Philosophical Apprentice collects some of the evocative dross of his ‘Class Day Ceremony’.

JUN 8, 2023

Stephens always plays the victim:

This is a speech about speaking your mind when other people don’t want you to.

To those of you who are protesting or planning a walkout, I thank you for not seriously disrupting my speech. And though I’m sorry you won’t hear me out, I completely respect your right to protest any speaker you dislike, including me, so long as you honor the Chicago Principles. It is one of the core liberties that all of us have a responsibility to uphold, protect and honor.

A Neo-Conservative ‘strikes a pose’, like that faded Pop Star?

Next Bob Zimmer, rhetorically brought aboard for needed ballast:

To those of you who choose to stay, I thank you for honoring another Chicago principle, one that was dear to my dear friend, Bob Zimmer: Namely, that a serious education is impossible except in an environment of unfettered intellectual challenge — an environment that, in turn, isn’t possible without the opportunity to encounter people and entertain views with whom and with which you might profoundly disagree.

A quick walk-on of Mr. Stephens, in his youth… like Wm. F. Buckley Jr., he was a self-entitled, would be polymath, in waiting. This self ascription, the purest comedy : when I was a nervous 17-year-old freshman…

To John Boyer, who welcomed me to Chicago in 1991 when I was a nervous 17-year-old freshman, I want to salute you for everything you’ve done to make the college so much better, while preserving what always made it great: the conviction that to think clearly, we must be able to speak freely; that to disagree intelligently, we must first understand the views of our opponents profoundly; that to change people’s minds, we must be open to the possibility that our minds might be changed. All of this asks us to listen charitably, argue candidly, consider deeply, examine and re-examine everything, above all our own deeply held convictions — and, unlike at so many other universities, to respond to ideas we reject with more and better speech, not heckling or censorship.

The above testimony to the ‘values’ of ‘Free Intellectual Inquiry’ from an unapologetic Neo-Conservative, in sum an apologist for The Zionist Faschist State, and the American Proxy War in Ukraine. Mr. Stephens is a bellicose Straussian in its American iteration. Stephens never served, but his appetite for War takes inspiration from an etiolated pastiche of Ernst Jünger…

Harold Rosenberg’s essay, that Stephens links to, is from the September 1948 Commentary, not the Commentary Magazine edited by Neo-Con John Podhoretz. I spent many years reading the works of Harold Rosenberg e. g. The Tradition of The New, Discovering The Present, and his monograph on Saul Steinberg:

Decades ago, the art critic Harold Rosenberg coined the phrase “the herd of independent minds.” It’s a line I think about often.

The herd of independent minds are the people who say they make up their own minds when it comes to politics, and yet somehow, and generally without exception, arrive at precisely the same long list of political conclusions as millions of others. The herd of independent minds were the Republicans who were ardent NeverTrumpers in 2015, fervent Trumpers from 2017-21, NeverTrumpers again after Jan. 6, and are now tilting back toward Trump: In other words, Lindsey Graham. The herd of independent minds are those who think “La La Land” is a great movie but “Miss Congeniality” isn’t.

The final paragraph lapses in Anti-Trump screeching, a favorite gambit of the New Centrist Alliance: The New Democrats/ Neo-Liberals and the Neo-Cons.

Mr. Stephens, in this paragraphs riffs on the passé territory of ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff.

The point is: There are very few people who don’t see themselves as independent thinkers. There are even fewer people who are.

This is true wherever you go, in most walks of life. But it seems to be especially true in places and institutions heavily populated by people with elite educations: The kinds of places and institutions that many of you will soon be a part of. Groupthink is the affliction of those who ought to be — and often think of themselves as — the least vulnerable to it.

The ‘Elite Education’ a reference to the Haidt/Lukianoff postulation of a 10% of spoiled malcontents, that harbor a natural ill will to an Enlightened Cadre of Technocrats like Haidt/Lukianoff . Note that Haidt is a New Democrat.

Headline: Jonathan Haidt: ‘We got fooled into thinking liberal democracy is easy’

Sub-headline: The social psychologist on the ‘darts’ of social media, our dangerous present moment — and a decade of stupidity in America

https://www.ft.com/content/c59f57c1-ba79-4856-a322-81a8f68df1b7

…

His willingness to engage thoughtfully in debates often characterised by tribalism and virtue-signalling has helped him win considerable influence — Barack Obama and Jeff Bezos have both recommended his most recent essay. But Haidt, professor of ethical leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business, is not without his detractors. To his critics, he falsely equates the excesses of the progressivist activism of the left with the disregard for truth, science or the democratic process of some on the right; they accuse him of “bothsidesism”.

…

While some feel Haidt focuses too much of his fire on the left, he has only ever voted Democrat. “I cannot imagine voting Republican because the Republican party has completely lost all sense of constitutional responsibility and has lost all touch with conservatism. I have a lot of respect for liberalism, but there’s a lot of illiberalism on the left, and I have a lot of respect for conservatism, but there’s not much conservatism left on the right,” he says.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/c59f57c1-ba79-4856-a322-81a8f68df1b7

This Reader feels sympathy for the students and faculty who had to listen to the remaining 2,106 words of his address, let me present some of his cast of characters in this first paragraph:

Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, Metaverse, New Coke, Federal Reserve, C.I.A, Afghanistan, Taliban, Ukraine, Russian Army (its the Soviet Army), Wall Street, Saddam Hussein,-Not to forget this bit of dangling hysteria: ‘Why were so many people convinced that overpopulation was going to lead to catastrophic food shortages, and that the only sensible answers were a one-child policy and forced sterilizations?’

Call this section of Mr. Stephens ‘stream of consciousness’ from his appointment with his strict Freudian Psychoanalyst? Think again of the audience, having to listen to this diatribe as it metastasizes, in the voice of a bankrupt newspaper scribbler.

Enough!

Philosophical Apprentice