Two Thoughts at Once

For several years I have tried not to write about the culture war. This has not been because I regard it as unimportant. Quite the opposite. I have avoided it because almost everything drawn into it becomes smaller, harsher and less truthful. Words are taken from us and made to serve as passwords. People are sorted into camps. Every disagreement must end with a victor and a defeated party.

My restraint has not always been peaceful. Beneath it all, I have felt a growing anger. The culture war has damaged our common life while pretending to defend it. It has taught us to treat our fellow citizens as abstractions and to take satisfaction in their humiliation. Most people do not want to live this way. They want to be free to conduct their lives with integrity, while also belonging to communities capable of sustaining trust, responsibility and some shared account of what is true. Yet they find themselves caught between two organised minorities, each increasingly dependent upon the enmity of the other. The death of Jason Arday has brought that anger to the surface.

Arday was forty one when he was found dead at his home in south London yesterday. The police have described his death as unexpected but not suspicious. A little more than a week earlier, he had resigned from the University of Cambridge, where his appointment in 2023 had made him the youngest Black professor in the university’s history. His resignation followed allegations of plagiarism, inconsistencies in his academic work and questions about parts of the remarkable life story for which he had become known. He denied the allegations of plagiarism. Liverpool John Moores University reviewed his doctorate and upheld its decision to award it, while Cambridge had announced further inquiries that have not been completed.

Nothing about his death resolves the questions surrounding his work. Death is neither an acquittal nor a confession. We do not know the cause of his death, and it would be wrong to draw a line of causation that the available facts do not establish. Yet it would be equally wrong to pretend that the moral context is of no importance. His family has spoken of sustained abuse and harassment. In his resignation statement Arday wrote that relentless scrutiny and public commentary had taken a profound toll upon him and those he loved. He asked for compassion and for the space to recover an ordinary life. Nine days later, he was dead.

It should be possible to state these facts without turning them into a weapon, but, in a culture war, that possibility seems to elude us.

By the time of his death, Jason Arday had long ceased to be merely a man in the public imagination. To many of his admirers, he represented the overcoming of racism, disability and educational disadvantage. His ascent to Cambridge seemed to confirm that institutions once reserved for a narrow class of people could change. To many of his critics, he represented something quite different: an academic culture so preoccupied with diversity that it had abandoned judgement and lowered its standards. Once the allegations emerged, he became evidence in a case that both sides believed they had already proved.

The argument was no longer only about whether passages had been properly attributed, whether claims had been substantiated or whether Cambridge had exercised sufficient care in making a senior appointment. Those were serious questions and they deserved serious examination. But seriousness was soon overtaken by appetite. There was excitement in the prospect of exposure and satisfaction in the fall of someone who had come to represent the ambitions of the opposing camp. The person disappeared behind the symbol.

The left and the right are not guilty of identical failures in every instance, and I have little interest in drawing up a balance sheet of offences. That would merely reproduce the habits I am trying to describe. But both have surrendered something without which a common life becomes impossible. On the right, there are those who speak of order, tradition and civilisation while showing remarkably little reverence for the innate dignity of the human person. They defend freedom in the abstract but are often contemptuous of the particular freedom of people whose lives offend their account of how society ought to be arranged. They speak of dignity, yet delight in humiliation. The exposure of error is not enough. The opponent must be stripped of standing, reduced to a category and displayed as proof of the corruption of everything he is thought to represent.

On the left, there are those who speak eloquently of autonomy and inclusion while treating almost everything shared as an instrument of power. Standards become suspect, inheritance becomes oppression and the ordinary human need for continuity is dismissed as nostalgia. Institutions are encouraged to advertise their moral virtue through the people they appoint, sometimes placing an impossible representative burden upon those individuals. When legitimate questions arise, there can be a temptation to treat scrutiny itself as hostility. The defence of the symbol then takes precedence over care for the person.

The result is not liberation on one side and belonging on the other. It is a distorted version of both. At their worst, one camp offers community at the cost of autonomy. The other offers autonomy emptied of obligation and place. Between them stand the majority of people, who understand perfectly well that a human life requires both.

This is where Stoicism has something important to say. It does not offer a comfortable position midway between the factions. It isn’t not a method for splitting the difference, nor an invitation to withdraw from public life while congratulating oneself on remaining calm. But it is an attempt, a demanding attempt to understand what belongs to the individual human person and what we owe to one another.

The Stoics placed moral agency at the centre of human life. Epictetus insisted that there is a faculty of choice that cannot finally be surrendered to another person. We are answerable for our judgements, intentions and actions. No institution, identity or history can remove that responsibility from us. This is the root of autonomy in the Stoic tradition. The human being is not merely the product of a group, a social category or a set of circumstances. Each person possesses an interior moral freedom and must be addressed as someone capable of thought and choice.

Yet Stoic freedom was never the freedom of an isolated self. Marcus Aurelius repeatedly reminded himself that human beings are made for cooperation. The Stoics understood us as citizens of a common city, bound together not by sameness but by our participation in a shared human nature. Hierocles imagined our obligations as a series of circles, beginning with the self and extending through family, neighbours and fellow citizens until they embraced humanity itself. The task was to draw the outer circles closer, learning to regard the stranger as someone whose good could not be entirely separated from our own.

These two convictions belong together. Each human being possesses moral agency. Each human being is also part of a larger whole. Our individual dignity does not release us from obligation. It is the reason we can have obligations at all. Our membership of a community does not extinguish our freedom. A community worthy of the name exists partly to protect and cultivate it.

The culture war depends upon our inability to entertain these two thoughts at once. It asks us to choose between truth and mercy, freedom and belonging, accountability and dignity. It encourages us to believe that compassion requires the suspension of judgement, or that judgement requires the suspension of compassion.

Stoicism refuses that bargain. It gives is an alternative approach. A stoic can believe that the allegations concerning Jason Arday require investigation and that he remains entitled to humane treatment. We can believe that academic standards matter and that the enforcement of standards must never become a public spectacle. We can recognise the continuing reality of racism while also recognising that not every question asked of a Black academic is racist. We can value representation without allowing a person’s race or disability to become a substitute for judgement. We can acknowledge personal responsibility while asking why powerful institutions were so eager to celebrate an individual, yet seemed so poorly prepared to protect him when celebration gave way to controversy.

Responsibility is not a finite quantity. One person’s wrongdoing does not exhaust the available blame, nor does institutional failure cancel individual agency. Jason Arday was responsible for his work and for the claims he made. Cambridge was responsible for the care with which it appointed and supported him. Those who investigated the allegations were responsible for the accuracy and proportion of their claims. Those who reported and discussed them were responsible for remembering that the object of their scrutiny was a human being. His defenders were responsible for distinguishing prejudice from legitimate inquiry. Every participant remained responsible for the manner in which they exercised whatever freedom and power they possessed.

This is a much harder moral picture than the culture war permits. It provides no blameless faction and no final victory. It asks us to tell the truth without cruelty, to defend standards without making an idol of them and to extend compassion without using it to obscure responsibility. Above all, it forbids delight in the destruction of another person.

The traditional Stoic virtues offer a useful discipline here. Wisdom asks us to withhold assent from the first satisfying explanation. Justice requires us to treat the person before us as more than a means to our own vindication. Temperance restrains the appetite for outrage and humiliation. Courage enables us to question the conduct of our own side, especially when silence would be rewarded. None of this is neutrality. It is moral participation without surrendering one’s judgement to the crowd.

Most people already practise some version of this in their ordinary lives. Families survive because affection and truth are not treated as opposites. Friendships endure because a person can be wrong without becoming worthless. Communities hold together because disagreement does not always lead to expulsion. It is only in our public life, and especially online, that we have come to regard such ordinary moral intelligence as weakness.

Jason Arday was not simply Cambridge’s youngest Black professor. He was not an argument for diversity, an argument against it, a story of triumph or a story of institutional decline. He was a father, a partner, a son, a colleague and a man whose life contained gifts, frailties, achievements and perhaps serious mistakes. Whose doesn’t? We do not need to pronounce a final judgement upon him in order to mourn his death. We need only recover the ability to see a person where the culture war has taught us to see a symbol.

That may be the first task in rebuilding a common life: to hold two thoughts at once, and to refuse any victory that requires us to forget that another human being is human.