CHAPTER 175

There’s another Cellar debate. It’s about free speech on college campuses. The moderator is Kmele Foster. The panellists are Jonathan Haidt, Suzanne Nossel, Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Sullivan. Andrew makes an opening speech, which Noam records and puts on the Cellar’s YouTube page,

Andrew: I want to try and draw back a little bit and look at this from the perspective of where I come from academically, which is in political thought. And I think that part of the crisis that we are dealing with is a conflict between two visions of the world. And the vision of the world that is in the ascendant is one that has always been the norm in human society throughout history. And that is that fundamentally you are a member of a group. And that groups compete for power. And that in fact everything in our society is really a function of these power structures. And these power structures used to be defined in classic Marxism as classes. Economic classes. Currently they are more often defined in terms of identity, things you can’t help that you are, or things that you’re proud of that you just happen to be. Your race. Your gender. Your sexual orientation. Your gender identity. And the view is, and you can feel it not just on campus but everywhere, that our society is basically a function of the oppression of some groups by other groups, and that therefore the most important thing to figure out is who is oppressing whom, and the most important thing to do is to resist the powerful or the more powerful and to defend and protect those with less power. And the power is a kind of invisible thing, because it’s not purely class, although class is mixed up with it. It is about how one feels about oneself and how one feels about other people. And so the most powerful group, and you can hear this in the rhetoric every day, are white, straight, cisgendered men. They are the ultimate oppressive force, and you can go down, and there’s a hierarchy, and we could have all sorts of complicated ideas about who’s where in the hierarchy, but essentially that’s what our society is, it’s a constant fight between these groups of people. And in fact because as a society we’re becoming more and more diverse, the intensity of that fight is growing. We are and will be the first white majority country to become a non-white majority country in the history of humankind. These are very powerful psychic effects. And in those circumstances, and especially with incredibly divisive and polarising political parties, we’re beginning to see our entire society and culture governed by which group you’re in, and your ability to represent that group, or to betray that group. And the notion that these groups have fixed interests and certain ways of thinking that distinguish them from one another. This essentially draws its roots in Marx, but also in the critical theory schools which are now taught as simply the truth in most universities. So we’re concerned if there are too many white people on a panel. We’re concerned if there are too many men. We’re concerned if there are too many straight people. And speech affects power. So because this is so amorphous, if you say something that makes an oppressed group feel more oppressed you’re not just speaking, you’re actually harming those people. Speech is not simply a way in which you are discussing things. It has immediate impact. It has harm. It commits harm against groups. It is a power play, and there is only power in this view of the world. All rhetoric is simply about defending your power or about seizing power for yourself. We are a tribal species. This comes very naturally to us. The history of humankind is really in many ways a story of these struggles between these groups. But there was an experiment in human history, beginning sometime in the seventeenth century, of which this country is the ultimate product, which says that no, no, no, no, no, this is not what we are. We are actually individuals. We have our own selves and we construct our societies to defend ourselves as individuals not as groups. That we therefore recognise, for example, freedom of religion as a fundamental right, because no group can tell you what to believe about the universe. We represent and defend private property, because private property is a way in which the individual is protected from the group and the mob. And we believe that when we’re trying to figure out the truth in a society, the way we do that is argument, we use reason. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re white, black, pink, purple. Whether you’re gay, straight, trans, bi, queer, asexual, you know, the rest of the alphabet. What matters is simply the cogency of your arguments. That’s all. Have you made a good argument? Have you persuaded someone or have you not? And power is really less important than truth. And when you become a citizen of this republic you’re as equal as anybody else, and your opinion is worth something regardless of whether you’re a man or a woman, or black or white. In fact, those things are kind of left behind when we become simply citizens. I became a citizen recently of this country, and I wasn’t …

The audience claps.

Andrew: Thank you. It took a long time but I got there in the end. And I didn’t become a gay citizen. I didn’t become a white citizen. I didn’t become a Catholic citizen. I didn’t become an English-American. I just became a citizen. And my voice has no more power and no more validity than the strength and cogency of my arguments. Now, those two ideas are in direct conflict, and the forces of the group over the individual are immensely powerful right now as society goes through enormous demographic change. And what matters, it seems to me, is that in that process individuals both in the minority and oppressed groups, or in the oppressor groups, are allowed their own conscience, allowed their own voice, and are treated no better and no worse than anyone else. And that’s the conflict. Are you to be treated as simply the member of a group? Is your activity on a campus or in the wider world really a function of power? Or are you an individual capable of making up your own mind, sometimes bucking your own group, saying what you think, and having that being taken seriously on its own terms without being called to account for being a gay person or a straight person or a white person or a black person or all the other characteristics that accumulate onto us. That’s what’s at stake here. The silencing of individuals. The intimidation of individuals by those groups. The loss of imagination and understanding of our society as really one of equals and individuals rather than groups. And power. That’s really what’s at stake. And that’s why this is not just a crisis for the campus. It is a crisis for the general culture. It’s a crisis whereby you can find people on the Right and the Left slowly being purged from positions of influence or from positions or platforms that they otherwise might have, because they’re violating the group norm, because they’re saying something the group doesn’t like, or because they’re acting as if they have a right to say something when in fact because they are white and male, or because they are black and female, or whatever, they don’t have a right to say what they think in that particular circumstance. Those two visions are at war right now. You can see it everywhere. You can feel it. You can feel the air and the oxygen in most of journalism and culture becoming … having a little less oxygen. People being more likely to be called racist, sexist, homophobic, bigoted, blah, blah, blah, blah. And in fact, that being the main argument that people use in rebutting other people’s arguments. And that is what I think we need to resist, and that is what I think we’re in danger of completely surrendering to.