Free Speech and the Campus Left at Law & Society Blog

Free Speech and the Campus Left

Published by Brian Berkey October 10th, 2006 in Culture

I have long been critical of the tactics that are sometimes employed by left-wing activists on college campuses, and also of the kind of thinking (or perhaps more accurately not thinking) that tends to motivate the use of such tactics. This criticism has earned me much scorn from members of the campus left, and the ways in which activists tend to respond to the most general aspects of my critique make me think that the most vocal advocates of what I think are often (though certainly not always; I have plenty of political disagreements with much of the campus left, and in particular with the most radical elements thereof) importantly correct policy views are not only failing to advance their cause, but actually doing significant harm to it. This concern is especially serious in cases in which the organized activities of leftist groups clearly violate principles that they claim to to defend, such as free speech. These actions accomplish nothing except providing the right with ammunition with which to attack the activists, members of the left generally, and thereby (at least in the minds of many who hear the attacks) the ideas for which the activists stand (or at least claim to).

Last Wednesday the College Republicans at Columbia University organized an event that included a speech by Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minuteman project. Minutes into Gilchrist’s speech, a number of left-wing students stormed the stage, halting the speech and forcing Gilchrist to exit the auditorium out the back door (video here). The students opened banners with slogans painted on them and chanted loudly, turning what was supposed to be a provocative speech by a controversial individual into a chaotic scene in which no discussion was possible at all.

This is yet another example of activists on the left engaging in actions that stifle reasoned debate, rather than fostering it. And this only hurts their chances of having a genuine political impact. It allows right-wing pundits to characterize them as dogmatic ideologues, unwilling to listen to opposing points of view or even to allow those points of view to be heard at all. And in at least some cases, this characterization is basically accurate. Some pundits also accused the students of taking the action that they did because they are incapable of winning a debate on the issues. This characterization is also basically accurate, at least with respect to many of the students who engage in the kind of actions that occured at Columbia. It is not accurate for the reasons that conservative pundits think, namely that the Minutemen are actually in the right. It is accurate only because so many campus activists have little or no interest in developing the skills necessary to engage in reasoned debate. This in turn has to do with a conception of politics that has become common to many left-wing campus activists and many right-wing political operatives. This conception involves the view that reasoned debate has no legitimate role to play in the political process; for right-wingers this view arises out of the view that political legitmacy is nothing more than the ability to exercise power (see here and here), while for those on the left it arises out of the view that there are no correct answers to normative political questions, just the equally valid opinions of individuals. This skepticism about objectively correct answers to normative questions in turn arises from a more general skepticism about reason and rationality. And this skepticism leads not just to the conclusion that reasoned debate has no role to play in politics, but that there is nothing that could even constitute reasoned debate (I’m still amazed how often left-wing campus activists simply accept this conclusion when I press them on these points; this really seems to be what many of them think).

With reasoned debate out the window as a means of advancing their cause, activists often choose to adopt tactics such as those used at Columbia. Of course these tactics seem to clearly undermine free speech, a value which these same activists often claim to defend. On Bill O’Reilly’s show last night Democratic strategist Kirsten Powers (with whom I often disagree) made the perceptive point that the students who rushed the stage at Columbia simply don’t understand what free speech is: “Free speech means that sometimes you have to hear things that offend you”, she said. This is an extremely important point, and one that many on both the left and the right tend to lose sight of. For example, here is a bit of what the students said in defense of their actions:

Fascist scapegoating is not up for academic discussion. Like Hitler in pre-Nazi Germany, Gilchrist and the Minutemen attempt to demonize foreign-born poor people, blaming “illegals” for society’s problems. His group doesn’t present reasoned debate. It spouts racism and hatred, aiming to divide people against one another.

This statement seems to me not entirely false. There are at least racist elements within the Minutemen, and even the comparison to Nazi race-baiting may be apt, at least in some sense. But to call a group ‘fascist’ without explaining what the term means is already to leave the realm of rational discourse; it is mere name-calling, designed to cut off rather than foster debate. More importantly, the students seem to mean their claim that the Minutemen “don’t present reasoned debate” as a criticism; but surely what they did strays even further from reasoned debate than the speeches of Gilchrist and the other Minutemen. If engaging in reasoned debate is the way to address political disagreements, then why not respond to Gilchrist by asking tough questions and presenting arguments against his views, rather than calling him names and eliminating the possibility of any debate at all?

We are sure that if the Nazi party held a public meeting on campus, Jewish groups would be there to challenge them-so would we. We are sure that if the Ku Klux Klan held a public meeting on campus, African American groups would be there to challenge them-so would we. The Minutemen are no different.

Of course individuals and groups have the right to, and indeed should, attend such events and register their dissent from the views being put forward by Nazis and Klan members, just as it would have been perfectly appropriate for students opposed to the Minutemen to attend the event at Columbia in order to register their dissent. But the relevant issue is how to do this in a way that both respects important principles like free speech and will be effective in combating the views of such groups. Holding signs, wearing T-shirts with slogans, passing out fliers, asking tough questions and making arguments against the views of the Minutemen are all perfectly appropriate ways that the students might have made their views known. But even racists, Nazis, and Klan members have the right to free speech, and silencing them in the way that the students did only harms their cause, as well as perversely providing legitimacy to those on the right who use different but equally repugnant means of silencing those with whom they disagree (e.g. communists, atheists, anarchists, etc.).

This is not an issue of free speech. The Minutemen were able to reserve a hall at our university and had the protection of campus security and the NYPD-all to espouse their hate speech. We along with hundreds of others expressed our right to speak and protest.

The students fail to see that this is an issue of free speech because, as Powers said, they do not understand what free speech means. Free speech means that people can say hateful and offensive things (and of course others can, and should, respond by denouncing those statements). The students’ claim seems to be that all that they did was exercise their right to speak, and that since they spoke louder they were able to drown out the message of the Minutemen. But this view assumes a conception of free speech in which everyone simply attempts to drown out opposing views, rather than engaging with them and responding with arguments (that is, engaging in reasoned debate). This not only a deeply troubling conception of free speech, but it is a conception that, as a general matter, surely favors the right and not the left, despite the isolated cases on elite campuses in which leftist students can do what was done at Columbia.

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18 Responses to “Free Speech and the Campus Left”

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1 Sean McGee Oct 11th, 2006 at 9:34 am

Very clear and unbiased reaction to these retards at Columbia.

I applaud you.
2 Ben Samuel Nelson Oct 11th, 2006 at 10:49 am

There is no doubt that this was an act which squelched free speech. That does deserve condemnation of some kind. But I’d like to ask about the origin of reason before I make a final judgment.

Let’s assume that to engage in good reasoning is to engage in cooperation in conversation — namely, when the conversants share the goal of mutual understanding. Two questions immediately arise: what are the conditions under which such discourses actually arise? And what is to be done to foster such conditions, if they are not present?

In social psychology (and well known to salesmen everywhere), it is known that there are a few different ways to persuade a person. First, there is the “foot in the door technique”, where you offer something good for a reasonable price, and then jack up the price later with hidden costs. For example, I bought an extremely cheap book just a few days ago on Amazon.com — for 89 cents! whatta steal! — but at the last minute, learned that shipping and handling was nine dollars. Second, there is the “door in the face technique”, where you offer something ridiculously expensive and unattractive with obvious costs, but then follow up by a more attractive offer. This is sort of what happens on infomercials — “How much would YOU pay for this cheese-grinding olive-maker?! 100 dollars? A thousand?! We’re offering it for only 9.95!!”

This can be understood politically, as well. A reasonable person who has a lot to say, many nuanced opinions — let’s call them “wonks” — are the perfect person to speak to when and if one desires to engage in a genuine discourse. But if the target is not willing to listen, to understand, and to try to be understood, then wonks are not going to have any impact on them at all. The costs of listening, because of (say) pride, sense of identity, dependency upon certain aspects of the social system, etc., are larger than the perceived benefits of engaging in a discourse. In other words, the “foot in the door” technique sometimes (or usually) fails in politics.

The only solution, then, to receive a fair hearing, is the “door in the face” technique. This involves showing the person that the costs of being ignored are greater than the costs of having to listen and pay attention. One way to do that is to foster the active wing of the party, who provide precisely that impetus to pay attention. This would be especially efficient when the targets have combatative personalities, for complex reasons relating to the American culture. Another way is to foster an ethos of enlightenment, where people understand that the benefits of being reasonable are always greater than the costs. In this way, the support for active members of the group being represented is essential.

(I say “active”, but not “coercive”, for obvious ethical reasons. It’s not right to coerce. But the underlying logic of one kind of intellectual support for radicals needs to be understood. Other kinds — those based around relativism, etc. — I won’t discuss, since you have.)

And what about those persons on the right who genuinely want to engage in reasoned dialogue? Well, in order for that to be made manifest, we would have to see indications that the right-wing movement(s) place any value on reason. Their continued support for spokespersons like Ann Coulter et al make it a challenge. Still, every person ought to be given at least a chance to show what they value, because it is individuals who think, not hordes. The benefit, though, is just the admission that being reasonable is of value. If that’s not present in the discourse, and there’s no hope of it in the future, then (as you allude) what’s the point of free speech at all?

To cut to the chase, you’re right, but there are caveats. They did harm, and they did wrong, but it’s not true that they did only harm.
3 cosim Oct 15th, 2006 at 12:30 pm

Peradventure, there were limits placed in a coercive manner upon Gilchrist’s free expression - at least, the libertarian conception of free expression. But perhaps this is a case - to use the lawyer’s parlance - of harmless error.

Is Gilchrist, given his politics and that of his very nativist organization too, entitled to defame? I would understand a reply in the negative to that query. And if these protesters were right in their perception of the Minutemen as a xenophobically racist outfit, then we might be talking about “hate speech” and “group libel”.

Looking back, we can with confidence say that the Weimar Republic ought not to have tolerated the Nazis fascist, racist speech. The object here isn’t to try and figure out how much the Nazis and Minutmen share certain affinities. But looking prospectively, and given the risk-of-error inherent in suppressing any expression, what expression should we allow? Not all things are allowed in every context. But which things and when?

Reason alone is not enough; I’d call it a required, but not sufficient, basis for the existence of a good discourse. The rest of the sufficiency is likely inexpressible, I think - it is a way of life, not an analytically defined term - so resort to transcendentalist pragmatism (Apel) or the ideal communicative discourse (Habermas) gets us only so far. (There was debate on the late cable television program “Crossfire”, but it was a parody of reasoned dialogue).

If the Minutemen seek to rob some immigrants of their voice in our society, should we tolerate that? If so, then that would be against the trend of expanding republicanism’s promise that has been going on for many centuries now - the inclusion of the disadvantaged, minorities, the oppressed, and the just plain unlucky in our polity.

The discussants here didn’t have faith in reason. At bottom, maybe that is what holds all of the dialogues in any society - and hence, the society itself - together. Otherwise than that, life is nasty, poore, solitary, brutal, and short, no?

Protest too has its bounds. Taking the stage, sending Gilchrist scurrying for the exits, was in error, no doubt. Different forms of protest - even ones that didn’t debate Gilchrist - would’ve been far better, I think. (Banners condemning his group’s narrow-minded focus, making fun of them for getting lost in the Vermont woods, etc.).

Another free expression debate has already begun. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/nyregion/13lives.html
4 Ben Samuel Nelson Oct 15th, 2006 at 8:25 pm

Cosim,

Surely a person should be judged by the content of their words, and not by mere reputation. That opportunity for self-presentation was something that Gilchrist wasn’t even allowed. How can someone be accused of hate speech when they’re not even given the opportunity to speak?

The usual JS Mill story about the legal limits of free speech tells us that hate speech falls into a category of utterances that are condemned because of the speech act that they perform, and not the information that they convey. If a racist — or a Holocaust denier, etc. — wants to stand on a streetcorner and try to defend the logic behind his views, then he should have that freedom. But if he is doing this act to covertly signal an intent to act unlawfully on those views (this is what hate speech really is, given that violence is unlawful, and hate is the intent to destroy); or is in a volatile situation where any act of that kind would foreseeably be a catalyst which sparks unlawful mob action, then he shouldn’t have that freedom.

People draw their own limits concerning what kinds of free speech that the non-legal parts of the society ought to tolerate. The traditional answers seem unhelpful. Locke gave us some great arguments concerning religious tolerance, but many of his points are ill-equipped to deal with secular topics like immigration reform. The best arguments, as you indicated, seem to revolve around good reasoning, and/or the possibility of error. But that makes an account of the origins of reason all the more pertinent.

Habermas’s notion of communicative rationality seems to itself be based around the ideal conversation, esp. wherein the goal of conversants is mutual understanding. By your admission, ‘Crossfire’ was a mere parody of reason; and I think it’s also pretty obvious that their conversations were merely asinine posturings, and not genuine (that was Stewart’s point, after all). This correlation seems to support Habermas’s view instead of condemning it. In other words, good reason is sufficient for good conversation, since good reason is itself cooperative conversation.

The question is, does language hold us together, as Aristotle felt? Or is it just another thing that drives us apart, as Hobbes felt?

Let’s admit for a minute that dialogue holds any human society together. But even so, there must be more fundamental forces than that, which we can see by looking at the different levels of complexity in the animal kingdom. At the most basic level, the society of bees gets along without conversation, merely by a) socially functional compulsions, b) the division of labor / status heirarchy that those compulsions entail, c) close proximity, and d) access to the means of (honey) production. Various mammalian societies seem to show e) kinship love, solidarity, and pack behavior. Human societies seem to be complicated by f) language and intellect, but also g) conscious dependency (leading to power and trust relationships) and h) the ability to choose.

The real question is: what drives people to be reasonable? What gives them “faith” in it?
5 cosim Oct 16th, 2006 at 8:10 am

Ben,

To be explicit about it, I disapprove of the fact that Gilchrist wasn’t afforded an opportunity to speak. (”His reputation preceded him”). In that sense, the protest was pre-emptive. And like, say, the invasion of Iraq that I assume the protesters would (justifiably, in my view) condemn, I don’t see grounds for forceful, mob-esque action such as was taken at Columbia.

“If a racist — or a Holocaust denier, etc. — wants to stand on a streetcorner and try to defend the logic behind his views, then he should have that freedom.” I’m not so sure of this point as you are. If the racist views are unlawful only on the ground that they rather tend to provoke violence, then perhaps you are correct. But I also imagine the concurrent and further rationale that human life and living to this point have given every indication that racist dialogue is completely harmful to not only the present order but to any future order worth living for. On this latter rationale, I think, not only would racist views fall beyond the pale but so too would meta-racist views given in defense thereof. In the end, the meta-racist is hardly putting up logic as his argument.

“Logic must take care of itself.” (Wittgenstein).

I think that’s important in this dialogue of ours. Good reason is required for decent discourse, but I would disagree that it is sufficient (unless we are speaking of the mathematical discourse only). Reason - as I understand you - is more than logical method. Perhaps it even extends over to analogical reasoning - the leap of faith required to indulge someone else’s analogies. Does reason also include something like that leap of faith? We can draw the categories however we like - grammar is somewhat arbitrary, I suppose - but to my mind, it’s something beyond the invocation of reason alone that would make for the possibility of good dialogue. (An alternative could be something like defining reason backward, as all that is required for meaningful conversation). But what does reason do about intuitive or perceptive thinking? How does reason do with the thinking that is on the less side of the more-or-less rational?

I shall be forced due to a time constraint to leap over certain very interesting aspects of your response, but I do wish to finish on your query, “[W]hat drives people to be reasonable? What gives them “faith” in it?”

Hobbes - who you mentioned in a slightly different context - would reply that civilization and reason are all that keep us out of a naturall state of warre. It is our artifice that makes life as we know it possible. Faith in reason is hope for something above knives out, but frighteningly, it can also lead to Hobbes’ Leviathan, right? Hobbes, who emulated the mode of reasoning he saw in geometers would think that, I feel, or something like it. But against Hobbes, I would insist that reason doesn’t lead in most cases - other than those of bald logic and mathematics - inexorably to one answer (Truth) - reason instead reveals all that’s there to see, at the plainer and also the less obvious levels; it opens up possibilities.
6 Ben Samuel Nelson Oct 16th, 2006 at 6:14 pm

Yeah, racist views aren’t reasonable, and if they have an impact on the social order, it will always be negative. Because of that, some response or other is always required by moral persons in the community.

However, no response is required by the law unless the speech act is itself negative. That’s all I was saying in the paragraph you quoted. Moreover, if we assume that it is not the content of speech, but rather the speech act, which has an impact upon the future social order, then even the most draconian sensibilities of the law can remain ambivalent towards racist speech. (And even when speech acts are negative, American law seems traditionally obliged to give latitude — to err on the side of non-intervention.)

For Habermas, reason itself is communicative rationality. For him, so far as I know, reason isn’t just logical deduction. If logical deduction is what you mean by “reason”, then you and he would disagree over semantics.

Still, his wider view of “reason” isn’t entirely out of step with the way we use the word today. A good and succinct definition of “logic” is the “study of good reasoning”. Now think of informal logic, which is based around fallacies which, at root, arise from careless conversation: ambiguities, appeal to irrelevant things, etc., where the honest conversation goals of one or both participants are frustrated. Because informal logic is logical, it is the study of good reasoning; yet these bits of informal logic are merely failures of conversation; so we have to figure that conversation plays a significant part in what it means to “reason”.

Anyway, the most troubling thing about all this, to me, is my earlier comment about free speech being dependent upon the possibility of reason. This view seems to be very sketchy, and could be used by any party to have the other put in jail under the charge of being “unreasonable”. That would obviously be nonsense. So I might want to add that, if we take Habermas’s view of “reason”, and we accept that we’re fallible human beings who are capable of misunderstanding what we misunderstand in conversation, then prudence would dictate that, as a rule, the law should always protect free speech.

Actually, as far as I can tell, Hobbes was characteristically pessimistic about reason. (As you point out, his view of reason is more akin to logical deduction than to anything Habermassian.) He states early on in the Leviathan (Chapter 7 or so?) that even seemingly benign mathematical disagreements would come to blows if it weren’t for the possibility that people would appeal to independent judges. In the end, he wouldn’t say that it’s reason that keeps us out of war, but rather, that reason merely allows us to recognize who the sovereign is, while enlightened self-regard aligns people toward maintaining the commonwealth.
7 Brian Berkey Oct 17th, 2006 at 1:57 am

Many thanks to Ben and Cosim for extremely interesting comments on my post; I wish I had more time to reply in detail, but unfortunately my stack of papers to grade limits what I will be able to contribute.

Ben, on your point about the necessity, at least at times, to use the “door in the face” technique, I completely agree. If you recall my post on Democracy and Civil Disobedience, I defended the right of activists to break the law in order to pursue remedies to injustices, so long as the injustices are severe enough and the civil disobedience isn’t excessively harmful (I’m not a pure proceduralist about pursuing social change, because often the procedures themselves are unjust and in need of remedy). I include the qualifications for the obvious reason that the cure shouldn’t be worse than the disease. And my point about the incident at Columbia was precisely that, for a number of reasons, the attempted cure was worse than the disease. One reason this is so is clear from the rather banal observation that a great many Americans are turned off by these tactics, and may have wound up more sympathetic to the Minutemen (and certainly much more hostile to the activists) than they otherwise would have been. This is by no means a conclusive reason to say that the protest was unjustified, but when we add in the fact that the activists violated a principle that they claim to stand for (i.e. free speech), and were in fact attempting to fight racism with authoritarianism, which is of course also something that they claim to oppose, I think the conclusion follows.

What I mean by the claim that their actions were authoritarian, and therefore violated their own principles, is this: These activists strongly and rightly oppose the Bush Administration’s recently passed law on so-called “enemy combatants” that allows the Executive to designate anyone an enemy combatant and hold him indefinitely without charges. The reason they oppose this is that the Executive has absolute authority over who gets classified as an enemy combatant; no one can challenge his designations. “No Habeas Corpus for terrorists” might, at first glance, sound reasonable enough, but when we ask who counts as a terrorist, the answer from the executive is “whoever I say is a terrorist.” So unless we’re willing to place absolute faith in both the executive’s judgement and integrity, we’d be crazy to support the policy “no Habeas Corpus for terrorists.” Who’s to stop him from deciding that we’re terrorists? What the activists have essentially said (and what an activist at my home institution, UC-Berkeley, actually said to me during a discussion of these issues) by way of defending their actions is “no free speech for fascists.” But of course the same problem arises. They’ve designated themselves as the arbiters of who counts as a fascist and who doesn’t, and asked us to trust them to make the right decisions. And that’s authoritarianism.

Given that what they’ve advocated, if only indirectly in their words, but explicitly in their actions, is authoritarianism, it doesn’t matter that they’re basically right about Gilchrist and the Minutemen. Just as the executive will sometimes use their absolute power to deny Habeas Corpus to actual terrorists, sometimes the activists will use their self-granted power to silence actual fascists. But surely we can’t trust them to get it right all the time, even if their intentions are far superior to those of the Administration. So long as speech does not become an incitement to violence (and therefore an act in itself), it ought to be free. Vile speech like that of the Minutemen ought to be challenged as vigorously as possible, but never silenced by means such as those employed at Columbia.
8 Ben Samuel Nelson Oct 17th, 2006 at 4:38 pm

Hey Brian,

I think we agree, then, on the main issue.

You’ve also uncovered an interesting implicit contradiction. But of course there are at least two messy edges around the argument. First, a person can always just deny that being a group of rabble-rousers on a campus has any in kind similarity with exercizing genuine, legitimated political force on behalf of the executive branch. That’s obviously hypocritical, and so, ethically dubious, though politically understandable. Second, a more powerful argument would be something like, “Ethics itself only makes sense within the framework of reasoned, cooperative discussion. The fascist/authoritarian despises reasoned, cooperative discussion as a matter of principle. Therefore, ethical conduct is impossible and meaningless when dealing with a fascist.” This dissolves all notions of integrity, and so, seems wrong; but still, it has something meta-ethically appealing to it.

Hope the papers you’re marking are philoso-fun.
9 cosim Oct 17th, 2006 at 10:52 pm

1. “We need some categorical imperatives, but not too many.” (Habermas)

Although I generally agree with the proposition that we should only proscribe negative speech acts, I’m not sure why the law should tolerate racist opinions; general propositions don’t decide concrete cases. For example, to take the Brandenburg case from American constitutional law, Klansmen spoke about sending ‘the Black back to Africa, the Jew to Israel’. Although the threat was surely not imminent, I’m not certain why a society should permit such talk, even if it is only that: talk by white men in white bedsheets.

In such a case, the risk-of-error - supression of speech that might in the long term come to good - seems exceedingly small so I think one can saely consider the limit of this over onto zero.

2. I think the argument over reason is more than merely semantic. This is especially so given the critique of Reason (with a capital ‘R’) over the centuries (but very much in the previous two, I’d say). I would take Habermas - the quintessential proceduralist in political philosophy, I’d call him - to stand for reason being fallibilistic (and thereby pragmatic too - “[S]ome categorical imperatives, but not too many”) and pluralist (it’s not about enshrining a lot of substance beyond the discourse ethics itself; thereby open-ended, and yes, pragmatic again). Rawls is someone whose procedures are imbued with a good deal more substance (and maybe he runs afoul of the habermasian commandment: thou shalt not have too many categorical imperatives)

Cavell writes of Emersonian perfectionists. I don’t think he’s included Habermas in that group, but I rather would.

3. Hobbes is a fascinating thinker to me, despite the latent conservatism of his ideas. I’m not entirely sure that he was entirely pessimistic concerning reason. To be sure, he doesn’t worship at that altar as some of his successors in the liberal tradition would. But Leviathan and De Cive are books that present a tightly argued theory of law and authority (among other things). The tight argument is possible only on Hobbes’ understanding of reason. Now, sure, Hobbes maybe figured that his writing had been in vain. He was a noted pessimist in all things, of course. Yet one sees in those treatises of his a new method, I daresay, of doing political philosophy - analytic, cold, logical.

One other Hobbesian point I should like to make is on mathematics - how Wittgenstein, a quite different thinker in style and substance, writes of math being what it is because one can look up the answers to the problems in the back of the book. Being correct means equalling those numbers.

4. Speech/act distinction: how viable? It’s mentioned several times, and I’m unsure as to whether and how much useful it is. I can see it much more as a spectrum - this context is much more on the ’speech’ side, this other over on the ‘act’ side, but for a large number of cases, one can see the thing both ways. Justice Black famously used this distinction in making up his mind on First Amendment case, but I think time has proven his rigid categories rather capable of being broken.
10 Ben Samuel Nelson Oct 19th, 2006 at 8:05 pm

Cosim,

I had a longer reply to your comments, but am having trouble posting. The server seems to think that my post is a “double-post”, and so, automatically bars it. Fah.
11 cosim Oct 19th, 2006 at 11:17 pm

Hmm. Well, hopefully this artful comment clears it up.
12 Matt Wood Oct 20th, 2006 at 11:37 am

I wonder if another precondition for open debate and the prevalence of reason (if not a constitutive feature of reason itself), at least in the modern world, is the existence of a robust intellectual and scholarly community. [One reason for limiting this precondition to the “modern world” is that world’s unprecedented fragmentation of knowledge domains into specialized ‘expert’ pursuits.]

Akbar Ahmed, the Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in D.C., in an article titled “Islam and Freedom of Thought”, warns of a decay in such traditions within the Muslim world (with consequent loss of “clarity and stability”), particularly in Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Here are the bellwethers he cites:
- Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a Egyptian sociologist, was arrested and charged with homosexuality, embezzlement, and spying for the United States and Israel in 2000. Before his arrest, he was researching Cairo voters’ opinions into why Muslims join militant groups.
- The founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, was an apparent advocate of women’s and minority rights, with a non-Muslim wife and a daughter who refused to marry a Muslim. An authoritative (within Pakistan) biography of Jinnah does not mention either woman in its 806 pages. Pakistan’s official archives, pictorial exhibitions, and official publications contain no more than two pictures of them.
- In 1997, the author was involved in a project which created a feature film of the life of Jinnah, which was filmed at least in part in Pakistan. The Pakistani press and political parties accused the film of being part of a Hindu or Zionist conspiracy. Verbal attacks and threats followed, warnings issued from “important officials” not to portray a tolerant Jinnah (and hence a tolerant Islam), journalists demanded money for positive press coverage, and bureacrats stonewalled.
- In 2000, an Islamabad professor at a medical college was found guilty of blasphemy and sentenced to death after students complained about him to the local religious leader. [I believe the conviction was later overturned.]
- Abdus Salam, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1979, needed to be protected by riot police upon returning to his native Pakistan in 1979.
- “Throughout much of the Muslim world, university students are among the most ardent fundamentalists, fueled by the literalist interpretation of Islam taught at madrassahs… In Muslim countries, madrassahs are seen as a legitimate Islamic alternative to unaffordable private schools patronized by the westernized elite.”
- “Large numbers of the educated middle class are trying to leave…”

Further contentions in the article:
- The U.S., in forging politically-expedient alliances with authoritarian or theocratic governments in the Muslim world, is in danger of perpetuating the decay of scholarly traditions in those societies and their growing radicalism.
- “Ordinary citizens have little idea that an indigenous democratic model is avilable to Muslim society, because the scholars and intellectuals who can articulate that vision are being silenced.”
- Knowledge and the cultivation of the intellect is an “Islamic ideal”. Ahmed corroborates this claim with a list of great Islamic scholars of antiquity.
- “When the scholar is silenced it is not useless knowledge that is lost: It is the sense that pursuing knowledge, wherever it may be found, is no longer part of the expression of God’s will.”

——
Of course, the stifling of intellectual and academic freedom may be just as much an effect of radicalism as it is a cause. But there seems to be an important lesson in this article about the important role the academic community plays in safeguarding intellectual freedom and tolerance as society’s guardians of history and nuance. Perhaps this role corresponds to a kind of engine in Habermas’s discourse theory of society (about which I admit my ignorance).
13 Matt Wood Oct 21st, 2006 at 3:43 pm

Pursuant to my previous comment, I think the following two mechanisms may help account for the role the academic community plays (or may play) in influencing a society’s reasoning faculties:

1) Role model effects - The academic community is one of hired thinkers whose conclusions, by clashing with those of their colleagues, typically require reasoned defense. It seems reasonable to expect that, of all subpopulations within a society, this one should boast the most refined reasoning processes. In addition, we should expect these refined reasoning processes to filter into the larger society as members of this community engage in dialogue with outsiders, perhaps through a process of emulation or unconscious mirroring. From these initial contacts, we’d expect secondary, tertiary (and so on) effects on reasoning to result from interactions between social actors ever-more remote from contact with the academic community. The following passage from Malcom Gladwell’s book ‘The Tipping Point’ is instructive:

“Jonathan Crane, a sociologist at the University of Illinois, has looked at the effect the number of role models in a community - the professionals, managers, teachers whom the Census Bureau has defined as “high status” - has on the lives of teenagers in the same neighborhood. He found little difference in pregnancy rates or school drop-out rates in neighborhoods of between 40 and 5 percent of high-status workers. But when the number of professional dropped below 5 percent, the problems exploded. For black schoolchildren, for example, as the percentage of high-status workers falls just 2.2 percentage points - from 5.6 percent to 3.4 percent - drop-out rates more than double. At the same Tipping Point, the rates of childbearing for teenaged girls - which barely move at all up to that point - nearly double. We assume, intuitively, that neighborhoods and social problems decline in some kind of steady progression. But sometimes they may not decline steadily at all; at the Tipping Point, schools can lose control of their students, and family life can disintegrate all at once.” (p. 12-13).

Bracketing and setting aside the interesting “tipping point” questions posed by these statistics, I would guess that a similar phenomenon operates between academics and the wider community by propogating good reasoning skills. [Granted, the connection between high-status community members and the lifestyle choices of their young neighbors is only imperfectly analogous to that of professional academics and the reasoning skills of the wider community as a whole.] An interesting empirical question is whether, all else being equal, college towns and cities tend to enjoy better average reasoning skills than other communities (although considerable problems of measurement exist).

2) Conventional wisdom effects - A non-academic community enjoying wider and deeper contacts with an academic community may also find its discourse affected by the quality of the reasoning deployed to support everything from various public policy positions (whether local, national or global) to childrearing decisions - although the degree of publicity (and hence transmission) is likely to vary greatly by subject-matter. Whether spread by media or conversation, positions on issues seem to frequently be reproduced without substantial revision, with a small amount of reasoning often accompanying a conclusion. [Ex: “I think the Iraq war increases America’s security, because now we’re fighting the terrorists over there instead of over here.”] A well-integrated academic community may elevate the quality of these conventional wisdom ’soundbites’, and hence the society’s overall reasoning abilities. [This ‘conventional wisdom effect’ may fold into the broad category of ‘role model effects’ as an important subcase.]
14 Ben Samuel Nelson Oct 22nd, 2006 at 4:37 pm

Weird stuff, Matt. It sounds as though these “role model” effects only have the effect of maintaining equilibrium. A key question is what exactly the cause is. Are people more susceptible to engage in good reasoning, as you suggest (a change in cognitive style)? Or are they simply more willing to respect the advice of those who engage in reasoned negotiations (a change in social trust)? I would think that, if we assumed that good reasoning led to better results, and that all actors were capable of good reasoning, then if it was a change in cognitive styles, we would have a hard time explaining the threshold of influence.
15 Matt Wood Oct 22nd, 2006 at 11:17 pm

Ben-
I’m not sure I understand your point about “explaining the threshold of influence”, but I don’t think these role model effects only work to maintain equilibrium. Perhaps the most potent form of contact between the academic and non-academic communities takes the form of professor-student relationships. I can only speak for myself, but the quality of my reasoning (whatever it may be) is surely, to some significant degree, a function of my contact with professors as a student. (A slightly more remote “contact” occurs when reading their written works or listening to recorded lectures.) Assuming for a moment that the degree of refinement in a university student’s reasoning abilities, per unit time of enrollment, is constant across time, academic role model effects should increase a society’s aggregate reasoning abilities as the percentage of college-educated citizens within that society rises. Furthermore, as a society’s storehouse of “great works” increases across time - with perhaps some sort of selection pressures operating to filter out all but the “best” (ie, best reasoned) works from classroom presentation (and even popular consumption) - the degree of refinement per student per unit time should itself rise across time. Of course, this entire theoretical contraption I’ve just erected may ultimately rely on the stability and primacy of community norms valuing “good reasoning” - and perhaps, as a functionally prior matter, some (at least intuitive) sense of what constitutes “good reasoning”. But perhaps we should expect this result, at least insofar as, as you suggest, “good reasoning” leads to better results. [And of course, a productive economy - capable of sustaining highly specialized academic communities and their material infrastructure, as well as generating practical questions for them to solve (perhaps in order to justify their existence) - also underwrites the model.]