A certain piece in The Atlantic recently made the rounds on Twitter. I don’t subscribe to The Atlantic, so I haven’t read it (I know, I know—hear me out), but the thesis runs as follows: college campuses are overwhelmingly liberal; therefore college conservatives find themselves constantly challenged and have to sharpen their beliefs and debate skills, whereas liberal students lean towards intellectual complacency. Setting aside the experience and data cited by the author, this strikes me as a reasonably accurate account of left-wing (though not liberal) students’ progression in today’s academy.1 Left-wing beliefs are not just widely trumpeted: they are gospel. Dissent amounts to heresy and will earn you immediate vocal opprobrium.2 Left-wing students rarely find their voices challenged in a way that is not immediately shut down via shaming or an outright heckler’s veto. Thus, left-wing students never learn how to defend their beliefs in a rigorous manner and instead proceed by parroting their catechism much the same way that fourth-graders in Sunday school parrot theirs.
I encountered a particularly galling example of this the other day. A friend admitted to feeling a sense of guilt for “living in this country” (i.e. the United States). I asked why. They cited America’s bad foreign policy and the facts that this is a rich country and they are comparatively well-off, while people in poorer countries endure a much lower quality of life. They also brought up the genocide of Native Americans. I asked what specific things they did or had done to contribute to these problems, and they mentioned paying taxes. I imagine they could also, given more time, have pointed to their regular consumption of products whose supply chain and production involve underpaid and dangerous labor. I have heard similar arguments from other progressive acquaintances, one of whom went so far as to say their being alive was, on net, negative for the world.
This is all ridiculous, and it would be outright funny if its implications weren’t so troubling. It is nothing more than Christian guilt retooled for the secular academic. The meek shall inherit the earth. The camel can more easily pass through the eye of the needle than the rich man enter the kingdom of god. Et cetera. We should all follow Mother Teresa’s example, or Saint Francis’s. Like the Christian,3 the progressive student sees the flaws of the world, undergoes an emotional reaction that ideology refashions into guilt, and emerges preaching self-flagellation.
This line of thinking persists—among Christians and progressives both—because it goes unchallenged in the insular social circles where members of these groups cocoon themselves. No one ever asks about the counterfactual. That is, they do not ask whether the world would be a better place if they were poor, or lived somewhere else, or refused to pay taxes or buy bananas or whatever (or if—and this is part of what I mean by troubling implications—they were dead). If they did ask these questions, they would see fairly quickly that the world would be worse off. One more person living in poverty would be worse than if that person stayed prosperous, and incrementally defunding global supply chains and production lines would do nothing to improve the lives of workers except in very few circumstances (which, of course, the zealot does not try very hard to uncover). Incrementally defunding the American government would also do more harm than good. Effective altruists get a lot of flack, some of it deservedly, but they at least try to develop logically and empirically defensible answers to these kinds of questions.
This self-flagellating line of thinking also exists in irreconcilable tension with other progressive tenets. It makes no sense to advocate for mass immigration, for example, if you think that people living in developed countries make the world a worse place just by living there. It also makes no sense to argue that developed countries’ economic ties to poorer countries harm the poorer countries while at the same time holding forth about the injustice of American embargoes of Cuba or Israel’s blockade of Gaza. But the nature of catechism tends towards contradiction, and progressives happily hold onto all these beliefs at once.
A much more sensible, much more reasoned, assessment would hold that it is no sin to live in a place where you have as much right to live as the next person,4 that it is no sin to buy food and drink and baubles, and that it is no sin to pay your taxes. There are indeed jobs and economic transactions that carry evil moral weight.5 But the progressive catechism makes a very feeble effort to identify them.
I don’t hang out with conservatives, so I feel less qualified to speak to the accuracy of this account as concerns conservative students. This is also, by the way, why I spend so much more time complaining about the left than about the right: I simply don’t have to deal with the irritations of right-wing stupidity in my day-to-day life.
The conservatives and libertarians don’t care so much about the opprobrium because they think it is entirely misguided, but the liberal students—as distinct from left-wing students—do care and therefore tend to keep their mouths shut politically to a greater degree than other groups.
To be clear, not all Christians are like this. Many have adopted a much more admirable interpretation of the faith.
Yes, you have as much right to live in the United States as anybody else, even if you have no Native American blood. The idea that your race or your ancestors’ birthplace gives you a greater right to live somewhere than others is a deeply right-wing idea, and it pains me to see self-styled progressives leaning into it. The genocide of Native Americans and their forcible expulsions from the places where they lived demand reparations, but those reparations should not take the form of excluding people from our country.
If progressives want to feel guilty about what they buy and change their behavior to improve the world, they could start by feeling guilty about eating animals and ceasing to do that. But most of them won’t because their motives lie less in improving the world and more in preaching the progressive catechism out of socially derived impulses.