tendency for people of a particular race or religion or ethnicity or gender or social orientation to form more or less exclusive political alliances and to think of themselves as beholden in some way to that particular background experience, set of experiences, or identity. And that’s a change to me, and legitimately understandable for people who have been discriminated against and who have had to live under certain burdens of oppression. Those people want to mobilize and gather with people of a similar background and orientation and to achieve a certain kind of power, on the basis of which they can hope to change the state of things.

But there are very unfortunate aspects of identity politics, which we’ve seen all too much and which seem to me to have something to do with the question you just put to me. There are insidious features of, or extrapolations from, this tendency toward identity politics—most especially the notion that people of a particular kind tend to be like-minded or to see and feel things more or less in the same way. The worst part of this is the demand, not only the notion that people of a particular background or experience or ethnicity tend to see and feel things in this same way, but the demand that they continue to see and feel things in the same way. That’s the direction we’ve been headed in, and I think it’s both dangerous and deeply misleading.

I come from a Jewish background. My grandfather was a rabbi, my father was a cantor. Am I expected to think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a Jew? Is it expected of me that I will adopt a perspective that’s, shall we say, suitable for a person of a Jewish background? Is that reasonable? In fact, I think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a person who is also a left liberal, an intellectual, a college professor, a person who’s had a whole range of experiences, who reads many books about the Middle East. Why would I be expected to relate to this particular kind of conflict solely by virtue of the fact that I went to Hebrew school and that my grandfather was a rabbi? Obviously, all identities are plural. I am many different things. I am not just someone who went to Hebrew school, but the demand increasingly is that I should think about things that way.

IC : When you talk about the “demand,” are you talking about in the academy or across society?

RB : We see aspects of this in the general society and the culture, but it’s particularly important and prominent in colleges and universities, where students are encouraged to think of themselves in narrowly identitarian ways, or basically as avatars of particular racial backgrounds. We have in colleges and universities ethnic-studies programs, along with black-studies programs. Nothing wrong with studying such subjects, by any means. But I would say that encouraging students in those programs to think of themselves primarily in terms of their race or ethnicity is terribly misleading.

IC : To what degree do you feel that people are being encouraged to think that way by other people in the academy, and to what degree do you think that people feel that society views them primarily in that way, and so that ends up being the identity that they’re most likely to express or to want to use to push back against what they see is the way society looks at them?

RB : I think there’s no question that people who have a personal experience of oppression, who have felt that, will tend clearly to self-identify along the lines suggested by that experience. So that, for example, if you’re an Islamic person who lives in a city where there’s a great deal of anti-Islamic sentiment, and you find yourself being looked at in ways that are distinctly uncomfortable, you will tend to think about yourself as a Muslim principally, and, of course, if you’re a religious Muslim, and your religion is the most important thing in your life, then again you will tend to think of yourself in that way. But the demand that the rest of us, who don’t live in those conditions, think of ourselves in that way seems to me not only unreasonable but misleading.

IC :  In the book, you write, “Intolerance among young people and their academic sponsors in the university is more entrenched than it was before, and both administrators and a large proportion of the liberal professoriate are running scared, fearful that they will be accused of thought crimes if they speak out against even the most obvious abuses and absurdities.” Young people are generally toward the left, but even on the left of the Democratic Party, candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren seem to have no interest in this sort of intolerance. There’s no left-wing Trump, obviously. Do you feel this has any political manifestations yet?

RB :

I don’t know if it will change, and I don’t know if these aspects of the culture will go all the way up to the Presidential race. I doubt it. Certainly, I doubt that we’ll see anything like that in the near future. But the thing I’m describing is definitely intolerance on the left, intolerance in my own cohort, intolerance among young people and their academic sponsors in the university who think of themselves as leftists and liberals, as I do. I give many such examples of intolerance, and these are serious. Look at the people who, in a workshop of the New York State Summer Writers Institute the year before last, attacked a white student who had spent a year on leave working at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, in Alabama. They attacked him for using material that he had come by in the course of that year, because he had illegitimately appropriated it as a white person from the experience of black people that he encountered in his year. [Boyers, the director of the summer institute, at Skidmore, describes the incident in his book.] That seems to me a mark of intolerance—that young man was shamed and chastised in his workshop by students who regard themselves as liberals, leftists, progressives, and passionate about racial matters.

IC :

My general takeaway from polling on young people is that you get more support for not allowing speech that people perceive as bigoted. And then, if you ask people questions about whether mosques should be able to be built or athletes should be able to kneel before a football game without getting fired, they’re actually more tolerant than previous generations. So I don’t disagree with you that something has changed in certain ways, but it also seems like it’s a mixed picture. Is that not your sense?

RB : Of course, I think in my cohort there is considerable support for Colin Kaepernick, as there should be. He should’ve been able to kneel, and he should be able to use his hands in the way that he wanted to, to signal his allegiance to certain ideas. Without any question. But, meanwhile, not only in the university but in the larger culture, you see reflections of the thing I’m describing. I’m sure you read about the pulling of the poem at The Nation in the summer of 2018, on the grounds, again, that the white poet had used the language of black speech—and this was found to be illegitimate after the poem had been accepted and published in The Nation. And I know you’re aware that, in the publishing world, there is a considerable momentum behind the notion that authors ought not to be publishing books or stories about or in the voices of persons who belong to groups different from their own. There are agents, powerful agents in New York, who will no longer send out a story by an author dealing with characters who don’t belong to that author’s own racial or ethnic group. That’s real. That’s happening.

IC :  You wrote a great essay years ago about V. S. Naipaul and whether to separate the artist from the art, and I’m curious what you think of the conversations that have arisen in the last few years, especially around #MeToo and different works of art and how we should be judging them now. Do you feel that that conversation has become, in some ways, less mature or more mature?

RB : The #MeToo movement has been an important, and, in most cases, highly beneficial movement, and it’s done very important things for all of us and the culture. I have misgivings about certain things that have happened under the auspices of #MeToo. But, on the whole, it seems to me #MeToo has been extraordinarily beneficial.

But has the conversation about ideas, ideology, and works of art become more mature? Decidedly not. There are large numbers of people who regard themselves as liberals and progressives and so on who were involved in demanding that Dana Schutz’s painting based upon the Emmett Till event be taken down from the walls of the Whitney. There are people who mobilized last year to ask the Metropolitan Museum to take down Balthus’s painting of “Thérèse Dreaming” from the walls because, presumably, certain viewers of these works found them offensive or disturbing.

That doesn’t seem to be mature. Again, people are allowed to demand what they want to demand and allowed to protest what they want to protest. I don’t regard those kinds of things as mature at all. The argument against appropriation has not, for the most part, been a mature conversation. A mature conversation would ask the question that Zadie Smith asked about the Dana Schutz painting: namely, does it give justice to the event—that is, the murder of Emmett Till—which it purports to represent? That’s a mature, adult question to ask of a painting. An immature question to ask of a painting is, “Is the person who made it white?”

IC : It seems like the question of who’s doing the representation is an interesting question, but it’s not the mature question about the quality of a specific painting.

RB : The term that Zadie Smith uses in her Harper’s essay on the question, or for the concern with the race of the person who purports to represent an event, is “philistine.” I agree with her entirely. She argued the Schutz painting is a failure that doesn’t do justice to the event that it purports to represent. That seems to me entirely legitimate. It’s a concern that we all have when we read novels, when we look at paintings, and we ask, “Do these do justice to the material that they handle?”

IC : Right. It’s a mature or interesting question to ask what groups of people are doing different types of artistic representation. If it were only white people who were asked to cover foreign countries or to write book reviews about the African-American experience, that would be an important thing to understand. But I agree with you that to look at a specific review, or to look at a specific person, and to judge their work by the color of their skin rather than the content of the art or the journalism that they’re creating is much less mature.

RB : I’m entirely in accord with what you just said.

IC : I grew up in Oakland and Berkeley in the eighties and nineties, and there were things as a teen-ager that I found really frustrating about political correctness. I felt people were kind of moralistic in the way they talked about the environment. I thought the way that they talked about inclusiveness was really good, but also could be kind of silly, and you’d roll your eyes and say, “Oh, it’s Berkeley, whatever.” Twenty-five years later, so much of that stuff is conventional wisdom across the whole country. People pay much more attention to the food they eat and to the environment, and most Americans have an opinion on gay rights and trans issues. And that makes me think that, if there are things that I find silly now, thirty years from now I’m going to look back on them and say, No, those actually were good things. Do you ever think this, despite your frustrations?

RB : Well, yeah, of course. One of the reasons that I really don’t want to talk about political correctness in my book is because there’s a sense in which, along the lines that you were just describing it, political correctness is obviously a very beneficial thing. It is wonderful that most people in a society like ours can no longer feel comfortable using epithets, disgraceful and disgusting epithets, to describe other human beings. We can no longer say the kinds of things that people used to say about Jews, black people, Italians, Poles, and so on. That’s an aspect of political correctness that I think most of us who are decent human beings applaud and you live by, and we’re glad that political correctness has, in that sense, had its way with us. But, on the other hand, political correctness comes in many different guises, and political correctness may also have to do with the demand that we not say things that, in fact, are not offensive, that some people take to be uncomfortable.

IC : So you are drawing a distinction between political correctness and virtue signalling, which I agree are not the same thing, but it seems like they have some overlap, no? What is the distinction?

RB : Virtue signalling would focus on what are sometimes called microaggressions, which are things, first of all, that are unintentional in many cases, accidental, and which in many cases really don’t hurt anybody’s feelings, but which people who are virtue signalling have taken hold of in order to emphasize their own alertness and their own virtue. That’s very different from the kinds of political correctness you were talking about.

IC : I think, in a way, we acknowledge this point about political correctness when we say we don’t want to judge people from twenty or thirty years ago too harshly by the standards of today. If we are going to acknowledge that, then it also seems like we should acknowledge that there were people thirty years ago who had more forward-thinking opinions, and even if they sometimes annoyed us, they were right, and so maybe the people who seem to have opinions today we find frustrating are onto something.

RB : They were right in some respects. In other respects they were not. Look, we have all paid considerable attention in recent months to controversies involving the use of the n-word. A professor at the New School for Social Research, a woman named Laurie Sheck, got into trouble for reading out the word in a graduate class, in a [statement] by James Baldwin. There was an article in the New York Times Op-Ed page by the black writer Walter Mosley about the way he received complaints and is brought up on charges for using the word. So those kinds of circumstances in which writers and professors and intellectuals are being called out for doing their jobs in the classroom seem to me to be aspects of what I’m calling virtue signalling. And, yes, they are related to political correctness, but they are decidedly different.

The True and False Virtues of the Left. By Isaac Chotiner. The New Yorker  ,  October 11, 2019

In recent years, Skidmore College, where I am a professor, has been roiled by political incidents large and small. As at other colleges and universities, these eruptions have ranged from sometimes violent protests designed to prevent controversial speakers from speaking to “call-outs” and disruptions to prevent the teaching of ostensibly offensive books or to punish people for using ostensibly offensive language.

In an effort to encourage dialogue, the president of Skidmore recently invited a scholar named Fred Lawrence to give a lunchtime lecture to faculty and staff. As author of a book called Punishing Hate and the secretary of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest honor society, Lawrence seemed suited to offer advice about the troubles we’d been going through on campus. How could we better differentiate between offenses serious enough to warrant concern, and the more minor slips or unintentional derogations sometimes called “microaggressions”?

“To be unable to tell the difference between kicking a dog and accidentally tripping over one is to have little hope of successfully navigating life on a college campus,” Lawrence said, in a talk that was mild and notably free of polemic.

The first faculty member to raise a hand after the lecture asked Lawrence whether he was aware of the privilege he had exercised in addressing us. She spoke with conviction, and suggested that Lawrence had taken advantage of his august position by daring to offer his advice. Lawrence replied with courtesy, conceding that, like everyone else assembled, he was of course the beneficiary of several kinds of “privilege”, and would try to be alert to them.

Though nothing further came of this exchange, it seemed clear that “privilege” had been invoked as a noise word to distract from the substance of Lawrence’s remarks and from his suggestion that some of us had failed to make the elementary distinction he had called to our attention. More, the “privilege” charge had been leveled with the expectation that he was guilty – not because of anything particular he had said, but because he was a white male.

It was hard not to think that my young colleague was in fact suffering from what Nietzsche and others called ressentiment – a feeling of inferiority redirected on to an external agent felt somehow to be the source or cause of that painful feeling. Rightly or wrongly, she regarded him as the embodiment of a power, or authority, that is nowadays conventionally associated with “privilege”; that is, with some endowment or attribute – wealth, position, conviction, erudition, benevolence – enjoyed by some people but not others.

Of course there really is such a thing as “privilege”, and of course it is distributed unequally in any society. You’d have to be a fool to deny that whiteness has long been an advantage, however little some white people believe that their own whiteness has given them what others lack. Can anyone doubt that privilege is a real and legitimate issue when certain groups in a society enjoy ready access to good healthcare and schooling when others do not? There was a time, not so long ago, when to speak of privilege was to identify forms of injustice that decent people wished to do something about.

But you’d also have to be a fool to deny that the idea of privilege has been weaponized in contemporary discourse, often by people attempting to seize rhetorical advantage. The privilege call-outs increasingly common in the culture entail a readiness to rebuke people simply because their gender, ethnicity or rank makes them an apt target for shaming and condemnation. The charge of “privilege” is usually directed at its targets not with the prospect of enlisting them in some plausible action to combat injustice but instead to signal the accuser’s membership in the party of the virtuous. Accusations of “privilege” have become a form of oneupsmanship, and a charge against which there is no real defense.

The writer and linguist John McWhorter has written of “the self-indulgent joy of being indignant”; for many in the academy, he notes, the “existential state of Living While White constitutes a form of racism in itself”. In fact, he argues, the standard “White Privilege paradigm” is designed to “shunt energy from genuine activism into – I’m sorry – a kind of performance art”.

Those words – a kind of performance art – sharply identify what has lately happened and explain why many of us believe it is time to retire the term “privilege”, or at least agree to use it only when it cannot be understood to describe a self-evident crime. Not every advantage is unearned. Not every advantage is misused. Not every white person enjoys privilege in the way that some white persons do. Not all black people are without advantages.

In fact, to speak of “privilege” in the way that is now customary is to suppose that whiteness, or blackness, or maleness, or other such attributes, must signify to all of us the same things. It is to consider a white person primarily as a white person, a black person primarily as a black person, and to consign to irrelevance the many other qualities that make humans different from each other.

Our emphasis on “privilege” has served to obscure a great many things that ought to be obvious. We cannot have a serious discussion about privilege without first making elementary distinctions between one experience of race or advantage and another. Until and unless we are prepared to renounce the “performance art” phase of our relationship to “privilege” we ought to let it go.

The term ‘privilege’ has been weaponized. It's time to retire it. By John Boyers. The Guardian.  November 8, 2019. 

A leading American Liberal arts college recently set out to hire a full-time fiction writer. Four candidates made the shortlist out of 200 applicants. Each candidate had to give a demonstration class to some students and field questions from faculty members sitting at the back. One candidate called some of the questioners by their first names. Unfortunately, he confused the names of the only two Asian-American faculty in the department. This was obviously not deliberate, just unfortunate. At a department meeting a week later, the department chair made it clear that as far as she was concerned the writer would no longer be considered for the job.

Why not? He had made a mistake, at the end of a gruelling and pressurising day. Did anyone think that mistaking the names of two Asian-Americans, who he had never met before, made him a racist? Maybe yes, maybe no. In a liberal arts college in America today, it was sufficient that there might be a suspicion that he might not be able to tell two Asian-Americans apart for him to be considered totally unacceptable.

This is what has happened to universities in America and this is what has led Robert Boyers to write The Tyranny of Virtue. Boyers, the founding editor of the cultural magazine Salmagundi and professor of English at Skidmore College, where this incident happened, has set out to explore this new culture of intolerance.

How could it be that in universities, of all places, free speech and the open debate of ideas, could have become intolerable, not just to students but to faculty and administrators? Why are academics running for cover, refusing to stand up for tolerance? Worse still, why have they become the “new commissars”, “fluent with anxiety about art that offends”?

Boyers is not some right-wing reactionary. He may be considered privileged because he’s a white man, but he was from a Jewish working-class family in Queens. His father worked in a dry-goods store for 13 hours a day, six days a week. He has been on the left for more than half a century, on what his academic colleagues would consider the right side of political debates from civil rights and Vietnam to Iraq and Trump. He has been, he writes, “a partisan in the ongoing culture wars for about 30 years”.

This isn’t some cranky polemic, raging against Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. From beginning to end, this is a moderate, thoughtful book, constantly questioning the rage for “purity”, the obsession with “safe spaces”, the longing to “drink at this well of misinformation and grievance”. It is as if he suddenly found that people who are with him on most things are increasingly suspicious of dissent. How have American universities become so illiberal?

The Tyranny of Virtue is superbly written and full of interesting anecdotes. At his college Boyers saw a sign that said, “KEEP SKIDMORE SAFE”. Of course. Who doesn’t want to be in a college which is safe and protected from potentially violent intruders? Women, gay and minority students have too often been victims of attacks on American college campuses.

But this isn’t what the sign meant at all. It was about “ableist language”, expressions like “stand up for”, “turn a blind eye to” and “take a walk in someone’s shoes”. These are apparently demeaning and offensive. A professor who talks about turning a blind eye to something is offending someone who is visually impaired. If you speak of having to “run” to catch a train, imagine how insensitive this must be to someone who has problems walking.

This is typical of an academic culture obsessed with harms, protections and all manner of offences. Nothing is innocent. Intention is irrelevant. As Boyers writes, “Just about every conversation had become a minefield.” Not just conversations, every lecture, every comment in a seminar or to a student in a casual conversation.

Someone protests against “the screening of a ‘disturbing’ 1960s Italian comedy that may trigger, in a person with her background, traumatic memories”. Boyers thinks that he was “courteous and sympathetic”, but then she tells him “that as a man you’ll never understand the problem”. Game, set and match.

A student complains to Boyers about a set text by the white South African writer Nadine Gordimer. It was “a bad idea” for a “privileged” white woman to be dealing with people about whose lives “she was bound to be clueless”. And were there particular instances in the novel, Boyers asks her, where Gordimer seemed to her “clueless” and had got things wrong? She couldn’t say. “I felt very uncomfortable about the direction we were heading in,” she says later in the conversation. She didn’t like “the usual Western prejudices”. This is, of course, not open for discussion. How she felt trumped everything.

For that student it was Gordimer. For many others it will be Saul Bellow. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read them.” With those few words Bellow destroyed his reputation in American literature departments for a generation. Does anyone teach Bellow any more in America? Perhaps Philip Roth can hang on for another decade, then he will make students feel uncomfortable. All those angry accounts of what happened to black Newark. All those men, all those jars of liver.

Boyers moves carefully through these issues, from identity politics and diversity to cultural appropriation and “policing disability”. The key word here is “policing”. The thought police have taken over. Boyers is quick to point to what gets ruled out. There is no room for diversity, complexity and ambiguity, what Robert Pinsky called “the virtues of ‘creole’”. There is one right way of viewing everything: a right way and a wrong way.

Boyers is not alone, of course. He quotes others who championed tolerance and diversity. Susan Sontag, who wrote, “Party lines make for intellectual monotony and bad prose.” Edward Said, who called on us all to “abandon[s] fixed positions, all the time”. But Said died in 2003, Sontag in 2004. That already feels a long time ago. Boyers, decent, embattled, at times sounds like the Last of the

Mohicans. Even his son asks him if he puts too high a value on doubt and contradiction.

There is a crisis in American universities and in Britain too. Intolerance reigns supreme. Boyers quotes Jonathan Freedland: “What so infuriates opponents on left and right is the insistence that two things, usually held to be in opposition, can both be true.” No, say the commissars. If someone is a sexist, a homophobe, a racist, there is nothing else that we need to know about them. We are the saved, they are the damned.

And what if they innocently muddle up two Asian-Americans or talk of “turning a blind eye” to something? Also damned. Or if they insist on discussing a Shakespeare play or an Italian comedy that makes a student feel uncomfortable? Double damned. Reasonable, sane, decent, this is the right book at the right time.

Intolerable intolerance. By David Herman. The Critic, December 2019.

Robert Boyers discusses his new book “The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt For Political Heresies. The Open Mind, hosted by Alexander Heffner. Thirteen,  January 20, 2020

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Newton’s Third Law deals with physical objects, but does it also have something to teach us about human behavior and the clash of forces in our fraught and turbulent society?

When it comes to the volatile issues of race, sex, identity, privilege, rights, and freedom, well-intentioned actions to redress genuine injuries can conflict with equally important societal values, such as freedom of speech and the open exchange of ideas. Are there unintended and adverse consequences that flow from the energetic vindication of cherished rights in our society? Consequences that have been ignored and deserve serious examination? Is there still any legitimate place for dissent and disagreement on these fundamental issues?

In The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies, Robert Boyers, professor of English at Skidmore College, author of 10 books, and editor of the literary journal Salmagundi, is alarmed by the “irrationality and anti-intellectuality” on college campuses and in the wider cultural environment that was “unleashed by many of the most vocal proponents of the new fundamentalism” to “silence or intimidate opponents.” He is deeply concerned that

     ‘’concepts with some genuine merit — like “privilege,” “appropriation,” and even “microaggression” — were very rapidly weaponized, and well-intentional discussions of “identity,” “inequality,” and “disability” became the leading edge of new efforts to label and separate the saved and the damned, the “woke” and the benighted, the victim and the oppressor.’’

He regrets that “people who are with you on most things — on the obligation to move the world as it is closer to the world as it should be — are increasingly suspicious of dissent.”

Boyers is asking whether in our zeal to address the consequences of racism, misogyny, sexual violence, bigotry, and intolerance in America, are we spreading a new intolerance, undermining cherished values of free and open discussion? The Tyranny of Virtue prompts serious readers to take a second look at their own assumptions as we try to navigate the troubles waters on which we so often feel adrift.

The force of Boyers’s book comes from the proximity of his own university experiences to the issues he is confronting, the grounding he provides with relevant examples to illustrate his arguments, and his bracing writing style which consistently expresses difficult ideas in crisp and succinct language.

As Boyers sees it, tendencies that alarmed him and others on the liberal left 25 or 30 years ago have grown more disturbing.

‘’Intolerance among young people and their academic sponsors in the university is more entrenched than it was before, and both administrators and a large proportion of the liberal professoriate are running scared, fearful that they will be accused of thought crimes if they speak out against even the most obvious abuses and absurdities.’’

Boyers offers a startling example.

An Ivy League college senior in Boyers’s July 2018 New York State Summer Writers Institute — a young white man — told Boyers he was denounced in a seminar by several other students for writing poems based on his experience as a volunteer in Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama. “How dare he write poems about lynching and the travails of oppressed people when it was obvious that he has no legitimate claim to that material?” Boyers sarcastically asks, echoing the all-too-sincere accusations leveled at the student. “Was it not obvious,” Boyers continues, “that a ‘privileged’ white male, who could afford to take off a year of college to work as a volunteer, really had no access to the suffering of the people he hoped to study and evoke?”

Boyers expands this example beyond the college setting by recounting another controversy that unfolded in July 2018, when objections (which Boyers calls “predictably nasty and belligerent”) were lodged against The Nation magazine for publishing a short poem by a young white poet in which he used black vernacular language. Within a few days the poetry editors who had reviewed and approved the poem issued what Nation columnist Katha Pollitt called a “craven apology” that read “like a letter from a re-education camp.” In The Atlantic, the scholar of black English John McWhorter called the language in the poem “true and ordinary black speech” and a “spot-on depiction of the dialect in use.” He also noted the irony that, at a time when whites are encouraged “to understand […] the black experience,” white artists who seek “to empathize […] as artists” are told to cease and desist.

Boyers is angry about what he sees going on in the institutions of higher learning to which he has devoted his life’s work as well as in the society at large about which he cares deeply.

 ‘’The revolution of moral concern, driven by people in the grip of delusions I have attempted to anatomize throughout this book, is clearly a bizarre phenomenon, fueled by convictions and passions that have the appearance of benevolence but are increasingly harnessed to create a surveillance culture in which strict adherence to irrational codes and “principles” is demanded.’’

He sees a “toxic environment that now permeates the liberal academy” that is “increasingly drawn to denial and overt repression” including “speech codes and draconian punishments for verbal indecorum or ‘presumption.’”

Unfortunately, Boyers’s anger can get the best of him as he ascribes ugly motivations to the targets of his denunciation. “It is decidedly not true that academics mobilizing to punish dissident or ‘incorrect’ voices on their own campuses are nevertheless operating with benevolent motives,” he defiantly declares. And it is “not true than an ostensibly well-intentioned effort to prevent a young white poet from imagining the lives of black people is an expression of genuine concern for black people.” Why does Boyers assume the motives of those concerned about cultural appropriation are not “benevolent” or “genuine”? For someone so dedicated to freedom of speech and open debate, why not address the merits of the arguments in these controversies without making groundless assumptions and attacking the motivations of those with whom he disagrees? Isn’t giving others the benefit of the doubt one of the liberal values Boyers is seeking to encourage on our campuses and in society at large?

Boyers is eager for his readers to get to know him so they don’t take him as just another conservative critic like Dinesh D’Souza or Tucker Carlson, who do not share his lifelong commitment to equality and justice. To that end he describes an encounter with an English professor during his freshman year at Queens College in the late 1950s. Having given Boyers an A+ on a paper examining George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Professor Stone suggests that Boyers schedule an appointment to see him in his office.

When Boyers arrives, unexpectedly a second professor is present. Professor Stone asks Boyers to summarize his paper on Orwell. After Boyers offers only a few sentences, Professor Stone asks him to stop and turns to his colleague. “See what I mean?” “Totally,” the other professor responds. Turning back to Boyers, Professor Stone guesses, “[Y]ou may be the first person in your family to go to college.” “It’s true,” replies Boyers. “You write very well,” Professor Stone says,

‘’But you know, I didn’t call you here to congratulate you, but to tell you something you need to hear[.] […] [T]hough you are a bright and gifted young fellow, your speech, I mean the sounds you make when you speak, are such that no one will ever take you seriously — I repeat, no one will ever take you seriously — if you don’t at once do something about this. Do you understand me?’’

Boyers agrees to enroll in a “remedial” speech course to “cure” what Professor Stone calls his “Brooklynese.” Within hours of his “escape” he realizes this was “a never-to-be-forgotten gift.” It was an insult to be sure, “but delivered not with an intention to hurt but to save and uplift.”

Boyers uses this formative incident in his life to introduce his discussion of white privilege. He clearly understands that white privilege exists. It is legitimate, he writes, to assert that “whiteness has long been an advantage, however little some white people believe that their own whiteness has given them what others lack.” He provides numerous examples:

   “[T]hat housing laws designed to help returning GIs discriminated against black veterans; that college admissions boards, even where inclined to diversify their student bodies, continue to rely on protocols that would ensure acceptance mainly for the wealthy or the otherwise privileged; that apparently trivial slights or insults might conceivably affect people in disastrous ways, while allowing those responsible for the insults to proceed as if nothing consequential had transpired.’’

And he quotes poet Claudia Rankine who argues that “whiteness has veiled from them their own power to wound.”

But Boyers goes deeper, in order to challenge what he sees as an absolutist assumption that white privilege is enjoyed by everyone who is white. Is it “reasonable to suppose,” he asks, “that whiteness confers, on all who claim it, comparable experiences and privileges?” Alluding to his embarrassing confrontation with Professor Stone, Boyers asks, “Was my own background as a working-class Jewish boy, growing up in a predominantly black community, remotely similar to the background or disposition of a white colleague who had never know privation, or in fact had no contact at all with other black children?”

Boyers offers some eye-opening examples. Two years ago, at a panel discussion at a writers institute, a graduate student complained that the entire topic of “political fiction” was dominated by male writers. When Boyers responded by referring to prominent women who write political fiction, such as Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Joyce Carol Oates, Ingeborg Bachmann, Pat Barker, Antia Desai, and others, another graduate student asked him if he was aware of the “privilege” he had just exercised in addressing the question. “Privilege?” he asked. “Your authority, she said, your presumption, the sense of entitlement that permits you to feel that you can pronounce on any question put to you.” As Boyers sees it, “privilege had been invoked as a noise word intended to distract all of us from the substance of our discussion and from the somehow unpleasant spectacle of a male writer intoning the names of great women writers, as if this were, in itself, a flagrant violation of a protocol.”

Then Boyers reports on an incident at Evergreen State in which a professor of biology (who subsequently resigned from the faculty) criticized the university’s “Day of Absence,” a day on which all white students were asked to leave campus. And the Northwestern professor who was subjected to a formal Title IX investigation by university authorities after an essay she wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education was said by a number of students to create “a hostile environment” on campus. Boyers comments that in

 ‘’the last year or two, those wishing to restrain real talk or, God forbid, actual debate more and more deploy terms like “entitlement” and “subordination” to suggest that people who stir the waters inevitably create a “hostile environment” and intimidate their colleagues, some of whom — so it is said — are thereby made to feel powerless.’’

Boyers enlists prominent New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who in a recent article argued that many liberals “want to be inclusive of people who don’t look like us — so long as they think like us.” Boyers writes that “[o]n campuses across the country, according to Kristof, academics casually admit that ‘they would discriminate in hiring decisions’ based on ‘the ideological views of a job applicant.’”

Boyers sees the accusation of “privilege” as being “increasingly hauled in as a weapon, though wielded, in the main, by persons attached still to the conviction that, whatever their own bristling incivility and the punishing quietus they clearly intend to deliver, they remain in full possession of their virtue.” He argues that the “privilege craze is part of a new fundamentalism built on a willful refusal to accept that the most obvious features of so-called identity are the least reliable indicators of what may reasonably be expected of us.”

But here again Boyers overreacts. “So-called” identity? Are not those who have been subjected to discrimination and been the brunt of bigotry on the basis of their race or gender or sexual orientation entitled to organize and speak up on the basis of those real, not “so-called,” identities? Although Boyers is sounding a much-needed warning over self-righteous accusations of “privilege” which can smother honest discussions of race, gender, and class, he again betrays his own blind spots. He belittles unnamed “partisans” of the “privilege critique” of “garden-variety envy.” That’s a particularly cruel epithet to hurl at individuals and groups who are seeking to reverse the impact of centuries of enslavement and present-day discrimination. Accusing them of “envy” for simply seeking equality smacks of the argument during the battle for marriage equality that the LGBTQ community was seeking “special rights.”

Boyers accuses these “partisans” — without evidence or example — of having “little interest in real-world politics, that is, in coalition building and respect for difference.” Really? The movements for equality in society today are all about “real-world politics,” including voting rights, racial justice, immigration, equal pay for equal work, mass incarceration, and the entire panoply of rights which have been denied to marginalized people for so long.

But let me practice what I preach and give Boyers the benefit of the doubt, for elsewhere in his book he exhibits a far more subtle and nuanced approach to his subject. The following passage, listing the purposes of his book, is worth quoting in full:

  “To argue that the idea of “privilege” has its important uses and is, at the same time, susceptible to misunderstanding and abuse. To demonstrate that the idea of “appropriation” was an understandable expression of legitimate and deep-seated fears held by people with a history of oppression and subordination, but that the idea soon came to be wielded by people ignorant of the ways of the imagination and the benefits of the very practices they resisted. To argue that “identity” is an important aspect of our ongoing efforts to understand ourselves, but that identity politics is based on a deep misunderstanding of the nature of race and ethnicity. To insist that policies like affirmative action are essential if we are ever to achieve the kind of social justice we aspire to but that there are costs and consequences we ought to acknowledge without pretending that those costs are negligible or incidental.’’

Boyers fears that the excesses of these movements for social change will prove counterproductive, descending into a self-righteous close-minded orthodoxy that will alienate potential supporters and feed the criticism spread by reactionary forces which take every opportunity to ridicule and parody the movements for equality and justice. “To challenge officially accredited views, particularly when those views have anything to do with sensitive issues, is now regarded as out of bounds, illegitimate, an expression of arrogance or entitlement, and thereby hostile.”

In addition to privilege, identity, and appropriation, Boyers devotes a chapter to ableism and how our society deals with disabilities. He begins by describing how recently he became agitated seeing posters saying KEEP SKIDMORE SAFE hung all over Skidmore College, where he has been teaching for 50 years. According to Boyers, the posters called out examples of ableist language considered offensive to persons with disabilities and their supporters, language such as “stand up for,” “turn a blind eye to,” and “take a walk in someone’s shoes.” The posters encouraged students to ask their teachers to stop using such ableist language and, failing that, to contact advisers and file an online “bias report” naming the professor.

Boyers doesn’t tell us what became of this call to action or whether any “bias reports” were ever filed and, if so, what happened, but he nevertheless is quick to attack the posters, arguing that “expressions like those cited in the poster have nothing at all to do with any reasonable person’s notion of keeping the campus safe.” He calls the “recommendation” that people “take offense at the language all of us use is sufficiently bizarre.” Boyers notes that of course it goes without saying that everyone should “speak respectfully to persons who are disabled.” But according to him “the notion that students will feel unsafe when I tell them I have to ‘run’ to catch a train or that I’ve long been ‘deaf’ to certain kinds of music is a lie.” He claims that students can be “trained” to “take offense where no offense is intended.” “But there will be a price to pay,” he writes, “for creating a generation of young people who are unwilling and unable to differentiate between actual offenses and casual utterances that clearly do not rise even to the level of so-called microaggressions.”

Is Boyers right? Was it “bizarre” and a “lie” for persons with disabilities to be offended by such expressions? I must admit that it came as news to me that the examples cited in the poster were offensive, so I asked Alan Toy, a longtime friend who has been a disability rights advocate for decades and is a fellow member of the board of the ACLU of Southern California, if these phrases are offensive.

“Yes, and I am not alone in this,” Alan replied. Those phrases

 “”do kind of sound very much like dog whistles or worse to many of us in the disability cohort. There are a few more that could come to mind, but you’ve hit upon some of the more common ones. I always find those things jarring personally, though I do give a little bit of credit to the cultural habituation of these phrases in our common dialogue.’’

However, Alan added, “once informed or ‘(a)woke(n),’ I have little sympathy for their continued use. If we can learn how to not say things like the N-word, or the K-word, etc., etc., then we can also undo the ableist language in our lexicon.” As for reporting these things to the “proper authorities,” Alan said he’s

   ‘’not big on that kind of approach, but if a person egregiously continued to use these phrases once warned, then perhaps further actions do need to be taken. But sometimes there are old dogs who just cannot learn new tricks, and it is not as if those folks are using these terms to purposefully slur or demean people with disabilities, even though that may be the outcome for some folks.’’

I’m glad I checked with Alan. I learned a lot. I wish Boyers had checked with persons with disabilities too, instead of making assumptions and casting aspersions. Here and elsewhere in his book he shows few signs of having conducted probing interviews with the people involved in these controversies, such as the students on his own campus who created the poster, to get their side of the story. For someone who believes in open debate and discussion, such readily available research would have enriched and clarified his project.

Yet, despite its flaws, Boyers has written an important and provocative book that acts as an alarm calling attention to the excesses of dogmatism found in some quarters of the movements for equality. In the end, what is missing from this discussion on both sides — or all sides, since it is multifaceted — is a greater sense of humility, compassion, and generosity toward those, on the one hand, who are struggling to overcome the historical legacies and present-day realities of oppression and discrimination and those, on the other hand, like Boyers, who share the goals of those movements but are trying simultaneously to uphold the values of free and open debate unhindered by overreaction and censorship.

In his sympathetic New York Times review of Brandon Taylor’s debut novel Real Life, playwright and author Jeremy O. Harris describes how the protagonist, Wallace, a black gay grad student (with whom Taylor and Harris share similar experiences), walks the “haunted halls of a white academic space” feeling an “overwhelming dread.” Harris is struck by “the whiteness of Wallace’s surroundings, a fact of many spaces of American higher learning, and one rarely articulated in literature by writers of any race.” Harris writes that the “simple truth of ‘Real Life’ is that Wallace, like myself and many others who’ve wandered dark, white halls in search of a future, has made himself invisible by shedding the skin of his past, and adopting a new skin unadorned with the blemishes of history.”

In the year 2020, the suffocation of whiteness, sexism, and other forms of bigotry, running the gamut from insensitivity and marginalization to outright discrimination, still plagues our campuses and beyond. We ignore it at our peril. No one who has not experienced “shedding their skin to make themselves invisible” can sit in supercilious judgment over those who have.

Boyers ends his book by offering several sensible suggestions of what should not be done. Ideas should not be promulgated “without seriousness, that is, without any corresponding consideration of what would be entailed were they actually to be effected.” Ideas such as privilege, appropriation, ableism, and microaggressions should not be used “to sow hostility, persecute other members of a community, and make meaningful conversation impossible.” The classroom and the seminar should not be used “to indoctrinate students and thus to send them off parroting views that they have not adequately thought through or mastered.” An “us versus them” orientation should not be created which is “underwritten by enemies lists, and fueled by a sense that on matters for which a consensus has been reached no dispute may be tolerated.” And “virtue” should not be weaponized “for what Marilynne Robinson calls ‘class advantage,’ with zealots adept mainly at trumpeting their own superior status and making ‘a fetish … of indignation.’”

There is much to be learned from these suggestions. Yet even in his closing words Boyers can’t resist using loaded terms like “indoctrinate,” “zealots,” and “fetish” to describe those with whom he disagrees. How would he react if teachers who promote his ideas in the classroom were labeled “zealots” who “indoctrinate” their students and make a “fetish” of their “indignation”?

The political thinker Michael Walzer contends that “no one on the left has succeeded in telling a story that brings together the different values to which we are committed and connects them to some general picture of what the modern world is like and what our country should be like.” The Tyranny of Virtue is not that book, but it is a thought-provoking effort in that direction which is worthy reading for anyone who cares about the struggle of creating a more perfect union.

In her highly original and incisive book Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (2017), Teresa M. Bejan, associate professor of Political Theory and a Fellow of Oriel College at the University of Oxford, makes a persuasive case that liberal democracies need not abandon one set of their values to preserve another. Drawing on the teachings of Roger Williams, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, Bejan argues that so long as we exhibit mere civility — “a minimal conformity to norms of respectful behavior and decorum expected of all members of a tolerant society as such” — without legislating civility through speech codes and other government-imposed restraints, we can achieve the highest ideals of an egalitarian, free, and just society. For her, democracy assumes “ideological division, insulting invective, and sectarian splintering.” Democracy is undermined by “conformity that delegitimizes dissent while reinforcing the status quo,” which hardly sets the stage for groups which have suffered oppression and discrimination to protest, speak out, and seek change. Equality and justice are not achieved by “civilizing discourse aimed at silencing dissent and marginalizing already marginal groups.”

Seen in this light, open and robust debate are the friends, not the enemies, of creating a diverse, multiracial nation dedicated to liberty and justice for all. Despite its flaws, The Tyranny of Virtue contributes significantly to a better understanding of the challenges we face.

Have We Weaponized Virtue? By Stephen Rohde. Los Angeles Review of Books , May 22, 2020.