Adult Babies
The childish nature of the grownup authoritarians.
Besides a declining appetite for Pixie Stix, the most noticeable effect of aging, for me, is an increasing consciousness of how much I don’t know. The more I learn, the more understand the vastness of what I haven’t yet learned. Even my small areas of expertise feel like they recede further into insignificance as each passing year reveals the contours of the world of knowledge that lies beyond. In this way the exuberant certainty of youth is assaulted by the universe.
When I think about the people that I most admire for their quality of adultness, of maturity, I think of those who adapt with grace to this process of forced humility that we all must go through. I think of people who remain curious, rather than retreating into fortresses of doctrine; people who remain humble, rather than grasping for authority; people who are generous enough to tolerate with love and good humor the foibles of those who are yet to pass through the same lessons of life. Likewise, I admire those who do not allow the famous “shades of grey” that come with increased understanding of the world’s nuance to become an excuse to remove themselves from life’s great moral battles. The adults in the room that I respect the most are those who combine their lifelong learning with tolerance and unpretentiousness and a determination to navigate the shoals of nuance on the path to righteousness, rather than simply giving up and settling into where they are. (I have not attained any of this yet, but we all need role models.)
What has struck me about the backlash to the campus protests of the war on Gaza that have swept the country is that it waves the flag of adultness without exhibiting any of the qualities that make being an adult something worthy of admiration. Instead, those who are most energetically leading this backlash embody the tendencies that characterize the traps and failings of adulthood: Incuriousness, inflexibility, zealous authoritarianism, an unseemly eagerness to use age as a platform from which to launch high-handed criticisms of the young. It is the adulthood of those who can imagine nothing better than being a graduation speaker, where they can indulgently pass on their priceless wisdom to an adoring crowd. Boring, flawed, immodest slogans masquerading as wisdom. If you think that college students are irksome, imagine a world ruled by college commencement speakers, who also have the power to send you to jail.
The most perfect example of this breed of undeservedly smug anti-advertisements for adulthood is Ben Sasse, the former Republican Senator who was inexplicably installed as the president of the University of Florida. He has taken every opportunity to glorify himself as the voice of maturity in the face of childish rule breaking, despite the fact that his school’s crackdown is based on a laughable list of “Allowable Activities” (“Speech”) and “Prohibitive items and Activities” (“No sleeping”) that resembles something a first-year UF law student would jot down in a panic three minutes before class.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Friday, Sasse showed off his sense of fairness: “Mob rule at some of America’s most prestigious universities in recent weeks has thrown gasoline on the fire. Pro-Hamas agitators have fought police… Parents are rightly furious at the asinine entitlement of these activists and the embarrassing timidity of many college administrators.” He goes on to compare his student protesters to “a 2-year-old’s tantrum,” “mobs,” and “agitators.” He wildly invents a new and imaginary category of villain that includes “The insurrectionists who storm administration buildings, the antisemites who punch Jews, and the entitled activists who seek attention.” He even throws in the obligatory assertion that Martin Luther King Jr. would have hated these protesters. Having established his bona fides as an incurious authoritarian, he sticks out his meager chest and crows about his willingness to enforce the newly invented rules. “We’re a university, not a daycare. We don’t coddle emotions, we wrestle with ideas,” he writes. “Minds are changed by reason, not force.”
He enforced his gentle commitment to reason with police.
Sasse spent yesterday going on the Sunday news shows and casting himself as a common sense protector of order, even as he avoided any questions about his inevitable support for Donald Trump by declaring that he has taken a vow not to “talk about politics.” Calling anti-war protests Pro-Hamas mobs of entitled agitators who deserve to be jailed is, of course, a purely apolitical statement. By combining a determination not to engage with any of the issues at hand in good faith with an iron fist—topped with a cherry of self-congratulation—Sasse found himself in good company. This toxic cocktail of sneering rejection of honest dialogue about the war with a hectoring tone of condemnation for various protest tactics is the method of choice for many of our most prominent Adult Voices right now. A famous(ly dumb) newspaper columnist decries Columbia students for refusing to speak to her, and then confidently proclaims that they are “sinister” and “cowardly.” A US Senator who one year ago sponsored a Campus Free Speech Restoration Act calls for all the protesters to be arrested and mocks the protest encampments as “little Gazas,” as though the word “Gaza” itself were a slur. Police chiefs make videos titled “Consequences Class 101” displaying the dangerous books they found on their campus raids. The mayor vows to crush the shadowy “global problem” of “professionals” who are “radicalizing our children.” An entire ecosystem of pigheadedness is in place: Politicians and college presidents to declare that peace protests are violent crime, police to crush them without remorse, and media cheerleaders to praise it all as a victory for the hallowed status quo, which is always the highest value of all.
What leaps out so vividly in all of this is not the political disagreement over the underlying issue—a substantive discussion of the universities’ role in the issue, after all, is what the protesters are asking for, and what the schools are denying them every time they call in the police. Rather, the most noticeable thing is that those who are reacting most forcefully against the purported immaturity of the protesters are themselves the ones acting like children. They ignore the big issue of the war in order to deflect attention to matters of personal comportment; they revel in their own physical power over the weak; they break things with sticks. They lack the moral judgment to understand what is truly important, they lack the personal responsibility to do the hard work of assessing how their institutions could run more justly, and they use the entire conflict as a chance to show off their own purported superiority to the young people that they are ostensibly tasked with loving and educating. They behave like a toddler who throws a screaming fit because their parent pulled them out of the way of oncoming traffic. I don’t care about the life and death issue! You pulled my arm! And I dropped my binky! I’ll be pitching a sharp essay to the Wall Street Journal about this outrage! Wahhhh!
There are student groups that have produced thoughtful and detailed calls for institutional divestment in the face of an ongoing civilian massacre. There are schools that have peacefully ended their protest encampments through genuine, substantive negotiation. There are institutions bigger than any university, like major unions, that are grappling directly with the question of how to position themselves in a moral way on this issue while navigating internal political disagreement. These things are possible. These things are, more to the point, mature responses to an ethical emergency. Would it be easier to scoff at the protesters, quiet them with force, ignore the faraway war, and continue thinking primarily about the upcoming SEC football season? Sure. But that would be childish. Only a baby would do such a thing.
Grow up.
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Previously: College Is an Education in Bullshit; How to Absolve American of Everything; The Point of Politics Is to Stop This.
The Los Angeles Review of Books has a new review of my book about the labor movement, “The Hammer.” There are a few parts of the reviewer’s analysis that I disagree with, but overall it is a worthwhile review that wrestles honestly with the underlying themes of the book. I am currently taking a break from my book tour, but I am considering a few more stops in coming months—if you are interested in bringing me to your city to speak, email me at Hamilton.Nolan@gmail.com. Please do buy the book, which is available wherever books are sold. If you missed me on book tour but would like an autographed copy, I will send you one for $40 on Paypal. Email me.
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The crackdowns really took off as soon as wealthy donors started pulling money. Students understand where the power lies and have (smartly) requested that the endowments change rather than merely protesting about the cause. The general public likely doesn’t understand how powerful and influential university endowments really are, so it seems like the students aren’t really asking that much.
Those in power know differently. They know that any power ceded to students will have major impacts on the amount of money they make. Hamilton mention there are larger institutions like unions involved in these issues. However, I’d be surprised if the unions are as large (financially) as the combined value of only the Ivy endowments. As soon as something or someone starts fucking with the money the “grownups” emerge to protect their investments. Think about what it takes for an ex senator to be content as a public university president. It takes money and power and that’s only UF.
This is a long winded comment that probably could have been simply stated as boomers love to wax poetic about things they did (protest, have ethics) while allowing the pursuit of money to crush ideals and the younger generations.
Teeing off from what you’ve written here 👍and also Caitlin Johnstone’s “I oppose the butchery in Gaza because I’m not a fucking psychopath.” I think what you say about healthy adult evolution is true. I think it’s also true that at the terminal stage of that process it gets harder to maintain an adaptable view of the world. I’m 73 and it’s certainly true for me. I try to bear this in mind when I think about people like Trump or Biden. Never a fan of either, both seem to be worse than they used to be. But my point is this: I think institutions are also subject to the kind of ossification that humans experience. I think we need to pay a lot more attention to the way social reproduction works at the institutional level. Nobody gets to be head of Goldman Saks by talking up workplace democratization and MMT. That power and influence will probably remain in the hands of people who think like the current incumbent forever. Same for the NYT and NYPD. I think bearing this in mind can help us make better political decisions as it will remind us that the earth belongs to the living and unborn.
Great essay dude.