The College Mind Ends with a Whimper

Students on the campus at the University of Washington were unwilling to tell a 5 foot 9 inch white male that he was not a 6 foot 5 inch Chinese woman.  Wow.

The interviewer was asking random college students questions related to transgender use of bathrooms.  Of course, every student was okay with anyone using the restroom they felt comfortable using.  Of course, they're trying to be compassionate and we want to encourage compassion.  They don’t want anyone stigmatized (we’ll ignore for the moment the stigma to a nine year old girl having a large male using the restroom next to her).  No reasonable human being is arguing with these college students that compassion for others is a bad thing - but I digress.

A serious problem arises when the interviewer asks the students if it’s okay if he goes around telling people he’s 6 foot 5 when he clearly is not.  One student indicated she might actually tell him he was wrong, but she hedged enormously.  The rest either said it was okay or said they would want to know why he felt he was 6 foot 5.  Somehow, they clearly thought it was wrong to tell someone the objective truth about their height, presumably because it would lack compassion.

It’s one thing to want to be compassionate, it’s another altogether to ignore reality.  Moreover, how is it compassionate to let a 5 foot 9 white guy go around pretending to be a 6 foot 5 Chinese woman?  There is no other way to say it: he’s pretending.  When children pretend we let them.  If one of my sons told me he was a superhero when he was four years old, I didn’t argue.  Why?  Because I knew he’d grow out of it.  He would start to examine reality and measure things and would come to understand that he was not able to fly on a whim or zap people with bolts of lightning from his eyeballs, or whatever other silly nonsense he pretended to do when he was four.  We let kids indulge in such fantasy for that very reason: it’s fantasy and they must come to some point in their life when they can start to recognize the difference.  We universally used to call that growing up.

Now, apparently, we have so ingrained the current generation with the idea that you can be anything you want that they have taken it to heart.  You really do get to be anything you want, even when it’s obviously and unalterably not true.  So a 5 foot 9 white guy can say he is a 6 foot 5 Chinese woman and no one is supposed to bat an eyelash.

But, oh, the irony (there’s always tremendously delicious irony afoot in such situations).  If the same 5 foot 9 white guy goes around saying he’s Adolph Hitler or Josef Stalin or Jack the Ripper, that’s not allowed.  Why not?  We all know the obvious response: they were bad people.  I agree 100% these were bad men.  In fact, I would have serious concerns about anyone who claims to be one of these men.  But let’s be consistent here: if I get to determine “who I am” and, more importantly, “what I am” then how can that possibly have any limits?  Moreover, if you are truly compassionate and caring and tolerant, then don’t I get to “identify” however I want, when I want, under what circumstances I want, with whomever I want, for whatever reason I want?  The answer, on college campuses at least, is, ironically, an emphatic NO.  I can’t be a Donald Trump supporter because that “scares” students who feel they should be in a “safe place.”  I can’t be a Christian because that means I’m homophobic, Islamophobic, bigoted, hateful and intolerant.  In the crazy college mind, these "identities" are wrong without any objective standard to truly explain their wrongness.

I am terrified for the current generation of college students.  If they are truly buying into this insanity (I don’t know if it is true or not – certainly there is plenty of anecdotal evidence, but such evidence is not always convincing), then it indicates a complete failure of rationality and logic.  First, such thinking is utterly irrational.  If there are no categories by which reality is organized, then reality itself must not exist.  If reality doesn’t exist, then allowing someone to “identify” however they want doesn’t matter.  If it doesn’t matter, then no one should really care whether it’s allowed or not allowed.  Yet, somehow, it MUST be allowed with certain exceptions, which makes this sort of thinking all the more infuriatingly irrational. 

Worse, such thinking lacks any sort of consistency (or logic, if you prefer).  As noted above, there are categories of being which are frowned upon, even though everyone is supposed to be allowed to “identify” as best suits them.  Either everyone gets to “identify” or not.  If there are limits on identifying then the very rationale for allowing people to “identify” is, itself lost.  Such inconsistency is absurd.  When it passes for reason, it passes beyond absurd into terrifying.  The dreary drain into which such thinking spins suggests a generation unwilling to think critically or logically about anything.   People who can be willingly led to accept such inconsistency will accept anything.  People who accept anything will accept their own demise with a smile.

 If this is the world these college students want to live in, do they not see where it leads?  It must lead to utter chaos and, therefore, either destruction or absolute, dictatorial control.  Either way, it goes without saying, you won’t get to “identify” however you want in either situation.  You’ll either identify as dead or you’ll identify how you’re told.  Such is not, I suspect, the utopia which these students envision when they decide to ignore reality and uncritically accept the identify movement.

Allow me to paraphrase the ending lament of the T.S. Eliot poem The Hollow Men:  this is the way the college mind ends, this is the way the college mind ends, this is the way the college  mind ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”