The Ritual That Couldn’t Hold

Two weeks ago, when the Washington Square News opinion desk argued that NYU graduates deserved better than Jonathan Haidt , I wrote here in AEI Ideas that the editorial had given the game away in its closing line: a complaint that the university kept booking speakers “who won’t rock the boat rather than those who would encourage us to make a change for the better.” Haidt is, by any reasonable measure, the textbook boat-rocker. The objection was not really to disruption. It was to disruption the authors had not pre-approved. On May 14, Haidt walked to a podium at Yankee Stadium and was booed before he had said a word . Roughly three dozen graduates walked out during his remarks. The Atlantic published the full text the same week with an unusual editor’s note: They were reproducing it “so that readers may judge it for themselves.” A commencement address now requires a chain of custody. Notice what the pre-emptive objection actually did. It did not engage anything Haidt was likely to say. It engaged what his presence would signify. The complaint was not about argument. It was about institutional signaling. The student government’s statement objected to Haidt’s “disturbing rhetoric around antiracism, social justice and diversity, equity and inclusion”—categories that describe what he represents, not what he was going to say. Commencement used to be a civic ritual of transmission—older people who had built or failed or governed something passing a few sentences of judgment to younger people about to leave the institution that formed them. It was structurally Tocquevillian: a reminder that graduates belonged not only to themselves but to a broader civic order, and it asked an outside voice to mark the seam. Whether the speech landed didn’t much matter. The ritual did its work by happening. What replaced it is something closer to a referendum. The speaker is no longer a transmitter of judgment but a symbol of the institution’s affective alignments, and the ceremony has become an occasion to ratify or contest those alignments in advance. The text is almost beside the point. Haidt’s selection was litigated as a statement by NYU about what NYU is—which is why the speech could be condemned before anyone had read it or heard it. Then Haidt gave the speech, and something stranger happened. It turned out to be a precise diagnosis of the conditions that had produced the protest against it. The address is built around three claims. Reclaim your attention from corporations engineered to extract it; Meta is worth more than a trillion dollars not because users pay it but because it sells their attention to advertisers. Do hard things, because young people are antifragile and grow under challenge rather than break under it. Spend your attention on real people in real life, because the characteristic loneliness of ambitious adulthood is the loneliness of mediated connection—visible to everyone, witnessed by no one. Ironically, read against the protest, the speech is not a rebuttal. It is a description of the machinery that produced the protest. A pre-emptive condemnation of a speaker the authors had not heard, circulated for amplification on platforms designed to reward exactly that kind of circulation, is the attention economy doing what it was built to do. The grievance generates engagement; the engagement confirms the grievance; the speech itself becomes the least relevant artifact in its own controversy. This is not a gotcha. It is the substantive point. If what you pay attention to shapes what you care about, and what you care about shapes who you become, then the question is not whether Haidt should have been invited. It is what habits of attention the surrounding institution has cultivated in its graduates, such that a measured speech about phones and friendship registers as an affront before it is read. Every commencement speaker now arrives pre-litigated, which means every administration faces a choice it did not face a decade ago: hold the ritual or fold it. NYU held it. The students who walked out were exercising the very freedom Haidt was there to defend. The administration that booked him and the magazine that published him both did the small, unglamorous work civic rituals require: letting the words be spoken, then letting them be read. The Atlantic’s editor’s note would have been unnecessary in 1985, when Haidt himself graduated, or in 2005, when David Foster Wallace told Kenyon that education is finally about “the choice of what to think about.” It is necessary now because that choice has been outsourced, at scale, to systems that profit from refusing to make it. Treasure your attention, Haidt told the graduates. Some had already surrendered theirs. The post The Ritual That Couldn’t Hold appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .