Disagreement as defilement

PuerAzaelis

For those who have been formed largely by the mythical core of human culture, disagreement and alternative points of view may well appear to them not as matters for rational adjudication but as defilement from which they must be cleansed.

The mythical cosmos of many students today is defiled, befouled, and disordered by the presence of Ann Coulter or Charles Murray or Richard Spencer. Note that I am not describing here people who explain, discursively and analytically, why a given speaker should not be invited to speak; those people are working from what Kołakowski calls the technological core rather than the mythical. I am describing, rather, those whose revulsion is primarily expressed in actions of protest and refusal, sometimes though not often violent ones, or with words that do not offer any definite assertion.

When students at Middlebury College shout that Charles Murray is “racist, sexist, anti-gay,” to reply that Murray, after previously opposing gay marriage, has publicly endorsed it for several years would be to misconstrue the students’ mode of speech. Chants and curses, like beating on windows and rocking cars, don’t arise from the discursive rationality of the technological core; they arise from the symbolic order of the mythical core, and are a response to its disturbance.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/wokeness-and-myth-on-campus

Disagreement as defilement

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