From public intellectual and professor Robert Boyers, ”a powerfully persuasive, insightful, and provocative prose that mixes erudition and first-hand reportage” (Joyce Carol Oates) addressing recent developments in American culture and arguing for the tolerance of difference that is at the heart of the liberal tradition. Written from the perspective of a liberal intellectual who has spent a … intellectual who has spent a lifetime as a writer, editor, and college professor, The Tyranny of Virtue is a “courageous, unsparing, and nuanced to a rare degree” (Mary Gaitskill) insider’s look at shifts in American culture–most especially in the American academy–that so many people find alarming.
Part memoir and part polemic, Boyers’s collection of essays laments the erosion of standard liberal values, and covers such subjects as tolerance, identity, privilege, appropriation, diversity, and ableism that have turned academic life into a minefield. Why, Robert Boyers asks, are a great many liberals, people who should know better, invested in the drawing up of enemies lists and driven by the conviction that on critical issues no dispute may be tolerated? In stories, anecdotes, and character profiles, a public intellectual and longtime professor takes on those in his own progressive cohort who labor in the grip of a poisonous and illiberal fundamentalism. The end result is a finely tuned work of cultural intervention from the front lines.
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Robert Boyers writes in the great tradition of Saul Bellow, Irving Howe and Susan Sontag: a powerfully persuasive, insightful and provocative prose that mixes erudition and first-hand reportage, combativeness and sympathy, moral vehemence, and humor. From his vantage point as longtime editor of the preeminent journal Salmagundi, Boyers has been in close contact with every seismic shift in literary, intellectual, artistic, and academic quarters in recent decades, and for those of us who may require guidance, here is our guide.
Robert Boyer sheds light on several issues which threaten our freedom of speech and liberty.The author states the internet empowers vast numbers of people to enact their worst selves, and to participate in grotesque campaigns of slander,vilification and irrationality. We are to understand at best we are no means neutral and that in fact there was no center to occupy .The writer asks ourselves to question the extreme voices who endanger our democracy and the importance of moderation and consideration if we are to continue living in a modern democracy.
Robert Boyers’s voice is a bracing one: courageous, unsparing, and nuanced to a rare degree. In this book, he patiently and wittily speaks sanity to the towering forces of cultural craziness, and he actually respects everyone — well, nearly everyone — whom he subjects to his rigorous critique. For anyone wondering how a person should be, The Tyranny of Virtue is an excellent example.
This is a moment in which many robust voices claim attention for groups and causes that have been undervalued historically — a splendid moment for a culture that, at its best, places great value on reform that tends toward justice. In our universities, the debates it encourages have sometimes become vitriolic and judgmental. Robert Boyers has given us a reminder of the complexity of the issues at stake and the urgency of preventing a humane impulse from being overwhelmed by passions unworthy of it.
The Tyranny of Virtue: think of virtue as an ideal, and yet also as a tyranny, and all that does not belong to that realm must cower and disappear. We live in a time when true virtue seems to have disappeared, and everything that is not virtuous has taken to wearing virtue as a cloak. Of course I might have begun by saying that I know of almost no one but Robert Boyers who can succinctly penetrate and dispose of this masquerade of a period we are living in. So much that is wrong and dark he reveals in extraordinarily limpid prose, showing us that what is out there will not be made right and clear without the courage to name the human mess we have made. The life of the academy should remain sacred, and this book makes a splendid case for it, for the proposition that virtue is permanently hinged to the ideal of truth — that many-hued and illusive reality. The admirable and triumphant accomplishment of this work is that it adds to the ongoingness of our common enterprise. The Tyranny of Virtue is a wonderful book, and I shall always have it nearby.
For decades Robert Boyers has been a bracing voice of sanity amid the ideological fashions of left and right. The Tyranny of Virtue is vintage Boyers — a brave and timely challenge to the suffocating moral orthodoxy that has come to envelop academic life and much of our broader public discourse as well. No one who cares about the future of independent thought can afford to ignore this book.