ACTA's Must-Reads
« Arguing by degrees | Main | Knowing what we need to know »
Remembering free speech
It's an established fact that fewer and fewer Americans understand their history or their rights--and it's a reasonable conjecture that one result of this will be a growing, global confusion about the nature and value of free speech. Colleges and universities, as ACTA has shown, aren't teaching civics or U.S. history--but they are enforcing codes of sensitivity through mandatory training programs and through speech codes. When they do so, they deny that they are infringing on students' rights; they invoke their anti-discrimination clauses; and they quibble about how free offensive speech should be. Along the way, they erode some of the most elemental principles of a free society, and they pave the way for a nightmare world in which feelings rule over reason, collectives dominate individuals, appeasement displaces justice, and putatively oppressed groups tyrannize over everyone else.
Trains of thought such as the one sketched above are routinely dismissed by defenders of the academic status quo. But that's as short-sighted as it is cynical and self-serving. From time to time, we get a cold, hard glimpse of what the nightmare world described above will be like--because from time to time, the West experiences two simultaneous systemic failures: It fails to comprehend the importance of defending free speech, and it fails to recognize that the right not to be offended is no one's right.
We are in one of those moments now. Anne Applebaum explains.
Colleges and universities need to educate citizens who aren't gluttons for appeasement, who don't think that someone's outrage should silence another's speech, who know their rights, and who can consequently recognize both civic cowardice and collective hypocrisy when they see it.
Posted by acta online at September 21, 2006 08:02 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.goactablog.org/blog/mt-tb.cgi/219
Comments
Let me get this straight. Colleges have speech codes, which make Muslim radicals respond violently to the free speech of a non-American religious leader, and the fact that the Pope chose to apologize for his statements can be attributed to American educators' failure to properly explain the American idea of freedom of speech.
Applebaum, of course, confuses demands for apologies with violence. The former is protected by freedom of speech, the latter not. Then she asks "the West," whatever that is, to rally round the Pope in the name of free speech. Where was the Pope when Father Charles Coughlin was promoting violence against my Jewish family?
What's most ironic is the Pope's own false claim that Muhammed only spoke out against forced conversion when Muslims were the underdogs. As if the Catholic Church would have stopped its own violence and forced conversions if it, too, hadn't lost most of its political power. Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone and all that jazz. But I guess God's flawless representative on earth doesn't read up on his Jesus. Luckily, that Jesus guy is GWB's favorite philosopher. As they said in that Disney dog rescue film, "Those dogs are my friends!"
Posted by: Karen Eliot at September 21, 2006 11:56 AM
ACTA readers may kindly review my comments below on the 16 September posting soon to appear for a complete counterblast to Karen Elliot's precious rubbish about comp instruction and how to improve it.
Now on to her present rubbish. Demands for apologies from Muslim groups' talking heads usually infer menaces or threats such as "we can't control our racaille [look it up, KE] if you allow this to be expressed . . .blah, blah, blah . . .". And KE, how many Jews in America suffered violence at the hands of followers of Father Coughlin? There may have been some incidents--it's up to you to produce them. Soon. Now, how many Jews have suffered violence at the hands of rabid and murderous Islamofascists? Please to direct your maenadic fury toward its proper objects in future.
Of course, your false and odious charge of forced conversion as a feature of Church practise is all the more contemptible because it clearly reveals its author's anti-Catholic bigotry (tu quoque once again, KE). And then her little expression of disloyalty thrown into this farrago of nonsense and screed. These points alone should make you blush with shame for expressing such slavering spleen against His Holiness. It's as if I were to advocate "kicking those murderous camel-jocks back into their 7th century desert where they belong", or something similar. Think it, perhaps, but take care before you write it. Yet I'm sure His Holiness, as perhaps more reluctantly, I, forgive you.
Pax tecum,
Dr JA
Posted by: Jacques Albert at September 23, 2006 12:44 PM
Et semel emissum volat irrevocabile verbum--"And once flown, the word takes flight irrevocably"--Horace.
Posted by: Jacques Albert at September 24, 2006 12:55 AM