By Chris Satullo

Jonathan Haidt saw all this coming from miles away.

By this, I mean all the roiling campus protests over Gaza – featuring protesters whose fierce, righteous passion for justice is matched by their naivete, their incoherence, their ideological blinders and their hypocrisy about free speech.

Haidt is a social psychologist whose work focuses on the root causes of polarization in America, as well as the stunning rise in anxiety, depression and suicide among Americans under 30. He has written several best-selling books that offer pungent opinions based on data from social research: The Righteous Mind, The Coddling of the American Mind and, most recently, The Anxious Generation. He’s someone I know personally, admire and have learned from, without subscribing to all his conclusions.

An assertion of his I find rock solid, though, is that Gen Z has been steeped both by media and too many of its elders in what Haidt calls The Three Great Untruths:

• You are fragile.
• If you feel it, it must be true.
• Life is about us vs. them.

That first untruth underlies the whole, unhelpful vocabulary of harm, trauma, microaggression and safe space et al. – one which most of the college students I’ve taught and worked with are fluent. It’s a vocabulary that paralyzes attempts at productive discourse.

The second untruth exalts the subjective over the factual. 

Let’s say you’re a young American who feels awful about what’s happening to innocent people in Gaza. (What decent person does not?) If so, you may find that chanting slogans like “From the river to the sea” and “Globalize the intifada” makes you feel you’re doing something important for those suffering people. In this heated environment, you also come to feel that no one has a right to question your chants. And even though these slogans do not actually mean what you feel they do, you don’t think it’s something you should have to confront.

What’s most at work, unhelpfully, in the Gaza protests is the third untruth, the notion that life is always and everywhere about us vs. them. This view elides easily into the position that everything is a battle between good and evil, where good = us and evil = them.

Presto, complexity and nuance disappear. It’s clarifying; it’s bracing; it’s exonerating. After all, whatever you do when you’re good and doing battle with evil must be justified, right? Plus, when you’re so full of righteous rage, anyone who tries to explain to you that situations are more complicated than you feel, that the world doesn’t work the way you imagine it does, that you’ve got some things twisted, well, they must obviously be apologists for the devil, no?

Somehow, we elders have managed to fill younger heads with powerful notions about privilege, power, oppression, liberation and intersectionality, apparently without ever mentioning the core truth that life is often just tragic.

The world is rarely a place of stark battles between pure good and pure evil.   It’s a gray place of nuance, of double motives, partial virtues and subtle vices, where, as a character in Jean Renoir’s great pre-WWW II film The Rule of the Game says, “The terrible thing is…everyone has his reasons.”

The Middle East is such a tragic realm. You can’t understand it, and you surely cannot figure how to bring justice or peace to it, by assigning to one side the mantle of pure good and the other, pure evil.

I teach civil discourse to college students. To do so, one thing I do is introduce them to the theory of tragedy developed by the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. It differs from the theory of tragedy you may have been taught in high school or college, that of the ancient Greek Aristotle, with its talk of tragic flaws, sudden reversals and hubris.

For Hegel, the most piercing tragedy emerges not from a conflict of good vs. evil, but a conflict between competing notions of the good, competing values that are each, in their way, admirable. Often, such conflict could be managed through hard-won, creative compromise – in accord with Hegel’s idea of synthesis. Tragedy develops, though, when each side doubles down on their preferred value and chooses to view the other side, and their preferred value, as evil.

Sound familiar? 

Both Jews and Palestinians have experienced lasting oppression. It would be good for Palestinians to have a homeland where they could be free and safe. It would be good for Jews to have a homeland where they could be free and safe. But life is tragic, so history has led each side to claim the same narrow sliver of land as their homeland.

The conflict is deep, but a workable compromise is not impossible to imagine. Thousands upon thousands of words have been spent imagining it in detail. But drunk-on-violence zealots on both sides of the conflict have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity to establish a complicated, but workable peace. The violence, this time and every time, is tragic, because each side is at once right about some things and fatefully wrong about others.

It would be great if the kids in the campus encampments were spending their time grasping the facts of the situation, grappling with its tragic dimension, and pondering the moral implications. Instead, they are chanting slogans that glorify one side, magically wiping its hands clean of Jewish blood, while demonizing the other, deploying leftist dogmas that their elders inside the ivied walls have taught them.

The notions that this is a case of “settler colonialism” and part of the eternal effort of evil “whiteness” to oppress and wound “brown bodies” dominate the rhetoric of many young protesters. But here’s the complex, tragic thing about that: This rhetoric is at once partly nonsense – and partly profound. 

It is false and a truly “colonizing” error to take racial rhetoric developed in the American academy and impose it on a tragic situation an ocean and a sea away. Many, many Jews are every bit as “brown” as the Palestinian brothers with whom they endlessly feud.

To label Israelis simply “colonial settlers” is to dismiss with a scornful wave of the hand the entire sordid and tragic history of inquisition, pogrom and holocaust that their people have endured over the ages. This is a sin that some of the protestors – all the while absolving themselves of antisemitism – casually do.

And yet: Israel has been guilty of building, defending and expanding colonial settlements on Palestinian land. From the first, these were moral sins and political obstacles that have contributed mightily to the agony. So, Israel may not be fundamentally a colonial project, but it has engaged in one unjust colonizing project for decades, sapping its moral authority.

Complicated, not clearcut. Tragic, not summed up by neat ideologies.

Rattling around in the students’ rhetoric, whether they realize it or not, are the views of thinkers favored by many on America’s academic left. These include people such as Frantz Fanon, who extolled the benefits of violence by the oppressed, and Michel Foucault, who explored how power relationships and knowledge disparities drive individual and societal interactions.

The work of each man is a lens that can yield insights and expand one’s thinking. It won’t do for any American – whose country after all began with a violent revolution against a colonial oppressor – to dismiss Fanon as simply a bloodthirsty fanatic. You can’t fully understand Palestinians’ plight if you don’t understand his insights.

Foucault’s work is profound, and I don’t claim to fully understand it. But it has become a fetish for some American academics who view everything through the singular lens of power relationships.

My point here is this: Zealotry exalts a singular lens (which it may only dimly understand) and converts it into slogans.

Wisdom looks at our tragic world through multiple lenses – collecting as many varying insights as it can. (Here are a few lenses providing insights to contrast with Fanon: MLK Jr., Gandhi, Augustine, Jesus – persons of color all.) Wisdom then deploys the insights it gleans to seek a balance among competing goods, one that might foster justice and peace.

Many of the students protesting now on campus – egged on by adults around them – are practicing zealotry, not peacemaking. They are not listening, only chanting. They are asserting that only the lens they’ve chosen is valid; all others are cowardly or evil. They are loudly complaining that their free-speech rights are being violated, while allowing no dissenting views to be expressed within their angry protest bubbles (e.g., at Columbia). Hypocrisy is never attractive on people who claim to be agents of justice.  

Indeed, these students are only doing things that young people have done since time immemorial, because they’re young. (I was their age back during the Vietnam War. Their spreading protests do not make me nostalgic. They make me yearn to talk with them about all the things we did wrong back then.)

Though I wish they wouldn’t do and say some of what they do and say, I honestly don’t blame these young zealots. They have encountered the fact that the world is unjust, bloody and tragic and they are putting their voices and bodies on the line, seeking to stop some of the injustice and suffering. That’s admirable, even if how they’re going about it leaves me with a mound of qualms.

Whom do I blame?  

Us, the adults, who validated Haidt’s three great untruths, then layered on a bunch of poorly digested radical thinking that propels these well-meaning students along a path of furious, confused, hypocritical intensity.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia