Edmund Burke famously ridiculed the radicals and revolutionaries of his day for justifying violent and unjust acts by simpleminded appeals to abstract values. The abstract value he had in mind was liberty, which the mountebanks of France and their cheerleaders in England used to justify murder and sedition. Wasn’t Burke for the revolution? his adversaries wanted to know. Wasn’t he for liberty? “I cannot stand forward and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction,” Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France. “Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, on the recovery of his natural rights?”
Today’s radicals are a much more peaceable lot (most of the time), but the habit of using abstractions as all-purpose moral guides is still very much à la mode. The word du jour is inclusion. Use it, and you can defend just about anything you want to do.
Consider: At Rider University in New Jersey this week, campus administrators decided to remove Chick-fil-A from a list of potential campus franchises on the grounds that the restaurant chain is “widely perceived to be in opposition to the LGBTQ+ community.” “We sought to be thoughtful and fair in balancing the desire to provide satisfying options for a new on-campus restaurant while also being faithful to our values of inclusion,” explained Rider’s president, Gregory G. Dell’Omo, and the school’s vice president for student affairs, Leanna Fenneberg, in a letter.
This little intellectual pirouette surely equals anything the Jacobins pulled off: By proclaiming the virtues of inclusion, you can literally exclude people and organizations you don’t like. We’re inclusive around here—now get out!
Rider’s Center for Diversity and Inclusion is organizing a campus forum “so that the voices of students, faculty, staff and others can continue to be heard” and that all involved can “grow from this experience.” What a relief to know that the school’s students are working through such momentous problems. Annual tuition: $42,000.
