3
" Culture warriors, in the academy especially, are in thrall to an ideal of solidarity. Anything less than complete submission and approval they regard as betrayal. Their instinct is to divide people into friends and enemies, with enemies figured as dispensable and hateful. Supposing themselves to be political, they have no patience for coalition building or for the difficult work of persuasion. What is to be done, they believe, is to drive away opponents and to avoid, so far as possible, self-examination. "
― , The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies
7
" Astonishing, of course, that those very terms - 'reeducation' and 'rehabilitation' - do not scare the hell out of academics who use them and hear them. That they do not call to mind the not-so-distant history of authoritarian regimes in Europe or lead on to the thought that 'diversity,' for many of us in the academy, has now come to mean a plurality of sameness. More important: the words, apparently, do not suggest how vulnerable we are - all of us - to error, slippage, and hurt, and how the protocols, tribunals, and shamings currently favored by many in the academy have distracted us from our primary obligation, which is to foster an atmosphere of candor, good will, kindness, and basic decency without which we can be of no use to one another or to our students. "
― , The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies
11
" The attempt to create a total cultural environment and to silence or intimidate opponents is part of a campaign that had once seemed promising, even to those—yourself included—alarmed at the irrationality and anti-intellectuality unleashed by many of the most vocal proponents of the new fundamentalism. But concepts with some genuine merit—like “privilege,” “appropriation,” and even “microaggression”—were very rapidly weaponized, and well-intentioned discussions of “identity,” “inequality,” and “disability” became the leading edge of new efforts to label and separate the saved and the damned, the “woke” and the benighted, the victim and the oppressor. Concepts useful in careful and nuanced discussions proved strikingly “amenable to over-extension,” as the cultural historian Rochelle Gurstein put it, and ideas suitable for addressing “psychological distress” were forced into the service of efforts to “[redress] the subordination of one people by another,” yielding not significant redress but a new wave of puritanism and a culture of suspicion "
― , The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies
12
" All that we can hope for, [Herbert] Marcuse argued, is that we will be 'reeducated into the truth' by an enlightened minority, 'who are entitled to suppress rival and harmful opinions.' Needless to say, Marcuse took himself to be a member of that elite minority, and people like me, who had the good sense to approve of his views, were likewise entitled to think of ourselves as among the happy few. Really, who would not thrill to such an idea when so much was at stake, and when our virtue was guaranteed by embracing a program so obviously bold and so at odds with our own former ideals of liberal tolerance, which it pained us - so we told ourselves - to renounce. "
― , The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies