For decades, ideas hatched in the seminar rooms of 1960s France have been quietly percolating through American institutions. The result is a moral and intellectual climate in which a generation of young Americans has been taught to see themselves not as free individuals in charge of their own destinies, but as positions in a hierarchy of victimhood, defined by race or sex.
Most Americans encounter the consequences without ever encountering the underlying ideas. The consequences are everywhere: in classrooms that treat objective truth as a colonial imposition, in courts that struggle to draw moral distinctions, in corporate cultures where the most senior people in the room hesitate to exercise plain judgement.
This week I had the pleasure of welcoming the conservative academic Gad Saad to Mississippi — as he prepares to publish his new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. Saad is one of the most important conservative thinkers working in higher education today. He has now associated himself with the University of Mississippi's Declaration of Independence Center, one of the emerging citadels of conservative scholarship in American academia.
His central insight is one that the American conservative movement has been slow to catch up with.
Postmodernism teaches that there is no objective truth and no shared moral order — only competing perspectives shaped by power. From this premise follows cultural relativism: the doctrine that no culture, no tradition, no inheritance can be judged superior to any other. By the time the rest of us noticed, these strange ideas had quietly become the unofficial creed of the Western managerial class.
The result is what we now loosely call "woke." But that label, much overused, obscures more than it explains. What is really at work is the elevation of one specific moral feeling — empathy with the marginalized — into the supreme test of public virtue. Saad calls this suicidal empathy: an irrational, undirected altruism that hijacks moral judgement.
He is right. Aimed at the wrong target, in the wrong dose, empathy stops protecting civilization. It dismantles it. A society in the grip of suicidal empathy protects criminals over their victims. It privileges illegal migrants over citizens. It condemns self-defense as toxic. It lets feelings outrank facts.
Allan Bloom warned of this 40 years ago in The Closing of the American Mind. The conservative movement did not, until recently, do enough to take the warning seriously. We were busy with the politics of taxes and regulation — important work, and necessary, but not enough on its own. The deeper battle, the one Bloom and now Saad have identified, is over the moral and intellectual inheritance of the West itself.
That fight has to be picked up where the schoolchildren are. At the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, we run programs that teach young people about American exceptionalism and the moral case for the free market. Our illustrated children's book, What Makes America Special, is aimed at seven- to 10-year-olds — children old enough to start absorbing ideas about their country, but young enough that the cultural inheritance they receive will shape them for life.
We also believe that what happens in Mississippi can shape what happens in the rest of America. Over the past five years, our state has led on tax reform, on labor market reform, on education, on energy. Each was said, at the time, to be too ambitious. Each is now part of why Mississippi is climbing the economic rankings.
The recovery of the American mind is a more ambitious project than any of those. It has to be fought in classrooms, in churches, in libraries, in corporate boardrooms, in law schools. It cannot be won by a single state, or a single book, or a single think tank. But Mississippi is now in the front line of this fight.
Douglas Carswell, President & CEO, Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
