Desire and Fate
A recent manifesto by the editors and reporters of the Columbia University student newspaper The Spectator denouncing that university’s failure to “protect” them during the demonstrations against the Gaza War and the subsequent decision of Columbia’s administration to call in the New York Police Department to break up first the student protest encampments and later an occupation of a campus building is emblematic not so much for the complaints that are being voiced, which are probably justifiable at least to an extent, but for the public health language the students employ. The Columbia student journalists write of “the trauma [italics mine] and suppression”* they have experienced. And that word order is key. For once one says that it is first and foremost one’s psyche rather than one’s principles that have been grievously harmed, one is actually depoliticizing the conflict, or, worse, demanding one’s political demands be met because of the psychic damage that will be done to one if they are not.
In fairness, the students are only using the “language their generation has been educated to use by the universities they attend,” as Adrian Bonenberger rightly pointed out to me on ‘X’. ** But that is precisely the point: the three most important reformist movements to have seized the imagination of the young in the West over the past half-century - humanitarian action, human rights, and now an identitarian, insurrectionary left - have all been profoundly anti-political —- humanitarianism, because it seeks to make aid a substitute for political action; human rights, because it attempted to bypass ideological debate by making an idol of international law that even worshippers of Baal would have thought excessive; and now the pro-Palestinian protests that ‘center’, to use the identitarian left’s favorite verb, the psychic fallout of losing a political battle. By doing this, of course, the students are also ‘centering’ themselves, but that is less noteworthy since that is what Western people do, even when ostensibly acting in solidarity with a non-Western people’s cause. What is noteworthy is the conflation of a political emergency with a psychological emergency. That used to be called narcissism; now, however, it seems to be part of a some imagined psychic bill of rights, one of whose principal elements is the right not to be traumatized.
*https://www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2024/05/04/letter-from-the/
**@AdrianBonenber1