Freedom of Thought and Speech

[Chinahand]

I thought this blog post by a lawyer at the University of Chicago was interesting:

The main threats to academic freedom in the natural sciences in the capitalist democracies come from powerful business interests that disfavor, for profit-seeking reasons, certain discoveries:   for example, concerning the human contribution to climate change, to take the most important example in the present, but also findings about the inefficacy of particular pharmaceuticals and medical treatments.   Businesses have a strong interest in the correct natural scientific understanding of the causal order of nature, to be sure, since the extraction of profit from nature requires it.  At the same time, businesses also have strong interests in concealing certain scientific results that might impede popular acceptance of their business practices and consumption of their products.  Academic freedom is a crucial bulwark in favor of discovering truths about the natural world even in the relatively free capitalist societies.

In the human sciences, the issues are usually different:  it is, shall we say, rare for international corporations to get exercised about the latest developments in the history of early modern Europe or philosophy of the social sciences.  The threats to academic freedom in the human sciences come less from the business sector, and more often from political and religious interest groups whose normative commitments are threatened by the findings of the human sciences.   In the United States, for example, external pressure is frequently brought upon universities who try to employ critics of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians.  But the pressure to violate academic freedom comes from within the universities too.   Indeed, some humanists have concocted a whole new metaphysics of “silencing” and “marginalizing” and “violence” to describe the expression of ideas that are offensive and insulting to certain minority groups.  For these academic insiders, Marcusian “indiscriminate” toleration in academic discourse is not acceptable, since the expression of ideas that might be hurtful to individuals based on group membership—in particular, membership in groups that have been victims of historical practices of subordination (e.g., African-Americans in the United States, though more recently, transgender individuals)—is alleged to “silence” members of that group and do “violence” to them.   

Marcuse himself wanted to suppress speech advocating for actual violence against and silencing of human beings:  murdering their political leaders, dropping chemical bombs on their country, destroying their society and livelihood through military violence.    But neoliberalism—the idea that the preferences of the consumers of products, including education, determine the value of what is offered—now rules in the capitalist universities too, with the result that some self-styled “progressive” faculty and students--even in institutions of higher education that protect expressive rights quite resolutely--believe that denigrating and offensive ideas “silence,” “marginalize” and “do violence” to them.   (Ironically, one need only watch videos, easily available on-line, of minority students challenging and ridiculing the pathetic NeoNazi Richard Spencer on various campuses to realize that no one was “silenced” and no one suffered actual “violence.”)  In both research and teaching in the human sciences, such metaphysical flights of fancy deserve no consideration at any university committed to academic freedom.   The dismissal of this melodrama is, of course, compatible with full commitment to laws, common in most Western democracies these days, prohibiting racial, gender, or sexual orientation discrimination.

There's a lot to chew within it. 

I think he is underplaying the very powerful social forces from religion which reject natural sciences - fundamentalist religious objections to our understanding of biological and cosmological sciences because they do not align with a tenet of religious faith. 

There is also a strong dynamic within the natural sciences created by anti-capitalists who reject business also rejecting the natural sciences behind those businesses - genetic modification, vaccine science etc; plus the woo a similar set embrace such as homeopathy and products which tend to use key words about "natural remedies" and "whole, pure or natural" foods which are just as capitalistic in their practices, and in my view far more rejecting of evidence than say pharmaceuticals which due to government regulation are under far greater oversight of their claims (that oversight is of course failure prone).

Within the humanities I am intrigued by the current obsession with intersectionality, micro-aggressions and how holding an opinion on someone does violence to them by creating a hostile environment.

I don't see this as being a product of neo-liberalism and find his third paragraph quite strange:

Neoliberalism rules in capitalist universities therefore progressives can shut down ideas they deem to "silence", "marginalize" or "do violence" to people they define as an oppressed minority.

That logic makes little sense to me.

It is a shame LDV no longer posts here, I would have liked to hear his opinion on this.

I enjoy thinking about these big big social issues.  

Why certain communities (cultural daos) reject or accept science, and also accept or reject other cultural daos, all within a larger dao of how society communicates.

The web is, I think, something which complicates this and has some very detrimental elements - it creates echo chambers, allows crank views to reinforce themselves by providing a community they can think is substantial in numbers while in fact being a tiny tiny minority of society, and it also encourages winner takes all controversialism as click bait is rewarded by algorithms which reinforce populist views by putting them at the top of the rankings and hence they become what is most likely to be clicked.

The result is the shouty, I'm not listening to you world we have.

[Chinahand]

I realise I am basically talking to my self with this topic, but if you've a spare hour this speech by Jonathan Haidt is fascinating:

 

You can miss out the first 12.5 minutes if you don't want the introduction by someone else.

If you haven't time you can also read a transcript here.

Highlights?

Woolley et al will like this bit:

[A]s a social psychologist, I must point out that immigration and diversity have many sociological effects, some of which are negative. The main one is that they reduce social capital—the bonds of trust that exist between individuals. The political scientist Robert Putnam found this in a paper titled “E Pluribus Unum,” in which he followed his data to a conclusion he clearly did not relish: “In the short run, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.”

In short, despite its other benefits, diversity is a centrifugal force, something the Founders [of the US Constitution] were well aware of. In Federalist 2, John Jay wrote that we should count it as a blessing that America possessed “one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, the same language, professing the same religion.” I repeat that diversity has many good effects too, and I am grateful that America took in my grandparents from Russia and Poland, and my wife’s parents from Korea. But Putnam’s findings make it clear that those who want more diversity should be even more attentive to strengthening centripetal forces.

While this bit is about the best description I've read explaining why intersectionality is deeply problematic:

The civil rights struggle was ... identity politics, but it was an effort to fix a mistake, to make us better and stronger as a nation. Martin Luther King’s rhetoric made it clear that this was a campaign to create conditions that would allow national reconciliation. He drew on the moral resources of the American civil religion to activate our shared identity and values: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note.” And: “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”

... Let us contrast King’s identity politics with the version taught in universities today. There is a new variant that has swept through the academy in the last five years. It is called intersectionality. The term and concept were presented in a 1989 essay by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA, who made the very reasonable point that a black woman’s experience in America is not captured by the summation of the black experience and the female experience. She analyzed a legal case in which black women were victims of discrimination at General Motors, even when the company could show that it hired plenty of blacks (in factory jobs dominated by men), and it hired plenty of women (in clerical jobs dominated by whites). So even though GM was found not guilty of discriminating against blacks or women, it ended up hiring hardly any black women. This is an excellent argument. What academic could oppose the claim that when analyzing a complex system, we must look at interaction effects, not just main effects?

But what happens when young people study intersectionality? In some majors, it’s woven into many courses. Students memorize diagrams showing matrices of privilege and oppression. It’s not just white privilege causing black oppression, and male privilege causing female oppression; its heterosexual vs. LGBTQ, able-bodied vs. disabled; young vs. old, attractive vs. unattractive, even fertile vs. infertile. Anything that a group has that is good or valued is seen as a kind of privilege, which causes a kind of oppression in those who don’t have it. A funny thing happens when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions. You tell them that one side of each binary is good and the other is bad. You turn on their ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle. Many students find it thrilling; it floods them with a sense of meaning and purpose.

And here’s the strategically brilliant move made by intersectionality: all of the binary dimensions of oppression are said to be interlocking and overlapping. America is said to be one giant matrix of oppression, and its victims cannot fight their battles separately. They must all come together to fight their common enemy, the group that sits at the top of the pyramid of oppression: the straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied Christian or Jewish or possibly atheist male. This is why a perceived slight against one victim group calls forth protest from all victim groups. This is why so many campus groups now align against Israel. Intersectionality is like NATO for social-justice activists.

This means that on any campus where intersectionality thrives, conflict will be eternal, because no campus can eliminate all offense, all microaggressions, and all misunderstandings. This is why the use of shout-downs, intimidation, and even violence in response to words and ideas is most common at our most progressive universities, in the most progressive regions of the country. It’s schools such as Yale, Brown, and Middlebury in New England, and U.C. Berkeley, Evergreen, and Reed on the West Coast. Are those the places where oppression is worst, or are they the places where this new way of thinking is most widespread?

 

 

[twinkle]

Wonderful.

[GD4XXX]

Too long; didn't read. But if it's what I think it's about, it seems that there is a new wind blowing in universities across Britain and the US that will starve the institutions of funding if they do not allow unfettered free speech - for the sole purpose of debating pertinent political issues. It doesn't and isn't intended to enable racists to suddenly scream "nigger!" in someone's face for the sheer fun of it.

Since curbing free speech allows lies and falsehoods to thrive unchallenged, I'd say it's a change to be welcomed.

[woolley]

On 12/27/2017 at 12:41 PM, Chinahand said:

 

Woolley et al will like this bit:
 

Not especially, China. All he is doing is acknowledging in a half-hearted and overly verbose manner, that which is patently obvious to those of us who are not afflicted by the metastasised cancer that is political correctness. Nature teaches us that birds of a feather flock together. It is the law of nature from time immemorial and we are of nature. We scorn its laws at our peril.

[TheDruid-3X3]

Awens to All:

One thing that I have found about the Right to Freedom of Speech is that there is no Government Policing Agency set up to help Protect ones ability to have their Freedom of Speech.

If you have your Right to Freedom of Speech Infringed Upon or you find yourself Censored or Banned from being able to have your Right of Self Expression, you have to Defend or Protect your Right to Freedom of Speech at your own Expense or Peril.

I have had my Right to Freedom of Speech Oppressed a number of times, and I have found that everytime that it has happened, there was No Place I could turn to in order to Register a Complaint.

So the Right to Freedom of Speech is something that you have to Protect Yourself at your Own Risk & Expense.

3X3

[Barrie Stevens]

We have the European Convention on Human Rights imported into domestic law by the Human Rights Act and Article 10 deals with such as freedom of expression. Many countries have something similar.

The caveat in the UK and amongst those members of the Council of Europe (Not an EU organisation) is that exercising your fundamental rights and freedoms must not detract or impair the rights and freedoms of others thus there are some curbs and of course remedies.

Public entities are expected to be Human Rights compliant but their actions and our expectations must be measured and proportionate.

Most human rights issues are vertical between "Us" and effectively "the State" but increasingly human rights issues are arising horizontally in private litigation between persons. This relates back to Article 6 and the right to a fair hearing before a tribunal the definition which we are told is becoming increasingly broad. The academics are in hot pursuit!

Nowhere really reflects the freedoms of expression you get in the USA but then it is a litigious society as well.

I attach an explanatory link.

https://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/human-rights/what-are-human-rights/human-rights-act/article-10-freedom-expression

 

 

[De nada]

https://cueballsdiaryofasadman.wordpress.com/2017/12/29/this-week-week-ending-29th-december/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

Freedom of speech...

[RIchard Britten]

9 hours ago, woolley said:

...the metastasised cancer that is political correctness.

You see, when I hear or read old farts moaning about "political correctness", all I can hear/read is "I'm grumpy because I can't say the racist, sexist, mysognist, homophobic, etc things I used to be able to say.  Now I have to be respectful to others in the same way old people have been demanding that others "respect their elders""

[Neil Down]

9 minutes ago, RIchard Britten said:

You see, when I hear or read old farts moaning about "political correctness", all I can hear/read is "I'm grumpy because I can't say the racist, sexist, mysognist, homophobic, etc things I used to be able to say.  Now I have to be respectful to others in the same way old people have been demanding that others "respect their elders""

I actually hate those words "political correctness" they were words dreamed up by the beardy weirdos. I much prefer the words "civilised" and "good manners"

[Declan]

For me things that get branded Politically Correct are just good manners. 

In fact, the concept was created or at least populised in reaction to anti-racism and anti-homophobia etc initiatives. It's an easy way to group quite reasonable ideas with more loopy ones and dismiss them all. 

[The Observer]

40 minutes ago, De nada said:

https://cueballsdiaryofasadman.wordpress.com/2017/12/29/this-week-week-ending-29th-december/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

Freedom of speech...

Oh great, I was hoping this might make an appearance for Christmas. I haven’t seen it for a while. 

[Neil Down]

39 minutes ago, The Observer said:

Oh great, I was hoping this might make an appearance for Christmas. I haven’t seen it for a while. 

No great loss. It was funny to start off with then went downhill rapidly

[The Observer]

3 minutes ago, Neil Down said:

No great loss. It was funny to start off with then went downhill rapidly

According to you. Part of the reason I signed up here was to see if that would appear again. I think it’s quite good. I think the link to the Twitter version works better presentationally:

https://cueballsdiaryofasadman.wordpress.com/2017/12/29/this-week-week-ending-29th-december/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

[gettafa]

TLDR