Weakness as weapon

In my previous post, I noted that one of the guiding principles behind "chivalry" was that the strong should protect the weak.  With the selection of Greta Thunberg as Time's "Person of the Year", I am again reminded of a very anti-chivalric principle, which is that it is effective to use the weak to attack the decent.

Greta Thunberg clearly adds nothing substantial to the climate change discussion; she is too young to have any expertise worth listening to, and nothing she is saying is new anyway.  She is--quite clearly--simply a tool: a rhetorical device used by her enablers as a strategy to influence opinion.  Sincere and motivated youth inspire sympathy in adults, and since they are students and not experts, we count their effort and enthusiasm a lot more than we count their results or their actual wisdom.  And we are naturally and unreflectively protective of children; we hate people who pick on them.

And this is the whole point of the bizarre concept of the "moral authority of the victim": that if you choose someone whom it is not decent to attack to make your argument for you, then your argument will become unassailable.  It's an odd tactic: a sort of reverse implied "ad hominem".  This is not a strategy for actual reasoned argument, of course--it's a strategy for shutting down your opponent by making it indecent for him to fight back. 

The natural counterpoint to this strategy is therefore to abandon decency.  It is only to be expected that people should begin to rhetorically attack Greta in public despite the fact that she is just a child, precisely because she is being used as a tactical shield to forestall criticism.  And are we going to let people get away with this sort of a tactic?  Well, not in today's coarse internet culture, no!  And you can blame internet culture for its crudeness and its abandonment of social niceties if you like, but we have to recognize that the blame starts with people who choose to use weakness as a weapon in the first place.

So while Greta is being promoted as some sort of hero, in reality she is being used.  Her selection by Time magazine as "Person of the Year" was simply another instance of this:  Time decided it wanted to pitch in and help the group effort of using a sympathetic child to push an environmentalist agenda.   I find the whole thing distasteful, however, and destructive of the reasoned conversation I wish we were having instead.

David Gibson, plaintiff in the Oberlin lawsuit, has died

This is a very good retrospective on his character and the controversy in which he became involved: https://quillette.com/2019/12/02/on-the-passing-of-oberlin-plaintiff-david-gibson/

I think this story is important for a few reasons:

1. I think it's important that many people know what a decent person David Gibson actually was.  Part of the damage that echo-chamber, ideology driven culture does is that we reduce people to caricatures that fit our narratives.  David Gibson was clearly wronged by this impulse.  He was  a White Man who Called the Cops on Young Black Men--and therefore subjected to all the race-war social justice theories Oberlin incubates.  In cases where the narrative takes precedence over reality and smears a decent person (Covington Catholic kid is yet another example), I think it's important to loudly correct the record.  This article does so.
2. David Gibson's actions strike me as an example of a very American sort of virtue: anybody shoplifting gets the police called on them, because nobody's above the law and everybody gets treated equally.  BUT, he'll work with you and the police: get a lecture, promise to try to be good, the charge will be reduced.  It's a small-town, do-it-yourself, personal-communication-based approach to crime and recidivism.  I like this a lot, because ultimately it's people and not programs who make a difference in troubled lives.  People who think in terms of grand social schemes to reduce inequality and crime overlook this type of approach at their peril.
3. It's still really mind-boggling how Oberlin could have gotten itself into this situation.  It would have been so easy for them to have apologized as requested, and it should have been easy for it to see that it was the right thing to do.  How a collection of supposedly elite intellects could have been so ridiculously wrong and blind about it is a question that demands to be answered.  Sadly, I don't see any impulse among the people who matter to ask this question of themselves.  The universities marinate in absurd ideology and have long lost the ability to honestly grapple with reality outside of it.