I teach in a law school. For several years now my students have been mostly Millennials. Contrary to stereotype, I have found that the vast majority of them want to learn. But true to stereotype, I increasingly find that most of them cannot think, don’t know very much, and are enslaved to their appetites and feelings. Their minds are held hostage in a prison fashioned by elite culture and their undergraduate professors.

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First, except when describing an ideology, you are not to use a word that ends in “ism.” Communism, socialism, Nazism, and capitalism are established concepts in history and the social sciences, and those terms can often bsdffsdae used fruitfully to gain knowledge and promote understanding. “Classism,” “sexism,” “materialism,” “cisgenderism,” and (yes) even racism are generally not used as meaningful or productive terms, at least as you have been taught to use them. Most of the time, they do not promote understanding....Second, you have been taught to resort to two moral values above all others, diversity and equality. These are important values if properly understood. But the way most of you have been taught to understand them makes you irrational, unreasoning. For you have been taught that we must have as much diversity as possible and that equality means that everyone must be made equal. But equal simply means the same. To say that 2+2 equals 4 is to say that 2+2 is numerically the same as four. And diversity simply means difference. So when you say that we should have diversity and equality you are saying we should have difference and sameness. That is incoherent, by itself. Two things cannot be different and the same at the same time in the same way.

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Furthermore, diversity and equality are not the most important values. In fact, neither diversity nor equality is valuable at all in its own right. Some diversity is bad. For example, if slavery is inherently wrong, as I suspect we all think it is, then a diversity of views about the morality of slavery is worse than complete agreement that slavery is wrong.

Similarly, equality is not to be desired for its own sake. Nobody is equal in all respects. We are all different, which is to say that we are all not the same, which is to say that we are unequal in many ways. And that is generally a good thing. But it is not always a good thing (see the previous remarks about diversity).

Related to this: You do you not know what the word “fair” means. It does not just mean equality. Nor does it mean something you do not like. For now, you will have to take my word for this. But we will examine fairness from time to time throughout this semester.

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Third, you should not bother to tell us how you feel about a topic. Tell us what you think about it. If you can’t think yet, that’s O.K.. Tell us what Aristotle thinks, or Hammurabi thinks, or H.L.A. Hart thinks. Borrow opinions from those whose opinions are worth considering. As Aristotle teaches us in the reading for today, men and women who are enslaved to the passions, who never rise above their animal natures by practicing the virtues, do not have worthwhile opinions. Only the person who exercises practical reason and attains practical wisdom knows how first to live his life, then to order his household, and finally, when he is sufficiently wise and mature, to venture opinions on how to bring order to the political community.

One of my goals for you this semester is that each of you will encounter at least one idea that you find disagreeable and that you will achieve genuine disagreement with that idea. I need to explain what I mean by that because many of you have never been taught how to disagree.

Disagreement is not expressing one’s disapproval of something or expressing that something makes you feel bad or icky. To really disagree with someone’s idea or opinion, you must first understand that idea or opinion.

“Let’s go! Face the wall! Don’t look at me,” the performer yelled as if he was a drill instructor commanding recruits. Then he went on.

“First they came for the Native Americans, but I’m not Native American, so I did not speak up. Then they came for the Jews, but I’m not a Jew so I did not speak up. Then they came for the gays, but I am not gay so I did not speak up. Next they came for the crippled, but I’m not crippled, so I did not speak up. Turn around. What do you see? What do you see?

“There’s one light left?” one student offered.

“One light. One life. My life, and when they came for me there was no one else to speak up,” the performer concluded.

In another performance, students heard very loud banging and a man’s voice yelling: “ICE, open up!” A “mother” in the scene hurriedly tells her daughter, who she is speaking to on the phone, that she has “to go.”

“Don’t let them teach you to be scared of others that don’t look or sound like you. Okay, stay quiet and stay put,” the mother says.

“Wait, mom?”

“Ti amo mucho.”

“Wait, don’t go! Don’t touch her! Mom?!”

Then the actress stands and faces the students observing in the wings.

“How would you feel if one of your family members was getting taken away from you? Well it’s happening today. It’s happening to me,” the performer says somberly as the skit ends.

In another skit, a loudspeaker chants “Jews will not replace us” over and over, the words echoing loudly and eerily through the darkened building. It’s the same chant neo-***** marching in Charlottesville yelled. “Then” and “now” images in the background appear to juxtapose images from WWII-era Germany with Charlottesville rioters.

In another performance, a female says she has a problem with her Middle Eastern roommate because “she’s a little too foreign.” She says her roommate wears a headscarf, and that she doesn’t “feel comfortable sharing a room with someone who could be related to a terrorist.”

The overall theatrical experience, which included about a dozen skits, lasted about 20 minutes.