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Thread: Scholars blast profs for telling students speech is "violence"

  1. #1

    Scholars blast profs for telling students speech is "violence"

    Scholars blast profs for telling students speech is 'violence'
    Toni Airaksinen
    New York Campus Correspondent
    @Toni_Airaksinen
    on Jul 21, 2017 at 3:51 PM EDT


    Two leading free-speech advocates are warning that teaching college students to view speech as “violence” only encourages them to counter opposing opinions with actual violence.

    “Of all the ideas percolating on college campuses these days, the most dangerous one might be that speech is sometimes violence,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue in an article for The Atlantic titled “Why it’s a bad idea to tell students words are violence.”


    "It tells them that words, ideas, and speakers can literally kill them." Tweet This

    Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and Haidt, a professor at New York University, expressed their concerns in direct response to a controversial New York Times op-ed by Northeastern University researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett, who argued that speech can be violence because of the impact words can have on a person’s nervous system.

    [RELATED: UMich paper defends silencing speakers who ‘outrage’ students]

    “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence,” Feldman Barrett suggested. “That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school.”

    While Lukianoff and Haidt concede that words can indeed cause stress, and even that “prolonged stress can cause physical harm,” they dispute Feldman Barrett’s conclusion that words can therefore be a form of violence, pointing out that “giving one’s students a lot of homework” could likewise cause “prolonged stress,” but would hardly amount to an act of violence.

    [RELATED: Angry mob attacks liberal prof for defending Charles Murray]

    Further, the two scholars suggest that telling students speech can be violence could lead them to anticipate violence everywhere they look.

    “If students are repeatedly told that numerical disparities are proof of systemic discrimination, and a clumsy or insensitive question is an act of aggression (a “microaggression”), and words are sometimes acts of violence that will shorten your life, then it begins to make sense that they would worry about their safety, chronically, even within some of America’s most welcoming and protective institutions,” Lukianoff and Haidt assert, pointing to already-growing concerns about student mental health [emphasis in original].

    “It tells the members of a generation already beset by anxiety and depression that the world is a far more violent and threatening place than it really is,” the two remark. “It tells them that words, ideas, and speakers can literally kill them.”

    [RELATED: Antifa group openly promotes violence at Clemson]

    Meanwhile, Haidt and Lukianoff note that colleges have already seen the consequences of promoting such a notion, pointing to recent events at the University of California, Berkeley, where students responded to speech they deemed offensive or objectionable with force.

    Indeed, after masked protesters sparred with people on campus the day of Yiannopoulos’ talk, the riot was subsequently defended by students and alumni in a series of op-eds called “Violence as self-defense,” which was published in the school newspaper, including features such as “Check your privilege when speaking of protests” and “Violence helped ensure the safety of students.”

    “The conflation of words with violence is not a new or progressive idea invented on college campuses in the last two years,” Lukianoff and Haidt remark ruefully. “It is an ancient and regressive idea. Americans should all be troubled that it is becoming popular again—especially on college campuses, where it least belongs.”

    Campus Reform reached out to Feldman Barrett for comment, but did not receive a response in time for publication.

    http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=9472
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    "Revolutions eat their children." This observation, by a journalist during the French Revolution, was only partly true. In reality, revolutions eat their parents. In particular, history’s left-wing revolutions eat the left-wing intellectuals who made them happen. By “left-wing” here I mean revolutions that explicitly aim to use government power to reshuffle society. To remake society so it matches whatever version of “justice” strikes its promoters as attractive.

    Of course, in such reformist revolutions the eggheads are just an appetizer. History's reformist revolutions move straight on to the main course: the marginalized and minorities who were often the revolution's most passionate supporters to begin with.

    The left-wing revolutions of the twentieth century have all followed this pattern: midwifed by utopian intellectuals, power is quickly seized by political entrepreneurs who play to the basest instincts of the common people. Even in the most “civilized” places, such as “anything goes” Weimar Germany or 1950s “playground of the stars” Cuba, these newly enthroned are happy to see those eggheads and their “perverted” friends interred, tortured, hung from the nearest lamp post.

    The litany is depressing. Especially for any tenured radical drawing taxpayer money to cheer on the violence. Mao famously boasted of “burying 46,000 scholars alive” meaning he shipped them wholesale to concentration camps so they would shut up and die. Pol Pot’s radical communist movement famously executed intellectuals in the thousands, extending to anybody who wore glasses. Even the supposedly “cool” regimes like Fidel Castro set up concentration camps for homosexuals, while the Soviet Union illegalized homosexuality for over fifty years, outdoing by a mile that light-weight hater Putin.

    Most ironically, given his campus stardom, radical hero Che Guevara gleefully and personally executed homosexuals, whom he detested, while helping set up Fidel's network of camps across the county to torture gays and effeminate men into renouncing their allegedly wicked perversions that were supposedly the product of morally corrosive capitalism.

    Why do reformist revolutions enjoy executing both left-wing intellectuals and the very “vulnerable groups” so near to the leftist heart? Because power has its own logic. Because any government based on violence has to constantly watch its back. And that means it has to appeal to the basest instincts of the masses. If the masses hate gays, or Jews, or the eggheads, then the government will do what it's told, stuffing the Gulags with gays, Jews, and eggheads. What the basest people hate, omnipotent government hates.

    Why are intellectuals so blind to this horrible pattern? Presumably, they hope this time is different and that the campus radicals and their pet politicians will hold on this time. If history is a guide, they will not. Instead, their revolution will get snatched from them by political entrepreneurs and turned into their worst nightmare: a revolution that is anti-intellectual, anti-gay, racist, and anti-Semitic. No matter how pure the birth of the revolution, history suggests this is what it will come to.

    This gives no pleasure to point out. None of us want radical leftists hanging from lampposts, or executed in Che's office for his entertainment. What we do wish is that violence-promoting reformers would have a bit more respect for the fire they play with. For them to study a bit more history. To understand why it is, always and everywhere, so dangerous to ride the tiger of unlimited government.

    The left thinks it can control the tiger of the masses unleashed. It cannot, and indeed it will be the first to hang.
    https://mises.org/library/revolutions-eat-their-parents



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