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The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies
From public intellectual and professor Robert Boyers, “ a powerfully persuasive, insightful, and provocative prose that mixes erudition and first-hand reportage” (Joyce Carol Oates) addressing recent developments in American culture and arguing for the tolerance of difference that is at the heart of the liberal tradition.
Written from the perspective of a liberal intellectual who has spent a lifetime as a writer, editor, and college professor, The Tyranny of Virtue is a “courageous, unsparing, and nuanced to a rare degree” (Mary Gaitskill) insider’s look at shifts in American culture—most especially in the American academy—that so many people find alarming.
Part memoir and part polemic, Boyers’s collection of essays laments the erosion of standard liberal values, and covers such subjects as tolerance, identity, privilege, appropriation, diversity, and ableism that have turned academic life into a minefield. Why, Robert Boyers asks, are a great many liberals, people who should know better, invested in the drawing up of enemies lists and driven by the conviction that on critical issues no dispute may be tolerated? In stories, anecdotes, and character profiles, a public intellectual and longtime professor takes on those in his own progressive cohort who labor in the grip of a poisonous and illiberal fundamentalism. The end result is a finely tuned work of cultural intervention from the front lines.
Written from the perspective of a liberal intellectual who has spent a lifetime as a writer, editor, and college professor, The Tyranny of Virtue is a “courageous, unsparing, and nuanced to a rare degree” (Mary Gaitskill) insider’s look at shifts in American culture—most especially in the American academy—that so many people find alarming.
Part memoir and part polemic, Boyers’s collection of essays laments the erosion of standard liberal values, and covers such subjects as tolerance, identity, privilege, appropriation, diversity, and ableism that have turned academic life into a minefield. Why, Robert Boyers asks, are a great many liberals, people who should know better, invested in the drawing up of enemies lists and driven by the conviction that on critical issues no dispute may be tolerated? In stories, anecdotes, and character profiles, a public intellectual and longtime professor takes on those in his own progressive cohort who labor in the grip of a poisonous and illiberal fundamentalism. The end result is a finely tuned work of cultural intervention from the front lines.
192 pages, Hardcover
Published September 24, 2019
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February 20, 2020
The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, The Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies condemns that tendency in today’s university toward political correctness, the suppression of speech, and the punishing of academics who violate the long—and growing--list of left-wing cultural norms. Lest you be inclined to dismiss this collection of essays as just one more right-wing screed, know this: its author Robert Boyers—English Professor at Skidmore for the last fifty years, director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute, editor of the esteemed intellectual quarterly Salmagundi—is as close to a card-carrying liberal as you are going to find.
Boyers—a teacher of fiction, a champion of multicultural works—has long been a proponent of diversity and tolerance. Over the years, though, as he has watched academia change, he has become worried by the changes he has witnessed. He is glad that the diversity of peoples and their differences are now universally tolerated, but he is dismayed to see that diverse opinions—and the free and open public expression of those differences—is too often seen as a threat to the “safe space” that the universal consensus demands. Ironically, the “liberal” university is becoming a threat to the liberal tradition itself.
The nine essays in this book touch on a variety of questions, including the meaning of “identity” (culturally, racially, personally), political correctness, privilege, “safe” and “unsafe” spaces, disability policing, cultural appropriation, microaggression. and “junk thought” (the use of slogans instead of ideas). Boyers treatment of these matters is thoughtful and measured. In short, Boyers, even at his most impassioned, is everything a liberal professor should be.
He offers no solutions. He does, however, provide us with a list of what not to do:
Not to be done:
The promulgation of ideas entertained without seriousness, that is, without any corresponding consideration of what would be entailed were they actually to be effected.
The use of ideas such as privilege, appropriation, ableism, and microagression to sow hostility, persecute other members of a community, and make meaningful conversations impossible.
The use of the classroom and the seminar to indoctrinate students and thus to send them off parroting views that they have not adequately thought through or mastered.
The creation of an “us versus them” orientation, underwritten by enemies lists and fueled by a
sense that on matters for which a consensus has been reached no dispute may be tolerated.
The weaponization of “virtue” for what Marilynne Robinson calls “class advantage,” with zealots adept mainly at trumpeting their own superior status and making “a fetish of indignation.”
September 27, 2019
Summary: A distinguished liberal scholar critiques the new academic orthodoxy, one that defines virtue through the excoriating of privilege, identity, safety, microaggression, ableism, and appropriation, creating an academic tyranny in which people fear to speak their minds under threat of denunciation.
Perhaps the most stunning thing about this book is who wrote it. This is not one more conservative diatribe against political correctness and speech codes in the university. Robert Boyers is a liberal arts professor teaching English at Skidmore as well as editing the literary quarterly, Salmagundi, which he has done for fifty years. He directs the New York State Summer Writers Institute. He does not have kind words to say about religious and political conservatives.
He also writes trenchantly against a new liberal academic orthodoxy of enforced virtue. He shows how constructs like privilege, microaggression, ableism, safety, identity, and appropriation, that may have a legitimate place in social critique, have become part of a surveillance culture on campuses where fellow scholars of good will can find themselves facing universal denunciation for the smallest, often inadvertent speech infractions, enforcing, while the denouncers assert their political virtues. It creates a culture in which faculty fear to say what they think, and students are taught all the things against which they should take offense.
Boyers is concerned with how this shuts down real inquiry and discourse, and often does little, if anything, to advance real efforts toward justice and equity with persons of color, or of other identities that these enforced virtues are meant to protect. He also is concerned with the lack of real intellectual underpinnings to the slogans used in the denunciation of transgressions, using Susan Jacoby's phrase "junk thought." One example comes in his discussion of cultural appropriation. As with other matters in the book, he recognizes legitimate instances of appropriation but then shows how all writers, including writers of color appropriate. He challenges the idea that those who are not of a particular culture have no right to write about it and cites examples of those who do so with real sympathy, with the intent to honor and honestly present that culture and who get it right in the eyes of persons from that culture.
Boyers in his epilogue soberly assesses the scene:
In many quarters we are now haunted by the specter of a liberalism increasingly drawn to denial and overt repression. Academic liberals who would have laughed thirty or forty years ago at the prospect of speech codes and draconian punishments for verbal indecorum or "presumption" are now not only compliant but enthusiastic about efforts to enforce standards many of them know to be intellectually indefensible. Those of us who are determined to call what is happening by its rightful name are astonished again and again, by the virulence of efforts to deny what is now unmistakable.
Boyers is describing the shift from the liberal value of honest, fearless exploration of ideas that allowed for difference and debate and discomfort. He decries the loss of a generosity of spirit that assumed good will of one's intellectual adversaries, replaced by a climate of suspicion, an "us versus them" mentality whose resting state is one of hostility and grievance.
What it seems to me Boyers is calling for is perspective and rigorous mental reflection. Privilege does exist. Microaggressions do occur. Sexual violence on campuses and #MeToo make it clear that campuses are often not safe places for women. "Black face" episodes remind us that cultural appropriation is all too real. It seems, though, that to find instances of this everywhere, even among those with the most impeccable liberal credentials, begs the question of whether we diminish the seriousness of flagrant instances by lumping inadvertent or even non-existent slights with these. To put all the onus of offense on the act also seems to take away the agency of being able to choose to be offended, or to choose other, perhaps more conciliatory responses that mend rather than rend the social fabric.
What Boyers doesn't address, perhaps in a desire to preserve the work he loves, is the connection between such toxic discourse and the eclipse of the humanities within the university. Yet might it not be contended that instances of the kind of speech codes and public shaming Boyers writes about occur most often with the context of the disciplines that fall within the humanities and social sciences? Might it be that the apparent dying of the humanities at many institutions is assisted by those within these disciplines digging each other's graves? What I think Boyers gets right is that these things are "not to be done" but rather vigorously resisted. Hopefully his fellow scholars will wake to this realization in time.
____________________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review e-galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
Perhaps the most stunning thing about this book is who wrote it. This is not one more conservative diatribe against political correctness and speech codes in the university. Robert Boyers is a liberal arts professor teaching English at Skidmore as well as editing the literary quarterly, Salmagundi, which he has done for fifty years. He directs the New York State Summer Writers Institute. He does not have kind words to say about religious and political conservatives.
He also writes trenchantly against a new liberal academic orthodoxy of enforced virtue. He shows how constructs like privilege, microaggression, ableism, safety, identity, and appropriation, that may have a legitimate place in social critique, have become part of a surveillance culture on campuses where fellow scholars of good will can find themselves facing universal denunciation for the smallest, often inadvertent speech infractions, enforcing, while the denouncers assert their political virtues. It creates a culture in which faculty fear to say what they think, and students are taught all the things against which they should take offense.
Boyers is concerned with how this shuts down real inquiry and discourse, and often does little, if anything, to advance real efforts toward justice and equity with persons of color, or of other identities that these enforced virtues are meant to protect. He also is concerned with the lack of real intellectual underpinnings to the slogans used in the denunciation of transgressions, using Susan Jacoby's phrase "junk thought." One example comes in his discussion of cultural appropriation. As with other matters in the book, he recognizes legitimate instances of appropriation but then shows how all writers, including writers of color appropriate. He challenges the idea that those who are not of a particular culture have no right to write about it and cites examples of those who do so with real sympathy, with the intent to honor and honestly present that culture and who get it right in the eyes of persons from that culture.
Boyers in his epilogue soberly assesses the scene:
In many quarters we are now haunted by the specter of a liberalism increasingly drawn to denial and overt repression. Academic liberals who would have laughed thirty or forty years ago at the prospect of speech codes and draconian punishments for verbal indecorum or "presumption" are now not only compliant but enthusiastic about efforts to enforce standards many of them know to be intellectually indefensible. Those of us who are determined to call what is happening by its rightful name are astonished again and again, by the virulence of efforts to deny what is now unmistakable.
Boyers is describing the shift from the liberal value of honest, fearless exploration of ideas that allowed for difference and debate and discomfort. He decries the loss of a generosity of spirit that assumed good will of one's intellectual adversaries, replaced by a climate of suspicion, an "us versus them" mentality whose resting state is one of hostility and grievance.
What it seems to me Boyers is calling for is perspective and rigorous mental reflection. Privilege does exist. Microaggressions do occur. Sexual violence on campuses and #MeToo make it clear that campuses are often not safe places for women. "Black face" episodes remind us that cultural appropriation is all too real. It seems, though, that to find instances of this everywhere, even among those with the most impeccable liberal credentials, begs the question of whether we diminish the seriousness of flagrant instances by lumping inadvertent or even non-existent slights with these. To put all the onus of offense on the act also seems to take away the agency of being able to choose to be offended, or to choose other, perhaps more conciliatory responses that mend rather than rend the social fabric.
What Boyers doesn't address, perhaps in a desire to preserve the work he loves, is the connection between such toxic discourse and the eclipse of the humanities within the university. Yet might it not be contended that instances of the kind of speech codes and public shaming Boyers writes about occur most often with the context of the disciplines that fall within the humanities and social sciences? Might it be that the apparent dying of the humanities at many institutions is assisted by those within these disciplines digging each other's graves? What I think Boyers gets right is that these things are "not to be done" but rather vigorously resisted. Hopefully his fellow scholars will wake to this realization in time.
____________________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review e-galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
July 19, 2020
The title of this book expresses a premise I already agree with, but I was curious to see how the author would make the case and from what perspective. The perspective is from that of a literature professor who's been devoted to Left-liberal causes for 50 years teaching at Skidmore College - someone who, in other words, can "talk the talk" (as he puts it in his introduction) of the social justice Left with his deep familiarity of the writings of people from oppressed identity groups, but also is susceptible to being shoehorned into the identity-bin of a septuagenarian white male academic. So that makes for an interesting tension through the book, and helps to make one of the main points of the book, that the social justice Left has become rigid in thinking about identity and toxic in reducing people to their identities, given the complex reality that we are all always more than those identities and the identities themselves tend to be shifting, overlapping, ambiguous, and conflicted.
I found his writing style highly readable - not ponderous or dry or academic in tone, but conversational and approachable without condescending to the reader or oversimplifying anything. Boyers has all the strengths of a good literary essayist. I was, however, constantly frustrated by the total absence of any kind of bibliography or footnote/endnotes or citing of sources. He often incorporates wonderful quotes from authors I wasn't familiar with, whom I'd love to look up, but my only recourse would basically be hoping to find titles of works by googling quote snippets on Google Books. That is really the only significant flaw in my view; otherwise, his thinking and logic are solid, his anecdotes and personal stories revealing.
Different chapters focus on different themes of social justice militancy in academia and the literary world - the uses to which the idea of privilege is put, identity, hostile environments and safe spaces, the policing of speech and thought, ableism, and cultural appropriation, among others. If, like me, the title sounds about right to you from the beginning, you'll probably find yourself not just nodding along, but appreciative of the nuanced discussions that take a charitable yet critical stance to the topics discussed. If the title is immediately off-putting, you will likely find the whole book offensive from beginning to end - but it will probably make for an excellent hate-read to complain about on Twitter!
I found his writing style highly readable - not ponderous or dry or academic in tone, but conversational and approachable without condescending to the reader or oversimplifying anything. Boyers has all the strengths of a good literary essayist. I was, however, constantly frustrated by the total absence of any kind of bibliography or footnote/endnotes or citing of sources. He often incorporates wonderful quotes from authors I wasn't familiar with, whom I'd love to look up, but my only recourse would basically be hoping to find titles of works by googling quote snippets on Google Books. That is really the only significant flaw in my view; otherwise, his thinking and logic are solid, his anecdotes and personal stories revealing.
Different chapters focus on different themes of social justice militancy in academia and the literary world - the uses to which the idea of privilege is put, identity, hostile environments and safe spaces, the policing of speech and thought, ableism, and cultural appropriation, among others. If, like me, the title sounds about right to you from the beginning, you'll probably find yourself not just nodding along, but appreciative of the nuanced discussions that take a charitable yet critical stance to the topics discussed. If the title is immediately off-putting, you will likely find the whole book offensive from beginning to end - but it will probably make for an excellent hate-read to complain about on Twitter!
January 18, 2023
As my school district eliminates and discourages the reading and study of literature (all literature not just the “the western canon”) from the high school curriculum in favor of internet searches and YouTube binging, Boyers, whose liberal record is beyond dispute, provides a sharp critique of the dangers of removing dissenting ideas and opinions and people from the academy as a method of “protecting” others from harm and creating a “safe” cultural space. Isn’t it the point to have dissent, to confront our own vulnerability as a way to strengthen and fortify, to exist in tension and ambiguity so as to continually carve out and create a better world? Shouldn’t we read literature deeply, challenging what’s to be problematic without cancelling or removing the work altogether? It seems that kind of logic reflects the fundamentalism of the right, who’d censure or burn works perceived to be distasteful or morally repugnant. One of my favorite memories teaching last year was the the overwhelming disdain my students had for Jane Eyre’s decision to reunite with Rochester. Their brilliant musings and salient points fostered a formidable analytical position about gender and femininity. But without the sounding board of Jane Eyre, I don’t think we would have had a space to develop those ideas. Eliminating Jane from the curriculum would erase that particular moment of elucidation altogether.
December 26, 2021
Maybe 3.7. So, I was attracted to this book after a couple years of 1. being subjected to the tyranny of virtue myself, and also 2.watching with interest as the world goes off the rails and refuses to say any woke or woke-adjacent emperor has no clothes.
The author is a professor steeped in liberal academia whose decades of experience give him ample material, background, and experience to grapple with what we will have wrought. I would say this is still very much one person's perspective. The great thing is, fun fact, you don't actually have to agree with people when you have a discussion.
This is not a long book and it really just touches lightly on several different aspects that could all be explored more in depth. But, the prose is occasionally academic and not a light breezy read.
Bottom line: ideas and discussion of ideas are important.
The author is a professor steeped in liberal academia whose decades of experience give him ample material, background, and experience to grapple with what we will have wrought. I would say this is still very much one person's perspective. The great thing is, fun fact, you don't actually have to agree with people when you have a discussion.
This is not a long book and it really just touches lightly on several different aspects that could all be explored more in depth. But, the prose is occasionally academic and not a light breezy read.
Bottom line: ideas and discussion of ideas are important.
June 29, 2019
Worthy Conversation. Boyers is by his own admission a liberal academic. In that, he means both that he genuinely favors much of the current progressive political agenda, but also the more classical sense of liberalism at least in regards to free and open speech. This discussion is thus from that point of view, critiquing the more "hard core" progressives for their lack of civility and commitment to free speech while holding fast to his commitments to ideas such as anthropogenic climate change, racial justice, and other tropes of the left. Boyers is very clearly of the old and dying breed that can disagree with someone while still genuinely respecting them, and this approach is abundantly evident throughout this text. Very much recommended, though likely a fair degree academic for many.
January 27, 2020
"To be liberal is not to back down or back away. I so declare, even as a great many of those in my own cohort quietly, quiescently line up behind the cadres of those determined to create an environment largely populated by the cowed and compliant."
I don't give books five stars very often - this book is a superb critique of the heretic-hunting and junk-thought commonplace within the academy today, written by a man who is himself an "old-school liberal", dismayed by much of what he sees around him. I probably most appreciated the "junk thought" chapter toward the end myself because I see it all the time... when there is some activist narrative we desire to promote then anything, no matter how low-quality, said in support of that narrative is perfectly acceptable, and only the courageous shall challenge it.
But being a liberal himself, many of his critiques come down to saying something like - "OK, the big idea you are promoting here has some value certainly, but where we have gone with it is terrible". And so I think, for example, the author would certainly affirm the idea that the concepts of racial identity, and even racial privilege, point to something real and are worthy of discussion. But then he would go on to say that, in the complexity of the world, there is so much more to the story that we are inclined to ignore or deny:
Are we not all privileged in some ways and not in others, and is not the color of our skin actually one of the less reliable indicators as to what might be reasonably expected of us?
Is not the elevation of lived experience, with the attached idea that the experiences of a marginalized identity can never be truly understood by anyone from a different identity, harmful to mutual understanding and to culture? How dare a white writer depict the experiences of a black teenager she could not possibly comprehend.
Although it is certainly possible to appropriate something from another culture in order to demean that culture, is not the whole idea of "cultural appropriation" as deployed today mostly absurd? "To say that art in general - all art - has inevitably to do with appropriation is to say what is clear to anyone who has made art and attempted to think about it."
Is it not possible that the whole idea of racial identity can be stifling, laying expectations upon individuals that they may not want or cannot meet? "The rage for 'identity' too often bespeaks a preference for simplicity rather than for complexity."
It would be nice to describe the whole book to you (perhaps you should just purchase it and read it), but you will also find herein (with many examples that I cannot now share):
1. Critiques of campus diversity culture and the culture of ideological conformity and "plurality of sameness" that it often truly serves to promote. "How bizarre that a culture officially committed to diversity and openness should be essentially conformist." Once you "see this" hypocrisy in so much of the way we talk about diversity today, you can never really un-see it. (On that note, this would be a stupendous book for a college diversity committee to actually read.)
2. Critiques of the harm caused when we promote the policing of language and encourage readers to take offense, and writers to self-censor, when no offense is intended. "...if I were to sign on to this business and learn to take offense where none was intended, I'd soon discover that just about every conversation had become a minefield, and I'd be accusing even my friends of insensitivity."
3. An interesting critique of the "pseudoreligion of victimhood" that suggests that, as groups within America that have traditionally had their own culture have begun to lose it as they blend into wider American life, victimhood itself has become, very unfortunately, a defining aspect of the identity.
4. Critiques of judging art for whether it has the right ideological frame of mind and promotes the right views rather than judging art as art with all its nuance and complexity (and sometimes uncomfortableness for the viewer).
Well I wrote too much now - highly recommended.
I don't give books five stars very often - this book is a superb critique of the heretic-hunting and junk-thought commonplace within the academy today, written by a man who is himself an "old-school liberal", dismayed by much of what he sees around him. I probably most appreciated the "junk thought" chapter toward the end myself because I see it all the time... when there is some activist narrative we desire to promote then anything, no matter how low-quality, said in support of that narrative is perfectly acceptable, and only the courageous shall challenge it.
But being a liberal himself, many of his critiques come down to saying something like - "OK, the big idea you are promoting here has some value certainly, but where we have gone with it is terrible". And so I think, for example, the author would certainly affirm the idea that the concepts of racial identity, and even racial privilege, point to something real and are worthy of discussion. But then he would go on to say that, in the complexity of the world, there is so much more to the story that we are inclined to ignore or deny:
Are we not all privileged in some ways and not in others, and is not the color of our skin actually one of the less reliable indicators as to what might be reasonably expected of us?
Is not the elevation of lived experience, with the attached idea that the experiences of a marginalized identity can never be truly understood by anyone from a different identity, harmful to mutual understanding and to culture? How dare a white writer depict the experiences of a black teenager she could not possibly comprehend.
Although it is certainly possible to appropriate something from another culture in order to demean that culture, is not the whole idea of "cultural appropriation" as deployed today mostly absurd? "To say that art in general - all art - has inevitably to do with appropriation is to say what is clear to anyone who has made art and attempted to think about it."
Is it not possible that the whole idea of racial identity can be stifling, laying expectations upon individuals that they may not want or cannot meet? "The rage for 'identity' too often bespeaks a preference for simplicity rather than for complexity."
It would be nice to describe the whole book to you (perhaps you should just purchase it and read it), but you will also find herein (with many examples that I cannot now share):
1. Critiques of campus diversity culture and the culture of ideological conformity and "plurality of sameness" that it often truly serves to promote. "How bizarre that a culture officially committed to diversity and openness should be essentially conformist." Once you "see this" hypocrisy in so much of the way we talk about diversity today, you can never really un-see it. (On that note, this would be a stupendous book for a college diversity committee to actually read.)
2. Critiques of the harm caused when we promote the policing of language and encourage readers to take offense, and writers to self-censor, when no offense is intended. "...if I were to sign on to this business and learn to take offense where none was intended, I'd soon discover that just about every conversation had become a minefield, and I'd be accusing even my friends of insensitivity."
3. An interesting critique of the "pseudoreligion of victimhood" that suggests that, as groups within America that have traditionally had their own culture have begun to lose it as they blend into wider American life, victimhood itself has become, very unfortunately, a defining aspect of the identity.
4. Critiques of judging art for whether it has the right ideological frame of mind and promotes the right views rather than judging art as art with all its nuance and complexity (and sometimes uncomfortableness for the viewer).
Well I wrote too much now - highly recommended.
March 8, 2020
Boyers writes here from the perspective of someone who has been a professor in the academy for some 50 years, a leader of writing workshops, the founder and editor of Salmagundi, a literary quarterly, and a self-described liberal. From this perspective he decries what is happening in academia with the intolerance and illiberal movement sweeping the academy under the banners of diversity and identity politics. He is appalled by the way free discussion and critical thinking seems to have collapsed in favor of a mono-culture that seeks to drive away all dissent rather than engaging it or persuading those it disagrees with. Policing of language in various forms is something he finds particularly distasteful, for example he devotes a chapter to the attempt to eliminate so-called ableist language from the campus. In short, he writes against the tyranny of a virtue, what people on the right might call the PC Culture that has overthrown campuses, driving out dissent in the misguided attempt to create safe spaces in which everyone thinks and speaks from within the bubble. It is an argument that has cropped up in other books late, for example The Assault on American Excellence from a liberal perspective and The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture from the right. he has chapters addressing the attempt to create a total cultural environment without dissenting voices, willing what can't be willed, use of words like hostile and unsafe to silence voices, the identity trap, policing disability, attack on appropriation, and a general lament about the way we live now ("Junk Thought") and a short epilogue on what is NOT to be done anymore if we are to escape this total cultural environment.
Some may just dismiss this book as the howl of the old order against being called out for its crimes and misdemeanors, but for me it is part of a growing conversation that recognizes that there is something gone wrong in the trajectory of the liberal movements towards greater equality and diversity. The insistence by cultural warriors that everyone get on the line or risk being silenced, fired, or shamed--labeled as racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic members of an old order that needs to be driven from the field. Anyone who has hesitated to share their thinking knows that it is absolutely true that the academy is far from a place open to the robust sharing of perspectives and ideas now, with even outcomes for courses being written with the cultural warrior perspective baked in. Indoctrination has come to the campus in no small degree and I'm on the side of those who call it out from left, right, or center.
Some may just dismiss this book as the howl of the old order against being called out for its crimes and misdemeanors, but for me it is part of a growing conversation that recognizes that there is something gone wrong in the trajectory of the liberal movements towards greater equality and diversity. The insistence by cultural warriors that everyone get on the line or risk being silenced, fired, or shamed--labeled as racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic members of an old order that needs to be driven from the field. Anyone who has hesitated to share their thinking knows that it is absolutely true that the academy is far from a place open to the robust sharing of perspectives and ideas now, with even outcomes for courses being written with the cultural warrior perspective baked in. Indoctrination has come to the campus in no small degree and I'm on the side of those who call it out from left, right, or center.
June 4, 2021
Wish I could afford to buy these books and mark them up but back to the library so a few notes...
p.5 "Say if you like the privilege is and advantage, unearned or earned, and you will be apt to ask several important questions. Earned according to whom? Unearned signifying shameful or immoral? The advantage to be renounced or held on to? To what end? ...Evidence anywhere that the consciousness raising directed in recent years at privilege has issued a substantial reduction in inequality or created more generous public discourse? ..."
Diversity in the academy too often a plurality of sameness.
"Reeducation" "Rehabilitation"
"Party lines make for intellectual monotony and bad prose" and result in "demands for intellectual simplicity." - Susan Sontag
Interesting chapter on disability studies and the banning of ableist language like "blind" and "deaf". "Talk a walk in my shoes." Bias reports. Keep Skidmore safe posters. This is a really great chapter on how literature/art is supposed to be discomfiting. And how books like The Woman Upstairs have complex messy unreliable narrators but if students are trained to read in binaries, to reduce novels to a single message, to insist that this character is simply a "victim" or an "abuser" well of course... this makes most art unintelligible because it's unable to work on multiple levels etc. It's a great loss.
Also fascinating discourse on appropriation. The idea that white people cannot collect or appreciate or engage with non-white subject matter/art etc. The famous painting of Emmitt Till in the Whitney that folks wanted to be burned. The idolatry of origins. The reemergence of old Puritan ideas of sin and evil. The politicization of all art.
"The last mass trials are going to be a great success there are going to be fewer but better Russians." - Ernst Lubitsch, Ninotchka
"What to me is truly frightful is not the quality of what everyone agrees on, but the very fact of universal agreement." - Alexander Nehamas
The role of the eccentric in keeping societies from slipping into tyranny.
"Making political claims that are based on identity is what white supremacy is." - Jill Lepore
"How to define provincialism? As the inability or the refusal to see one's own culture in the large context?" -Milan Kundera
Losing arguments as a way to learn things and get over the ego/ not care who's right.
"What began as concrete activism aimed at getting justice devolved into abstract gestures unconcerned with justice." -John McWhorter
p.5 "Say if you like the privilege is and advantage, unearned or earned, and you will be apt to ask several important questions. Earned according to whom? Unearned signifying shameful or immoral? The advantage to be renounced or held on to? To what end? ...Evidence anywhere that the consciousness raising directed in recent years at privilege has issued a substantial reduction in inequality or created more generous public discourse? ..."
Diversity in the academy too often a plurality of sameness.
"Reeducation" "Rehabilitation"
"Party lines make for intellectual monotony and bad prose" and result in "demands for intellectual simplicity." - Susan Sontag
Interesting chapter on disability studies and the banning of ableist language like "blind" and "deaf". "Talk a walk in my shoes." Bias reports. Keep Skidmore safe posters. This is a really great chapter on how literature/art is supposed to be discomfiting. And how books like The Woman Upstairs have complex messy unreliable narrators but if students are trained to read in binaries, to reduce novels to a single message, to insist that this character is simply a "victim" or an "abuser" well of course... this makes most art unintelligible because it's unable to work on multiple levels etc. It's a great loss.
Also fascinating discourse on appropriation. The idea that white people cannot collect or appreciate or engage with non-white subject matter/art etc. The famous painting of Emmitt Till in the Whitney that folks wanted to be burned. The idolatry of origins. The reemergence of old Puritan ideas of sin and evil. The politicization of all art.
"The last mass trials are going to be a great success there are going to be fewer but better Russians." - Ernst Lubitsch, Ninotchka
"What to me is truly frightful is not the quality of what everyone agrees on, but the very fact of universal agreement." - Alexander Nehamas
The role of the eccentric in keeping societies from slipping into tyranny.
"Making political claims that are based on identity is what white supremacy is." - Jill Lepore
"How to define provincialism? As the inability or the refusal to see one's own culture in the large context?" -Milan Kundera
Losing arguments as a way to learn things and get over the ego/ not care who's right.
"What began as concrete activism aimed at getting justice devolved into abstract gestures unconcerned with justice." -John McWhorter
December 24, 2022
Robert Boyers is a long-time professor or English at Skidmore College, esteemed public intellectual, and editor of Salmagundi--an international quarterly magazine of politics, culture, literature and the arts. This book raises alarms about the noxious--some might call it "McCarthyite"--values espoused by the radical left that have taken hold at American colleges and universities . At issue is the desire to censor views/practices alleged to to antithetical (or insufficiently sympathetic) to women, those who are physically or mentally challenged, and minorities of color. The popular short-hand term, shalowly appropriated by conservatives, but not only applied by those on the right, which best captures these values is "political correctness". But this simple label does not begin to convey the serious danger to traditional liberalism of the movement that Boyers describes by presenting many real-life examples of how proponents have shuttered true intellectual debates, denied tolerance of dissent, and marginalized and vilified anyone with the audacity to disagree. In nine related essays, Boyers assails those academics brought up in the same liberal milieu as Boyers himself who buy into this growing illiberal orthodoxy as well as their impressionable students. The Tyranny of Virtue is a timely corrective from the perspective of traditional liberalism (what now has been shoved into the political center) to a trendy mindset that threatens the foundational norms of the academy and intellectual discourse more generally.
December 26, 2025
The book is a critique of some of the current trends in the culture of political correctness primarily as it is being promulgated within the academic world. He opened with a chapter that discusses privilege and asks what exactly it is, and whether a person can be classified only in terms or race, or gender, or sexual orientation or indeed any other category. He then goes on to describe the academy as a total cultural environment in which conformity with political correctness and identity as currently in fashion is encouraged to the point of compulsion. He then argues that identity is complex and that focussing on one aspect of identity is a trap – identity can be gay/straight, white/black, Christian/Jewish/etc – and that the alpha characteristic is not exclusively male.
In a chapter on ideas and fear of diversity, Boyer observed that once upon a time, conservatives were reluctant to debate, perceiving that they were self-evidently "right", but now it’s the left that is uncomfortable with debate and actively tries to shut it down. He also noted that this hostility to differences of outlook and the supposed shock experienced by those hearing them has led to demands for “safe spaces” on campus. He also observed that those with passionate intensity won’t engage in actual debate, citing WB Yeats, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity", and then cited some common arguments against debate: all values are “constructions”; people can only grasp what their tribe, culture or faction allows them to; argument is a sign that there’s still dispute; and now’s not a good time for ideas. Citing a possible appointment of a CDO (chief diversity officer) as something that should raise a red flag, he noted that those who argue for diversity neglect to argue for diversity of opinion, instead arguing that the job of the CDO is to promulgate and enforce the party line.
The book then tackled and took apart the claims of “cultural appropriation”, noting that just about all art across its many forms has echoes of earlier artists and works of arts, arguing that so-called appropriation is next to impossible to avoid. Noting that the term "appropriation" implies taking what inherently belongs to another, he countered this with the question: does a work influenced by works in a given culture make it more difficult for artists in that culture to earn a living or produce distinctive arts? It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that the answer is “no”. Towards the end of the book, he cited the recent controversy that had arisen concerning the 1928 painting by the German artist Winold Reiss of the jazz age titled “Hot Chocolate” as if its name was somehow an act of appropriation. Boyer noted that the painting’s name was that of a Fats Waller musical revue, something the appropriation polemicists omitted to mention.
While overall an excellent book, it had its weaknesses. Although it made a competent argument on cultural appropriation, it wasn’t nearly as strong as those made by Lionel Shriver when she spoke at an Australian writers’ Festival. Similarly his argument on the language by political correctness didn’t have the same strength as that by Robert Hughes in "The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America" who also mounted a strong defence of the Western literary canon in response to attacks on it by the politically correct lobby. That being said, the book’s strengths included its highlighting of the corrosive effect of political correctness on debate in academia, the observation that "systemic racism" is an idea that now cannot be questioned, the parallels it presented between the conformity described in Milosz’s The Captive Mind and the current climate of what passes for debate in American academia and, what for me is the gem of this book, the observation of the ‘polite bigotry’ that makes it acceptable to target groups or persons not because of what they have done but because of what they are.
In a chapter on ideas and fear of diversity, Boyer observed that once upon a time, conservatives were reluctant to debate, perceiving that they were self-evidently "right", but now it’s the left that is uncomfortable with debate and actively tries to shut it down. He also noted that this hostility to differences of outlook and the supposed shock experienced by those hearing them has led to demands for “safe spaces” on campus. He also observed that those with passionate intensity won’t engage in actual debate, citing WB Yeats, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity", and then cited some common arguments against debate: all values are “constructions”; people can only grasp what their tribe, culture or faction allows them to; argument is a sign that there’s still dispute; and now’s not a good time for ideas. Citing a possible appointment of a CDO (chief diversity officer) as something that should raise a red flag, he noted that those who argue for diversity neglect to argue for diversity of opinion, instead arguing that the job of the CDO is to promulgate and enforce the party line.
The book then tackled and took apart the claims of “cultural appropriation”, noting that just about all art across its many forms has echoes of earlier artists and works of arts, arguing that so-called appropriation is next to impossible to avoid. Noting that the term "appropriation" implies taking what inherently belongs to another, he countered this with the question: does a work influenced by works in a given culture make it more difficult for artists in that culture to earn a living or produce distinctive arts? It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that the answer is “no”. Towards the end of the book, he cited the recent controversy that had arisen concerning the 1928 painting by the German artist Winold Reiss of the jazz age titled “Hot Chocolate” as if its name was somehow an act of appropriation. Boyer noted that the painting’s name was that of a Fats Waller musical revue, something the appropriation polemicists omitted to mention.
While overall an excellent book, it had its weaknesses. Although it made a competent argument on cultural appropriation, it wasn’t nearly as strong as those made by Lionel Shriver when she spoke at an Australian writers’ Festival. Similarly his argument on the language by political correctness didn’t have the same strength as that by Robert Hughes in "The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America" who also mounted a strong defence of the Western literary canon in response to attacks on it by the politically correct lobby. That being said, the book’s strengths included its highlighting of the corrosive effect of political correctness on debate in academia, the observation that "systemic racism" is an idea that now cannot be questioned, the parallels it presented between the conformity described in Milosz’s The Captive Mind and the current climate of what passes for debate in American academia and, what for me is the gem of this book, the observation of the ‘polite bigotry’ that makes it acceptable to target groups or persons not because of what they have done but because of what they are.
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November 19, 2021Not quite resonant. I'm torn by most of the book. Marilynne Robinson was a little generous when she said that Boyers is both sympathetic and combative; he is mostly combative. As a result, Boyers, a self-described classic 1960s liberal, is frequently uncharitable towards the "inflamed" progressives with whom he takes issue. In his passionate pursuit of dissent, Boyers does make a couple of good points in most of the essays, though. Usually his stronger points pertain to opacity, ambiguity, ambivalence, or something else that might disrupt the rigid moral certainty of bias probes, "thought police," and those who call for such measures. So maybe an irenic specialist in a hermeneutics of opacity would be a better pick to serve as lead dissenter in an increasingly hegemonic academic culture.
October 25, 2019
I got little out of this other than the following: "Privilege had been invoked as a noise word intended to distract all of us from the substance of our discussion. We will pay a price for creating a generation unwilling to differentiate between offenses and casual utterances. . . . blame is always bound to simplify one's understanding." We need to stop making excuses and passing blame, and accept responsibility for our words and actions. The condemnation of "political correctness" is an excuse not to treat others with respect and to think before speaking. The Golden Rule is golden for a reason.
April 28, 2024
It is funny because for being such a liberal highly educated New York professor Boyers has a very skeptical way of talking about systemic issues like misogyny and racism to the point where he dismisses any minority critiquing the systemic way America has kept minorities down as literal noise and excuses. He has a very pull yourself up by your boot straps way of thinking that (if he didn’t remind us so much of his liberal, working class, Jewish background) one would read as right wing. I get what he’s trying to say. Don’t let a spirit of victimhood become pathological. but I think you can be aware and talk about things like systemic racism without using it as an excuse for everything. I’m not in academia so I’m probably out of my depth but this does read as a guy who has been in academia for a long time and has kind of become disenchanted with his students and their pointless virtue signaling.
November 26, 2019
I heard an interview of Robert Boyers about this book and was excited to read it. Robert Boyers has a very important message but unfortunately the book is nearly unintelligible. Boyers chose to write in a dry academic style that fails to communicate to society at large. I shutter to think that this is the writing style he is teaching his students! Please Mr. Boyers, try again and reduce the historical references and include some stories to illustrate your ideas! Your premise is excellent but the execution needs work!
November 15, 2021
Very thoughtful account (based on a lot of personal experience) of why what some leftist students (and faculty) are getting wrong today regarding speech issues, among other things. Gives one a lot to think about, even if you don't agree with all his points. Always (or, almost always) set at the proper tone for discussion (and, perhaps, disagreement) - as it should be.
December 27, 2022
Boyers lists as things not to be done: the creation of an us vs. them orientation, but he can't keep from doing just that with unconnected asides scattered through the manuscript. They are unwelcome interruptions in an otherwise fine book.
February 22, 2023
A tortured attempt to rescue honesty and human decency from the wreckage of the modern inHumanities. There are literally a dozen better books on the subject. Possibly useful to loan to the leftist in your life whom you know to be secretly unhappy about the despicable cult that runs academia today.
October 11, 2019
Excellent read. Trenchant and bold analysis from a leading liberal intellectual.
December 7, 2019
Sometimes thoughtful, sometimes I felt not engaging with his opponents' arguments very deeply. Above all, my feeling is that this book won't move any needles.
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