The Pestilent Heresy of Safety First

Or, exploring through Albert Camus and the Office Linebacker how a congressional hearing with three academics got over 100 million views.

In the opening sentence of his memoir, Fear, and Be Slain, Jack Seely, a British General and Member of Parliament, wrote, “Safety First is a vile motto.” He goes on, “It is, indeed, really a euphemism for not facing facts, for lack of confidence in oneself or one’s principles… if such maxims be needed for human conduct, Duty First… may form the basis for a rule of life… but Safety First is a soul destroying, pestilent heresy.”

Seely went to the Great War in 1914 – opening the war at the head of one of the last great calvary charges in history – and remained until the end, publishing his memoir in 1931.  Nearly 100 years later, we’re all familiar with the safety first mantra on college campuses.  In their 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt wrote about how safetyism has become a sacred value that prioritizes emotional safety over intellectual rigor.  This kind of safety is, of course, meant in a different sense than what Seely had in mind – the concept of emotional or intellectual safety would never have occurred to him, and physical safety on college campuses should very well be taken for granted – but mindset is the same.  His title – Fear, and be Slain (an unusually breathless title for the British-soldier-memoir genre) – is meant to say that boldness and courage are essential to physical (and, really, mental) survival in war (and, come to think of it, the office, as Terry Tate reminds us with his take on tippy-toeing).  In the war of ideas (that should exist) on university campuses, it is intellectual courage that is essential.  As Van Jones perfectly said, colleges must keep students intellectually and emotionally unsafe. “I’m not going to pave the jungle for you.  Put on some boots and learn how to deal with adversity.” In short, you must have the strength and courage to confront ideas you passionately disagree with.  Which is all to say: safety first in academia is also a soul destroying, pestilent heresy.

We have a sense of this from the December 5^th congressional testimony of the Presidents of MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania.  If yours isn’t one of the 105 million views of Bill Ackman’s X post of the exchange, the summary is this: Representative Elise Stefanick asked each if calling for the genocide of Jews violates (your university’s) code of conduct or rules regarding bullying or harassment.  Each responded rather poorly, saying, in brief, that it depended on the context.  Though Representative Stefanick’s exchange with President Magill stood out.

President Magill:  If the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment.

Rep. Stefanick (stunned): Conduct being committing the act of genocide?

President Magill: It can be harassment.

Throughout the exchange, President Magill smirked and smiled, giving the impression that the entire hearing was beneath her.  As Jonah Goldberg wrote, It’s the smirking, damnit; the suspected condescension of the elites for the rest of the country made manifest in the breezy sighs and smiles of these academic leaders on the question of genocide. 

But what has really touched a national nerve is the apparent hypocrisy.  Fareed Zakaria noted that elite universities have gone from centers of academic excellence to institutions pushing political agendas.  With ideology replacing academic rigor, we’ve seen the growth of “safe spaces, trigger warnings, micro aggressions.” This has led to “speech codes that make it a violation of university rules to say things that some groups might find offensive.” Zakaria says that having gone so far down this ideological road, these university presidents could not credibly make the claim that free inquiry is a priority on their campuses and that it applies to all students equally.  And without free inquiry, one wonders what purpose these universities serve.

Days later, President Gay apologized, and said that she had been “caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures.” (One might hope that the President of Harvard could manage an extended exchange with a member of congress without getting “caught up” in it.) She clarified her position by saying, “Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group… have no place at Harvard.” President Magill also changed her position in a two-minute-long video statement that halfway through included, “In my view it (calling for the genocide of Jews) would be harassment.” (President Magill has since resigned.)

It begs the question: What changed in the three days from the hearing to the apologies?  It would seem to have something to do with that soul destroying, pestilent heresy of intellectual safety.

---

There are those who are objectively consistent and those who are ideologically consistent.  The mark of the latter is that they are, well, inconsistent.  The mark of the former is that they gain or lose friends depending on the controversy of the day.

Take Albert Camus, one of the objectively consistent.  His falling out with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre was in part over his insufficient passion for the Algerian War for independence, but the root cause was their opposing views on ends and means. 

Sartre and de Beauvoir (and most of the post-World War II French philosophers) had big ideas about the future.  It’s understandable.  After witnessing the world’s greatest calamity from the front lines, the desire to take hold of mankind’s destiny with both hands and jam it through the eye of a needle toward a better world must have been overwhelming.  How else to answer the destruction of Europe and the loss of more than 20 million lives (or counting the direct and indirect results in all theaters of the war, 100 million)?  For de Beauvoir and Sartre, nearly any means justified the construction of a world that would end war and its root causes.

But Camus had his doubts.  For him, ends are illusive at best and dangerous at worst.  A messianic faith in our ability to mold the perfect future tends to a deadly consequentialism that can be as cruel as war.  This is what Camus had in mind when he described Marx as “the prophet of justice without mercy who lies, by mistake, in the unbeliever’s plot at Highgate Cemetery.” For Camus, the pursuit of paradise either in heaven or on earth requires all the same religiosity.

Rather, Camus said the best we can do is to attempt the right ethical decisions moment to moment; which is quite hard enough.  As he wrote in The Rebel:

When the end is absolute, historically speaking, and when it is believed certain of realization, it is possible to go so far as to sacrifice others.  When it is not, only oneself can be sacrificed, in the hazards of a struggle for the common dignity of man.  Does the end justify the means?  That is possible.  But what will justify the end?  To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.

Camus wrote the book in 1951 as an answer to the many influential western Leftists who sought to excuse Stalin’s crimes as the price of progress.  It was this that ended the friendship with Sartre.  He hated The Rebel, damned Camus as a counterrevolutionary, and responded with a series of personal attacks that ignored the book’s arguments entirely.  To Sartre – who would have condemned the West with all his might had it committed a fraction of Stalin’s crimes – Camus was a naïve contrarian who would trade the world’s great future for his own present conscience and bourgeois status. 

Camus did not respond to the criticism.

After all, it was the Marxists, not him, who believed that class determines what one may say.  But it was a petty and laughable accusation even so: Sartre grew up in privilege, and he let other people manage his domestic matters all his life.  Camus grew up in Algeria in poverty, where as a child he lived in a two-room apartment with his brother, uncle, grandmother, and deaf widowed mother who worked as a cleaning woman to support all of them.¹

The point, here, is that those who favor means prefer an objective ethical standard for behavior that holds, regardless.  These are the objectively consistent.  In contrast, those who favor ends will adopt or discard any value as it suits their perceived goals at any given time.  These are the ideologically consistent.  In American universities today, it would seem apparent which group holds sway.  

---

Actually, it’s worse than that.  It took five years from the publication of The Rebel and the Soviet invasion of Hungary before Sartre renounced Stalin.  In contrast, it took three days and some bad press for Presidents Gay and Magill to renounce their (already lukewarm) positions on free speech.    

In retrospect, it seems there were three options for Gay and Magill in the wake of the hearing.  One, defend their testimony as consistent with their ideological view of power.  Meaning: Israel has more power than the Palestinians, therefore speech critical of Israel (the oppressor in this dynamic) is permissible while speech critical of the Palestinians (the victim) should remain restricted.  Two, defend their testimony as consistent with need for free inquiry on campus, but acknowledge the double standard that exists among different groups, and pledge reform.  Three, capitulate to criticism, apologize for “hurtful words,” and call for further speech restrictions on campus. 

The first two would’ve had at least the benefit of demonstrating the courage of their convictions (much as option one arguably remains antithetical to an open society).  The third option was, of course, the one chosen; and also the worst of the three.  It demonstrated that there appears to be no guiding principle, whatever.

This lack of fundamental guiding principles today – or, in Seely’s take, so much as a helpful maxim such as duty first – is the problem today.  Shadi Hamid (one of the objectively consistent) wrote about this in the essay, America without God, for the April 2021 issue of The Atlantic.  Hamid noted that as religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen, asking: will the quest for secular redemption through politics doom the American idea? Hamid went on:

On the left, the “woke” take religious notions such as original sin, atonement, ritual, and excommunication and repurpose them for secular ends. Adherents of wokeism see themselves as challenging the long-dominant narrative that emphasized the exceptionalism of the nation’s founding. Whereas religion sees the promised land as being above, in God’s kingdom, the utopian left sees it as being ahead, in the realization of a just society here on Earth.²  

It's Camus v. Sartre – the clash of ends and means – all over again.  Indeed, there is nothing new under the sun.  But the difference today in the US is that it’s the middle versus both the far left and the right (so much of the latter having committed to empowering one man with unchecked power to crush their enemies, however perceived); thus leaving the majority of the country flanked by those illiberal forces on both sides who believe that the ends justify the means. 

Which, then, is the good news.  And it’s the reason Civil is here; to serve the vast majority who still believe in America’s founding ideals.  After all, it’s the pursuit (the means) of a more perfect union that matters.  We’ll never get to perfection (ends are an illusion), but the point is to keep trying and to be true to our values. If Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania can’t do so (and their opponents on the right won’t so so), no matter. We, the middle, outnumber them many to one, and easily have enough courage of conviction to spare.

Ian Allen is the CEO and cofounder of Civil

1. https://quillette.com/2019/03/26/albert-camus-unfashionable-anti-totalitarian/

2. Lest it seem that this article was only critical of the left, I should note that Hamid is also critical of the right.  He is, after all, objectively consistent and will hold both sides to task for failing to live up to an objective ethical standard; the standard in this case being the classical American values of tolerance, pluralism, and free expression.