Zooze the Horse roams around the pasture near Lamar State College. Zooze thinks about problems in academia. Zhe wants proffies to submit posts (blog posts, not fence posts).
Thursday, October 12, 2017
Big Thirsty
If Adolf Hitler gave a lecture on your campus, would you
A) shout him down and not allow him to speak?
B) stand and turn your back to him while he spoke?
C) shoot him?
D) other:_______________________
This is an easy question: (D), one reason being that Hitler is dead.
For a living villain, (A) is out. We’re a university: we’re not supposed to do that, no matter how repugnant the ideas expressed. The idea is that if you go ahead and let them talk, what they say will be far more damning than anything you could do.
(C) is out. Don’t we have a bad enough record of political violence already? Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy, and attempts on too many others.
Frod has parsed it pretty well, I think. The problem is that, except in retrospect, it's hard to identify someone as dangerous as Hitler until he's already acquired considerable power (at which point it is, if not too late entirely, at least too late to avert as much damage as earlier action would have averted). I haven't done a lot of reading in the history of the period, but it's my impression that many of Hitler's contemporaries considered him rather ridiculous, at least at first (and yes, that reaction has alarming contemporary resonance).
For the great majority of speakers, I'm in favor of B (and, if parts of the potential audience refuse to abide by B, in favor of some sort of arrangement that allows the speaker to be heard by those who wish to hear hir -- perhaps a video feed from a room without an audience, or with a selected panel of questioners who have pledged to respect the speaker's right to speak, as long as (s)he pledges to answer all questions asked).
I do think there is a place for C (cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his co-conspirators), but, as Frod's examples illustrate, there's a very real danger of mistaking someone with whom you disagree vehemently (and perhaps for good reason) for someone who is both truly evil and truly dangerous. I'm still somewhat surprised (and very relieved, though I'm sure my relief is nothing compared to that of his family) that Barack Obama survived to be a former president. Given our national history, that might just be a sign of progress (as well as the result of good work by the Secret Service, among others). I hope I'm not being naive, but I don't think that any participant in current US political/civic discourse (including Obama's successor) is dangerous enough to warrant C (which I might call the nuclear option, except that there's an actual nuclear option out there, which is probably more dangerous than the hateful rhetoric on which recent campus debates about free speech tend to focus. I'd hope, though, if the current president's manifest mental infirmities seemed to be pushing us close to that brink, someone would find a way to invoke the 25th amendment, which, although it is potentially subject to misuse, would surely represent a less dangerous precedent than option C).
The other problem with C, of course, is that Hitler didn't operate in a vacuum, and eliminating him would not necessarily have eliminated the forces he served as a catalyst to unleash. There's always the possibility of creating a martyr, for good (e.g. some of the Civil Rights progress made in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination) or for ill.
This is an easy question: (D), one reason being that Hitler is dead.
ReplyDeleteFor a living villain, (A) is out. We’re a university: we’re not supposed to do that, no matter how repugnant the ideas expressed. The idea is that if you go ahead and let them talk, what they say will be far more damning than anything you could do.
(C) is out. Don’t we have a bad enough record of political violence already? Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy, and attempts on too many others.
Frod has parsed it pretty well, I think. The problem is that, except in retrospect, it's hard to identify someone as dangerous as Hitler until he's already acquired considerable power (at which point it is, if not too late entirely, at least too late to avert as much damage as earlier action would have averted). I haven't done a lot of reading in the history of the period, but it's my impression that many of Hitler's contemporaries considered him rather ridiculous, at least at first (and yes, that reaction has alarming contemporary resonance).
ReplyDeleteFor the great majority of speakers, I'm in favor of B (and, if parts of the potential audience refuse to abide by B, in favor of some sort of arrangement that allows the speaker to be heard by those who wish to hear hir -- perhaps a video feed from a room without an audience, or with a selected panel of questioners who have pledged to respect the speaker's right to speak, as long as (s)he pledges to answer all questions asked).
I do think there is a place for C (cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his co-conspirators), but, as Frod's examples illustrate, there's a very real danger of mistaking someone with whom you disagree vehemently (and perhaps for good reason) for someone who is both truly evil and truly dangerous. I'm still somewhat surprised (and very relieved, though I'm sure my relief is nothing compared to that of his family) that Barack Obama survived to be a former president. Given our national history, that might just be a sign of progress (as well as the result of good work by the Secret Service, among others). I hope I'm not being naive, but I don't think that any participant in current US political/civic discourse (including Obama's successor) is dangerous enough to warrant C (which I might call the nuclear option, except that there's an actual nuclear option out there, which is probably more dangerous than the hateful rhetoric on which recent campus debates about free speech tend to focus. I'd hope, though, if the current president's manifest mental infirmities seemed to be pushing us close to that brink, someone would find a way to invoke the 25th amendment, which, although it is potentially subject to misuse, would surely represent a less dangerous precedent than option C).
The other problem with C, of course, is that Hitler didn't operate in a vacuum, and eliminating him would not necessarily have eliminated the forces he served as a catalyst to unleash. There's always the possibility of creating a martyr, for good (e.g. some of the Civil Rights progress made in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination) or for ill.