Global Dialogues

The only way to challenge the legitimacy of cruelty in the minds of people over the long term is to foster and promote a conception of goodness that embraces all. If I understand that those who oppose my views and even offend me—or whose affinity group is not my affinity group—also share in the good in which I share, it won’t make sense to treat them cruelly.

The nation has witnessed public assassinations in recent days, not murder for private gain but cruelty of the worst kind—killing—to erase one’s political enemies. Examples this year include Charlie Kirk in September and Melissa Hortman in June, the former a conservative campus activist and media personality, the latter a progressive member of Minnesota’s House of Representatives. No less disturbing than these public acts of cruelty was the glee with which people celebrated them on social websites and even legacy media. It is this delight in the death of one’s political opponents that lays bare the lack of any sense of a shared goodness binding us all together, a moral condition that will only feed into furthering such acts of senseless cruelty.Unfortunately, it would seem that universities are themselves susceptible to the logic of cruelty. 

When cruelly attacked by the government for their alleged wokeness, all they can do is negotiate. In other words, they have trouble—above all but not only—in congressional committees, presenting themselves as institutions of higher learning in terms of a robust conception of goodness, a moral purposefulness that goes beyond the “right” to academic freedom. As a result, they are unable to counter the administration’s claim that they’re not serving the good of the nation—and are left to negotiate with the administration on its terms.

As suggested in The Atlantic, students no longer see value in classroom learning but are now focused on joining student organizations as vital paths to coveted high-paying power jobs. It’s not, I’d argue, that they’re not interested in classroom learning but that the learning process is no longer clearly distinguishable from partisan and even narcissistic agendas that fail to offer students a moral purposefulness to guide their lives, which they’re actually deeply longing for.

For these reasons, we established a concentration in the Department of Theology at Georgetown University on the Common Good, inspired by the vision of Pope Francis in Fratelli Tutti. No field of knowledge is free of moral questions and even moral crises. Thus, if higher learning cannot introduce students to a common-good vision of knowledge pursuits across disciplines, we’ll never be free of the cruelty of brute force, the political “rationality” of which festers in citizens’ souls in the absence of a conception of goodness that embraces all. As I noted in a blog on the Berkley Forum: “We will be better able to manage the coming disasters, which will certainly touch U.S. universities, only by giving the vision of Fratelli Tutti a central place in our curriculum.”

Paul L. Heck is a professor of Islamic studies in Georgetown University's Department of Theology.