Black and White

My son and I were having a discourse by e-mail when the subject of this blog came up.  If he doesn’t mind, I am going to quote from his latest message, “Had a conversation the other night . . .  about how what seems to be in shortest supply in our contemporary discourse is complexity and nuance. We've been told that we live in a world of choice, and that extends to how we consume information: we build a bubble, an echo chamber, and we don't tend to permit into that bubble anything which challenges our views. A seeming result of this is an increasingly black/white worldview: "That's wrong, so it should be stopped." Yes, it is wrong. But no number of goddamn internet petitions will have one bit of impact on it. There are some things we can't prevent, even in the face of all our great intentions.”

 

Some people have tended to blame Donald Trump for this black/white worldview, but the trend has been there long before his campaign.  But I will admit that he didn’t help the situation by depicting the world as a we/they proposition.  But we saw lots of examples before.  It has been seen rising in discourse about the genders (however many there are these days).  We have seen it in politics.  Is it my imagination that this black/white view seems to be more prevalent among those on the conservative/right than those of us of a more liberal bent? Like the Conservative government minister a few years ago who, in trying to justify unfettered access by police to all e-mails, said that if you did not agree with the bill, you were in the same category as child molesters.  Black and white.

 

But where I have seen this worldview most vividly recently, and in my mind the most troublesome, is in universities.  Universities were, I thought, places where young people could explore different ideas in an unbiased atmosphere.  It was a place to welcome diversity of thought leading to your own thought-out worldview. It was a place where you learned, you thought, read, thought and debated ideas. But that no longer seems to be the case.  Although I am no fan of her ideas, I thought that one of the most shameful episodes in recent years was the treatment of Ann Coulter by the students and faculty of the University of Ottawa. In 2009, she was scheduled to speak there, but the event was cancelled when people objected.  At the time I wrote, “One student tried to explain the situation be stating, “On campus, we promise our students a safe and positive space, and that’s not what (Coulter) brings.”  I agree that physical safety is important for students, but here we are talking about intellectual “safety”, the prevention of exposure to different ideas.  Is this what we want our students to be subjected to, a litany of wishy-washy or unimagined ideas?”  More recently, we have the issue at a west coast school where an instructor used an example in his lecture that “triggered” (whatever that means) a female student who complained to the school authorities.  He was then subjected to the most demeaning of meetings and forced to make a declaration of contrition.  In it he admitted that he liked and admired the young complainant and for that the student turned her thumb down and he was fired.

“If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one than the one - if (s)he had the power - would be justified in silencing mankind.”
  - John Stuart Mill

I asked my son, who graduated from Carleton University with an honours degree in history some years ago, if he had experienced any of this on campus.  He replied,”I wasn't subject to anything like this during my post-secondary education, though it was in the air -- after all, Allan Bloom wrote "The Closing of the American Mind," about this very subject, in 1987.”   He added, “Part of me worries that this is all representative of the last throes of the Enlightenment's basest and best ideals.”  When a thinking man of forty with a wife and family can say this, it really does give pause.

Many people explain this shut-down of debate by saying it is the politically correct way of thinking.  But to me that is a cop-out.  There are many ways to be “correct” and “incorrect” and for some to set themselves up as the arbiter of what is correct and incorrect is the height of intellectual arrogance.  They think they can talk for all of us.  That they, and they alone, have a total world view of every situation.  They challenge every tradition and cultural practice without any idea when and why these practices came about (see my earlier blog http://jgforbes.blogspot.ca/2016/05/sins-of-fathers.html)

“Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.”
  - Michael Crichton

There is a famous saying to the effect, “I may not agree with your ideas, but I will fight to the death to defend your right to say them.”  That is what open discussion and debate is all about, not fixed ideas that cater to the political correctness of the day.  What are students, the future leaders of industry and government, learning from this experience?  Do they learn that they can impose their view on society merely by shutting down discussion and not allowing other ideas to be considered?  I hope not, but I fear that this is what, after all, will happen.

“There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.”

  - P. J. O'Rourke

 “Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.”
  - Christopher Morley

 “Ideology has triumphed over reason.”

- William L. Shirer (The Collapse of the Third Republic)

It would appear that some people in the past understood this.  Some may condemn this blog as being politically incorrect and if so, it just proves my point.