Generally, Free Expression

Free press is a handful,
but never an eyeful.

Free to Speak, Free to Not Listen

Free speech is a mouthful,
but never an earful.

Our Twitter Commander

Richard Kenney, Poet

Wikipedia

I had a wild thought just now that if I were to insult our current president of these United States and get him to tweet an insult in return, I'd gain the notoriety I need to bring publicity to myself and my writings!

What sparked that wild thought was a poem by Richard Kenney, whom I encountered today in Nicholas Kristof's NYT column, "To Reject Trump the Perverse, Poets Wage a Battle in Verse," (February 9, 2017). Kenney's a poet at the University of Washington, and here are two stanzas of his poem:

We mustn't slander our Twitter Commander,
he'll burble our bird and snatch our bander
and fire off a tweet with his hot little hand, or
maybe report us, so stay discreet—

Commander in Tweet! Commander in Tweet!
Muster the army, commission the fleet!
He's a patsy for Putin, buffoon complete—
(And that old Constitution? Hit Delete—)

Those are pretty good lines, especially with the two allusions to Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky! I wish I had time to come up with an insulting poem of my own. Borrowing lines from Kenney probably won't get Trump's attention directed towards me, but I'll bet that Kenney is getting that good old 'bad' publicity for himself.

By the way, none of this blog post should be taken as meaning that I do or do not support President Trump, the title of Kristof's column notwithstanding, but I do wish Trump would refrain from saying everything that comes into his head. Oddly enough, Obama had the same problem. Neither of them seems to recognize the virtue of silence, keeping one's own counsel, and not thinking out loud.

Timothy Garton Ash on Free Speech

Timothy Garton Ash
Wikipedia

Okay, I'm back from my long poetry break - a break for poetry, not a break from it - and I'm ready to assume my usual role of spokesperson for free speech.

I see that Timothy Garton Ash has also spoken out for free speech by publishing Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, which NYT writer Tom Rachman tells about in an article titled "Timothy Garton Ash Puts Forth a Free-Speech Manifesto" (May 22, 2016):

After the murders at Charlie Hebdo last year, the public intellectual Timothy Garton Ash - once a dashing foreign correspondent, long since a scholar amid the spires of Oxford - issued an appeal to news organizations: Publish the offending cartoons, all of you together, and in that way proclaim the vitality of free speech.

"Otherwise," he warned, "the assassin's veto will have prevailed."

Apparently, the terrorists prevailed . . . or maybe not, given Ash's book, and especially his website.

Rainey Knudson: "Art is not politics . . . . It's not anything except an echo of nature, which is to say it's chaotic."

Rainey Knudson

Google Images

Finally, someone who believes in free speech! Writing for Glasstire, Rainey Knudson comes out for free expression in her article "The Best Defense is Good Offensiveness" (December 6, 2015):

[V]iewed in the context of the latest round of culture wars, . . . observations on the traditional oppressors of sartorial freedom . . . could also be applied to many so-called progressives. We have entered a time of rigid orthodoxy for some people on both the right and the left regarding what is acceptable to say, wear, and even think. [Yes,] I’m referring to political correctness, and its main bugaboo, offensiveness . . . . [M]any people seem to be more hung up on the aesthetics of correctness and offense than ever. When academics and journalists incorrectly assert that the First Amendment doesn't protect hate speech; or when students at Amherst College write that they want other students who have posted "ALL LIVES MATTER" posters to undergo "extensive training for racial and cultural competency," political correctness of the left begins to uncomfortably evoke other well-meaning uprisings against oppression that converted into their own reigns of terror . . . . Thankfully, the art world is rife with offensive material . . . . [even if some of it still gets censored, such as] the more recent removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly from a 2010 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, because a clip of ants crawling over a crucifix made Rush Limbaugh crazy . . . . But religion - well, Christianity [but not Islam!] - remains fair game for art, and has since at least Caravaggio’s time. Andy Warhol, a devout Catholic all his life, made work about the death penalty and talked about how he wanted to be a machine. Piss Christ, Ninth Hour, the Barbie Crucifix . . . examples of the genre are plentiful. Same too for sex. We snicker at a mainstream media that can't show a Modigliani nude without blurring the nips and pubes, and we revere Robert Mapplethorpe's meditations on light, composition and symmetry . . . . [W]e all need to be offended, and not for the righteous satisfaction of saying so. Being offended means being slapped with a wrongness that doesn't fit our worldview. If we aren't offended, we are never shaken out of our own little bubble and forced to acknowledge all the other little bubbles out there . . . . Of course, it's not art's job to save us from ourselves. Art may be good at being offensive, but it's also ambiguous. Great art is unto itself, meaning that even when it has political undertones, it's not straightforward propaganda. Art is not politics . . . . It's not anything except an echo of nature, which is to say it's chaotic. I take great comfort in that . . . . [T]hat's a reason many people aren't interested in art, or at least good art - they want their ten commandments to help them go through their lives with a sense of externally-imposed order. They need art that explains itself. But good art doesn't explain itself. It doesn't spell things out. It has multiple agendas, and reflects our ambiguous world where things are not black and white . . . . Transforming the world means transforming yourself, continually, by leaving your context and crossing over into unknown territory. The term "trans" has become associated with gender identity, but its more general meaning applies to everybody: vacating your own territory of this-is-what-I-am, what-I-believe. Social conservatives (who distrust art) tend to be lousy at this. But so do many so-called progressives. Face it, we all do: our tribalism, a nifty evolutionary advantage for survival, has been holding us back for centuries now. Tribalism is acute in the art world: our insular, reactionary, small-c conservative bubble responds to the unknown with indifference or hostility, just like every other bubble . . . . Fussing over people's language and dress, policing Halloween costumes, and writing up checklists of acceptable behaviors, while providing a comforting sense of order, won't change the world. The universe is chaotic and ambiguous. Look to the artists.

Knudson gets it Right . . . and Left! I also like her remark about the meaning of art: "Art is not politics . . . . It's not anything except an echo of nature, which is to say it's chaotic." Art as an echo of nature. Something to think about . . .

C.S. Lewis: Great Scholar and Secret Government Agent

C.S. Lewis
Image from CT
Christianity Today

Professor Harry Lee Poe, at Union University in Tennessee, writing for Christianity Today (December 10, 2015 ), reports that "C.S. Lewis Was a Secret Government Agent" whose vivid lecture style and choice of subject matter won Iceland's people over to the British side in WWII:

As I browsed eBay not long ago, I came across a 78 rpm recording of a lecture by C. S. Lewis. I assumed that it was a mistake or that the seller was trying to defraud an unwitting public. I knew Lewis well enough to know that he had never made a 78 rpm recording for general distribution, much less one produced by something called the Joint Broadcasting Committee. I also knew that Lewis never delivered a lecture on the subject "The Norse Spirit in English Literature." At least, I knew we had no evidence of such a lecture. Fortunately, curiosity got the better of me, and I bought the record from the dealer in Iceland . . . . And what an unusual find it turned out to be. I discovered some things about a secret episode in Lewis's life that few, if any, people knew about . . . . It was an unusual mission for which few people were suited . . . . The first thing I discovered was that the Joint Broadcasting Committee was an arm of British secret intelligence that served a propaganda purpose by broadcasting to people in occupied enemy territory during World War II. Until now, the general public and the world of scholarship had no idea that C. S. Lewis began his wartime service by undertaking a mission for . . . . the Secret Intelligence Service . . . . When Lewis came on board at the beginning of World War II, it was still a fledgling group of amateurs desperately working to save their [British] island home from disaster . . . . [The Secret Intelligence Service] needed Lewis in the wake of the German invasion of Norway and Denmark on April 9, 1940. Though the British sent troops to Norway to counter the German invasion, it was too late to intervene in Denmark, whose subjugation was accomplished in only one day. One month later on May 10, 1940, German forces invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, and by June 22 the French government had capitulated . . . . On that same morning in May, however, the British did the next best thing they could do to help Denmark and the rest of Europe: They launched a surprise invasion of Iceland, which was part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Iceland's strategic significance in the North Atlantic had been known since the Viking voyages a thousand years earlier . . . . Though British control of Iceland was critical, Britain could not afford to deploy its troops to hold the island when greater battles loomed elsewhere, beginning with the struggle for North Africa. Holding Iceland depended upon the goodwill of the people of Iceland who never had asked to be invaded by the British. If Britain retained Icelandic goodwill, then Churchill could occupy the island with reserve troops rather than his best fighting forces . . . . [Such] was the strategic situation in which C. S. Lewis was recruited. And his mission was simple: To help win the hearts of the Icelandic people . . . . And what did an Oxford don have to say that might help turn the tide of war in Britain's darkest hour? He spoke on the subject "The Norse Spirit in English Literature." Lewis provided a touchstone between the Norse people and the English, which Lewis made clear in his first recorded statement. He said that he did not know why he had been asked to address the people of Iceland, but that he agreed to do it in order to repay a great debt. He explained that his imaginative life had been awakened by Norse mythology when he was 14. He went on to explain how his love of Norse mythology only deepened when he began to learn the Icelandic language at Oxford . . . . After this introduction, Lewis proceeded to praise the Icelandic tongue as one of the most poetic on earth. Rather than a private view of his own, Lewis argued that successive generations of English writers have felt this affinity with the old Norse tales and that this influence has found its way into the greatest of English literature . . . . The literature of England, inspired by the Norse, views self-important office holders as knaves and fools. By implication, the English had come to Iceland to repay a great debt and help fend off the knave and fool who ran Germany.

There's more in the article, but this is already an inspiration to keep blogging. Perhaps I can persuade some few readers of the importance of free speech. I'm not as articulate as Lewis, though. His ability to communicate well on a level accessible to anyone fitted him for the job he undertook in Iceland:

How Lewis came to be recruited and by whom remains a secret . . . . Perhaps one of his former pupils at Oxford recommended him for his mission . . . . Perhaps someone had heard Lewis lecture on his favorite subject in one of the two great lecture halls in the Examination Schools building of Oxford University. At a time when Oxford fellows were notorious for the poor quality of their public lectures, Lewis packed the hall with an audience of students who were not required to attend lectures. In the 1930s, Lewis was the best show in town. Somehow Lewis had developed the skill to speak to an audience and hold them in rapt attention, in spite of his academic training rather than because of it.

How great a gift that must be . . .

Jonathan Chait on P.C. 'Thought'

Jonathan Chait
Wikipedia

In a New York Magazine article titled "Can We Start Taking Political Correctness Seriously Now?" Jonathan Chait looks at p.c. students' successes in shutting down free speech in universities on various topics, and he notes:

That these activists have been able to prevail, even in the face of frequently harsh national publicity highlighting the blunt illiberalism of their methods, confirms that these incidents reflect something deeper than a series of one-off episodes. They are carrying out the ideals of a movement that regards the delegitimization of dissent as a first-order goal. People on the left need to stop evading the question of political correctness - by laughing it off as college goofs, or interrogating the motives of p.c. critics, or ignoring it - and make a decision on whether they agree with it.

I wish the Left would open up on this issue. I know that many of the New Left opposed restrictions on speech back in the Sixties, but their commitment has softened under the decades-long pressure of culture-critical questioning of liberal values, and the fact that some groups have historically been deprived  of a voice becomes a 'legitimate' reason for shutting down voices that have not been historically suppressed.

Why? Resentment, mostly, I reckon. Teach 'em how it feels! The Left is all about 'feelings' now, not rigorous argument, so whoever can shout the loudest in resentful voice and gain the coveted crown of victimhood wins by being the biggest loser.

The Inexperienced Against Free Speech . . .

Conor Friedersdorf
Google Images

Conor Friedersdorf, in an earlier article, called some Yale activists "intolerant," and he explains why in "Yale's Activists Deserve Constructive Criticism" (The Atlantic, November 17, 2015):

I called the Yale activists intolerant because it was not enough for them to protest an email that they found wrongheaded; it was not enough to fully air their grievances in multiple public forums and at the home of its author; it was not enough for [the two faculty] . . . to listen attentively to student critiques and to express heartfelt regret that the email hurt feelings; rather, the student activists demanded that the couple renounce the substance of their beliefs, or else face public shaming and an effort to remove them from their position. Never mind that . . . [the author of the email] believed what she wrote. She had to reverse her position, or else, . . . [which] is what I believe to be intolerant: a refusal to agree to disagree, however passionately and impolitely; a rejection of the notion that earnest differences held by people of good faith are not cause for punishment, even if they are mistaken, or unwittingly insensitive, or give offense; a stance that amounts to "error has no rights."

Those who cannot "agree to disagree" are immature, too young to have experienced their own reversal of opinion, or too dishonest to admit that they have ever changed their minds.

They'll see someday . . . unless that chance is past.

For Free Expression!

Dr. Michael Green
CSIS

Michael Green offers some words about freedom of expression in a recent column, "Forsaking our principles" (JoongAng Daily, December 5-6, 2015):

In the U.S., the pressure on academic freedom is coming from social movements that seek to penalize scholars or students who express views deemed hurtful to certain groups. There is no place on American campuses for hate speech, racism or anti-Semitism, to be sure. Discourse in a university should be civil - but there must also be room for different perspectives. The interaction of eclectic thinking is the essence of a liberal education. Higher learning should never be about ideological indoctrination or rote memorization. Yet recent protests at Yale University, the University of Missouri and other institutions of higher education have argued for just that. Protesters - mostly students but also some faculty - have demanded mandatory courses in sensitivity as well as accountability for lecturers or students who engage in "microaggressions" that might implicitly defame aggrieved groups on ethnic, gender, religious or other grounds. When a student journalist sought to cover these protests at the University of Missouri, a protesting faculty member called out for "more muscle" to help drive off the student. At Yale, a junior faculty member and his wife were surrounded and shouted down for arguing that efforts to police Halloween costumes had gone too far and were symbolic of a larger stifling of free speech on campus. Initially stunned by the protests - or sympathetic with student criticism of the establishment - faculty members across American universities have only just begun objecting to demands from students and sometimes administrators that they not engage certain sensitive subjects in class.

These are the very restrictions on free expressions that I was criticizing only a few weeks ago, and I see that Green holds the same view that I have, namely, that "the assault on academic freedom in the U.S. is mostly coming from the left." I'm thus heartened to hear - and to hear of - other dissenting voices.

Nicholas Kristof: Pro Free Speech, Even at Mizzou

Nicholas Kristof

Wikipedia

Nicholas Kristof, in "Mizzou, Yale and Free Speech" (NYT, November 11, 2015), notes that "moral voices can also become sanctimonious bullies," and he shows some on the Left not only being against racism but also being against the First Amendment even though they depend on it for their protests:

"Go, go, go," some Mizzou protesters yelled as they jostled a student photographer, Tim Tai, who was trying to document the protests unfolding in a public space. And Melissa Click, an assistant professor who joined the protests, is heard on a video calling for "muscle" to oust another student journalist (she later apologized).

Tai represented the other noble force in these upheavals - free expression. He tried to make the point, telling the crowd: "The First Amendment protects your right to be here - and mine."

Do watch the video. It's illuminating. As for Ms.Click, I believe she was sincere - when she called for "muscle." But not when she apologized. She was sorry, of course - sorry she got caught on camera.

If you watch the video, keep an eye on the very photogenic girls in the front line who don't look entirely convinced of their role.

Is Freedom on the Wrong Side of History?

Macer Gifford (Pseudonym)

The Spectator

The provocative journalist Brendan O'Neill, writing for The Spectator, asks "Why are student-union officials censoring criticism of Islamic State?" (Novemmber 6, 2015), and he focuses on Macer Gifford (a pseudonym), who was invited by the Kurdish Society to speak at University College London on his experience fighting against Islamic State:

Macer Gifford, a former student at University College London (UCL), was due to give a talk at UCL this week on his experiences with the YPG, the fighting units of Syrian Kurdistan who have valiantly stymied the spread of Isis. But the Kurdish Society who invited him was told by Asad Khan, the activities and events officers of UCL's students' union, that the talk couldn't go ahead, because 'in every conflict there are two sides, and at UCLU [University College London Union] we want to avoid taking sides in conflicts'.

It's true there are two sides in the YPG v Isis conflict. One side has both men and women fighting hard to protect their homeland and people from falling to brutal Islamist rule; the other pushes gay people off buildings, stones adulterers, sets fire to its prisoners of war, and mows down anyone who stands in the way of the growth of its creepy Caliphate. If you can't 'take sides' in a conflict like that, then your moral compass is in serious need of repair.

Asad Khan to the contrary, allowing Macer Gifford to speak is not the same as promoting his views. University students these days seem to conflate the two - free speech and promoting views - so they protest against speakers whose views are 'controversial' and they apply pressure to have the speakers 'dis-invited.'

As I asked several posts ago, doesn't anyone believe in free speech anymore? Are those of us who do still believe in free speech on the wrong side of history?

Fair Enough?

Google Images

I help in editing the Ewha Voice, and I was recently asked to edit a special article that was 10 pages on an MS Word document, rather longer than most. The title was "Inclusion needs action: Harmonious coexistence with LGBTs in New York" (September 28, 2015, Volume 61, Number 10, page 5e), written by one of the Ewha Voice's reporters. Most of what the article covered was the prejudice still faced by those of the LGBT community but also the greater acceptance these days on the part of society - and especially on university campuses. But one fellow hadn't got the memo:

On the other hand, an anti-LGBT protester was standing at one side of the fair and was shouting at fairgoers that homosexuality should be "cured." He was also holding a poster that read "Homosexuality is sin, Christ can set you free." Soon, scuffles broke out when participants and fairgoers started to fight back, expressing their thoughts as well to the protestor.

"It's intolerant to say such words and force one's idea [on]to others," said Emily Terry, a fairgoer who was upset about the protester. "In my opinion, homosexuality is never a sin and everyone has [been] given a free will to choose who they love."

My last edits don't seem to have made their way into the print version - hence the brackets. I also see that the reporter wasn't able to find out what actually happened with the protester or who had started the scuffles. I advised that the precise details ought to be determined, or that this passage be excluded. That was my opinion, anyway. The Voice apparently disagreed.

But here's what I think happened. The protester was shouting his message as he held his protest poster. Somebody from the fair grabbed at his poster and pulled on it. The protester pulled back. Other fairgoers joined in on what became a scuffle - a physical altercation - accompanied by shouting at the protester.

I'm guessing that the ones who attacked the protester hold views like those of Ms. Emily Terry, who thinks that anyone protesting against LGBTs is trying to "force one's idea [on]to others."

Doesn't anybody believe in free speech anymore?

Rushdie on PEN American Center and Charlie Hebdo

Salman Rushdie

Wikipedia

Alexandra Alter recently interviewed "Salman Rushdie on His New Novel, With a Character Who Floats Just Above Ground" (New York Times, September 4, 2015), and along with Rushdie's words on his novel were some words from him about free speech, words motivated by Alter's query:

Q. You were very vocal in supporting the PEN American Center's decision to honor the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo this year, something that some other writers, including Peter Carey and Francine Prose, opposed, because they said the magazine perpetuated bigoted ideas. Were you surprised to be on the other side of an ideological divide from some of your peers?

A. I could not believe it. Still can't believe it. So many writers who are old friends. It was really shocking. Now, of course, the lasting damage is in some of those friendships. I haven't seen any of them, nor have any of them been in touch with me. I felt a sense of injustice, that these people were executed for drawing pictures. If we're a free-speech organization, how can we not be on their side? For Mr. Carey to say to The New York Times that he didn't see it as a free-speech issue, I thought, "What?"

Q. He's a friend of yours, right?

A. Well, was. It's bewildering and saddening.

I'm glad Rushdie supports free speech so unreservedly. He has to. of course, due to the fatwa against him for his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses. Like Rushdie, I am also - and always - surprised to hear writers speak out against free speech.

Rand Richards Cooper on PC

Rand Richards Cooper

The novelist Rand Richards Cooper has recently published an article titled "Political Correctness" (Commonweal, September 1, 2015) to explain it to folks who don't know what it means:

The m.o. [- modus operandi, the usual way of doing things -] on today's campuses, at least among the humanities, features the elevation of group identity politics, with a special focus on oppression, and the use of academic discourses to apply an analysis of systemic power relations to individual interactions and (especially) utterances. The goal seems to be to cleanse public discourse, and even campus itself, of anything ideologically adverse . . . . [There have been] disinvitations of Condi Rice, Christine Lagarde, George Will and others as campus speakers. When I was at college, we eagerly invited speakers whose ideologies we were hostile to (Antonin Scalia, Cal Thomas, etc), and then debated them. Christine Lagarde is the head of an organization whose workings are central to the global economy. The student group whose protests led her to withdraw blamed her for "the strengthening of imperialist and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide." That doesn't sound like an attitude of eagerness for inquiry.

Cooper's right, of course, and he's explained political correctness perfectly. He's even endured it:

People seem to be spending a good deal of time waiting for other people to transgress, so that they can pounce. When I was visiting writer at an elite liberal arts college I published a fictional narrative with a black man as the protagonist (I am white). I was assailed by a progressive political scientist (also white) for my "audacity" in presuming to inhabit the point of view of the African-American underclass; he cheerfully skewered the story as an act of cultural and political appropriation. These tropes are common.

I've tolerated political correctness at times, for much of it is about courtesy, but when it suppresses free speech, the time is right to fight back hard.

Spiked Editor Brendan O'Neill on Free Speech

Brendan O'Neill Speaks Out in Spiked for Free Speech Everywhere

Brendan O'Neill, editor of Spiked, explains why "We must be free to hurt Muslims' feelings" and "Why we must stand with Bangladesh's vilified secularist bloggers" (Spiked, August 12, 2015):

Following the hacking to death of yet another Bangladeshi secularist blogger, a Bangladeshi police chief has come up with an idea for how these gruesome murders might be halted: secularists should stop criticising religion. Yes, . . . the problem is not the machetes . . . wielded by the intolerant Islamists who can handle no questioning of their beliefs; no, it's the blasphemous words being published on the blogs of secularists, atheists and free thinkers . . . . [D]oesn't it also sound familiar? If you want to stay safe, don't cross the line . . . where have we heard this before? We heard it after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. And again following the shooting at a free-speech event in Copenhgan in February . . . , Europe's chattering classes, even the literary set, all . . . expressed the idea that murdered critics of Islam are responsible for their deaths . . . . After the Copenhagen shooting, a Guardian writer said: 'Free speech as legal and moral pre-requisites in a free society must be defended. But . . .' Ah, the inevitable 'but' that follows every unconvincing declaration of support for free speech these days. 'But', he said, 'we must guard against the understandable temptation to be provocative in the publication of [anti-Islamic] cartoons if the sole objective is to establish that we can do so. With rights to free speech come responsibilities.' In short, 'don't cross the line' . . . . After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, a writer for the New Statesman said we cannot have 'the right to offend' with 'no corresponding responsibility'. '[T]here are always going to be lines that . . . cannot be crossed', he said . . . . Who'd have thought it: a writer for the house magazine of the British left and a head of police in a less-than-liberal state sharing the same view . . . . And of course, in April numerous authors . . . . publicly balked at American PEN's decision to give a freedom of expression award to Charlie Hebdo. Their reasoning . . . was striking. [Criticism of Islam] hurt people's feelings, and that is bad . . . . [P]eople's feelings are more important than freedom of speech . . . . There is a disturbing unholy marriage between these influential people who are cagey about free speech and the Islamist hotheads who carry out attacks on speakers who offend them . . . . The sanctification of hurt feelings gives extremists a licence to seek vengeance for their own hurt feelings . . . . Across the West, people's feelings are being elevated over freedom . . . . Enough . . . . You feel hurt? Tough shit. Grow up. Deal with it. We will carry on saying what we want to say.

For O'Neill's complete column, see the Spiked site. As regular readers are aware, I stand pretty strongly for free speech and have argued that we have the right to insult religious feelings - and indeed any feelings - because the more we defer to people's feelings, the less we will be allowed to say, and speech will become largely unfree.

The Universe: A Safe Place?

The Economist
June 13, 2015

In an anonymous article, "Trigger-unhappy" (The Economist, June 13th, 2015), I'm told that free speech is threatened on American campuses by 'activists' who view anything provocative as a violation of students' right to feel 'safe':

A crucial word . . . [on campuses these days] is "safe". Campus activists have stretched the meaning of safety from an important but second-order concern - shielding students from serious harm - to a defining ambition for any well-run academy. From town-sized public universities to tiny liberal-arts colleges, students have declared and administrators accepted that teachers or visiting speakers should aim for a psychologically safe learning environment, avoiding ideas or imagery that might prove distressing.

Activists sometimes organise campus "safe spaces" where students may flee alarming material. Door-stickers denote full-time safe zones for specific groups, such as gay and transgender students, or religious non-believers [i.e., non-religious people]. Demands have multiplied for "trigger warnings" - a device first seen in self-help and feminist internet forums, signalling content that may trigger painful memories - to be applied to challenging books, films or lectures.

Well, the universe is a scary place, but be careful, students, you might get what you're after, namely, a less-safe place as a university professor someday:

[Critics] see a reap-what-you-sow irony, as politically correct culture warriors of the 1980s and 1990s are devoured by their own heirs . . . . An online essay headlined "I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me" went viral.

How terrifying. But what's really going on? According to the Economist:

At root this is a fight about power, with feelings wielded as weapons.

That sounds accurate enough (with even professors claiming to 'feel' terrified), and it leads to this warning:

Students should beware of winning too many victories. A perfectly safe university would not be worth attending.

I spent three years at a university where the social studies group criticized the philosophers group for daring to question political correctness! "But . . ." I wanted to exclaim, "but that sort of questioning is what philosophers are supposed to do!" To their credit, the philosophers shrugged off the complaints and questioned political correctness anyway, so I didn't need to do any exclaiming.

Anyone who reads my blog regularly knows my view on free speech: entirely for it. I've not taught in American universities since the 1980s, so I don't know how accurate this Economist article is, though I suspect there's some exaggeration about students' views on restricting free speech.

But I'm willing to hear from readers with firsthand experience . . .

Interesting Points on Free Speech by Jonathan Chait and Ross Douthat

Extreme Circumstances
Google Images

In an article for the magazine New York, "Charlie Hebdo Point-Missers Miss Point" (January 9, 2015), Jonathan Chait explains his support for Charlie Hebdo as follows:

In this case, the content of Charlie Hebdo's work is not the issue. The issue is the right of publication. Given the fact that violent extremists threaten to kill any journalist who violates their interpretation of Islam, establishing the freedom (I argue) requires committing the blasphemy. To argue, as some have, that the threat is wrong, but that journalists should avoid blasphemy out of prudence allows the extremists to set the rules.

Ross Douthat, writing a bit more patiently than me, laid this out more explicitly. Douthat was very clear about his argument: Vulgar expression that would otherwise be unworthy of defense becomes worthy if it is made in defiance of violent threats.

Let's look at Douthat's article, "The Blasphemy We Need" (New York Times, January 7, 2015), in which he says the following:

[W]e are not in a vacuum. We are in a situation where . . . . the kind of blasphemy that Charlie Hebdo engaged in had deadly consequences, as everyone knew it could . . . and that kind of blasphemy is precisely the kind that needs to be defended, because it's the kind that clearly serves a free society's greater good. If a large enough group of someones is willing to kill you for saying something, then it's something that almost certainly needs to be said, because otherwise the violent have veto power over liberal civilization, and when that scenario obtains it isn't really a liberal civilization any more.

This is the extreme situation in which we find ourselves, namely, threatened on a core value of our civilization, i.e., free speech. Extreme circumstances sometimes call for extreme reactions, and this is one of those extreme times.

Otherwise, just imagine what we would not be allowed to say . . .

Response to one of Bill Vallicella's "Observations on Free Speech"

Observation
Appearances are Deceiving
Google Images

In a blog post titled "Observations on Free Speech" (January 28, 2015), my friend Bill Vallicella makes the following observation:

5. One who defends the right to free speech by identifying with adolescent porno-punks and nihilists of the Charlie Hebdo ilk only succeeds in advertising the fact that he doesn't understand why this right is accorded the status of a right.

I am one of those who identified myself with Charlie Hebdo (CH) - "Je suis Charlie" - so I suppose I need to clarify my position.

First, I was identifying with CH on its legal right to publish images of Muhammad, not its natural right to do so. The magazine's legal right to depict images of Muhammad was threatened by murderous Islamists bent on restricting freedom of expression by terrorizing free people from depicting Muhammad in any way whatsoever.

Second, I grant that the images of Muhammad appearing in CH are offensive, but are they pornographic? I have not seen those images, so I am accepting the reports of others and assuming that the images are offensive. But pornography is defined as "the depiction of sexual behavior that is intended to arouse sexual excitement in its audience," and that doesn't seem to be the case with CH, so far as I can judge from what others say about the CH images.

Third, the Islamists' target was not limited to CH. Rather than being narrowly focused like an assassin's attack, the concentric circles of the Islamists' target were far more encompassing than that, circumscribing so many of us within their circumferences as to terrorize potentially everyone into submitting to shariah's prohibition against depicting Muhammad's image in any way. In that sense, we were all already 'Charlie.' By standing up and saying "Je suis Charlie," I was showing my recognition that the terrorists also have the rest of us in their scope and would therefore see our defiance against their terror.

Fourth, this was an extreme situation - people had been brutally murdered for images they had drawn. Ordinarily, I would not identify myself with cartoonists of the sort who work at CH, but under the extreme circumstances, I did so to oppose terrorism and defend free speech.

My position, I suppose, is a pragmatic one of the sort that arises in political action. I am against Islamists. Their violence against free speech as practiced by CH makes no distinctions among the various sorts of images that might be drawn to depict Muhammad. Any depiction at all warrants the death penalty for the artist. Allow me to cite here one of Bill's earlier blog entries, in which he wrote: "In reaction to the murderous attack by Muslim terrorists on Charbonnier and Co. at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, many have jumped on the 'I am Charlie' bandwagon. It is quite understandable." I don't know if Bill meant any of the points I have raised in his use of the term "understandable," but I hope I have made my choice understood.

"Call It Courage" - Commonweal Editors on Charlie Hebdo

Commonweal

In an article titled "Call It Courage: You Don't Have to Like Charlie Hebdo to Admire It," The Editors of the Catholic magazine Commonweal (January 20, 2015) had this to say:

After the January 7 attack on the offices of the weekly satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, . . . an expression of solidarity soon began appearing on banners, public monuments, and social media: "Je suis Charlie." Never mind that many of those who repeated these words - including many Americans - had never seen the publication, and would likely find it offensive if they did. Even if the slogan seemed a little too easy, the solidarity was genuine. In targeting Charlie Hebdo for having published irreverent cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, the terrorists, Cherif and Saïd Kouachi, not only attacked a legendary journalistic institution, well known in France if not elsewhere; they also attacked a principle central to all liberal democracies: the freedom to speak one’s mind, to write and, in this case, draw freely, without fear of being either locked up or gunned down . . . . [O]ne can admire its staff for their willingness to go on doing what they knew might get them killed, for refusing to let zealots armed with Kalashnikovs determine the boundaries of permissible discourse. Ross Douthat of the New York Times put it well when, after conceding that "a society’s liberty is not proportional to the quantity of blasphemy it produces," he went on, "If publishing something might get you slaughtered and you publish it anyway, by definition you are striking a blow for freedom, and that's precisely the context when you need your fellow citizens to set aside their squeamishness and rise to your defense" . . . . [T]here is . . . a risk of underreacting to this latest outbreak of violence, by treating it as if it were an isolated event rather than part of a much larger pattern. A few weeks earlier, twenty-three people were injured in Nantes and Dijon when two "lone wolf" terrorists drove their vehicles into crowds of Christmas shoppers. Around the same time, an Islamicist took eighteen hostages in a Sydney café; two of them were killed. Two months before that, a down-at-heels Muslim convert killed a Canadian reservist at the National War Memorial in Ottawa. The list goes on. Some of these attacks may have been planned and funded by terrorist organizations in the Middle East; others appear to have been alarmingly spontaneous. But they were all inspired by the same poisonous ideology, which turns alienated and insecure young people into suicidal jihadists. It is no good pretending this ideology will disappear or cease to afflict us if only the Charlie Hebdos of the world can be persuaded to exercise a little more tact and self-restraint. The groups behind these attacks are demanding vengeance or submission, not better manners.

Commonweal is a very liberal Catholic magazine, but it sees the problem quite clearly in this instance: courtesy will not satisfy these Islamist ideologues; only resistance will keep such wolves from the door, whether they be lone or in packs.

British Prime Minister David Cameron speaks out to defend free speech

British Prime Minister David Cameron

BBC News

The pope recently compared insulting a religion with insulting someone's mother - and remarked that anyone insulting his mother could expect a punch in the nose. I had a mental image of the pope smashing his fist into someone's face. Rather disconcerting! Perhaps a cartoon of Pope Francis doing exactly that?

In an interview with British Prime Minister David Cameron ("PM[, down] on Pope['s] comments[, insists]: 'There is a right to cause offence,'" January 18, 2015), the BBC noted that the pope's words seemed to give some justification for violence in response to an insult directed at one's religion, especially when the pope added that "religions should be treated with respect, so that people's faiths were not insulted or ridiculed."

When Cameron was asked his opinion, he replied:

I think in a free society, there is a right to cause offence about someone's religion.

I'm a Christian - if someone says something offensive about Jesus, I might find that offensive, but in a free society I don't have a right to, sort of, wreak my vengeance on them.

I'm glad Cameron said that, and that he said it directly in response to the pope. Cameron added that "as long as publications acted within the law, they had the right to publish any material, even if it was offensive to some."

Right. No one should have the legal right not to feel insulted.