When we dehumanise and demonise our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them.
NELSON MANDELA1
On the night of February 1, 2017, the University of California’s Berkeley campus exploded into violence. An estimated 1,500 protesters surrounded the building where Milo Yiannopoulos, a young, British, gay Trump supporter, was scheduled to speak. Yiannopoulos was formerly an editor at Breitbart News, a principal outlet of the “alt-right” movement that had come to national prominence during the previous year’s presidential campaign. He had been banned from Twitter the summer before when Twitter concluded that he had violated its policy regarding “inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others.”2 Yiannopoulos was a skilled provocateur—a master of the art of triggering outrage and then using that outrage to embarrass his opponents and advance his goals.3
The protesters’ goal was to prevent the speech from happening. Many of them came from local radical anarchist groups that call themselves “antifascists,” or “Antifa.”4 UC Berkeley officials claimed5 that only about 150 of the protesters were responsible for the vandalism and violence that ensued—knocking down a light generator;6 shooting commercial-grade fireworks7 into buildings8 and at police officers;9 smashing ATMs;10 setting fires;11 dismantling barricades12 and using them (as well as bats)13 to break windows; throwing rocks at police officers;14 and even hurling Molotov cocktails.15 The property damage (exceeding $500,000 for the university and town combined)16 was less chilling, however, than the physical attacks on students and others who attempted to attend the speech.
One man carrying a sign saying “The First Amendment is for everyone” was hit in the face, leaving him bloody.17 Others also suffered bloodying blows to the face and head as protesters attacked with fists, pipes, sticks, and poles.18 Recorded on video, a young woman sporting a red MAKE BITCOIN GREAT AGAIN baseball cap told a reporter, “I’m looking to make a statement by just being here, and I think the protesters are doing the same. Props to the ones who are doing it non-violently, but I think that’s a very rare thing indeed.” As she turned, the camera caught a black-gloved hand pepper-spraying her in the face.19
Masked Antifa protesters clad in black used flagpoles to batter a woman and her husband as they were pinned against metal barriers, unable to get away. The woman, Katrina Redelsheimer, was clubbed on the head, and her husband, John Jennings, was struck in the temple and began to bleed. Immediately afterward, other protesters blinded the couple and three of their friends by spraying them in the eyes with mace. As the friends cried for help, protesters punched them and hit them in the head with sticks, until onlookers pulled the victims over the barricades. Meanwhile, five or six protesters dragged Jennings a few feet away, where they kicked and beat him until bystanders pulled attackers off him as he lost consciousness.20 The police, according to Redelsheimer, had by this point barricaded themselves inside a building, refusing people entrance—which she learned when someone tried to help her get into the building to rinse her eyes and the police turned them away.21 Meanwhile, Pranav Jandhyala, a UC Berkeley student journalist and self-described “moderate liberal,” who used his cell phone to record events as they unfolded, was attacked by protesters, who tried to take his phone.22 When he fled, they chased him, punching him in the head, beating him with sticks, and calling him a “neo-Nazi.”23
The mob got its way. The speech was canceled. Police issued a “shelter-in-place” campus lockdown order24 and escorted Yiannopoulos to an undisclosed location.25
This all happened just ten days after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president. Tensions across the country were high, and the president’s inaugural address and first executive orders (among them, to close the borders to people from seven Muslim-majority countries)26 did little to calm them. The fact that some Berkeley students and residents reacted strongly to an anticipated speech by a pro-Trump provocateur does not prove that they are closed-minded or fearful of every idea they don’t like. But it’s important to take a close look at the February 1 riots at UC Berkeley, because they marked a turning point—an escalation of conflicts over campus speakers. Berkeley and its aftermath were the start of a new and more dangerous era. Since then, many students on the left have become increasingly receptive to the idea that violence is sometimes justified as a response to speech they believe is “hateful.” At the same time, many students on the right have become increasingly eager to invite speakers that are likely to provoke a reaction from the left.
Some early reports claimed that the violent, mask-wearing “black bloc” protesters were outside agitators, not students from UC Berkeley.27 It is impossible to know how many Berkeley students took part, because the university never undertook a public investigation into the riots to determine precisely who the black bloc protesters were. One UC Berkeley employee bragged on social media about beating Jennings—even posting a photo of Jennings unconscious on the ground—and several Berkeley students admitted that they had participated.28 One student who wrote about having joined Antifa explained in an op-ed that “black bloc tactics” (dressing in black, wearing black gloves, and masking faces) were used that night “to protect the identities of the individuals in the bloc,” and asserted that “behind those bandanas and black T-shirts were the faces of your fellow UC Berkeley [students].”
The failure of UC Berkeley to openly discipline any of the students who engaged in violence or vandalism during the mayhem29—even those who publicly admitted participating—and the fact that the police arrested just one person that night (for failure to disperse)30 seems to have taught the protesters an important lesson: Violence works. Unsurprisingly, the Antifa activists built on their success by threatening more violence in response to campus invitations to conservatives David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, and Ben Shapiro.31
The “Milo riot” at UC Berkeley caught the attention of the national and international media, not only because of its scale but because of its symbolism. This was, after all, the very place where the campus free speech movement started. In 1964, when left-leaning students demanded the right to advocate for political causes and hear controversial political speakers, Berkeley student Mario Savio, the leader of the movement, famously spoke of freedom of speech as “something that represents the very dignity of what a human being is.”32 Savio had marched with the civil rights movement in Mississippi the summer before, and, inspired by the power of their peaceful tactics, he began working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee when he returned to campus. It was that activity that first brought him into conflict with university authorities, leading up to his impassioned activism for free speech.33 The fact that in 2017, Berkeley students were protesting to shut down a speech—and even using vandalism and violence to do it—seemed ironic to many observers. Particularly troubling were the ways in which some Berkeley students justified the violence.
A few days after the riot, The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley’s leading student newspaper, ran five op-eds under the headline VIOLENCE AS SELF-DEFENSE,34 all of which offer examples of the Great Untruths and illustrate the cognitive distortions we described in chapter 2.
Here’s one excerpt from an essay titled “Condemning Protesters Same as Condoning Hate Speech”:
If you condemn the actions that shut down Yiannopoulos’ literal hate speech, you condone his presence, his actions and his ideas; you care more about broken windows than broken bodies. I can’t impeach Trump, and I can’t stop the alt-right from recruiting nationwide. I can only fight tooth and nail for the right to exist in my hometown. So it’s time for those waiting in the center to pick a side.35
Taken at face value, the author seems to be engaging in a number of cognitive distortions. The most evident is catastrophizing: If Milo Yiannopoulos is allowed to speak, there will be “broken bodies” on our side. I might lose my “right to exist.” Therefore, violence is justified, because it is self-defense. The author also engages in dichotomous thinking: If you condemn my side’s violence, that means you condone Yiannopoulos’s ideas. You must “pick a side.” You’re either with us or against us. Life is a battle between good people and evil people, and if you disagree with us, you’re one of the evil people.
The other essays are similar in appearing to employ multiple cognitive distortions to justify physical violence as a reasonable way to prevent a speech. Some of the essays offer Orwellian inversions of common English words. For example, from another essay: “Asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act.”36
A bit of background is needed here. Weeks earlier, at another college, Yiannopoulos had displayed the name and photo of a trans woman in order to mock her.37 In advance of the Berkeley event, rumors had circulated that Yiannopoulos planned to identify Berkeley students who were undocumented immigrants. He denied the allegation, the protesters offered no evidence for it, and it’s not clear how shutting down his talk on campus would have stopped him from revealing those names if that had been his intention. (He could have easily disseminated the information on the internet.) Nonetheless, you can see why people might think that calls for peaceful dialogue with Yiannopoulos are misguided or counterproductive. It is not irrational, in our nasty political climate, to worry that some of the things he might say could lead to online harassment or even physical harm to innocent people.
But if asking for peaceful dialogue is violent, then it seems that the word “violence” is taking on new meanings for some students. This is another example of concept creep. In just the last few years, the word “violence” has expanded on campus and in some radical political communities beyond campus to cover a multitude of nonviolent actions, including speech that this political faction claims will have a negative impact on members of protected identity groups.
Outside of cultures of safetyism, the word “violence” refers to physical violence. The word is sometimes used metaphorically (as in “I violently disagree”), but few of us, including those who claim that speech is violence, have any difficulty understanding the statement “We should reduce incarceration for nonviolent offenses.” However, now that some students, professors, and activists are labeling their opponents’ words as violence, they give themselves permission to engage in ideologically motivated physical violence. The rationale, as an essay in the Berkeley op-ed series argued, is that physically violent actions, if used to shut down speech that is deemed hateful, are “not acts of violence” but, rather, “acts of self defense.”38
This is not an uncommon view on many campuses. Almost one in five students surveyed in a 2017 Brookings Institution study agreed that using violence to prevent a speaker from speaking was sometimes “acceptable.”39 While some critics challenged the sampling used in that study, findings in a second study by McLaughlin and Associates were similar; 30% of undergraduate students surveyed agreed with this statement: “If someone is using hate speech or making racially charged comments, physical violence can be justified to prevent this person from espousing their hateful views.”40
If that sounds reasonable to you, just think about what the statement implies after concept creep and emotional reasoning expand the meaning of “hate speech” and “racially charged.” In a call-out culture, almost anything that is interpreted by anyone as having a negative impact on vulnerable members of the community—regardless of intent—can be called hate speech. The Columbia University linguist John McWhorter describes how the term “white supremacist” is now used in an “utterly athletic, recreational” way, as a “battering ram” to attack anyone who departs from the party line.41 McWhorter himself (who is African American) has been called a white supremacist for questioning received wisdom on matters related to race.42 But if some students now think it’s OK to punch a fascist or white supremacist,43 and if anyone who disagrees with them can be labeled a fascist or white supremacist, well, you can see how this rhetorical move might make people hesitant to voice dissenting views on campus.44
It’s hard to know whether the events at Berkeley played a causal role in later instances of violence on campus, but the spring semester of 2017 saw an increase in politically motivated violence, vandalism, and intimidation, all of which was justified by moral arguments about violence and safety, with the goal of shutting down speakers on campus. One of the most widely covered events occurred on March 2 in Vermont, at Middlebury College. Charles Murray, a libertarian scholar affiliated with the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, was invited by a student group to speak about his 2012 book, Coming Apart. The college’s Political Science Department cosponsored the talk. The book is about one of the most important and widely discussed topics of 2017: the social and economic dysfunction of the white working class, which (according to many commentators) made voters in that group respond more enthusiastically to the anti-immigrant and protectionist messages of Donald Trump.45 But in a previous book, published in 1994 (The Bell Curve), Murray and his coauthor, Richard Herrnstein, proposed that differences in average IQ scores found across racial groups may not be caused entirely by environmental factors; genetic differences may play a role, too.46 Some Middlebury students and professors maintained that anyone who makes such a claim is a white supremacist, and they came together to demand that Murray’s talk about his later book be canceled.47
When the disinvitation effort failed, a large number of students attended Murray’s talk just to shut it down by chanting in unison and shouting over his attempts to speak. College administrators had anticipated this possibility, so Murray and Allison Stanger, a political science professor who had agreed to question Murray after his talk, were moved to a different room so he could deliver his talk via livestream, behind a locked door. But students soon discovered where they were and continued to try to stop Murray from speaking by pounding on the walls and pulling fire alarms in the building. When the livestream ended, as Murray and Professor Stanger left the building, they were swarmed by protesters. One shoved Stanger; another grabbed her hair and pulled with such force that she suffered a concussion and a whiplash injury.48 As Murray and Stanger attempted to flee campus by car, protesters, some of them masked, pounded on the car, rocked it back and forth, and jumped onto the hood.49 Someone threw a large traffic sign in front of their car to prevent them from leaving, but public safety officials cleared a path, and the car eventually drove off to a dinner with selected students and faculty.50 The protesters, however, somehow discovered where the group had gathered for dinner, so the Middlebury administrators quickly moved the group to yet another location, this time miles from campus.51
After dinner, Professor Stanger went to the hospital, where her injuries were diagnosed. She required physical therapy for the next six months.52 Stanger later described her experience in a New York Times essay. “What alarmed me most,” she wrote, “was what I saw in the eyes of the crowd. Those who wanted the event to take place made eye contact with me. Those intent on disrupting it steadfastly refused to do so. They couldn’t look at me directly, because if they had, they would have seen another human being.”53
Just one month later, at Claremont McKenna College, near Los Angeles, about 250 students54 prevented fellow students from attending a speech by journalist, attorney, and social commentator Heather Mac Donald.55 In her 2016 book, The War on Cops, Mac Donald argued that Black Lives Matter protests made the police more hesitant to enter and actively engage in minority neighborhoods, thereby leaving the people in those neighborhoods less protected and more vulnerable to crime. Her theory had been the subject of lively national debate. As Neil Gross, a left-leaning sociologist, wrote in The New York Times: “There is now some evidence that when all eyes are on police misconduct, crime may edge up. Progressives should acknowledge that this idea isn’t far-fetched.”56 But for some students, allowing Mac Donald to present her thesis would be allowing “violence” on campus, so she had to be stopped. These students mobilized with a call on Facebook to “show up wearing black” and “bring your comrades, because we’re shutting this down.”57 Protesting students prevented anyone from entering the building to hear the talk, which Mac Donald gave via livestream as protesters pounded on the clear glass wall of the nearly empty ground-level lecture hall. Mac Donald was later evacuated from the building through a kitchen door and into a waiting police car.
After the event, the president of Pomona College58 (part of the Claremont consortium of five colleges) wrote a statement in defense of academic freedom and Mac Donald’s right to speak on campus. In response to his letter, three Pomona students wrote a letter, signed by twenty-four other students, explaining why Mac Donald should not be allowed to speak. As at Berkeley, the students asserted that the speech itself was a form of violence: “Engaging with her, a white supremacist fascist supporter of the police state, is a form of violence.”
The letter exemplified the dichotomous thinking of the Untruth of Us Versus Them:
Either you support students of marginalized identities, particularly Black students, or leave us to protect and organize for our communities without the impositions of your patronization, without your binary respectability politics, and without your monolithic perceptions of protest and organizing.59
The students continued: “If engaged, Heather Mac Donald would not be debating on mere difference of opinion, but the right of Black people to exist.” This sentence includes fortune-telling, as the students predict what Mac Donald would say. It also includes a rhetorical flourish that became common in 2017: the assertion that a speaker will “deny” people from certain identity groups “the right to exist.”60 This thinking is a form of catastrophizing, in that it inflates the horrors of a speaker’s words far beyond what the speaker might actually say. The students also called Mac Donald “a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, [and] a classist.” This is labeling running wild—a list of serious accusations made without supporting evidence.61
Where did college students learn to think this way? We don’t know what courses they took at Pomona, or whether they thought this way before they arrived on campus, but the letter overall shows the influence of the common-enemy identity politics we described in chapter 3, and it makes extensive use of the language of intersectionality. For example, the students end their letter with a demand that the president must send an email
to the entire student body, faculty, and staff by Thursday, April 20, 2017, apologizing for the previous patronizing statement [his defense of academic freedom], enforcing that Pomona College does not tolerate hate speech and speech that projects violence onto the bodies of its marginalized students and oppressed peoples, especially Black students who straddle the intersection of marginalized identities.
As we saw in chapter 3, this kind of identity politics amplifies the human proclivity for us-versus-them thinking. It prepares students for battle, not for learning.
The events at Berkeley, Middlebury, and Claremont McKenna were, in a sense, shocks from the left, which angered and radicalized some conservatives on and off campus. But there was also a continuing series of shocks from the right, which angered and radicalized the left, giving us a year of rapidly escalating mutual outrage. The most shocking event of all occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia. On the night of August 11, 2017, members of the self-described alt-right, including many neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen, marched across the fabled grounds of the University of Virginia, carrying Tiki torches and chanting neo-Nazi and white supremacist slogans, including “Jews will not replace us.” If you are looking for examples of common-enemy identity politics, it doesn’t get any clearer than this.
The next day, the racist mob marched through downtown Charlottesville, carrying swastika flags while making a pilgrimage to a statue of Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army in the American Civil War. During the march, six of the alt-right marchers beat a black man with metal pipes and poles, causing broken bones, lacerations, internal injuries, and a concussion.62 The marchers also violently clashed with Antifa counterprotesters.63 And a white supremacist who idolized Adolf Hitler64 stopped his car in front of a group of counterprotesters, backed up, and then sped forward, slamming into them, sending people into the air, badly injuring at least nineteen peaceful counterprotesters, and killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer, a paralegal described by friends as “a passionate advocate for the disenfranchised who was often moved to tears by the world’s injustices.”65 Her mother said that she began receiving threats in the aftermath of Heyer’s death, and as a result, her grave is in a secret location to protect it from being desecrated by neo-Nazis.66
The sight of Nazi flags and the murder of Heyer profoundly shook an already divided nation. It was a moment that brought together many Republicans and Democrats in leadership positions in a forceful denunciation of the white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Yet one voice was conspicuously absent from the conversation: President Trump’s. The president had by that time demonstrated a willingness to condemn many people harshly and promptly, yet he was restrained and slow in his criticism of the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville. On the day of Heyer’s death, when most Americans were looking to the president to clearly and unambiguously condemn neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, he condemned hatred, bigotry, and violence “on many sides.” Two days later, he read aloud a written statement that offered condemnation, but the very next day, in unscripted remarks, he said that there were “very fine people on both sides.”67 With those three words—“very fine people”68—the president showed that he was sympathetic to the men who staged the most highly publicized march for racism and antisemitism in the United States in many decades.
Charlottesville was a tragedy that presented an opportunity. With many Republicans, conservatives, and leaders from both business and the military distancing themselves from the president and his remarks,69 it would have been a good time to draw larger circles and change the landscape of American politics.70 On campus, however, where levels of fear and anger were understandably elevated in the wake of the events in Charlottesville, the more common response seemed to be an increase in us-versus-them thinking, including hostility aimed at people and groups (including many on the left) who otherwise could have become allies. The autumn of 2017 saw more episodes of students using the heckler’s veto to shut down classes and speeches than in any previous semester on record.71 For example, students at William & Mary shut down a speech by Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, the executive director of the Virginia affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), because the ACLU had defended the constitutional rights of the Charlottesville alt-right march organizers.72 The ACLU has consistently defended the rights of the poor, minority populations, LGBTQ individuals, and others whom progressives reliably defend. For example, it defended the right of a pregnant, undocumented teen to get an abortion,73 the rights of English translators of radical Islamic texts that call for jihad,74 and the rights of the Black Panthers.75 The ACLU defends rights, not ideologies. But William & Mary students chanted, among other things, “The revolution will not uphold the Constitution!” and “Liberalism is white supremacy!”76
A few weeks later, the president of the University of Oregon’s “State of the University” speech was shut down by close to fifty students who seized the stage, chanting “Nothing about us without us.” A student with a megaphone insisted, “We will not be ignored” and “Expect resistance to anyone who opposes us.” A student protester complained about the oppression of minority students, tuition increases, and indigenous rights, and described “fascism and neo-Nazis” as the reason for the protest.77 (The president, Michael Schill, whose extended family members were murdered by actual fascists during World War II, responded with a New York Times op-ed piece titled “The Misguided Student Crusade Against ‘Fascism.’”78) The following week, at the question-and-answer session of an event at UCLA titled “What Is Civil Discourse? Challenging Hate Speech in a Free Society,” sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, protesters from a group called “Refuse Fascism” disrupted the event.79
And then there’s Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. For thirteen months, beginning in September of 2016, campus activists tried to shut down the freshman humanities course because it focused on the thinkers of ancient Greece and the eastern Mediterranean world (who would be considered white today).80 These tactics often work against the protesters’ own goals, as they alienate many people who might otherwise support them. For example, one of the lecturers in the course was Lucía Martínez Valdivia, who tried to teach the work of Sappho, an ancient Greek poet from the island of Lesbos and an icon of both feminism and lesbian liberation.81 Martínez Valdivia found it hard to lecture while students were waving signs with aggressive and vulgar statements right next to her at the front of the classroom. She shared with students the fact that she has PTSD and asked them, out of concern for her health, not to protest in her classroom. They complained in an open letter82 that her request “creates a hierarchy [of traumas] where your traumas matter more” and accused her of being “anti-black,” “ableist,” and engaging in “gaslighting,” that is, manipulating victims by making them question their perceptions or their sanity. She was shocked that the college allowed these intimidating in-class protests to go on, and decided she had to speak out. In October 2017, she wrote a powerful essay in The Washington Post titled “Professors Like Me Can’t Stay Silent About This Extremist Moment on Campuses.” Here is an excerpt:
No one should have to pass someone else’s ideological purity test to be allowed to speak. University life—along with civic life—dies without the free exchange of ideas. In the face of intimidation, educators must speak up, not shut down. Ours is a position of unique responsibility: We teach people not what to think, but how to think. Realizing and accepting this has made me—an eminently replaceable, untenured, gay, mixed-race woman with PTSD—realize that no matter the precariousness of my situation, I have a responsibility to model the appreciation of difference and care of thought I try to foster in my students. If I, like so many colleagues nationwide, am afraid to say what I think, am I not complicit in the problem?83
Charlottesville was a national tragedy that sent shock waves through many American institutions, particularly universities. It occurred in the middle of the tumultuous first year of Donald Trump’s presidency. In the months afterward, there was a big increase in efforts by off-campus white supremacist organizations to provoke students and recruit members by putting up racist posters, flyers, and stickers on hundreds of campuses.84 We understand why so many students embraced more active and confrontational forms of protest. But because their activism is often based on an embrace of the Great Untruths and a tendency to attack potential allies, and because aggressive protests are often exactly what right-wing provocateurs are hoping to provoke, we believe that many student activists are harming themselves as well as their causes.
Most students oppose the use of violence. When asked in a poll conducted by FIRE whether they themselves would use violence to stop someone from speaking, only 1% said yes.85 But there is a much larger group—roughly 20% to 30%, according to the two surveys we described earlier—that is willing to support other students who use violence, drawing on the sorts of justifications offered by the Berkeley students. The most common justification is that hate speech is violence, and some students believe it is therefore legitimate to use violence to shut down hate speech. Setting aside the questions of moral and constitutional legitimacy, what are the psychological consequences of thinking this way?
Members of some identity groups surely face more frequent insults to their dignity than do straight white males, on average. A free-for-all attitude toward speech that allows people to say whatever they want with no fear of consequences can therefore affect people with different social identities differently. As we noted in chapter 2, some portion of what is commonly called political correctness is just being thoughtful or polite—using words in a way that is considerate to others.86 But students make a serious mistake when they interpret words—even words spoken with hatred—as violence.
In a widely circulated essay in The New York Times in July 2017, the argument that words can be violence was made by Lisa Feldman Barrett, a well-respected professor of psychology and emotion researcher at Northeastern University.87 Barrett offered this syllogism: “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence.”
We responded in an essay in The Atlantic, in which we noted that it is a logical error to accept the claim that harm—even physical harm—is the same as violence.88 Barrett’s syllogism takes the form that if A can cause B and B can cause C, then A can cause C. Therefore, if words can cause stress and stress can cause harm, then words can cause harm, but that does not establish that words are violence. It only establishes that words can result in harm—even physical harm—which we don’t doubt. To see the difference, just rerun the syllogism by swapping in “breaking up with your girlfriend” or “giving students a lot of homework.” Both of these can provoke stress in someone else (including elevated levels of cortisol), and stress can cause harm, so both can cause harm. That doesn’t mean that they are violent acts.
Interpreting a campus lecture as violence is a choice, and it is a choice that increases your pain with respect to the lecture while reducing your options for how to respond. If you interpret a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos as a violent attack on your fellow students, then you have a moral obligation to do something about it, perhaps even something violent. That is precisely how trolls manipulate their victims.
But if you keep the distinction between speech and violence clear in your mind, then many more options are available to you. First, you can take the Stoic response and develop your ability to remain unmoved. As Marcus Aurelius advised, “Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.”89 The more ways your identity can be threatened by casual daily interactions, the more valuable it will be to cultivate the Stoic (and Buddhist, and CBT) ability to not be emotionally reactive, to not let others control your mind and your cortisol levels. The Stoics understood that words don’t cause stress directly; they can only provoke stress and suffering in a person who has interpreted those words as posing a threat. You can choose whether to interpret a visiting speaker as harmful. You can pick your battles, devote your efforts to changing policies that matter to you, and make yourself immune to trolls. The internet will always be there; extremists will always be posting potentially offensive images and statements; some groups will be targeted more than others. It’s not fair, but even as we work to lessen hatred and heal divisions, all of us must learn to ignore some of the things we see and just carry on with our day.
A second and more radical response opens up when you reject the “speech is violence” view: you can use your opponents’ ideas and arguments to make yourself stronger. The progressive activist Van Jones (who was President Barack Obama’s green jobs advisor) endorsed this view in February of 2017 in a conversation at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Politics. When Democratic strategist David Axelrod asked Jones about how progressive students should react when people they find ideologically offensive (such as someone associated with the Trump administration) are invited to speak on campus, Jones began by noting the distinction we described in chapter 1 between physical and emotional “safety”:
There are two ideas about safe spaces: One is a very good idea and one is a terrible idea. The idea of being physically safe on a campus—not being subjected to sexual harassment and physical abuse, or being targeted specifically, personally, for some kind of hate speech—“you are an n-word,” or whatever—I am perfectly fine with that. But there’s another view that is now I think ascendant, which I think is just a horrible view, which is that “I need to be safe ideologically. I need to be safe emotionally. I just need to feel good all the time, and if someone says something that I don’t like, that’s a problem for everybody else, including the [university] administration.”90
Jones then delivered some of the best advice for college students we have ever heard. He rejected the Untruth of Fragility and turned safetyism on its head:
I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym.
Jones understands antifragility. Jones wants progressive college students to see themselves not as fragile candles but as fires, welcoming the wind by seeking out ideologically different speakers and ideas.
The “Milo Riot” at UC Berkeley on February 1, 2017, marked a major shift in campus protests. Violence was used successfully to stop a speaker; people were injured, and there were (as far as we can tell) no costs to those who were violent. Some students later justified the violence as a legitimate form of “self-defense” to prevent speech that they said was violent.
Hardly any students say that they themselves would use violence to shut down a speech, but two surveys conducted in late 2017 found that substantial minorities of students (20% in one survey and 30% in the other) said it was sometimes “acceptable” for other students to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking on campus.
The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a white nationalist killed a peaceful counterprotester and injured others, further raised tensions on campus, especially as provocations from far-right groups increased in the months afterward.
In the fall of 2017, the number of efforts to shut down speakers reached a record level.
In 2017, the idea that speech can be violence (even when it does not involve threats, harassment, or calls for violence) seemed to spread, assisted by the tendency in some circles to focus only on perceived impact, not on intent. Words that give rise to stress or fear for members of some groups are now often regarded as a form of violence.
Speech is not violence. Treating it as such is an interpretive choice, and it is a choice that increases pain and suffering while preventing other, more effective responses, including the Stoic response (cultivating nonreactivity) and the antifragile response suggested by Van Jones: “Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity.”
In the quotation that opened this chapter, Nelson Mandela warned us against the danger of demonizing opponents and using violence against them. Like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other advocates of nonviolent resistance, Mandela noted that violent and dehumanizing tactics are self-defeating, closing off the possibility of peaceful resolution. But what if the goal of a movement isn’t entirely peaceful resolution but, rather—at least in part—group cohesion? What might we see if we take a sociological approach to the new culture of safetyism?