On October 9, two days after Hamas launched a terrorist attack in Israel, Harvard University issued a formal statement. “We write to you today heartbroken by the death and destruction unleashed by the attack by Hamas that targeted citizens in Israel this weekend, and by the war in Israel and Gaza now under way.” Supporters of Israel reacted with anger. “The delayed @Harvard leadership statement fails to meet the needs of the moment,” wrote Harvard economist and former president Lawrence Summers. “Why can’t we find anything approaching the moral clarity of Harvard statements after George Floyd’s death or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when terrorists kill, rape and take hostage hundreds of Israelis attending a music festival?”
In response to the backlash, Harvard president Claudine Gay issued a follow-up statement the next day, saying, “As the events of recent days continue to reverberate, let there be no doubt that I condemn the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas. Such inhumanity is abhorrent, whatever one’s individual views of the origins of longstanding conflicts in the region.”
Rather than end the complaints about Harvard’s position on the Middle East, this statement merely angered a different set of complainants. This month, pro-Palestinian protesters occupied a building and demanded, among other things, “an immediate call by Harvard’s administration for a cease-fire.”
The war between Israel and Hamas has exposed an ideological schism on the left that had been growing beneath the surface for many years. For that reason, some of the bitter conflict that is turning progressive Americans against one another was unavoidable.
But a significant proportion of the domestic strife we are currently experiencing is completely avoidable. It is a product of the newfound expectation that institutions will issue statements about national and world events. The solution is to simply stop making such statements.
Institutions have been making statements about issues outside their purview for a long time. But the murder of Floyd was a break point. The video was so ghastly, everybody saw it, and it came against the backdrop of a pandemic and a president who had routinely shattered long-standing social norms.
Donald Trump not only attacked minorities in nakedly racist terms, he openly refused to treat people and even regions that didn’t support him as equal citizens. Presidents traditionally alternated between dual roles of party leader and symbolic head of state, but Trump essentially abdicated the latter role. A wave of schools, municipalities, and corporations rushed in to fill the vacuum of leadership and unity. Professional sports teams, which had traditionally commemorated causes like honoring the troops and opposing breast cancer, were soon displaying anti-racist messages.
The trouble, of course, is that the precedent was quickly extended to issues that were not as unifying. Suddenly, CEOs, mayors, and university presidents were routinely deciding what position they needed to take about various conflicts.
Progressives, in particular, have turned this new responsibility into a locus for activism. Thirty staffers in Chicago’s City Hall have endorsed a letter (anonymously, natch) demanding Mayor Brandon Johnson call for a cease-fire. Because the job responsibility of these leaders has been redefined to include position-taking, protesters are treating them as decision-making parties.
After University of Michigan president Santa Ono made a statement denouncing the October 7 terror attacks, protesters demonstrated outside his house, leading him to issue a second statement standing by the original but adding, “We mourn the loss of lives in both Israel and Gaza.”
This failed to satisfy the protesters, who rallied to demand the university “release a formal statement that clearly defines the massacre in Gaza as a genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign, led by Israel and aided by the United States.” Rallygoers chanted, “Ono, Ono, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide.”
The escalatory logic of moral absolutism had culminated in grouping the president of the University of Michigan with the great monsters of history. Protesters are going to protest, of course. But at least some of this agitation might have been avoided if Ono were never expected to say anything about off-campus news events.
The saddest account I’ve read of this dynamic is a Washington Post story about Teaneck, New Jersey. It’s a town I know well, because my wife grew up there. Teaneck, the first city to voluntarily desegregate after World War II, is one of the most integrated and tolerant places in the United States.
A recent influx of Muslim Americans, who now live alongside a large Jewish population, has naturally created some underlying political and social tension. Still, the account makes clear that the most direct source of internecine anger stemmed from efforts by the schools and City Council to make statements about the war. The superintendent of schools upset Jewish families by sending a letter about the conflict that “opened by referring to the conflict as part of a ‘cycle of violence in the Middle East’ instead of directly stating that Hamas carried out the attack against Israel.”
A planned City Council resolution set off a physical altercation:
On Oct. 17, as word spread that the township commission was considering a resolution on the matter, supporters of both Israel and the Palestinian cause crowded around the municipal building. The two sides jockeyed to get inside, at times pushing in front of each other. When the building reached capacity, opposing groups tried to shout each other down in the parking lot, waving Israeli and Palestinian flags. Later, some residents would call 911 to report feeling harassed or unable to walk to their cars safely.
Opponents of the resolution wanted to add calls for unity, which struck the most pro-Israel faction as a way of deflecting from a singular tragedy. The council cited 2020 as its precedent:
Goldberg and other critics of the timing of the unity resolution compared it to debates during the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. “They would have never done an ‘all lives matter’ resolution on the same day you are doing a ‘Black lives matter’ resolution because that would have been inappropriate,” Goldberg said. The commission eventually passed the unity resolution two weeks later.
They are correct about the 2020 precedent. The problem is that the precedent is bad. The statements after Floyd’s murder were the first step down a slippery slope.
Ono implicitly invoked the same precedent when he wrote, “Speaking with moral clarity against any act of terrorism is not, and should not, be controversial at the University of Michigan.”
The truth is that “moral clarity” is usually controversial. In a large, diverse society, disagreement over basic moral precepts is natural.
The central impetus for the development of liberalism was a way to avoid religious strife. The role of the government was not to impose “moral clarity,” but to do the opposite: to allow citizens to follow their own consciences. Polarization has turned politics into a kind of ersatz religion, and the most fervent believers are increasingly demanding every authority they can reach affirm their own pieties.
If we expect schools and towns and businesses to muster a clear position that everybody can agree on, we are setting them up for anger and betrayal. The goal of hatemongers is to import ethnic conflict into the domestic arena. The most obvious step leaders of our institutions can take is to stop trying to settle our moral beliefs and instead establish rules of the road that let people peacefully coexist with their disagreements.
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November 26, 2023 at 08:00PM
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Just Stop Making Official Statements About the News - New York Magazine
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