A light bulb went on as I read these Princeton encampment "Community Guidelines":
What jumps out is their fear of being unholy in so many different directions:
littering is a "desecration of the land"
"affirmative consent" is a must, or rape will break out in the crowded tents
alcohol of any kind is "an offense to the [Palestinian] cause"
a recognition of stolen native land must be made, to ward off complicity in ethnic cleansing 300 years ago
holding stock in companies with business in Israel amounts to “a 75-year long...Princeton-funded genocide of the Palestinian people"
And these are just the holiness issues that happened to spill into these short Gaza rules. Of course there are more in their lives.
For me, it feels like Puritans trying to keep various holiness plates spinning. I asked AI to make an image of that, and this is what it came up with:
The other image in my head is of Jainist monks so afraid to kill anything they cover their mouths with veils so they don't inhale flies, and feather the ground in front of them so they don't step on insects.
The stolen land recital seems almost literally like they're afraid to step on guilty ground without an incantation.
Cumulatively, it seems like a form of collective OCD: frantic neurotics who think they're contaminated by everyday things the rest of us see as harmless.
In OCD, rituals are done to avoid magical and imaginary bad consequences: like if I step on a crack, someone will die.
But the thing about this collective form of OCD is that some bad consequences are very real. If they commit a holiness infraction, they will be swarmed by their fellow students.
What a terribly anxious frame of mind to be in, and they enforce it on themselves. They are at once the ones anxiously washing their hands, and the ones who'll furiously pounce on anyone who stops.
These secular moral panics are filling the void left by supernatural religion. Puritans saw the need for obsessive personal virtue since their God was always watching and keeping score. Honesty, piety, chastity, sobriety, etc.
But without a supernatural God, it's impossible to invest such everyday micro-virtues with enough gravitas. They just don't matter that much, compared to literal genocide.
Absent God, we can only achieve that kind of sacred/unholy intensity with grand secular harms: colonialism, rape, LGBT suicide, climate apocalypse. So these students see slavery around every corner, instead of God. One false step, they could be complicit in literal genocide. Atrocity land mines are everywhere.
This is Puritanism desperately trying to survive without the supernatural. They won't accept strained arguments for God, so they accept strained connections to Hitler and slavery.
Pick your implausibility: omnipresent God, or omnipresent Hitler.
At least with God, you get some mercy, forgiveness, peace, and awe as part of the bargain. This OCD encampment mentality is like Puritanism without the good parts.
For more on what drove this transition to secular Puritanism, see this cognitive model of modernity that traces it to physics equations that began arriving in the 1600s.
Harvard was founded as a Puritan seminary in 1636. When supernatural religion was later privatized by Locke, Harvard theologians refused to accept that diminution in status. To continue as prophets railing down at everyone, they shifted their preaching to grand secular harms like genocide. This meant dropping the "good parts" of their religion like forgiveness and peace. That was the Faustian bargain. Anything, to remain apex moral predators.
Hence the name of this substack: Jurassic Locke. Outrage finds a way.
Well said .. Mass holiness OCD . The indoctrinated activists on college campuses are fervent Leftists . They are taught much but learn little . Combine this with ignorance of history and secular moral panics , you get young coeds with a broken moral compass.