Watching Berkeley Burn
“Ungovernable” vs “Illimitable” at Cal Berkeley
As I type this, I can hear a helicopter hovering overhead above Telegraph Avenue. Down the street, on the normally bourgeois stroller-section of College and Ashby, I can just make out the dystopian, Peanuts-teacher-muffled commands emanating from what I imagine is a loudspeaker-outfitted police SUV. The pictures are flooding in now, snapchats from hell: figures, dressed in all black, cudgeling a pair of Bank of America ATMs. A young woman, perhaps a Republican, being ambushed with pepper spray while she speaks to a reporter. Masked heroes bashing in the windows of a fascist corporate overlord, Starbucks, and looting the inside. A trailer, set ablaze and now smoldering.
One paragraph in — helicopter hasn’t budged.
That smoldering trailer — it’s important. It burns like an ironic candle. In its exact place, not too long ago, recent enough that some professors and Berkeley residents remember it, students peaceably protested, marched and were unjustly arrested for the right to express themselves freely — the same right denied many of the world’s most radical and brilliant thinkers, including intellectual heroes like Galileo and Socrates, whom you might think Berkeley students would lionize.
Today, the foe against whom we’ve decided to become, in the words of the myopic prattle on one student banner, “ungovernable,” is an otherwise powerless provocateur with the intellectual firepower of a Red Rider BB Gun. In doing so, we’ve handed him a nuclear warhead. We’ve made him into a sympathetic figure. A martyr.
What a difference a few years makes.
I’ve had the good fortune to attend — in my very biased view — the two greatest public universities in America: Cal Berkeley and the University of Virginia. Perhaps not so coincidentally, both have historically stood as institutional reminders of the highest ideals of America — indeed, perhaps, the West: the relentless pursuit of truth, the rigorous exchange of ideas, the belief that knowledge and democratic citizenship are inextricably intertwined.
This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.
So wrote a proud Thomas Jefferson in 1820, grounding the University of Virginia, “the hobby of his old age,” in an idea as old and potent as that cup of hemlock a bunch of prissy, pissed off, self righteous, supposedly enlightened Athenians handed Socrates.
It is the idea that it is especially those things we find abhorrent that we must defend. After all, those pernicious ideas are gifts. They are the whetstone on which we sharpen our own beliefs, the way we epistemically limited creatures stumble collectively towards the truth.
Without them, we yap at one another happily until we forget in our collective self satisfaction the arguments that made our ideas so compelling in the first place. Until, in the words of J.S. Mill, they become “dead dogma.” Until challenges to those beliefs become so threatening to us that we consider them blasphemy.
Dead dogma gets you burning cars and busted windows and precisely not one single inch closer to convincing a soul of the rightness of your cause. It is discourse fit only for toddlers, who weep and wail until they get their way, or for their parents, who, when pressed for reasons for their coercive orders, respond only with “Because we said so.”
Because we said so is all the rage these days.
