Four years ago, I was invited to contribute a chapter to a proposed book titled, “The impact of speech complaints on instructors in higher education.” This is an unlikely title to stir a runaway best seller. What motivated the book’s editors was personal experience of toxic political correctness upon collegiality, course content, and employment. Professors were unjustly targeted and denied due process by administrations for speech tagged as sexist, racist, homophobic, or otherwise offensive.
Today’s atmosphere on campuses is analogous to that which pervaded the society during the McCarthy era about communism. The mere accusation of reading communist material, friendship with the wrong person, or affiliation with a left-leaning group could cost your job, your friendships, and even your marriage.
In the early 1960s on many college campuses, a condition of employment was a loyalty oath. Selected colleges, most visibly, the University of California at Berkeley, resisted the muzzling of free speech and expression. As a student reporter for a college newspaper, the Daily Foghorn, I attended the House Un American Activities Committee (HUAC) meetings in May, 1960. The meetings were held in a second-floor chamber of San Francisco City Hall. I sat in the Press Box and remember the solemnity and pomp of committee members seated behind the tall dais grilling subpoenaed “witnesses”, “Were you now or have your ever been a member of the communist party?” Here’s a clip of the historical testimony at that meeting by commentator, William Mandel:
When I returned for the second day of hearings, my way was blocked. Students from Berkeley, Stanford, and other Bay Area schools had sat-in on the long marble staircase leading to the chamber. Students had locked arms. The marble floor was slippery from the high-pressure streams of water that had earlier targeted them. I was witness to police brutality and mayhem. I observed police and firemen pulling unresisting students down flights of stairs by their ankles banging their heads on the marble steps. Free speech and peaceful protest were simply quashed:
The paranoia and fear about communism touched every walk of life. During the summer of 1960 after years of service at the larger Camp Mendocino, I served as a Program Director at the San Francisco Boy’s Club Camp at Cragmont Ranch, Sonoma. The campers, who numbered about 60 children, slept in a dormitory with bunk beds arranged in rows, much like a military barracks. I had a private room just off the dormitory.
About a month into the season, I left on my bedstead a copy of the Communist Manifesto, a reprint of a political booklet, originally published in 1848, by Marx and Engels. The fact that I had this booklet was reported to my superior by a coworker. The booklet had been assigned as a reading in a course required for graduation at the University of San Francisco. The course was “Poly Sci 140: The tactics and strategy of international communism”. This may seem strange that such a course would be required at a Jesuit school, but the purpose was not to indoctrinate students but to instruct students about the dangers of communism. To my superior, the fact that I was reading the booklet in preparation for a course did not matter in the least. I had potentially exposed the Boy’s Club to the accusation that a communist was influencing children. I was reluctantly terminated by my employer from my summer job. A year later I found out the coworker’s identity. He was an ambitious, supposedly religious, small-stature, middle-aged staff member who wanted to replace me. He succeeded.
History is a story of manias. Humans are social animals that depend upon kin. Humans are not loners but live in groups. Group membership is a survival imperative. Unlike mammals with less developed neocortices and capacity for symbolization and language, humans establish group coherence through shared beliefs. Shared beliefs are established by socialization and influence. Since influence is central to marketing, politics, social management, and kindred pursuits, whole disciplines and business operations revolve around marketing, advertising and opinion management. Central to the concept of modern warfare is change of “enemy” beliefs. War fought by physical means is far more costly and less efficient than war mediated by propaganda.
Influencing or changing beliefs is challenging to purveyors of opinion management because social groups share common “default” values and attitudes. The trifecta of values, attitudes, and beliefs comprise the deep structure of social norms. Individuals rarely work through and articulate in everyday language the interior wellsprings of motives and behavior because these depend upon context and social relations as much as they depend upon internal processes.
In the early 1960s an influential segment of American society held the belief that America was at risk of being taken over by communism and that communists were hidden in places of influence to subvert America. Such generalized fear and suspicion trigger defense. Defense promotes attack. In America today in academia, the media, and influential institutions, the “social sea” is impregnated with fears and accusations of sexism, racism, privilege, and phobias that challenge the fabric of society. Like communism in the early 1960, threats from agents of these evils are presumed to reside in every facet and corner of society and invite shaming and annihilation. A new mania has replaced or augmented an old mania.