Feelings, nothing more than feelings: on the culture of victimhood and death of the intellect

{Update: this is particularly useful to read since college students across America are "traumatized" and "need hugs" given the fact that Trump was elected President}.


The year was 1968. The television network ABC was plummeting in its ratings, and they needed a quick fix. Something controversial. It was the time of both Republican and Democrat National Conventions. ABC wanted to have commentators, so they paired up two enemies: William F. Buckley, Jr. - a conservative, writer, founder and editor of National Review, and host of Firing Line, and Gore Vidal – a liberal, writer, commentator. Buckley and Vidal were to debate on television.

And debate they did. It was during one of those debates when Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” and Buckley responded by calling Vidal a “queer.”

It would have been really easy to solely focus on this infamous moment, but filmmakers Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville took a different approach in their documentary Best of Enemies (2015). They use the intellectual relationship between Buckley and Vidal as a way to examine the political consciousness of the people at the time, as well as the role of the media then and now.

Whenever one encounters a documentary film that deals with both conservatism and liberalism, there is a tendency to assume that it will surely be biased, favoring one side over the other. I will admit that when I saw the trailer for the film, I had a trepidation that it might be leaning more toward the left, therefore attacking Buckley and favoring Vidal. But it truly wasn't like that. Gordon and Neville treat both Buckley and Vidal as human beings and actions of each men speak for themselves.

The film finely balances individual biographies of Buckley and Vidal and a larger picture of state of political debates. Wherever you look these days, “the talking heads” are shouting at each other. Some say things that are more interesting and true than others but for the most part, there is no interest in an actual exchange of ideas or reaching of intellectual conclusions.

The film opens with the tour of Vidal's Italian home. We enter into Vidal's bathroom where he shows us photographs of himself, proudly of course, and there right above the bathtub, are some of shots of the debate with Buckley. Vidal is a hedonistic elitist and when he is speaking, there is a kind of ooze released from him. He was fiercely intelligent but, to echo Buckley's brother's words in the documentary, I cannot help but feel slightly nauseous from Vidal's words.

“Why are the races unreconciled? Why does poverty persevere? Why are the young disenchanted? Why do the birds sing so unhappily? It is easy to be carried away, and yet always there is a strain of seriousness, something in the system that warns us, warns us that America had better strike out on a different course rather than face another four years of asphyxiation by liberal premises.”

These were Buckley's words, and he certainly had a way with those. He used the English language in a variety of unusual ways. Although I do not think that Vidal was better or even Buckley's match in such an endeavor, I do think that he was a good intellectual adversary.

They both represented a particular way of American consciousness – a distinctly American battle between the sacred and profane. For Buckley, sacredness and preservation of order of things was of utmost importance.

For Vidal, shaking the metaphysical foundations of America via sexuality was what was on his mind and what came out of his pen. Before it was “fashionable” and these days, dreadfully dull, Vidal wrote (namely, in his novel Myra Breckenridge) about transgenderism and any other kind of game of sexual behavior. He got a rise out of shocking moral Americans, who undoubtedly would shake with horror and wag the religious finger at the sexual perversions of Vidal's writerly explorations.

Whether he intended to shock people or whether he saw a genuine need to explore the issue of gender, Vidal most certainly got a rise out of disturbing Buckley. Buckley always prided himself in never being shocked by the strange behavior of the Left, but something about Vidal touched a personal nerve. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that Vidal was so offensive, addicted to smearing dirt over the purity of the sacred.

Either way, it would appear to me that both Buckley and Vidal were slightly uncomfortable in their own skin in order to face each other in a non-defensive way.

Another aspect that Best of Enemies touched upon is the lack of intellectual dialogue today. All we are left with are talking heads, pundits, whatever you want to call them. (The ending of the documentary shows a cacophony of voices that ends with bizarre cackle of Megyn Kelly).

This is true. Love him or hate him, agree or disagree with him, Buckley created an intellectual space in America for a genuine and civil exchange of ideas. One had to be prepared to argue one's point with a strong back up, which often included experience rather than purely ideas.

Buckley was what you might call a public intellectual. He was able to bring together people from the Right and the Left, and even those who were apolitical. For him, the American Square was not just about politics. It was about culture, and culture was about the order of things, and order of things was necessary for the survival of civilization.

It isn't that the tension between the sacred and profane did not exist in the past (far and distant one, or a more recent one). It is that, today, we do not know the difference between the sacred and profane.

This is partly due to identity politics, which are inextricably linked to the “philosophy” of victimhood. Intellectual disagreement means being metaphysically offended. Those who wallow and hide behind the many masks of identity politics do not have strong philosophical arguments for their positions. So, when they are called out on it, the cry to mommy, and claim that they have been attacked and demand safe spaces. In the words of Tom Hanks: “THERE'S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL!”

We see this practically every day. Here are just a few examples from the last week or so:

1. Newt Gingrich gets into a heated argument with Megyn Kelly. He calls her out on her journalistic inadequacy. He is labeled a misogynist.

2. Christina Hoff Sommers is about to deliver a talk at Columbia University on victimhood and academic freedom. Posters of her talk are defaced and student organizer of her talk gets pretzels and cereal thrown at her by the opposition. Pretzel logic?

3. Professor Tony Esolen is protested against at Providence College for writing an article titled “Succumbed to the Totalitarian Diversity Cult.” The students who protested wrote a letter to the president of the college with main point of how such article “made them feel.”

Victims everywhere! Even from a purely psychological stand point, I am not sure how can one derive the meaning of life on being a perpetual victim. This is a pathological problem. It is also a multi-faceted problem: one that involves academia, politics, public square, anti-intellectualism. All of these have one thing in common: lack of freedom of speech. The order of things is subverted under the guise of empathy and diversity. Change the meaning of words, and a lie will become a truth.

It is a sad state of affairs, my friends. We should welcome ALL of the intellectual positions (be they sacred or profane). However, they have to stand on their own merit and power and validity. 

{Best of Enemies trailer}