I’ve run into a bit of a conundrum today, as I struggle to catch up on my reading that piled up while we were away on a vacation. First, Andrew Sullivan posted a continuation of the controversy swirling about some college campuses these days. Here’s a bit of it:
Check out this recent staff editorial at the Wellesley News. It draws an explicit distinction between “free speech” and what it calls “hate speech.” The former is fine, the latter impermissible. How does the editorial define “hate speech”? “Racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia or any other type of discriminatory speech.” Oppose affirmative action? Free speech denied. Challenge the subjugation of women in Islam? Ditto. Support a traditionalist view of marriage? Silence the bigot! Wellesley’s student journalists argue, moreover, that they are not being intolerant. They insist they are in fact in favor of free speech and quite forgiving of contrary views. Behold the compassion: “Mistakes will happen and controversial statements will be said … It is vital that we encourage people to correct and learn from their mistakes rather than berate them for a lack of education they could not control.” But there are, of course, limits. If you persist in your error, and are not successfully re-educated, “then hostility may be warranted.” That includes anyone who supports “racist politicians or pay[s] for speakers that prop up speech that will lead to the harm of others.” The latter category is so vast and vague it would essentially ban the speech of anyone who supported the campaign of our current president, i.e., 46 percent of the country.
The students’ polemic is a fine example of shallow analysis, hardly shielding the power-hungry grasping motivating it; perhaps I’ll take it apart in more detail at a later date. But then I received a petition from change.org:
In its public statement of core purpose, The New York Times commits itself to telling “the complete, unvarnished truth as best we can learn it.” Now, scientists and concerned citizens across the country urge The New York Times to uphold its commitment to the truth and rescind its job offer to the climate denier Bret Stephens.
Science says that climate change is happening, human activity is causing it, and its adverse impacts will only increase unless we act to curb the emissions of fossil fuels. Over 97% of peer-reviewed climate-science studies have reaffirmed this truth. Climate change threatens our agricultural system, our water supply, our coastal cities, our public health, and our national security. It threatens the lives of the current generation of young children. The New York Times itself has acknowledged that climate change is “the most important story in the world.”
Yet Bret Stephens writes about climate change with utter contempt, calling climate science a “religion without God […] presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge.” He slanders the integrity of climate scientists, claiming that they practice the “hyping of flimsy studies—melting Himalayan glaciers; vanishing polar ice—to press the political point.” And he falsifies the significance of scientific data to claim that the climate crisis is merely “hysteria generated by an imperceptible temperature rise of 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880.” As the NASA Earth Observatory explains: “A one-degree global change is significant because it takes a vast amount of heat to warm all the oceans, atmosphere, and land by that much. In the past, a one- to two-degree drop was all it took to plunge the Earth into the Little Ice Age. A five-degree drop was enough to bury a large part of North America under a towering mass of ice 20,000 years ago.” Whether or not insults and slander have a place on the Opinion Page of The New York Times, surely his falsification of scientific facts puts Mr. Stephens in direct conflict with the Times’ public commitment to uphold the truth.
And something about the two pieces – not so much Andrew himself, but the anonymous student quoted – and the petition struck me as related. I believe it’s the determination of each writer (singular or plural) to deny someone else a voice, and that the group they implicitly represent has a singular and unique claim on the truth. Neither is a pleasant truth to embody, as, taken together, they antagonize those who are not part of the group. In this respect, the Wellesley group is in more desperate straits as their claim is patronizing, arbitrary, and not consistent with serious, scholarly investigation. It stinks of “wisdom” handed down from on high, criticism not to be met with reason, but with the sword.
And that never ends well.
The petition makes me uncomfortable more because it wishes to shut down the voice of a critic before he ever gets started. While this does not meet the definition of censorship, since government is not involved, it is unfair to a fellow citizen.
It is my consistent belief that every citizen should have the opportunity to make a fool of himself in public. If Mr. Stephens wishes to do so in The New York Times, then, at the discretion of the Editor, he should be permitted to do so – and he should be held to the standards of The New York Times as stated:
… “the complete, unvarnished truth as best we can learn it.”
If, as the petitioner writes, Mr. Stephens misrepresents the facts, then I would hope the editorial staff would inform him of his errors, and if he persists, can his ass.
And then maybe tatoo “LIAR!” on his forehead.
But to shut him down before he can go there? This smacks of personal vendetta. This smacks of antagonism. And that will not facilitate whatever collective actions we may need to undertake in the future for our very survival.
As much as I’m sympathetic to the climate scientists and their concerns, this was not a petition I could sign.
