Unlearning liberty

[xoxoxoBruce]

The strangling of free speech on college campuses, and indeed in public, is making us dumber.

He says: ‘In the history of censorship, there’s always been good intentions, there’s always been someone thinking that they’re saving the world by shutting someone up. There’s nothing new about that. But the telling thing about the argument presupposing the fundamental psychological fragility of the populace is that its advocates are merely echoing what the pro-Tsarists used to say in the late nineteenth century; that is, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, the people can’t handle the truth, the people are too weak to live in a free society.

And that’s one thing you have to point out when people try to take the moral highground in policing the mental and psychological safety of students. Not only are they saying that people are incredibly psychologically weak; they’re also putting themselves in charge of who gets punished, and - as Tsar Nicholas II amply demonstrated - time and again they punish those who they don’t like, those they disagree with.’

From a technical perspective, of course, university administrations don’t talk about censorship; they talk about ‘protecting people from harassment’. Yet, as Lukianoff writes, this represents a redefinition of the legal concept of harassment into a ‘generalised ‘‘right not to be offended”’. ‘A lot of people don’t know this’, he tells me, ‘but harassment as a legal concept was developed in the 1970s. As I understand it, when the US legislators passed the civil-rights laws, they wanted to avoid a situation where a company could be legally obligated to hire minorities and women but could then make life so awful for them, through outright harassment, that the formal equality would mean nothing.

But in the 1990s, this particular concept of harassment evolved. A lot of Americans know about campus speech codes, they know that there was some sort of politically correct movement in the 1980s and 1990s. But what many don’t know is that many of those codes were modified harassment codes, which redefined harassment from being a serious pattern of discriminatory behaviour to anything which could potentially offend somebody.’

As Lukianoff admits, at the height of ‘PC gone mad’ stories during the early 1990s, many people rejected the convolutions of campus speech codes. They were objects of mockery not respect. But the preponderance of anti-harassment codes has not prompted the same resistance. ‘I think students have just gotten used to these absurd little harassment codes’, he says. ‘The courts don’t accept them. Every time they are challenged in court, they’re defeated. But unfortunately, I think that campuses are raising a generation that believes that harassment happens every time they are offended, and that is a dangerous thing.’

A lot of good reading here.

Much more.