Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In many ways we are living through a re-enactment of Cold War battles that pervaded higher education in the mid 20th century. This essay explores a small part of that history by way of an exploration of Sidney Hook’s 1953 Heresy Yes—Conspiracy No. In this work, Hook weaves a path between the excesses of McCarthyism and American liberals’ naive indifference to the real dangers of Soviet communism. I argue the book is an insightful exploration of the limits of tolerance and the paradoxes of the liberal impulse to embrace illiberal beliefs. Hook focuses on the confusions prevalent among those he calls Cultural Vigilantes and Ritual Liberals, and he explores their roles in enflaming and perpetuating exaggerated scares about Communism and indifference to its actual dangers. This essay begins with a careful reconstruction of Hook’s arguments in their historical setting. It then argues the Cultural Vigilante and Ritual Liberal are still with us and readily visible in today’s debates about Critical Race Theory, Transgenderism, and Cancel Culture. The degree to which current polemics recall some of the least edifying behavior of politicians and academics at the height of the Red Scare and McCarthy era of American politics is almost eerie. The paper ends with the suggestion that one unique feature of contemporary debates is the open willingness of some on the left to see conspiracy at work when confronted with mere heresy.