Hypocritical about that Kool-Aid!

Charles Krauthammer's recent comment about liberals needing "their moral superiority like oxygen" allows me to make some sense out of some irritating liberal behavior.

What unites the garden-variety liberal whose station wagon is plastered with bumper stickers, the guy who sat in front of me during a lecture yesterday, and the door of a professor whose office and lab I occasionally pass by? Well, let me describe the three briefly first.

Ms. "Say that with a z!" Bumper Sticker never has a cute bumper sticker or ever just one. She has several, and all advocate liberal pet causes or belittle nonliberals in general. For example, "How does killing people who kill other people show us that killing people is wrong?" and "Hatred is not a family value." You know what I'm talking about. Ms. Bumper Sticker makes sure the whole world knows that she's an upstanding liberal.

In academia, of course, many consider adherence to leftism and adoption of various countercultural trappings de rigeur. For example, I attended a lecture yesterday on stem cell research by a major authority, Professor Dame Julia Polak. (Yes. This sounds like a character straight out of Keeping up Appearances, but I'm not making up the name. She's here on sabbatical, though. Perhaps she's avoiding the Bucket-woman. But I digress.) A few minutes before the lecture started, this fortyish man sat a couple rows down from me, skullet in full glorious view. (Go here and scroll down. The Phase III Forcekullet is the closest approximation.) When you're in academia and encounter enough liberals, you start developing an intuition, sort of like how homosexuals develop "gaydar." I could just look at this guy and tell that wearing long hair was his way to show his moral superiority as a bona fide leftist. So I had an interesting juxtaposition during the lecture between (1) interest in the vast medical promise of stem cells and (2) a desire to whip out a pair of clippers whenever my eye wandered down from the projection screen. I wanted to kindly take this man aside and inform him that long hair fringing a bald skull looks really, really, REALLY stupid. But this would have done no good: this guy's hair style is a badge of honor. And how could I be so superficial to judge him based on something as unimportant as his appearance? (Short answer: because this aspect of his appearance is totally under his control and thus reflects his choices.) So Dr. Skullet may look clueless, but more importantly, he looks liberal, and the former assessment is superficial anyway.

Now we get to the office door of the man I'll call "Dr. Kool-Aid." Occasionally, I pass the office of a professor in another department and see: a color photo of the walking pitcher that is the Kool-Aid mascot on the wall next to a door. The door is plastered with newspaper and magazine clippings, mostly of political cartoons and pictures (doctored or not) with captions. The material is variously liberal, anti-Bush, or anti-corporate (e.g., to the effect that large corporations are evil -- just like Enron). By now with this third example, you get it: here we have another liberal who insists on beating every casual passer-by with the following: "News Bulletin: I'm liberal!" But for a long time, Dr. Kool-Aid presented something of a riddle to me. He was the typical exhibitionist liberal, but still different in some way. But how?

The Kool-Aid photo is the key. Since the Jonestown mass suicide, the phrase, "Don't drink the Kool-Aid" has meant "Don't become a zealot." The meaning seems to vary between a warning against blindly buying into an ideology and a warning against having any ideology at all. (In academia, where a kind of dogmatic skepticism is very common, this latter meaning is the usual meaning.) So we have this ultra-liberal warning us not to drink the Kool-Aid. What's up with that?

It could be that Dr. Kool-Aid doesn't regard himself as liberal at all. In discussing media bias, Bernard Goldberg makes an interesting observation: "Conservatives must be identified because the audience needs to know these are people with axes to grind. But liberals don't need to be identified because their views on all the big social issues ... aren't liberal views at all. They're simply reasonable views, [emphasis added] shared by all the reasonable people the media elites mingle with at all their reasonable dinner parties in Manhattan and Georgetown." If this is true, Dr. Kool-Aid sure feels the need to warn a lot of people about a whole slew of uncontroversial issues. If that were the case and I were in his shoes, I'd head for the hills. But I think something else is going on here.

Ms. Bumper Sticker, Dr. Skullet, and Dr. Kool-Aid are dfferent from you and me in that they have the urgent need to shove their opinions in our faces regardless of whether we actually want to hear them. If we do nothing, they feel the validation of tacit agreement. If we object, they feel the validation of moral superiority over the buffoon who disagrees with them. It's the same sort of thing as the bully kid who goes around picking fights: he either gets to yell "chicken" or slug somebody. (The fist of someone stronger than he usually sets him on the path of enlightenment about what bravery really is.) But Dr. Kool-Aid is a scientist. He deals with the world impartially. Surely he's not influenced by ideology! (The fact is, we all have ideologies of varying degrees of explicitness, consistency, and validity. But remember what I said about the naive skepticism running rampant in academia. Its biggest proponents are usually scientists who confuse objectivity with agnosticism.) So the great scientist, I think, knows, at least on some level, that he subscribes to an ideology. So while he's on the usual quest for moral validation of his political beliefs, he has the additional need to feel like he's being uncommitted to ideology. So he puts up a silly photo of the Kool-Aid pitcher to let us know that he hasn't "drunk the Kool-Aid" and that if you don't march in lockstep with him, maybe you have. This way, he can still feel like an unbiased scientist.

In the sense that I freely admit what my political beliefs are and that I don't feel the need to foist them on people who aren't interested in hearing them, I guess I'm glad I didn't drink the Kool-Aid. Too bad you did, doc. Do I smell almonds on your breath?

-- CAV