Gaza Protests Reveal the Stakes Have Changed

The neo-barbarians are at the gates

It is strange to hear school administrators using terms like “negotiations” and “peace” in the context of recent campus protests. As if these words retain some vestige of common currency between them and protestors. They’re dead wrong, of course. In case it escaped their notice, protestors are now making demands, not raising points for thoughtful consideration. 

Make no mistake, the only currency now in circulation among the tents is power. This shouldn't surprise us. According to the Marxist conception of "progress," conflict is a feature, not a flaw. It is the “engine of change" that will propel us towards the next stage of sociocultural evolution. 

In this, they’re not entirely wrong; conflict does bring about change. If the conflict is informed and principled, such change may even be for the better. The problem with the conflict currently playing out on campus front lawns, however, is that they are neither informed nor principled. If the recent exchanges between protestors and interviewers are any indication, it seems that most aren’t really interested in persuading or being persuaded. Indeed, many seem to possess the emotional stability of an autistic dolphin.  

University administration has been able to coexist with their student body so long as everyone made sure to maintain purely hypothetical convictions regarding  “justice, equity and inclusiveness.” What we’re currently seeing play out is what happens when those hypothetical convictions take on real-world applications. In other words, when the interests of the supposed oppressors (school administrators, in “solidarity” with Israel), collide with the interests of the supposedly oppressed (student protestors, in solidarity with Palestine). 

Administrators are terrified of losing their well-salaried positions as a consequence of moral clarity. As a result, they are unwilling to emit the tiniest whisper of dissent, even in the face of blatant antisemitism. Students, on the other hand, are terrified of missing out on an opportunity to “fight for humanity.” They don’t need to know all the details of exactly how defunding Israel is going to accomplish that. All they need to know is that they’re on the “right side” of history. 

Again, what we are seeing play out in colleges and universities shouldn’t surprise us. Today’s students haven’t been taught how to think, only how to react. They haven’t been taught how to identify legitimate oppression, only how to engage in performative acts of courage against predetermined villains. They haven’t been taught the value of intellectual humility or healthy self-doubt, only inflated with delusions of their own omnipotence. What we are witnessing among the tents and the flags and the checkered scarves isn’t an entity of principled resistance. It is an unstable concoction of insecurity, spiritual vacuity, and pure, undirected rage. 

Something is going to give. Administrators are realizing they aren’t going to be able to hum and haw their way out of this mess. Students are just now realizing the chaotic power sixteen years of indoctrination has imbued them with. This is what you get from an education untethered from moral absolutes — you get the sheer force of will, without even the pretense of appeal to principle. You get barbarians. Worse still, you get virtue-signalling barbarians.

The best we can hope for at this point is the total collapse of woke post-secondary institutions, which is most of them. In the ashes, Christians must work and pray for a new post-secondary movement, formed by the same biblical principles that gave birth to the first post-secondary movement.

It’s Christ or chaos. And it looks like chaos is fast losing its charm.