In the Confiteor, Catholics acknowledge they sin “in my thoughts, in my words, in what I have done, in what I have failed to do.” One can wrong another in many ways.
That perspective seemed to be missing in the testimony of three prestigious university presidents – Harvard’s Claudine Gay, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth, and Penn’s already-defenestrated Elizabeth Magill – before a House committee about on-campus antisemitism. All three were excoriated for being unable to say whether employing antisemitic slogans – like “from the river to the sea” (the Palestinian saying about being free from Jews) – violated student codes. They repeatedly claimed that it depended on “context.”
They may have been lawyerly in their responses in order to evade liability or establish a precedent. But the heart of the question wasn’t legal, but ethical: Are antisemitic threats inconsistent with the values of your university?
As Congresswoman Elise Stefanik put it: antisemitic slogans do not “depend on context. . .and this is why you should resign.”
The presidents were parsing the difference between speech and behavior, setting themselves up as advocates of free speech, as long as it was peaceful and did not attack others.
Given their institutions’ histories of suppressing campus speech deemed “hateful” (and usually conservative), some critics were quick to brand the trio as hypocrites. Others claimed the presidents and their conservative interlocutors had traded places: the presidents were suddenly for robust speech, while the legislators argued “they believe in free speech. Except when it comes to Israel.”
A passel of commentators, channeling their inner Voltaire (“I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”) insisted “[t]he fight for truth must be fought in the push and pull of unfettered debate” and “Let [students] grow up and engage with even the most vile of ideas.” The latter view—David French’s—even got a patriotic twist: “It’s true liberty.”
All those choices have one thing in common: they are the offspring of the dictatorship of relativism, unsupported by a thick, substantive ethic (much less metaphysic).
Most university speech codes are the product of woke-ism. Superficially, this might look like a system built on morality, but push hard enough and the “morality” reveals itself as political ideology, because its goalposts tend to move. Yesterday’s perfectly acceptable position (e.g., that there are men and women and nothing else) is today’s heresy.
Same with the presidents’ “context-driven” solution: the essence of relativism is that everything is “context-driven.” There are no fixed moral points. X might be good here but bad there. “It depends.”
But what about the free-speech advocates? Most of them, too, are relativists. Their “free speech” is a proceduralist ethic, mostly agnostic about any intrinsic goods or evils about what is spoken. For them, “good” or “evil” consist in everybody abiding by a particular set of procedures.
No real goods (or evils) underline those procedures, only a “diversity” of “values” that a “democratic society” must “respect” or at least “tolerate.” Most of these free speech advocates are also in a perennial quest for truth but equally convinced that truth is an unreachable star. Challenged by certitude they ask, like Pilate: “What is truth?”
My objection to free speech absolutists is their ultimate conflation of the “good” with “free speech” itself. It is not “good” to advocate genocide as long as you don’t act on it. It is not “good” to shout “fire” in a theater when there’s no fire, even if nobody gets hurt.
What underlying moral principle measures these words and behaviors?
A more substantive ethic (like Catholicism, which once upon a time was called “the Judeo-Christian ethic”) has a set of principles to assess what is being said or done.
“Innocent people should not be deliberately killed” would be one principle in such a substantive ethic. By implication, it excludes advocacy of genocide in thought, word, or deed. Obviously, as we progress from thought to word to deed the moral gravity increases as what is proposed becomes more actual.
But Hitler’s genocide did not start in Auschwitz. It began in the housepainter’s mental ravings over Übermenschen and Untermenschen in Landsberg Prison and was exported in his verbal ravings at the Nuremberg rallies. Would free-speech absolutists (and some presidents) have us believe Hitler only crossed the line when he crossed the Polish border?
Free speech unanchored to a moral substructure leads to a dead end. . .and dead people. That said, in one sense I agree with its proponents: one should be able to say what one thinks, however “vile.” I say that because I want to know what kind of barbarian I am dealing with.
A person with at least a partially healthy conscience doesn’t need Harvard to “censor” him. His conscience should shame a tongue that defends terrorism “by any means.”
Speak freely – but be held to account for what you say. You’re free to promote driving Israel into the sea. But a truly intellectual and moral community would answer: “not on my campus.”
Is this wokeness by another name? No, precisely because “woke” is an ideology whose “truth” is ever-shifting, ever-adapting, ever “evolving.” The Judeo-Christian ethic stands on moral absolutes (e.g., advocating killing innocent people is intrinsically evil) that fix boundaries. I won’t let a relativistic ideology brand that ethic just another “viewpoint” because, implicit in that leveling is the relativist’s flight from truth qua truth, “transitioning” it into just another “opinion.”
In a post-testimony comment in the Harvard Crimson, university President Claudine Gay admitted: “words matter.” Yes, they do. “The tongue has the power of life and death.” (Proverbs 18:21)
