On the Right to Riot

Although I have not yet said anything about the scandal that rocked Penn State this past week, I want to highlight something related to it:  the student reaction to the firing of Joe Paterno, who was in his 46th year as head coach.  In his Friday column, Jonah Goldberg notes that students blamed their rioting on the decision of the school trustees who, hours before, had fired the head coach because of his inaction on learning about the heinous crimes of former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky.  Here is Goldberg:

Imbued with a sense of victimhood, entitlement, and cultivated grievance that can only be taught, their preferred response to inconvenience is a temper tantrum. Sometimes, as with the Penn State riots, they are physical. Other times, they are intellectual or theatrical. But the tantrums are always self-justifying. Arguments are correct not if they conform to facts and reason, but if they are passionately held. Unfairness is measured by the intensity of one’s feelings.

Perhaps that’s why a “right to riot” has become a staple of campus culture across the country, particularly at big schools. Students riot when administrators take away their beer. They riot when they lose games. They riot when they win games. They riot when the cops try to break up parties. Inconvenience itself has become outrageous.

This is a very lucid and thoughtful critique of modern society.  This supposed right to riot is just as absurd as saying that one has a right to a temper tantrum or a right to slavery, an act contrary to the very principles which underlie this republic.  James Wilson taught in his Lecture on Law that "selfishness and injury are as little countenanced by the law of nature as by the law of man. Positive penalties, indeed, may, by human laws, be annexed to both. But these penalties are a restraint only upon injustice and overweening self-love, not upon the exercise of natural liberty."

Goldberg also points out that today, passion rules reason completely.  Things once held to be self-evident truths can now only be judged as good based on how passionately one holds to that belief, notwithstanding the belief itself.  The exclusive focus on rights totally eliminates any sense of duty to anyone else. 

At bottom, this is relativism and nihilism which, on most college campuses, is only reinforced by the professors who teach these same students.