Instrumental Tedium

social severing 101

Take the time to read this remarkable essay describing changes in student life at Stanford, because it describes a version of something that’s happening to us all. Click over to the linked piece for a lot of detail, but here’s the heart of the thing:

Since 2013, Stanford’s administration has executed a top-to-bottom destruction of student social life. Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus, a growing administrative bureaucracy has destroyed almost all of Stanford’s distinctive student culture.

What happened at Stanford is a cultural revolution on the scale of a two-mile college campus. In less than a decade, Stanford’s administration eviscerated a hundred years of undergraduate culture and social groups. They ended decades-old traditions. They drove student groups out of their houses. They scraped names off buildings. They went after long-established hubs of student life, like fraternities and cultural theme houses. In place of it all, Stanford erected a homogenous housing system that sorts new students into perfectly equitable groups named with letters and numbers. All social distinction is gone.

Whenever Stanford empties out a fraternity or theme house, the administration renames the organization’s former house after its street number. Now, Stanford’s iconic campus Row, once home to dozens of vibrant student organizations, is lined with generic, unmarked houses with names like “550,” “680,” and “675” in arbitrary groupings with names like “S” and “D”.

The de-named units are a particularly telling choice, like a description of a factory that makes new young adults on the model of full standardization. There’s an element of Jonestown to it, in the deliberate severing of natural connections that happen spontaneously — the “you’re cool, wanna grab a beer?” of college life — and an element of the Cultural Revolution. Stanford is breaking affinity groups, groups made up of young adults who like being friends and doing things together, and either preventing the re-emergence of the shattered social clusters or forcing them to reconvene under a new political umbrella — like Outdoor House, which used to be for students who liked hiking and camping, but will be reopening as a space for students who are committed to “racial and environmental justice in the outdoors.” You can have something like the old friendships, but they have to be reconstructed on the new political model. If you and your bros just grabbed a keg ‘cause you felt like it, you’re probably bad cadre. Perform every action in the full interior light of political consciousness!

At nearly the same moment this story appears, we’re getting a first look at a new basic training program in the US Navy, where eight weeks of entry-level instruction will now turn into a ten-week program — so the people training new sailors can “tackle…social issues that have been worrying the Pentagon’s top brass: sexual assault and harassment, racism and political extremism.” As someone who spent part of his life watching drill sergeants give PowerPoint presentations to tired young men — DO NOT LET ME CATCH YOU SLEEPING DURING MY PRESENTATION, IS THAT CLEAR? — I just shuddered in involuntary sympathy. Meanwhile, from the linked story:

At Fort Jackson — one of the Army’s main basic training centers — Lt. Col. Larry Steward’s pilot program of naming “SASH influencers” (for student against sexual harassment) in each unit is expanding to cover all recruit platoons.

The idea is for recruits to listen for and intervene when early signs of harassment emerge: it is easier to hear a peer telling you a comment is out of line than to hear from a drill sergeant or company commander. And sometimes, an early intervention that doesn’t involve punishment can have a better effect.

This sounds to my ears like the preparation of a political commissariat, embedded in peer groups: Your friends will be trained to inform you when your speech acts in social settings are problematic, freeing more senior authority figures from the burden of directly policing what you say to your friends.

Again, the effect is isolation, atomization, and the destruction — or at least the impairment — of natural affinities. How many times does the “SASH influencer” who hits the bars with you and your friends have to correct your wrongspeak before you learn to just keep your mouth shut so your commissar-friends don’t have to correct you?

Safetyism and nannyism, these endlessly metastasizing social-policing obsessions, just. keep. going. I thought, last week, that the National Park Service had become rules-and-permits obsessed to a near-OCD degree that felt at least a little new, and I’m sorry I taped that campsite registration slip to the wrong side of my windshield. Thank you for letting me know about that so clearly.

For a while we responded to The Dreaded Virus™ — remember to experience a frisson of delicious fear as you ponder it — by closing playgrounds and hiking trails, by forbidding outdoor tennis and playground basketball; there was risk, so we closed everything. That instinct is written on more of our lives with each passing moment, in a kind of ratchet effect in which it looks harder all the time to get back to, you know, being in danger all the time, like when you hung out with friends in the absence of an explicitly established political line. It felt like fun at the time, didn’t it?

Units are rolling

The author of that essay about Stanford, Ginevra Davis — a young writer who appears to be fairly awesome — concludes that Stanford’s social flattening has a clear human cost: “In the aftermath, all that is left is the generic: empty walls, names scrubbed off buildings, and kids safely, or not so safely, alone in their rooms.”

That feels exactly right: lots of safety and equity and fairness and institutional schoolmarming is boring — SO BORING — and it’s atomizing. The social effect of the war on problematic fun and social engagement is that people become more isolated and less happy — or, in other words, more anxious, less stable, and more susceptible to authoritarian solutions to their perceived problems.

Loneliness is political. We’re making a lot of it.