By DOUG SHAVER
December 24, 2010
A minority that wants to rule a democracy has an obvious problem. One solution is to pretend, following Richard Nixon’s example, that it represents a silent majority.
Peter Hitchens, a conservative journalist and younger brother of the more famous Christopher Hitchens, recently argued in a YouTube interview, “The silent majority never existed.” He was responding to a claim that majorities lose their liberties by failing, out of indolence or apathy, to speak up against the machinations of tyrannical minorities. What happens instead, Hitchens proposed, is that the majority fails to notice the tyrants’ progress in taking over positions of academic, journalistic, and political power until it no longer is the majority. Their silence arises more from ignorance than from indifference, and by the time their ignorance is cured, they are now the minority.
I think he makes a good point, but even on his view, the newly oppressed were the majority, and they were silent, and their silence led to their oppression. And so, when they were warned that they needed to make their voices heard, should they have heeded the warning? Well, that was the wrong warning. They should have been warned to educate themselves about what was happening within the institutions that shape public opinion. The consent from which our government derives its just powers has to be a properly informed consent. Uninformed or misinformed consent offers no protection against tyranny.
The insanity of the woke left now dominating our political discourse might or might not be shared by a majority of American voters, but it claims to represent the best interests of all Americans whether they like it or not. It also claims that those who don’t like it have no right to exercise any power, and this was certainly not a majority viewpoint within any segment of the intellectual or political establishment until just a few years ago. How it came to achieve its current dominance is a long and complicated story, part of which is told in Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody, by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, published last August.
I cannot judge the accuracy of their narrative without examining their sources, and I don’t have time to do that. However, I was coming of age at the beginning of the period they cover. I was paying some attention to what was going on in the academy and even had my own run-in, as a student journalist, with a Marxist professor of sociology in the mid-70s. Most of what Pluckrose and Lindsay say is consistent with what I remember.
Opposition to Marxism was certainly the majority’s position a half-century ago, and this was no secret, because the majority was in no way silent about it. But what the majority did not know was the extent to which apologists for Marxism were convincing college administrators that they were entitled to a place at the academic table. After all, higher education was supposed to be about diversity of ideas, and so there seemed to be no way to justify a “No Marxists on our faculty” rule. So, the Marxists got their faculty jobs, and then they got tenure, and then they got chairmanships, and in due course some became administrators. And after that, for some reason, conservatives became increasingly scarce on college faculties.
It was never necessary to deny Marxists their faculty positions, even if such a policy had been justified, which it would not have been. What was necessary but too seldom done was a critical and thorough analysis of Marxism in those classes where its ideas were relevant. Marx was not entirely wrong in his critique of capitalism, and Adam Smith’s defense of capitalism was not infallible. Our economic system has some injustices built in, and we won’t fix them by having a war of insults and waiting to see who wins.
We will fix them, if it isn’t too late, by reviving the Enlightenment values that gave us both capitalism and our system of higher education. As Steven Pinker has reminded us (in Enlightenment Now and elsewhere), those values are reason, science, and humanism. While the majority of us were not looking, the academy over the past half-century abandoned all three. This was not because Marxism itself is hostile to them, but because they are hostile to any dogmatic ideology. No advocate for any belief system can use them to defend any assertion that only bad people can disagree with them. Whether that system be classified as liberal, conservative, libertarian, green, progressive, or anything else is beside the point.
The myth of the silent majority misses the point. It is not enough that opinions be expressed. For our democracy to work, opinions need to be defended with sound reasoning. That is how a properly informed consent is generated.
I sometimes hear the objection that I have too much faith in the American people’s rationalism. But I have no such faith at all. And besides, if the objection were valid, then how would we justify democracy? If the people are all such idiots that someone has to tell them what to think, then democracy is doomed no matter what we do.
What I believe is that ordinary people are capable of thinking rationally when sufficiently motivated, and that it would be a sufficient motivation if they were persuaded that it was in their best interests to be rational. And this persuasion would require no deceit, because I believe we actually are better off thinking and acting rationally than otherwise. Not that I claim to be an exemplar of rationalism. Nobody is. Nobody can be, because natural selection didn’t wire our brains that way. But we can keep trying, and the better we try, the better off we’ll be.
As Pinker explained in his book, we are better off now than we used to be, precisely because we were trying. His adversaries sometimes accuse him of advancing a panglossian “best of all possible worlds” view. He has said nothing of the sort, and no sensible defender of the Enlightenment ever claimed that it could bring us a utopia. We who embrace its values claim only that it has gotten us to where we are, that where we are is better than where we used to be, and that we have a moral obligation to continue the progress we have made so far.
But the progress cannot continue if the majority of us fail to learn how we got to where we are and why, though we have the option of going back, we don’t have the option of stopping. We cannot have a perfect world, but we can make the world better or we can make it worse, and we will do one or the other.