Our generation is largely focused on agreement. We're not a group that defines ourselves through dissent as those who came of age in the '60s did, and with the rise of the internet's ability to create an even more extensively shared mass culture than TV, it has become all the easier to plug into the same matrix of social enthusiasms. But everything has its downside the '60s dissent mentality spurred ineffectuality, in which smoking pot and listening to sweet music often substituted for more sober and sane forms of political action. The downside of our generation's mentality is that we tend to underrate the value of conflict. By "conflict," I don't mean physical struggle, I mean simply the clash of irreconcilable positions through debate and mental warfare.
I wonder, if we had two of our top professors get on stage and debate each otheron affirmative action or the existence of God, say would it generate a student audience? I doubt it, but I would like to be proven wrong. I think Dartmouth students would be made anxious, not invigorated, by perceiving the fault lines running through society. This has something to do with our frat culture we form social unions, based on scant shared values and interests, and have to struggle to maintain them by, essentially, chilling out and dumbing down. It amplifies the basic tendency of our generation to acquiesce. No doubt, the College attempts to provoke serious conversations about social class, for instance but few students engage in these discussions. The issue of socioeconomic class is a particularly good example because class is obviously the main line of fracture among Dartmouth's students and therefore it would be socially deleterious to discuss it. (But let society deteriorate. It always needs to deteriorate now and then it would've been impossible to talk about slavery without sparking social acrimony.)
This refusal to debate is evident in the backlash against Roger Lott's conservative columns. This would seem contrary to my argument that we are a "join together" culture, but I think Lott is just an example of a scapegoat necessary to justify everyone else getting along. He's like the woman who gets (spoiler alert) stoned to death to keep the community functioning at the end of "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. I mostly disagree with Lott, but it's stupid for people to dismiss him as a crypto-fascist who must be excluded from honest argument. The responses to Lott exemplify our tendency to ignore such differences of opinion or dismiss them as absurdly evil, in order to proceed with a mindless orgy of sociable agreement about how silly the song "Friday" by Rebecca Black is.
Despite the fact that we have a divisive political atmosphere, I see little evidence that we really debate each other. Chris Matthews and Bill O'Reilly mainly affirm their positions loudly to themselves and a few others, preaching to the choir. It's a far cry from the days when you could hear William F. Buckley and Noam Chomsky argue about Vietnam and actually listen to each other while still being vigorously at odds. A good place to start would be for the faculty to take a lead in sparking clashes rather than tolerating the students' timid affability. Either that, or we could bring back the draft (as I suggested in an earlier column).
One of the great villains of literature Judge Holden, in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian utters these disturbing words: "[W]ar is the truest form of divination. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is God" Within the novel, this statement is reprehensible but if we re-appropriate "war" to mean mental combat, I think the Judge gives us something valuable. If we restore a robust intellectual culture defined, as it was in ancient Greece, in terms of struggle, as the mental equivalent of joyful athletic contest, or "agon" we might stand a chance at, perhaps, preventing real wars, such as those we neglect to debate in the pages of The Dartmouth.
