Those familiar with the ADF litigation on behalf of Jonathan Lopez know that his speech class professor (among other delinquencies) nominated Jonathan a “fascist bastard” because he announced in class his support for the definition of marriage found in the dictionary.  Of several questions we might ask about this episode, let us consider one:  Why “fascist”?

It is a commonplace of contemporary political and cultural discourse for those on the left to label conservatives as fascists.  As an analytical matter, the description is inapt.  But the infelicity of the charge has not obstructed its widespread use.  How did this familiar practice initiate?

Theodor Adorno was a prominent theorist among the neo-Marxists associated with the Institute for Social Research (commonly referred to as the Frankfurt School).  Adorno and three colleagues authored The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950.  They therein unveiled the “F scale” by which one’s fascist potential is measured.  This ostensibly scientific system involved politically-loaded classifications posturing as psychological analysis, in which the “fascist type” was discerned from various opinions held by the person subject to scrutiny.  Conservative attitudes in religion, culture, and politics were equated with racism and deep-seated authoritarianism.

Adorno’s biographer Lorenz Jäger explains:

[I]n other words, even political attitudes within the framework of the American constitution could be interpreted as mental disorders. . . .  Freud’s theory was used to interpret certain opinions as involuntary symptoms analogous to Freudian slips and dreams—with the underlying idea that they would reveal a hidden meaning to the expert.  Psychoanalysis became an apparently scientific means of saying something about the normatively desirable and the pathological in politics.  In future, people were not only to be simply reactionary but were also to have mental problems.  The result was a kind of twentieth-century Inquisition.

The Authoritarian Personality may be seen as an attempt to gain cultural power by defining the enemy.  And the enemy was the social middle ground that was now suspected of pathological tendencies.  From now on, the patriotic and anti-Communist average American was to be regarded as a potential fascist.

While its theoretical and methodological foundations were thoroughly discredited in short order, the book was immensely popular in intellectual circles.  Its thesis became embedded so firmly and widely as to suggest a community awaiting the appearance of a mechanism through which to shroud its prejudices in scientific pretense.  The book’s influence in creating a societal habit of discourse is impressive.

The special utility of the Adorno theory is that the arguments offered by persons contesting their authoritarian diagnosis on the F scale are rendered irrelevant.  Since the diagnosis purports to reveal the unconscious motivations of the diagnosed persons, it neutralizes their publicly offered rebuttals, which derive from their afflicted condition—not independent merit.  There is thus no need to consider their reasoning before consigning them to outer darkness.

We’re all only too familiar with this tactic, though lately its employ—being detached from conscious association with its origins (the next stage in social development)—has diminished in surface sophistication while expanding the categories of easy judgment: racism, sexism, classicism, homophobia, among others.  These are the default terms of critical discourse on the university campus.

Ingrained cultural habit does not dislodge easily.  Especially the sort discussed here, when considering a society such as ours that too often prefers dismissive aphorism and stigmatization to reasoned discourse.  Ad hominem is easy; short-form quips are how we do social theorizing.  We’ll not be rid of Adorno’s theory and its progeny any time soon.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his June 8, 1978 commencement address at Harvard, observed the following about American intellectual culture:

Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges.  Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad.  There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block successful development.

There is (as Solzhenitsyn surely understood) a certain inevitability to one form of this phenomenon, for it is never the case that simply any postulate is allowed to freely travel in an intellectual community that is defined by certain commitments.  The irony is introduced, however, when a dogmatic and censoring atmosphere characterizes a society or institution that advertises itself as open-minded and oriented to seeking the best answers wherever and however they may be found.  This is the tension characteristic of enlightenment liberalism, embraced in the modern American university.  Western liberalism is at least as territorial and exclusionary as any of its competitors, but pretends otherwise—which pretending is one of its principle features.  (Stanley Fish, for one, has made much of this.)

Our educational institutions have made systemic the exclusion of outlooks that deviate from their shared rigid definition of acceptable rationality.  As one prominent example, the Rawlsian ideal of “public reason”—as ubiquitous in its dominance as encompassing in its prohibitions—forbids Christian and other religious presuppositions from participation in public discourse.  That this involves de-privileging a framework of understanding that historically informed Western Civilization seems, for that reason, a considerable affront.  But it is just there that its explanation is found.  An intellectual rival has gained ascendancy, and is not inclined to give any latitude to its vanquished—and loathed—predecessor.

The new managers enforce worship of the idols of current intellectual fashion (to draw from Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor) often through a social pressure, rather than an intellectual one.  And that brings us to the title of this blog post.  A number of months ago, ADF’s Center for Academic Freedom director David French, writing at Phi Beta Cons, observed that the right-think enforcement environment at our universities is not one characterized by logical justifications.

In the battle of ideas, stigma always beats dogma. In other words, through stigmatization, one can defeat a set of ideas or principles without ever “winning” an argument on the merits. . . .  Why convince when you can browbeat? Why dialogue when you can read entire philosophies out of polite society?

This technique is surely effective.  But does its utility alone explain why this mode of enforcement is the contemporary means of keeping the herd fenced in?  Or does the New Vision, with its diligent avoidance of truth claims and metaphysical foundations, necessarily require non-rational enforcement measures?  When consensus rather than justifications is the foundation for the preferred creed, we should not expect the shoring-up of support for it to be an exercise in analysis.

French philosopher Chantal Delsol has given attention to this issue in her Icarus Fallen:

[O]ur era is singularly dogmatic, in spite of its slogans of relativism and tolerance.  It not only forbids certain opinions but mandates the acceptance of certain ideas.  One might well wonder how to explain the fact that in a world where each is free to decree his own good, strange unanimities have developed that function as categorical imperatives and have the power to function as a veritable moral terrorism.  Orthodox thinking does indeed exist today, in spite of the banishment of all objective truth and of an objective good.

With the exile of objectivity, on what grounds is unanimity attained?  She later elaborates:

Today’s moral message is not explanatory, as it was [in other settings].  Our message, on the contrary, is loud and repetitive.  It is proclaimed vehemently and always carries a threat against its adversaries.  It creeps in through all the cracks of social life because to be convincing it must be constantly repeated.  It compensates for its lack of justification by its ubiquity and omnipotence.  Its “human rights”-ism is incantatory to the point of inducing nausea.  It disguises the lack of crucial backdrop by hogging the stage, leaving no space for rival.  What it is unable to obtain through persuasion or debate, it obtains through the stifling of adverse ways of thought, which are vilified as soon as they dare to show their faces.  Evil is not rejected by reason, but hated out of indignation and denounced through invective.  At the same time, discourse about the good is set to the tones of panegyric and the smell of incense.  Because the morality of complacency is unaware of its justifications, it attacks its critics not through arguments but through ostracism.

Elsewhere she explains:  “We brandish the arms of invective, disdain, repetition, and force, for we simply have nothing else to say.”

Has the stigmatizing efforts of the secular catechizers been successful?  You bet.

In the desert now uninhabited by truths, ethical universals create obligations only because most people share them.  The “good” appears as a necessity without a reason for being.  It is everywhere at once even if it has been deprived of legitimacy and imposes itself self-righteously.  We may therefore quite appropriately speak of a common agreement about certain values, without their being at all objective.  In Western societies we see a convergence of subjective norms.  A certain moral consensus is emerging, without reference to truth.  The indefinite repetition of the same subjective intuitions is creating an ersatz objectivity.  The repetition of sincere feelings is creating a substitute for moral truth.

This provokes the uncomfortable observation that thereby not only is the dissenter finding his maneuvering space increasingly cramped, but concurrently the community is losing both the mental habits and vocabulary whereby to comprehend his right and reason to dissent from the consensus. 

At the college campus, in addition to the social atmosphere which serves the stigma-method of buttressing uniformity are the omnipresent institutional forms, including: mandatory thought-reform programs, speech codes, nondiscrimination policies applied against student associations, and the unstated faculty career advancement requirements.  These reinforce the prevailing dogma by removing from subversives their avenues of expression, access to resources and position, and other benefits that allow distribution of an alternative voice.

But if the heterodox evade these restrictions and present their unsanctioned messages, unleash the scorn.  The Order must be maintained.

The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), when challenged by a student that the facts did not conform to his theories, is reputed to have rejoined, “Then the facts be hung.”  Slavish adherence to abstract ideological formulas (with disregard for life as it actually is) is a defining feature of the revolutionary mind—and of many in the ranks of American university officialdom.  Historian Richard Pipes has described this characteristic in the revolutionaries driving the devastating upheavals in late 18th-century France and early 20th-century Russia: 

For intellectuals of this kind, the criterion of truth was not life:  they created their own reality, or rather, sur-reality, subject to verification only with reference to opinions of which they approved.  Contradictory evidence was ignored. . . .   To understand the behavior of the intelligentsia it is imperative to keep in mind at all times its deliberate detachment from reality.

Taine’s description of the paradigmatic French Jacobin is similar: 

Men as they really are do not concern him.  He does not observe them; he does not require to observe them; with closed eyes he imposes a pattern of his own on the human substance manipulated by him. . . .  Should actual experience through the eye and ear plant some unwelcome truth forcibly in his mind, it cannot subsist there; however obstreperous and telling it may be, the abstract principle drives it out.

I couldn’t help but think of this disposition when reading my colleague Joe Martin’s recent blog post on San Jose State University’s suspension of all blood drives on campus.  The university’s reason for barring these life-saving contributions?  The FDA forbids men who have had sex with other men (MSM) from donating blood—and this, we are told, violates the university’s “sexual orientation nondiscrimination policy.”  The FDA instituted this public health policy because of the statistically significant risk of transmission of infectious diseases associated with blood donations from men so behaving.  But for the SJSU officials in thrall to egalitarianism, it is not permissible for empirically irrefutable public health risks to inform public health policy when such considerations collide with the nondiscrimination creed of the egalitarian faith.  The facts be hung.  It is to abstractions that we must pledge allegiance. 

O, that way madness lies.