It occurs to me as well that we are regressing to a Puritanism based on everyone being focused solely on what we CAN’T do, rather than on anything good or positive. It’s everyone looking around angrily, constantly on edge.
As Mencken put it: “Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
Somewhere, there is some guy deciding whether or not to keep wearing his Cleveland Indians hat. And somewhere there is some Leftist worried that he will.
The standards are enforced ruthlessly, pitilessly, because the Inquisitors believe they are GOOD. They see themselves, as did the Nazis and Bolsheviks, and Maoists and Japanese Imperialists–and for the matter white Christian missionaries and colonialists–as inherently right, and everyone else as inherently wrong.
This is one more iteration of their Essentialism, which it was supposed to be the task of the Academy to eliminate, not distil and propagate, as has in fact happened. Progress was undoing that sort of arrogance, by making it impossible in the light of the critical thinking and self awareness Liberal educations were supposed to make common and reliable in their administration.
But the book burners have taken over the universities. They don’t need to subject ANYTHING to critical scrutiny. They simply use social and political and even physical violence to silence the speaker, without ever even HEARING the ideas. All they know about the ideas is that they were different. All they know is that they hate THAT sort of diversity. They can’t deal with it. They are like Christians without faith, and without the comforts the positive aspects of that religion reliably provide when practiced honestly.