Academia: Viewpoint Diversity (Not Again! Edition)
Thursday's Child Wants Us to Stop Pushing This Rock Up the Hill
Doesn’t matter how many times you think you’ve beaten the Terminator, it always comes back to life.
Doesn’t matter how many times folks try, wearily, to challenge a very particular subset of self-validating public intellectuals with prestigious academic positions and secure access to major publications who continuously howl to the moon about how illiberal and narrow-minded academia or public culture has become, how silenced they have been. They’ll be back at it tomorrow with the same complaint, unaffected by any objections, challenges or conversations, announcing just how sagely heterodox they are. For folks in that little segment of the world, when you point out the actually narrow range of viewpoints they collectively hold to, they’ll typically respond that you’re wrong: some of them are Democrats and some of them are Republicans, as if that’s what “viewpoint diversity” means.
I’m all for what I might mean by that phrase were I able to use it with any seriousness, given its capacious misuse by others. I once tried to put this as thinking of ideas, theories, methods, or frameworks within the academy in terms of “positive liberties”, e.g., that rather than saying “we should have free speech” as a negative liberty—that we do not suppress what a person already in the community might wish to say—we should say, “we’re trying to encourage the widest range of thinking and curiosity within the academy, we want to produce more variety and stimulate more idiosyncrasy, even just as conjectures, thought-experiments, explorations in curiosity.” That would be a good thing. That’s what “heterodoxy” could really mean.
I don’t think I’d describe the contemporary academy as consistently devoted to that spirit, but I’m really sure that Heterodox Academy, the University of Austin, Jonathan Haidt and so on do not practice in that spirit. I spend a year of my life discussing Haidt’s book with imaginative colleagues who came up with a whole bunch of meaningful, thoughtful objections to it in a series of public discussions and then watched Haidt at a dinner and in the questions after a talk demonstrate absolutely zero interest in any of the discussions that might follow from all that investment of time and energy.
If you’re really about heterodoxy, you’re about curiosity, about disagreeing with yourself, about uncertainty, about being provisional. You’re about seeking the best objections to your strongest arguments. You’re about listening seriously to the strongest criticism and having the generosity and maturity to wait on a response, to let that criticism sink in, to seeing things from other angles and other circumstances. You give up arguments and theories easily, you get an intellectual oil change every hundred miles. I don’t pretend that’s easy. But people who know it’s hard sometimes at least have the humility to not constantly beat their chests celebrating their own openness of mind and commitment to heterodoxy.
Montaigne’s essays aren’t dominated by him complaining about how other people aren’t sufficiently skeptical or doubtful or heterodox: he knows he’s got enough work on his hands being doubtful about his own inclinations and observations.
Everybody, even the smugly self-congratulatory crowd, grant that in the most viewpoint-diverse academic institution imaginable, there would still be excluded viewpoints. That’s where the trouble begins. Why shouldn’t there be someone in the Biology Department who doesn’t believe in evolution? There are some new Lysenkoists out there, believe or not: surely they could force us to think about epigenetics to a new extent, amrite? Why shouldn’t there be Holocaust deniers in History Departments, or people trying to write history as moral fable rather than as based in archival evidence? There are both out there in the world: on what grounds do we exclude them from a charge to represent diverse viewpoints? Are we afraid of the challenge? Any dumb or evil thing that someone out there in the world thinks can huff and puff and demand to come in if you’re completely stupid in the way you talk about viewpoint diversity.
As soon as you concede that disciplines have valid limits to the methods and concepts that they represent and that those limits are best set and understood by people trained in that discipline, the doxas are already considerably less hetero, no matter how much you vibe to my idea of academic freedom as a positive liberty. As they should be! We’re not here to teach falsehoods or to make the world even worse than it is. We are here to do valuable and purposeful work under constraints of resources and time.
So ok! There’s still a lot of at least arguably valid thought out there in the world: shouldn’t it be represented? Sure! But let’s take Bari Weiss’ favorite topic set, namely Zionism, Israel, Judaism and anti-Semitism, as an example.
The conventional call from the conventional complainers about viewpoint diversity on this subject would be “Zionists should be allowed to be Zionists without someone arguing that Zionism is beyond the pale or shouldn’t be allowed as a legitimate point of view”. E.g., they want heterodoxy to mean two positions and two positions only: Zionism and anti-Zionism. And actually Bari Weiss and many others don’t even want that, inasmuch as they frequently claim that anti-Zionism is exactly the same as anti-Semitism and hence is in fact beyond the pale. So the only heterodoxy here they’re seeking is generally “variations of Zionism”. More or less like that version of heterodoxy that settles into something as conventional and inane as “Democrats” and “Republicans”.
Instead, imagine an academic discussion of Zionism—an argument about the proposition that the state of Israel should have been created and should continue to exist in its present form—that was maximally heterodox. That discussion would include historians, anthropologists, philosophers, theologians, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, economists, etc; it would range over talking about nations and nationalism; forms of sovereignty and citizenship; ideas and practices of community; rights and personhood; violence and suffering; Judaism and Islam; the Middle East and Mediterranean world from 2000 BCE to the present; and much else.
In a genuinely heterodox conversation, not only could there be no presumption that the state of Israel must exist, but there could be no presumption that any contemporary nation should exist in its present form or that nations as such are a necessary or preferred form of human political community. In a genuinely heterodox community, here are some (only some!) of the positions in this imaginable conversation you’d need to ensure were represented in an intelligent, informed, thoughtful manner:
That empires, federations, confederations or other forms of supranational or large-scale non-national political belonging allow for human flourishing, diversity and possibility better than nations do and hence Israel and many other contemporary nations should be incorporated into some future supranational organization;
That the doctrine of national self-determination as articulated in the early 20th Century after World War I, which was an important contributor to the growth of Zionism, should apply universally if at all; meaning that if Israel both should exist and should continue to exist, there are another one hundred or more nations with comparable sovereignty that must be created urgently which do not yet exist, and that there are no defensible arguments about Israel’s unique rights or nature in this respect;
That national self-determination as envisioned in the 20th Century is everywhere a bad doctrine that has caused tremendous suffering both in the ways that it has created polities where some existing population is turned into a minority with limited rights and some other group buys into an exaggerated or unreal understanding of their own history and exclusive rights to territory;
That the creation of Israel was necessary as a response to the unique vulnerabilities of Jewish populations throughout the world and will remain necessary for that reason, regardless of whatever costs its creation might have entailed for others;
That the creation of Israel was a completely normal sort of response to the legitimate demands for self-determination by a well-defined population, and while not all such demands can practically be accommodated, Palestinian self-determination should have an equal status and lead to the creation of a sovereign nation;
That Israel has a right to exist, but not a right to be a Jewish state in perpetuity, that there should be one state encompassing Gaza, Israel and the West Bank that has a normal majority-rule democracy, right of return for all Jews and Palestinians, and strong rights protecting the freedom and security of all citizens;
That focusing on nations and sovereignty is beside the point, and that what really matters are community-level social relations and the relative autonomy of local communities to set their own standards and membership, whether we’re talking Israel or any other contemporary nation, that the answer is a radical devolution of authority and the demilitarization of all territories in the region;
That Israel must be an exclusively Jewish state and must be governed by orthodox Jewish standards and that is all that matters—its resemblance or lack thereof to other nations is unimportant and its participation in international covenants, norms or agreements is immaterial, that only the will of God for the Jewish people is important, and that among the things that God wills is that Jews should control the entirety of their former kingdoms, including the West Bank, and that all others should be driven forth or allowed no citizenship or rights within this territory;
That the God of Judaism does not will that there should be a nation of Israel and that no observant Jew should in fact obey Israeli regulations or law or recognize the authority of its government;
That Israel is a settler state like many others, and that the political imperative of the 21st Century should be to repair and reverse settler colonialism at a global scale, including Israel;
That Israel is a settler state of a unique kind and requires disproportionate attention because of it, or alternatively, is for unique reasons the only settler state that people opposed to settler colonialism can imagine having a tangible political effect upon and therefore should be subject to that critique;
That nation-states are created not by international agreement or coherent standards but are all the sui generis product of unique or particular processes of violence, accident, negotiation, and domination and that any nation which does exist should continue to exist by whatever means necessary and besides having a normative view of the existence of nations is laughably stupid anyway, they either exist or they don’t and you don’t get to have an opinion;
That any view of Israel as justified or unjustified is beside the point, that its value in any American discussion of international politics is its distinctive status as a geopolitical ally of great usefulness, so let’s just stop talking about it (variant form: it is what an important political constituency wants, so it’s what an important political constituency gets; when there are enough Igbo-Americans who want Biafra to exist and they vote and donate on that basis, well, we’ll talk);
That the protection of the security and rights of Jews worldwide is paramount but that this can never be achieved via building up the military power of a single nation, especially not in a way that intensifies anti-Semitism, and so Zionism is a terrible distraction from some other political project of great urgency;
You get the point. (I hope.)
That’s heterodoxy. Those are all actually existing positions in the world or have been at some point since the first discussions of Zionism as a political project within European Jewry over a century ago. They’re all positions that have some foothold in the global academy somewhere, and that’s leaving out some forms of academic anti-Semitism that might exist in some Islamic institutions or elsewhere. A genuine commitment to heterodoxy in my sense of “positive liberties” would seek to explore, represent, include and imagine all of these positions and to cultivate their existence in any discussion about Israel, without tendentiously foreclosing or misrepresenting some of them.
Yet this is a really hard charge to put in front of people, especially if it applies equally to everything we study and teach. First, there’s just a basic problem of bandwidth here. To do right by all those positions (and all others that might exist beyond them) takes time. It takes scholarly study. It takes patience. It takes either an exclusivity of focus that will misrepresent some aspect of the rest of the range of an argument or it takes a large comparative focus that will obscure the specificity of some of these positions (look at the ones above that either require a much more comparative understanding of nationalism and sovereignty across time and space, or a deeper understanding of Judaism and its theology, or an attentive history of the formation of the state of Israel, etc.)
Second, the suspension of personal judgment that this kind of heterodoxy demands is a legitimately hard sell. Someone like Bari Weiss hasn’t been able to sit on her hands and listen with interest, engagement and patience to many of these positions, or treat them as entitled to be present and heard simply because they’re conceivable. That’s because they’re more than just classroom propositions. Many of these arguments are real in the world: there are people whose actual actions and politics are shaped by these visions. If you’re a secular Israeli woman who doesn’t accept the authority of the Rabbinate and its privileging of Haredi Judaism, listening patiently to an argument about the nature of Israel as a nation that enshrines that authority and intensifies it isn’t some abstract argument in a playful academic setting, it’s your life. If you’re a Jew who believes deeply in the importance of Israel for the protection of your life and the lives of your children going forward, listening to someone argue that Israel is unnecessary or unjust isn’t abstract. If you’re a Palestinian whose family knows exactly where and when they were dispossessed in the Nakba or who is getting kicked out of an East Jerusalem apartment right now, you’re way past wanting to sit in a big conversation going down the list of valid arguments about your life, some of which legitimize your suffering, dismiss your humanity or call for you to be hurt even more intensely.
It’s why most of the people calling for viewpoint diversity are blowing smoke up everybody else’s asses: they only mean, “I want my viewpoint to be a necessary inclusion or an enshrined position wherever it is not; I could care less about the rest. I want my criticisms of you to be protected, but not your criticisms of me”. Or perhaps they mean, “we should be allowed to talk about anything, but not if some of you are actually planning to do it or are doing it already and I think those actions are scary, dangerous or oppressive.” Which is pretty much another position that very understandably drives people absolutely nuts—this proposition that reasonable people should be able to sit in a room reasonably talking about ideas and proposals that none of them intend to enact, firmly enshrined in a view from nowhere, but that if anybody in the room gets serious about some of those ideas, they’d argue for kicking them out the door. The “all ideas are on the table” crowd tends to switch over to the “that’s anathema” crowd when their own red lines get crossed, the way that Cary Nelson went from Mr. Free Speech to Mr. We Can’t Allow Salaita to Be Hired Here.
So does everybody. Everybody has red lines. The reason why we all flash over that way—I can’t think of a person who doesn’t have a line they draw where an idea in theory becomes unacceptable if it’s meant to be practiced—is that something in the conversation threatens our own existence or thriving if it’s meant seriously. Am I cool having a discussion about whether the university as it stands is necessary? Sure. Am I heterodox enough to welcome a discussion where someone’s taking an extreme version of the Hayden White position on the discipline of history and arguing that no one should be a historian? Certainly! Heck, I’ll play at being the Hayden White guy for that discussion, he’s got a point and someone should say it.
Will I embrace sitting around with great open-minded detachment in a conversation where one of the people is a governor who is actually planning to abolish universities, or one of the people is a college president telling me that the history faculty are going to be fired because history has no intellectual validity? I’m not going to sit there sipping my sherry and enjoying the bon mots at that point, no.
It’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt, but here’s the thing: people are getting hurt by words and ideas and their informing of actions every damn second of every damn day. Ideas are real; they do real things in the world, to people. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have ideas, but taking ideas seriously means taking the stakes of doxa, truths, seriously.
Which in turn means that free speech and a commitment to thinking all the ideas that can be thought does not mean, “You should say anything you want, any time, as you will, without fear of any consequences of any sort.” That’s not a definition of liberalism, it’s a definition of being a toddler who is free to poop his diapers and have temper tantrums. As a dogma, that’s suitable only for a person in solitary confinement. It’s not suitable for anything like a society, at any scale. Everybody understands that even in the most protected, nurturing, educational, exploratory, curiosity-driven environment, there are things that you shouldn’t say. You shouldn’t look at another student that you find ugly (or beautiful) and simply blurt that out in the middle of a classroom discussion. You shouldn’t tell the professor to his face in the middle of a lecture that he’s boring. You shouldn’t announce to everyone that you took a fabulous huge shit just before class started and you’re still feeling really good because of it. You shouldn’t announce that you didn’t do the reading because you got drunk on a Tuesday night and besides it’s a dumb class that you’re just taking because the economics department says you have to.
Why shouldn’t you say everything true about what you think and feel? Sometimes because it’s completely irrelevant and purposeless. Sometimes because that would hurt someone else, to no end. Sometimes because it would put you in the crosshairs of someone with power over you, perhaps for good reason. I don’t expect a professor who has convened a particular course for a purpose, along with students who share that purpose, ought to just smile blandly and approvingly at the student who declares forcefully that they were too drunk to care about a stupid class—any more than I expect an orchestra to tolerate an audience member who suddenly starts playing the kazoo because the kazoo-player thinks that’s a good sound to add to the concert.
That’s ultimately what unites the University of Austin folks: they believe themselves to be people over whom no one should have power of any kind. If they want to play the kazoo, well, that’s viewpoint diversity. They don’t believe that should be a universal dispensation under liberalism, plainly. Other people get edited, or peer reviewed, or have conditions put on the funding they receive to invite people to conferences. Other people have to satisfy colleagues and institutions in order to receive tenure, or have to make employers happy to stay employed. Other people should get, as Niall Ferguson put it in emails to students at Stanford about other students at Stanford, buried, intimidated and ground down. Other people don’t belong in the Atlantic or the New York Times.
I don’t believe in a world absent of power (well, and even if I did, it’s not happening imminently)—and so I think an adult vision of speech rights is that there are things which should not be said because of power over people, and because of power over you. In any context, or just some contexts. Nor do you have to say everything, all the time, that you might say, if for no other reason than to let other people say something too.
Have I become more mindful about saying some things that I might have said easily thirty years ago? Yes. Am I more nervous about the consequences to me and others of some things I might say? Yes. Is that bad? I don’t know. It’s pretty hard to sort between “what do I not say because I’ve learned something about other people or the world and the consequences of my saying it, and I regret my former ignorance?” and “What do I still want to say but I’m afraid because other people don’t want me to say it and will try to hurt me if I do?” Not to mention my increasing recognition over time that ideas have power and consequences and that’s why they matter in the first place.
Not only is it hard to sort all this out out, the things that might be said that fit strongly under “I want to say it, but I feel I am being kept from saying it” aren’t at all ideologically or politically coherent—the people who are trying to keep me from saying those things do not have the same instrumental purposes at all, do not have the same kinds of power over me at all, and thus the perceived stakes involved may be far more minor than either I or they imagine (or perhaps far more unexpectedly catastrophic).
Which means that even in the most viewpoint diverse, heterodox community of inquiry that ever could exist, not everything should be said, and not every conversation or discussion needs to give expression to all the thoughts in the room. Not every thought or view that is out there in the wild of human history or in the tangled forests of the mind belongs as an expressed thought in every domesticated or purposeful space of conversation and deliberation. So when you do bring something into those spaces, you ought to have to be sure that what you’re adding has value and purpose appropriate to the circumstance. Nobody gets a free pass, and asking for proof of value—and discretion—is not some horrifying act of illiberal tyranny.
Image credit: "The Myth of Sisyphus" by vintagedept is licensed under CC BY 2.0