Pissed off about always needing to show your papers and confirm you’re on board. Maybe too reluctant to let people know you’re with them. The pleasure you take in saying no to things many of your friends embrace. Your tendency to quarrel with people in your own left-liberal cohort. Even your kids, who are given to noting your deficiencies, assure you that you’ve written nothing to embarrass them-not yet, though they are wary of your insistence on coming out with things uncomfortable or contrarian. The kinds who sign up for your classes, attend your lectures, read your articles, and occasionally send you email letters to express their encouragement or disappointment. And yet no prospect, you think, that you’ll spontaneously utter something that will lead decent people to walk out or turn their backs. Not averse to assigning books sure to provoke unrest. Willing to talk politics when teaching your courses. After three classes with you the student probably means mainly that. Invoke the system and the market, inequality and abuse, neoliberalism and privilege. “It’s no small thing,” she continues, “for an old white guy like you.” And so you think further about it the next day. The idea that one should speak one’s cultural allegiance first and the truth second (and that this is a sign of authenticity) is precisely such a deformation.Ī student at a graduation party tells you she thinks you’re “woke,” and you say thank you and you’re not sure you know what that means. Excerptīitter struggles deform their participants in subtle, complicated ways. The end result is a finely tuned work of cultural intervention from the front lines. Why, Robert Boyers asks, are a great many liberals, people who should know better, invested in the drawing up of enemies lists and driven by the conviction that on critical issues no dispute may be tolerated? In stories, anecdotes, and character profiles, a public intellectual and longtime professor takes on those in his own progressive cohort who labor in the grip of a poisonous and illiberal fundamentalism. Part memoir and part polemic, Boyers’s collection of essays laments the erosion of standard liberal values, and covers such subjects as tolerance, identity, privilege, appropriation, diversity, and ableism that have turned academic life into a minefield. Written from the perspective of a liberal intellectual who has spent a lifetime as a writer, editor, and college professor, The Tyranny of Virtue is a “courageous, unsparing, and nuanced to a rare degree” (Mary Gaitskill) insider’s look at shifts in American culture-most especially in the American academy-that so many people find alarming. From public intellectual and professor Robert Boyers, “ a powerfully persuasive, insightful, and provocative prose that mixes erudition and first-hand reportage” (Joyce Carol Oates) addressing recent developments in American culture and arguing for the tolerance of difference that is at the heart of the liberal tradition.
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