Cancelling thought on campus

Today, the university is a hollow man stripped of purpose and devoid of substance, writes Jennifer Oriel in this edited extract from Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March - an anthology about the origins of the culture wars edited by Dr Kevin Donnelly.

To read Mao Zedong’s works is to understand that he was a brilliant political strategist and adept tactician with a deep understanding of human nature. He used it to create a politics devoid of moral goodness and the one party communist state that governs China with an iron fist. But he is unique among genocidal leaders of the 20th century for the degree to which he created enduring conformity by using a combination of social pressure and re-education. It is in Zedong’s theory that we find the genesis of political correctness (PC) and its development into cancel culture where dissenters are publicly denounced, found guilty without trial and sentenced to a life in exile from the university, often losing their livelihoods in the process.

Students celebrate the silencing of dissent because they do not understand that as they win the power to censor, they lose ability to reason. It is human nature to be lazy and seek the easy way out. Silencing opposition is far easier than listening to an opponent and learning how to argue well. The act of destruction is cheap and exciting. The act of creation is exacting.

Although politics was never far from campus governance after the 1960s and 70s it became an academic affair. The aim of higher learning, the pursuit of objective truth and the classical liberal education in how to think were replaced by a revolutionary education that taught students what to think.

As communism maintained its grip on the East and the Islamic world fell under the spell of charismatic jihad, a new left politics was born in America. Its promise was equality. Its leaders were Marxist. Its spirit was militant and its legacy is tyranny. What began as a movement for civil rights became a destructive force against both freedom and genuine equality on campus.

The New Left produced a radical transformation of the university from a place of higher learning to a site of political activism. The humanities was remade in the image of a new ideology called neo-Marxism.

While many activists contributed to the revolution, the principal architect of New Left thought was the brilliant theorist Herbert Marcuse. He is perhaps the most commonly forgotten leader of the modern left. Students do not know that when they deplatform conservatives, demand that people who offend state-protected minorities are censored or think reflexively that the world minority means true disadvantage, they are doing the work of Marcuse.

In 1965, Marcuse justified a new form of inequality that would be made manifest by censoring right-of-centre freethinkers. In Repressive Tolerance, he wrote: “The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed … what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression.”

Marcuse was one of the Frankfurt School’s most successful exports and worked in the long shadows of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci who sought to transform the West by a long march through the institutions. In his book The Rotten Heart of Europe, economist and EU critic Bernard Connolly revealed that founding member of the Frankfurt School, Willi Munzenberg, proclaimed that the West must fall for communism to rise. He said it was necessary to “organise the intellectuals and use them to make the Western civilisation stink. Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Neo-Marxists began their revolution in universities and socialism led by a new proletariat class: radical minorities. Marcuse’s equation for new Left equality demanded in a 1968 Postscript to Repressive Tolerance, “Not equal, but more representation of the Left”. The left moved away from the aim of civil rights, which was equal treatment under the law. Instead, it devised a system stacked against critics of the politically correct. It became known as affirmative action, or minority rights where members of the minority are not necessarily disadvantaged but usually reliable supporters of left-wing politics and politicians. Thus, women were included along with an ever expanding list of identity groups.

Marcuse argued for a new form of inequality won by censoring dissent. He wrote that a “subversive majority” could be established by “undemocratic means” including “the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly” from groups that dissented from left-wing politics. He proposed “rigid restrictions on … educational institutions” and “intolerance toward scientific research” that did not support his proposed revolutionary aims. 

In respect of political correctness and what would become known as cancel culture, Marcuse seemed to channel Mao. He demanded “intolerance … toward thought, opinion, and word … [of] conservatives [and] the political Right”.  In the final score, he justified militancy and revolutionary violence by appeal to the Chinese communist revolution, among others. He dedicated his thesis of repressive tolerance to his students at Brandeis University.

Five decades later, his influence and legacy loomed large when students from Brandeis demanded that the university withdraw the offer of an honorary degree to freedom fighter Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Her thought crime was Islamophobia. According to former member of The International Institute for Islamic Thought, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, Islamophobia is a “loathsome term … nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics”. Like so many before and since, Hirsi Ali was cancelled for being politically incorrect.

This is an edited extract of Jennifer Oriel’s chapter of Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March edited by Dr Kevin Donnelly AM. To read the full essay and other contributions you can purchase the publication here.