Freedom of Speech and the University Campus
Some disconnected thoughts on free speech on the university campus.
The shutting down of talks on campus is troubling to me. I admit that I have woefully downplayed the significance and danger of this growing trend.
The rub for me, however, is that the people who are getting pushed off campus truly are immoral imbeciles. I don’t find it helpful to switch to a wimpy open-mindedness about what speech should be paid attention to. Richard Spencer doesn’t deserve an audience. It’s not weak or snowflakey of you to avoid listening to someone who just verbally harrasses for a living.
But generally speaking, I do prefer open engagement, even with immoral imbeciles, for the very reason that I think some of these people being shut out are reprehensible. In this I share the moral outrage of people protesting. But I maintain that evil cannot be held at bay by brute force (at least not by itself), but requires argument, the vulnerability of hearing something horrendous and being able to combat it on its own terms. Otherwise, it simply grows and spreads.
The most troubling has been more moderate voices that have been shut out of conversation, but I maintain that these are rarer instances.
That said, the controversial public figures who receive the biggest stir are poor representatives of the ideas they claim to stand for, and have brought upon themselves any backlash they receive. Milo and Coulter and Spencer cannot play the victim card with all their racially-charged rhetoric and childish argumentation. If they get rioted out of town, it’s not because they’re a martyr to free speech, they’re just immoral attention-hogs getting what comes from loose tongues.
Now, there are such things as boundaries. I honestly don’t feel the need to show up at a talk given by a man who thinks it’s cool to post videos insinuating that all Arab/Muslims practice bestiality (like Milo). If you wrestle with pigs, you’re going to get dirty. I have better things to do, actual intellectuals to engage with and challenge my views. Some people are so beneath the level of reasonable discourse that they’re not worth taking seriously. If you are a member of a group that is targeted for ridicule by a certain person, I think you very much the freedom and the responsibility to ignore them. That may not always be the case, and there can be no hard and fast final rules abou thtis. Martin Luther King, Jr. could not have fought white supremacy without facing it, though he should certainly never tolerate any insinuation that he has an obligation to sit and listen to a Klan member give a lecture about the inferiority of the black race, the way a battered wife need not face her batterer. My current opinion is that the best antitode for this far-right crowd is to ignore them instead of providing them the controversy upon which they thrive. That may not always be good enough, but for the most part, I don’t think these figures deserve the dignity of a response.
What worries me is that the reaction to ‘political correctness’ (I’m still not sure know what this means, it’s just an often meaningless buzzword used by the right, but I’ll use it for now) leads conservatives into a horrible trap. In their quest to take down ‘progressivism,’ they become their caricature of the left in order to mock it, and thereby truly fascistic. They become a tradition of no values, just brute force.
Left and Right are in some ways trading places in America. The Left is realizing they can and should have stronger moral standards (they are just not ‘traditional’ standards, but standards well rooted in the progressive wing of Enlightenment Western thought) to the point of being very rigid, sometimes Puritanical, as they work out what these standards are and what they mean. Maybe tolerance isn’t everything, maybe intolerance shouldn’t be tolerated? Many are starting to ask this.
The Alt-Right is countering in an attempt to caricature the previous instantiation of ‘the left,’ but in doing so are becoming themselves the embodiment of that caricature. They thereby become a party of obscene, libertine, tolerance where all sorts of morally repugnant ideas can and must be expressed without consequence: “Poor Richard Spencer/Ann Coulter/Milo Yiannapoulis is a martyr to free speech, where has tolerance gone?” (no, actually, they’re not victims. they’re just reaping the consequences of their own actions).
Before religious conservatives, especially, start trying to take the moral high-ground regarding free speech and tolerance, they must recognize (and perhaps celebrate?) that what is truly going on here is that the left is now becoming more recognizable to the world religious conservatives operate within. The values are different, but the difficult negotiation of having strong religious and cultural traditions in a multicultural society is the same. Why shouldn’t a progressive seminary choose not to honor someone who represents, no matter how winsomely and maturely, values that go against their deepest sensibilities? Conservative seminaries would do the same thing on different issues (I cannot imagine my evangelical seminary alma mater awarding a pastor who performs gay marriages, even if they were invited to come speak) and strongly defend their right to do so. The quest to catch the other in a ‘gotcha’ moment removes all footing for a reasonable position.
The more complex task of figuring out how to live together with a never-before-existing diversity of cultural and religious traditions is a difficult, but an increasingly necessary, task. How do we negotiate the gray areas of tolerance and moral conviction? This is a difficult task that no one in the West seems willing to do. I maintain that there is no easy answer to this, there are real and valid concerns from every direction here. Failing to figure this out, however, certainly guarantees that the strongest forces of intolerance, on all sides, will come out on top.
