The ascendancy of London’s new mayor eerily resembles the election of a “moderate” totalitarian Islamist president of France in Michel Houellebecq’s painfully sharp, controversially timed satire Submission. Meanwhile, the ever-growing slate of campus outrages reflects a subtler, no less insidious submission that was also subject to Houllebecq’s grim parody.
As Submission‘s narrator, Francois is a perfect caricature of flimsy resistance to thought-control and political takeover. Perfect because he is an isolated academic, a fan of accepting sex acts from students and microwavable dinners washed down with grocery store wine. He’s a deeply but narrowly accomplished scholar of Joris-Karl Huysmans, the semi-obscure novelist of the French decadent movement. Unlike nineteenth-century Huysmans, whose conversion to Christianity has always been an aesthetic disappointment to Francois, Houellebecq’s creation is a victim of modern-day decadence and moral vacuity. Francois, armed with very little conviction, timidly resists until he just can’t be bothered anymore.
Read between the latest headlines exposing campus culture, and you’ll find a reasonable majority of non-radicals bewildered by the radical fringe and its prevailing ethic of revolt—but, like Francois, they’re helpless to resist. Members of the drowned-out majority wonder aloud what the heck is wrong with kids today, such as Oberlin’s Roger Copeland decrying a shift in “student character” to Nathan Heller of the New Yorker.
After Erika Christakis and her husband Nicholas came under fire at Yale, reasonable academics came out in favor of freedom of expression. But they did so delicately—as though theirs was the radical position—and, even so, only egged on the furious mob. Afraid of spurring conflict, faculty find it safer to sign an open letter in support of colleagues unfairly accused of hate speech, as did Yale’s last fall. But gentle resistance further enflamed campus leftists, and proved ineffectual: Both Christakises have since resigned their administrative posts.
And it should be safer even than mild public resistance—also, one would think, more effective within the institution—to use an administrative vote to stand up for intellectual diversity, or, say, to support an entirely appropriate faculty appointment deemed offensive by leftists. As did Northwestern University’s faculty senate. They voted strongly in favor of appointing retired general and former ambassador Karl Eikenberry head of the Buffett Institute for Global Studies before a radical minority stirred up enough opposition that he refused the position. The radicals again carried the day.
Clearly, some resistance exists. But it’s not strong enough to break up what social scientist Jonathan Haidt calls progressive monoculture. Regarding the spineless professoriate, Haidt told me, “From what I can tell, most professors are uncomfortable with what the social justice activists are doing and demanding, but they are afraid to speak up publicly.”
Fearful skeptics end up drowned out in exposés of campuses in crisis. As little more than background noise, those who wonder how the pervasive ethic of their radical colleagues came to prominence are helpless in their bewilderment. As Francois knows, it’s much easier to heat up takeout and watch the tube.
