There is a lot of day to go, but as I write this at 6:30 a.m., I feel that it has already been a success. Not an achievement, mind, but a day with rich satisfactions. Those wonderful feelings and the upbeat feelings about the rest of the day come from this paragraph, which is part of a column in yesterday morning’s New York Times by Princeton professor Robert P. George.

He is, according to his assessment in this column, a well-known conservative on a very liberal campus. Conservative students who feel they have been mistreated by various collections of liberals on the campus, come to him with their complaints. A good deal of the column is his advice to them. The rest of the column describes his notion of what a liberal arts education is all about and how he plays his part in that larger drama.

Here is the paragraph

Grievance identitarianism — be it of the left or the right — impedes the very thing a student is attending university to do: namely, think and learn. It turns a person into a tribalist, someone who, rather than thinking for oneself, outsources one’s thinking to the group.

First, I have never heard the term “grievance identitarianism” (hereafter, GI) before and I embrace it fully. To me, it means something like this: I have grievances and they are so central to me that I have organized my self system around them. There is a difference, as C. S. Lewis noted in his The Great Divorce between grumbling and being nothing more than a Grumble. I think that is what “grievance identitarianism” means to Professor George.

And I think, further, that it does what he says it does. As I see it, Professor George makes three conclusions in that paragraph. The first is that GI it impedes thinking and learning. Of course it does. A grievance is a support-seeking missile. If a finding is about the right topic and if it provides support for the issue to which you have attached your grievance, then it is golden and is to be embraced without restraint.

Notice that there are two tests there. The first is the test of salience. If my grievance has to do with social class, for instance, and the data on offer have to do with race, I just keep walking. I don’t reject it; I am just not interested. I am searching for information that will support what I am angry about; I just don’t care about the other stuff. The second is the test of effect. Given that it is relevant, does it support the case my grievance requires/allows me to make?

Notice that neither of these tests supports open inquiry, much less disinterested learning. When Professor George writes the best pro-life argument he can and then assigns the best pro-choice (anti-life?) argument he can find, he is promoting open inquiry. The students will feel it is a burden to have to read both. Even at Princeton.

The second of Professor George’s conclusions is that GI turns the student into a tribalist. What he means by that is that he “outsources his thinking to the group.” “Tribalist” means a good deal more to me than that, so I am going to treat this as two effects, rather than one, as the column does. There are three potential benefits to tribalism. The first is that the other members of your tribe believe in the same thought structures you do; their world has done them wrong, just as yours has.

The second is that there is a great deal of emotional support from the tribe. It isn’t just that they have the same views; they also have the same emotions about those views. We deeply resent this and wholly support that and are sure we are being disrespected by our opponents. The third is that when there is work that needs to be done—projects that are directly implied by our shared grievance, there are colleagues to do that work with.

What I am calling the third effect is that a GI “outsources his thinking to the group.” By that, I mean more than having access to people who will agree with my beliefs and my feelings. I mean that these people, my fellow grievants, are the source my my thinking. They provide from one time to another, the data I count on; the cause and effect logic by which I connect one issue to another; and the actions that are clearly implicated. It is not that I could not have come to those conclusions by myself; it is, rather, that I never have to. My philosophy is right there on the tribe’s library shelf. It’s all plug and play for me.

Professor George is lamenting the prospect of teaching students whose attention is so directed and whose emotional commitments are so volatile. I sympathize. Thinking carefully and drawing tentative conclusions is an acquired taste. But the university is where those tastes are supposed to be acquired. It is hard to think where else it could happen and if it is going to become a habit of mind, it is going to have to start early and it is going to have to be confirmed by friends and enemies.

I mean, here, only to celebrate the expression “grievance identitarianism” and to offer Professor George my thanks for doing the work he does. All of us benefit from that work, even those who oppose the conclusions he draws.