Strange times for free speech.
A century ago, Germany was the authoritarian nation. Kaiser Wilhelm was presiding over its efforts in World War I, and young Adolf Hitler was working toward his opportunity in World War II. At the same time, Britain and America were havens of liberal ideals.
Yet those nations seem to have reversed roles on free speech and open debate. This year the German authorities decided to allow the republication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. But simultaneously the British government has ordered its universities to police extremist ideas within their walls. And with the American commencement season approaching, we can expect another round of speaker dis-invitations as university students demand that they not have to listen to ideas outside their comfort zone.
Let’s take up the new British directives. Read for yourself this “Prevent Duty Guidance” document at Her Majesty’s Government’s site (or this PDF version) — especially pages 20-23 which focus on the special duties of Higher Education. Or you can take my summary word for it:
The U.K. government’s current fear is terrorism, especially of the Islamist type, and the large number of young people who become radicalized while at university. So the government has decided that students at institutions of higher education now need extra protection from extreme ideas. This will require, as the document puts it, some “interaction” with the universities’ traditional duty of free speech.
* First on the government’s list of concerns are guest speakers who may expose the students to extreme views. More guidance on managing speakers will be forthcoming.
* But students might also be influenced by already-radicalized students at student-group events and “through personal contact with fellow students and through their social media activity.” So the government directs universities to “recognise these signs” and learn how to respond.
* Computers and other Information Technology devices must not be overlooked. IT can be used to access extreme material or for extreme purposes, so universities “should consider the use of filters as part of their overall strategy to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.”
* In a phrase that appears several times, the document emphasizes that the target is “not just violent extremism but also non-violent extremism.”
* This will require training of the universities’ staff who are, among other things, charged with “sharing information about vulnerable individuals.”
* To administer all of this, the government recommends that universities establish “a single point of contact” and that they consult with government-appointed “coordinators” on how well they are performing their duties.
* The document also includes a reminder of who is paying most of the bills, i.e., the British government, with the implication of he who pays the piper.
* And a final point: the Secretary of State will be monitoring universities “to assess the bodies’ compliance,” with further details forthcoming.
What could go wrong? (Perhaps readers of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix already know the story: the Ministry will be sending Dolores Umbridge into Hogwarts.)
Let’s first dispense with an important but secondary issue — the document’s regular use of the weasel-word “extremism,” which is often a euphemism for “strongly-held positions that I disapprove of.”
Extremism is definitely not the problem. Some extreme ideas and actions are true, important, and healthy — extremism in hygiene as your surgeon is preparing to operate upon you, extremism in eating healthy foods and avoiding poison, and extremism in opposing child molesting. The problem of terrorism is the problem of false-and-destructive ideas, not extreme ideas.
Another important but secondary issue: the government’s inclusion of both violent and non-violent forms of extremism. What is non-violent extremism? Mahatma Gandhi was rather extreme about non-violence. Do his ideas count as suspicious? Of course not! comes the reply. Don’t be ridiculous! We don’t mean to ban Gandhi! But who really knows where the lines will be drawn? With the document’s bureaucratese language, we are to wait until the government-appointed coordinators decide and let us know.
Another secondary issue: already the special-interest lobbying has commenced and, on a technicality, student groups at Oxford and Cambridge universities get special exemption. (A colleague reminded me that the Communist spies Philby, Burgess, Blunt, and Maclean were recruited at Cambridge, so it’s not clear how effective that exemption will be.) But of course it was politicking that led to the elite-universities exemption, not high principle.
Yet the primary point in response to “Prevent Duty Guidelines” is about high principle.
The document references “the fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs.” Excellent. Exactly those values are at stake.
But they cannot be preserved by indoctrination, half measures, or ignorance of their enemies. Our best defense of democracy, liberalism, and tolerance is citizens who are fully educated. That means those who know what those values mean and what they depend upon — and who know the best arguments by the opponents of democracy, liberalism, and tolerance.
Especially in a university context, education requires principled commitment to free speech and robust debate. By trying to limit the range of ideas rather than extending it, the British government is implicitly admitting that it has little confidence that its best minds can out-argue the ideas of terrorists — even on their own turf at British universities.
That may be a genuine concern. Yet British officials would do much better for democracy by re-reading its trinity of Johns — Milton, Locke, and Mill — three philosophers whose advocacy of vigorous and open liberalism in thought and debate were essential to making Britain great in the first place. John Milton’s Areopagitica, John Locke’s A Letter concerning Toleration, and the second chapter of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty are timeless teachers of how to advance free societies.
We must also remember that for its entire history, liberal civilization has had to grapple with powerful ideological opposition. Plato, Augustine, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger — all of them are extreme thinkers implicated in varying degrees in extreme ideologies and extremely violent practice. But we must read them and understand them. No shortcuts.
So in combating the latest contender, politicized Islam, we will have more success by encouraging students to read Islamist writings, e.g., Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones (as I will be doing this fall in my Philosophy of Religion course).
Prevent Guidance Compliance Officers sniffing around and self-censoring by institutions of higher education can lead only in the direction of failure — to universities that will graduate a whole generation of citizens ignorant of enemy ideas and unable to argue effectively against them.
Centuries ago the British best taught all of us how to live freely. They can once again find the way to defeat dangerous ideas — openly, cleanly, and steadfastly.
[This article was originally published in English at EveryJoe.com and in Portuguese at Libertarianismo.org.]
Free speech on campus is not dead yet
” editorial
A light in the politically correct campus darkness
As the dense fog of political correctness and lefty “sensitivity” engulfs campuses across America, a few lights still shine — and one of them flared bright last week, as the University of Chicago warned incoming freshmen that free speech still reigns there.
“Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own,” wrote Jay Ellison, the dean of students for undergraduates.
Cue the hallelujah chorus.
“Members of our community are encouraged to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn without fear of censorship,” he added. “At times this may challenge you and even cause discomfort.”
For the record: Learning anything requires all of the above.”
http://nypost.com/2016/08/28/a-light-in-the-politically-correct-campus-darkness/
It was never alive, Mr. Hicks.
I visited your site out of some amusement I found in your Nietzsche and the Nazis book. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are two of my favorite modern authors, so of course that dismisses any illusions about my antipathy toward what is the status quo of modern liberal academia.
I was encouraged early on to pursue English, due to predominant writing skills that excelled far ahead of the class; this was a continuing trend since my youth, as it was my strongest innate skill (there’s likely genetic inheritance at play there, as I have other wordsmiths in my line).
Anyways, moving along. As I’ve said, I’ve spent a good bit of my youth as somewhat a loner, rather bored by what I suppose Herr Fritz would call der unterherd (bad joke, bad German), and of course I buried myself in a lot of books. It helped my writing I suppose, being exposed to what you quite rightly put in Nietzsche: “a stylist par excellence.” It helps raise your game to play against better players. There’s no LOL and WTF and “like and subscribe, bro” in German continental philosophy.
Oh, by the way, do you have thoughts on Weininger’s Sex and Character? I get the feeling you’ve probably read that. I’m fascinated by that recently.
Anyways, getting back to academia. I decided instead on a particularly lucrative healthcare degree instead of English. Healthcare is evergreen, it is also a bit more globalization-proof, for lack of better words: it’s hard to send the sick to Bangladesh when they need fixing, in comparison to sending our Snickers machines there. And, of course, it’s expected that those who have seeped in the likes of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and some others in that vein (Spengler was quite amusing as well, I’d be very interested in your take on his Man & Technics, as well as his other works), I came to the conclusion that — as Evola would say — “there are those who are the nobility, and there are those with degrees.” That is to say — perhaps echoing Goebbels even as you cited — “the man in a capitalist machine is a cog”, and went on to postulate how he is detached from the final product and whatnot, of course probably another mild plagiarism from some “commie” (what’s original…) — I’d be trading my time for a paycheck. There would be accountants, bean-counters, some executives who float around on boats, investors who float around on boats, and in our world where Gott ist Tot, I mentally zoom to the end, I look at my predecessor boomer parents, who also lived a life of chasing crap, Godless modern secular men and women (Evola’s “American Civilization” is an amusing short read that summarizes 20th century Americanism as the new global culture, with the only modern modification being technological appendages humanity has adapted, we cyborgs with ours phones: in the 2000’s, we saw our cable modems become “always-on”; the 2010’s finally saw humanity as “always-on”. Gone to any parks lately? The borg have taken over, and they’re catching pokemon.
Anyways, this isn’t terribly structured, but it’s all to say that I am undoubtedly disillusioned, as are a great many of a sure minority of the modern “philosophical type” of young males, perhaps some women. Do I get my equality points on my job evaluation? Can I get that raise now? Oh goodie!
And so, getting back to that English. I decided, in pursuit of this healthcare degree, to fill my electives with English. Why not? I can write; when I structure it, that is, and drive toward a point. In my English 101, I did quite well! Top of all my professors’ classes, she noted. She even said “are you an English major? I can give you a referral for tutoring!”, to which I thanked her, took her up on the tutoring job, and then immediately signed up for English 102 as an additional elective, thinking perhaps I would tutor that as well to help make a little extra money through college. She even gave me a 99 on one of the major papers, and the only reason she docked a point was because of my preference for British punctuation over American punctuation: the comma outside of quotes for example, which was a habit picked up reading English translations of German, French, and Italian works.
This was all very recently, within the past few years.
Now, we get to 102. Different story. Now, excuse me for a moment when I promise I am not slapping on my beer hall party badge, but the professor was a Jewish woman. I would like to assume that has no bearing on her behavior, but I thought that was worth a foreword. So, her class proceeds. She of course preaches seminal feminist works from around a century ago. She preaches other cornerstones of liberalism.
By the first week, the words dominated my mind: “should I be a whore?” The next words followed: “I decided to get a degree, I’m already one.”
Stupid me, of course, decided to speak my mind. I’d hope by my writing here, you’d assume that I made genuine arguments against these liberalism cornerstones, arguments I channeled from the likes of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spengler, Evola, even modern authors I admire like Michel Houellebecq and who he led me to, Tocqueville (his Democracy in America being probably quite relevant to some of the things you’ve done). I tried my best to remain civil. I tried my best to constructed targeted arguments on the pros and cons of what she was teaching.
And you know what she did? She failed me on the final paper. She dragged my GPA into the dirt. What was her excuse? “You pushed your politics.” In reality, she used her weaponized method of stomping on those who do not fit her worldview — ruining them academically, and thus limiting them professionally, in livelihood, and otherwise — to slow me down, to demerit me. My writing did not fail on the grounds of what “good writing” is typically assessed to be: critical thinking, constructed arguments, silly punctuation rules which Orwell scoffed but I adhered, no sir.
I failed the compliance test.
To conclude, I wonder if you see as well — or perhaps I’m just channeling Nietzsche a bit too much, maybe even Achilles whining to Agamemnon while Odysseus cringes — that the world has always been a compliance test of those in power. I failed her compliance test.
And, if this here was a bit too much of philosophizing with a hammer, please feel free to delete it.