“For truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.” —Matthew 13:17
I want to tell you a story that gets to the heart of why so much organized energy is devoted to silencing certain views at universities across the West.
Once upon a time, there was an emperor who loved new clothes more than anything. He spent all his money on fine garments and enjoyed parading through the city to show off his latest outfits. One day, two swindlers arrived at the palace claiming to be master weavers who could make the most magnificent fabric in the world. Their cloth, they said, had a magical property: it would be invisible to anyone who was unfit for their position or hopelessly stupid. Intrigued by this promise, the emperor ordered them to weave a set of clothes for him.
The swindlers set up looms and pretended to weave, though there was nothing on them. Ministers and officials, sent to inspect the work, saw nothing but, fearing they would be thought unfit or foolish, they praised the fabric’s nonexistent beauty. When the suit was “finished,” the swindlers presented it to the emperor. Although he saw nothing, he too pretended to admire it, not wanting to appear unworthy. He put on the invisible garments and went out to parade before his subjects.
The townspeople, not wanting to seem stupid, pretended to admire his fine clothes. But a small child in the crowd spoke up: “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!” At first, the crowd was silent, but soon they began whispering and laughing, realizing the truth. “But he has nothing at all on!” at last they cried out. The emperor was upset, for he knew that the people were right. But, though embarrassed, he continued walking proudly, unwilling to admit his nakedness.
Obviously, this is not an original story. You knew that already. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is a classic fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. The typical interpretation of Andersen’s tale is that it highlights the dangers of the power of social pressure, pride, and vanity. It’s a parable that reflects real-life situations where people go along with falsehoods to avoid looking bigoted, foolish, and mean—because they know that is how they will be portrayed if they don’t. It also teaches that truth, even when spoken by a child, has the power to break illusions.
All these are indeed among the lessons of the parable, but I see something else in Andersen’s tale: the importance of mutual knowledge. Until the kid speaks up, everybody knows that the emperor is naked, but they don’t know that everybody else knows that the emperor is naked. The small child has not yet been socialized in civil inattention—or indoctrinated to withhold truths offensive to the emperor (this is why totalitarian desires command of early childhood education). That a child sees what a man sees gives the man confidence to publicly acknowledge the truth of what everybody sees: the emperor is naked.
Andersen’s parable applies to our universities under the hegemony of woke progressivism. Being called to account these days in public universities occurs when one’s pronouncements contradict the prevailing ideology. The demand that professors uphold a particular ideology by professing it, or at least by not openly criticizing it, is to deny the presence of a naked emperor; only by preventing mutual knowledge around the truth of things can fictions be sustained. When myths fall, actions lose their cloak of justice. The righteous become a mob.
Perpetuating fiction is what lies behind the demand, albeit often subtle, that professors engage in newspeak, Orwell’s term for a neurolinguistic project to change cognition. Manufacturing an illusion takes a great deal of effort, but illusions are always fragile, because they are just that: illusions. Therefore rule-following is crucial and the targeting of those who do not follow the rules necessary.
But whose rules? The rules humans have operated by for millennia? The rules that come with instinct? Rules based on reality and reason? Or the rules of a new minority demanding conformity to its ideology in order to sustain necessary illusions? In the case of new rules, it is particularly helpful to those wishing to impose them on others that the institutions and organizations in which they move demand that everybody follow them. It is moreover understandable that those who call the new rules into question make those who require them to feel unsafe.
Whether they think the new rules are good, every professor and student who reads this essay knows the rules and the pressure to follow them. Trepidation at violating them is palpable. The earnest professor who slips up and violates a rule feels terrible guilt and apologizes a second time after a sleepless night. Professors and graduate students talk about the tyranny of the rules in hushed voices at academic conferences. They’re talking about the emperor and they don’t want the emperor to overhear.
This is a bad place for the Enlightenment project. Open and free spaces are unsafe because they allow the truth to be spoken aloud and for mutual knowledge to be formed. They should therefore be unsafe in the sense rendered here. If we make them safe in that sense, we cancel the project. For if we are forced to appreciate the emperor’s new clothes when there are none (or even when the emperor is fully dressed, for that matter), then we live in an unfree society—at least not as free as we should have it. We must therefore secure those spaces with a different sense of safety.
Freedom requires more than reminding people about the right to free speech and the value of academic freedom. A man often needs to feel free to tell the truth. To be sure, that free feeling is only potentially obtainable when he is not told what to say or punished for saying what he is told not to. But some men need beyond reassurance that they may safely speak their mind encouragement to say the things that others wish they wouldn’t in an environment free of retribution. Finding that free feeling requires the active promotion by those in authority of the values that are central to the Enlightenment project, chief among them critique of all things existing.
Maybe a man will never find his courage. But other men will. Courage is contagious. And this is why so much organized energy is devoted to silencing certain views at universities across the West.
freedom and reason 