Listen to thisEditorial Comments are provided by the writer in their personal capacity and without prior sight of journal content.
I am writing this in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk. Not being of the TikTok or Instagram generation, I hadn’t heard of him before his death. In other circumstances, it might have registered temporarily as just another gun death in America. But this one affected me, not just because of his widowed wife and kids, but because somehow it struck me as being a watershed moment in the culture wars that have raged, and at times been encouraged to rage in recent years.
We have reached a cultural moment that some big thinkers foresaw and warned us about. I’m thinking of Christopher Lasch, Philip Rieff and two philosophers, Charles Taylor and Alistair MacIntyre, whose work I’ve been engaging with recently.
Each of the above writers, in their own way, might point to a problem in modern society of excessive individualism, which has descended, to use MacIntyre’s term, to emotivism, or in Taylor’s words, expressive individualism - both of which reflect a situation where subjective feelings have displaced rational argument. MacIntyre argues that we have lost any means through which to resolve differences through civil argumentation oriented towards a common good. We can no longer disagree over points of view without resorting to ad hominem attacks on those with whom we disagree. One of the things that saddens me about Kirk’s death (whatever one might think of his politics) was that this seems to be precisely what he was trying to do – to change minds through dialogue.
I might have hoped that his death would be a wake-up call for us to take stock of where all this was going. But not content with his death, the keyboard warriors proceeded to dance on his grave. Some of these contributions went beyond the pale of any common decency; others were more insidious, not quite condoning the murder but hinting that Kirk’s views were ‘problematic’ and his fate, understandable.
Where does this connect with CYC? Clearly, Charlie Kirk’s audience was young people. He met his death while speaking at a university. He, it seems, realised that many young people were unhappy and searching for meaning in their lives. From what I have read, I wouldn’t necessarily agree with his all-American boy solutions, but I do agree with his basic premise of youth searching for something that the world isn’t offering them. My own thoughts lead me to consider that this is, largely, a symptom of the emotivism or expressive individualism that MacIntyre and Taylor talk about. Young people are told that they can be whatever they want (and indeed deserve) to be, only to find that real life is rarely like that. This gulf between expectation and reality then becomes framed as a mental health problem. We are told that we are in the midst of a mental health crisis and need an army of therapists to deal with the problem. Those of us working in universities are only too aware of the ever-increasing numbers of students seeking help for what, in many cases, are just the travails of everyday life.
I would suggest that an expansion of mental health support is the last thing we need. A mental health response is as likely to feed as to alleviate the problem we are said to be facing. Surely, I’m not the only one asking questions about the relationship between the expansion of a therapeutic mindset and the rise in mental health issues – could one be feeding the other and not necessarily in the direction that might be assumed?
More than that, some of the messages young people seem to get from this growing army of counsellors and therapists is that they are vulnerable, especially to ideas they don’t like. They are told to be kind to themselves. This is a problem in colleges and universities. It panders to the emotivism and focus on subjective feelings that MacIntyre decries. This is not because he (or I for that matter) did not hold the best interests of students in mind, but because there are different ways to understand what these best interests might be. One could argue that in many instances they would be better served by the rigours of academic learning and through engaging in the kind of debates that ought to be central to this. Doing so can lead to the cultivation of wisdom and character, which might ultimately foster the self-esteem students need to take their place in the public square. Indeed, there is growing evidence to support claims that the culture of safetyism, evident in calls for such as trigger warnings and safe spaces, reinforces rather than ameliorates negative patterns of thought and their resultant mental health consequences. Paradoxically, it is through engaging with the existential strangeness of learning that students might cultivate qualities of self-reliance and resilience, which are in many cases their best shield against adversity.
This brings me back to the CYC (and indeed wider) academy. MacIntyre argues that ‘The distinctive function of the university is to enact, elaborate, and critically assess standards of rational justification, and to educate by initiating students into key practices of rational inquiry’. Such universities need to be reconceived as places of ‘constrained disagreement, of imposed participation in conflict in which a central responsibility of higher education would be to initiate students into conflict’. I’m not sure that this is the expectation or experience of students nowadays. They are taught that conflict is abuse and that words or sentiments that they don’t like can cause harm. They are encouraged to see themselves as activists rather than scholars. Activism only needs assertion of a particular point of view in the sure knowledge that the holder of that view is on the side of the angels. Scholarship requires putting in the hard yards to research a position, considering what someone else who holds a contrary view might think about it and then trying to convince through rational and civil argument. When we give up on that, we open the door for another Charlie Kirk moment.
