An interesting article from Roger Kimball, today, in the New Criterion.
Here’s the take-away:
Here’s Bagehot from Chapter 2 of Physics and Politics, “The Use of Conflict”:
History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.
“A little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness,” all of which, says Bagehot, prepares a nation for “destruction” at the first opportunity. Keep that in mind as you contemplate these words of Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia University. Explaining that he intends to confront President Ahmadinejad with some “sharp challenges” (e.g., why does he deny the Holocaust? Why has he publicly called for the destruction of Israel?), President Bollinger goes on to deliver this little aria about free speech and “the powers of dialogue and reason.”
I would like to add a few comments on the principles that underlie this event. Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas—to understand the world as it is and as it might be. To fulfill this mission we must respect and defend the rights of our schools, our deans and our faculty to create programming for academic purposes. Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most, or even all of us will find offensive and even odious. We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through the powers of dialogue and reason.I would also like to invoke a major theme in the development of freedom of speech as a central value in our society. It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas, or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible.
That such a forum could not take place on a university campus in Iran today sharpens the point of what we do here. To commit oneself to a life—and a civil society—prepared to examine critically all ideas arises from a deep faith in the myriad benefits of a long-term process of meeting bad beliefs with better beliefs and hateful words with wiser words. That faith in freedom has always been and remains today our nation’s most potent weapon against repressive regimes everywhere in the world. This is America at its best.
What can one say? That President Bollinger traduces the idea of “a community dedicated to learning and scholarship”? Yes. That he elides the notion of free speech and the more limited privilege of academic freedom? Yes again. That his incontinent demand that his university provide a forum for all ideas, no matter how toxic, erodes freedom by making it vulnerable to fanaticism? A third time Yes. Powerline’s Scott Johnson got it exactly right when, reflecting on this pathetic congeries of liberal cliches, he wrote that
Columbia and President Bollinger are a disgrace. They welcome to their campus a man who is a ringleader in the seizure of American hostages, a terrorist, the president of a terrorist regime, and the representative of a regime responsible at present for the deaths of American soldiers on the field of battle. Columbia’s prattle about free speech may be a tale told by an idiot, but it signifies something. And President Bollinger is a fool who is not excused from the dishonor he brings to his institution and his fellow citizens by the fact that he doesn’t know what he is doing.
Amen. And it is worth stepping back to ask ourselves why Scott is right and President Bollinger is wrong. Here are some of the reasons: Universities are institutions dedicated to the pursuit and transmission of learning and the furtherance of civilization. They are not circuses for the exhibition of politically repugnant grandstanding. Free inquiry is not a license for moral irresponsibility. At a university, as at every other human institution, freedom can thrive only when it is limited by allegiance to certain positive values–the value of historical truth, for example, or the moral truth that human dignity is worth preserving.
Its far longer than this, and I ask you go and RTWT. I’ll be making reference to this article going forward, as the basis of future articles,on more than just this.
Tags: iran, War on American culture
