A staple of conservative and libertarian press and blogging is the story of the liberal academic or college student who calls for the censoring of non-liberal speech or ideas on campus. These stories usually (and intentionally) invoke shock, outrage and indignation. After all, colleges and universities are where, since time immemorial, free thought and the exchange of ideas have been the bread and butter, the raison d’tre, the places to advance human knowledge and philosophy. While we know that many to most of our universities have strayed far from that premise, that they are safe harbors for intolerance towards non-liberal thought, where diversity is something embraced only when it comes to labels and appearances, we nevertheless still find it an affront when someone is so overt in opposing one or more of our basic liberties.
But why? Why are we shocked? We know college liberals are what they are, yet we still get cranked up when we hear these stories. We scream and pound the table about the injustices perpetrated on some, about the abridgment of some of the rights that are the foundation of this country and its founding, and about the selectivity with which these abridgments are perpetrated, but in truth it’s what we should expect. There are lots of people who don’t give a hill of beans about the reason this nation exists or the protections it affords to the citizens. And, in the normal fashion of most folks, they tend to find each other and concentrate themselves where those of like mind are.
Look at a map of New York City with someone who grew up there and knows the neighborhoods, and he can tell you where the Italians are, where the Irish are, where the police and firefighters tend to live, where to find Russians, Mexicans, Greeks, Norwegians, which neighborhoods tend conservative, which tend liberal, where gays tend to live, where the hipsters are concentrating, where the old conservative money is, where the liberal money is, and so forth. People tend to gather up with their own, and despite the complaints of “lack of diversity” that liberal scolds put forth, there’s nothing wrong with that. Nor is there anything wrong with the fact that these gatherings and trends are not static. Little Italy is far more Chinese than Italian now. Williamsburg, long a Hispanic neighborhood, became an area where Hasidic Jews began to concentrate a couple decades past, and is now considered a hipster heaven. Sunset Park in Brooklyn, also long Hispanic, is having its “border” moved southward as more and more yuppies, celebrities and affluent people move into the Park Slope area.
Just as various “classifications” of people tend to flock in neighborhoods where “their own” have concentrated, so have liberals have increasingly found safe havens in the halls of academia. And, as is amply clear from examples too numerous to count, they have priorities that are quite far removed from the basic principles embodied in the Bill of Rights. We shouldn’t be surprised – the Bill of Rights prioritizes and celebrates the individual, while modern liberalism subordinates the individual to the collective. Instead of surprise, we should be happy they’re so overt, so honest in their intent and action, since it helps us more fully understand their nature and helps us more fully show those who might be on the fence how alien their nature is to those who respect and cherish liberty.
The Scorpion and the Frog is an animal fable about a scorpion asking a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is afraid of being stung during the trip, but the scorpion argues that if it stung the frog, the frog would sink and the scorpion would drown. The frog agrees and begins carrying the scorpion, but midway across the river the scorpion does indeed sting the frog, dooming them both. When asked why, the scorpion points out that this is its nature.
We don’t get mad at scorpions for being scorpions. We simply handle them in a fashion consistent with their nature.
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