Author: Ophelia Benson

Jeremy Waldron in the LRB:

A more troubling reading, however, is that Nazi speech is worth protecting even if a consequence of that protection is that someone gets hurt or killed. ‘I will defend your right to say it, even if your saying it makes violence more likely against the people attacked in your pamphlets.’ Is that what is meant? Defenders of free speech squirm on this point…they assure us dogmatically that there is no clear evidence of any causal connection between, say, racist posters and incidents of racial violence…

Yeah. The assurance often seems very dogmatic to me – it just somehow has to be true that there is no causal connection between racist speech and racial violence, and hence no clear evidence of same either. It has to be true because defenders of free speech want it to be true because – um – otherwise they find themselves defending free speech that could get people killed and they’d rather not but they’d also rather not think in detail, rather than in dogmatic generalities, about free speech? That’s what I often suspect, anyway.

…in other contexts, American civil liberties scholars have no difficulty at all in seeing a connection between speech and the possibility of violence. They point to it all the time as a way of justifying restrictions on citizens’ interventions at political gatherings. If Donald Rumsfeld comes to give a speech and someone in the audience shouts out that he is a war criminal, the heckler is quickly and forcibly removed. When I came to America, I was amazed that nobody thought this was a violation of the First Amendment…So there is an odd combination of tolerance for the most hateful speech imaginable, on the one hand, and obsequious deference, on the other, to the choreography which our rulers judge essential for their occasional public appearances. The Nazis can disrupt the streets of Skokie, but those who disrupt Rumsfeld’s message will be carried away with the hands of secret service agents clamped over their mouths. I have given up trying to make sense of any of this.

I still sometimes try, but I get lost quickly, like those people who set out to get a PhD in political science and accidentally end up in the English department.

And there’s this interesting article by Scott McLemee which is a good read in itself and also the cause that – there is much silliness among the commenters. Why does a piece by an omnivorous reader like Scott attract so many people who can’t read at all? People who read the label on a can of pineapple juice and think it contains Crisco? Dunno, but the result is pretty funny. Somebody started off by reading Scott’s “There are plenty of conservative publicists in America now. There are not many conservative thinkers, proper, worthy of the name” and, first, paraphrasing that as “America has lots of conservative pundits. But thinkers? Not so much,” which is a pretty bad job of paraphrasing (also pointless: why not just paste in the actual words?), and leads to an even worse retort: “You should do some reading then.” But then even better, people start giving examples of conservative thinkers [not publicists, remember – the whole point is thinkers as opposed to publicists] in America now. Like these:

“Frederick Hayak. Ayn Rand. Milton Friedman (or any of his fellow Nobel/economics winners). George Will. Pope John II.” “I would also add the late Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver and Peter Viereck.”

See? They’re nearly all at least one of 1. dead 2. not in America 3. publicists but not thinkers. I find that sidesplittingly funny, somehow. Hey – what about Confucius! He was pretty conservative, right? Genghis Khan? Lycurgus?

One remark in this CHE piece on learning to hate literature in order to get a PhD in it particularly caught my attention. It’s so expectable and yet so odd.

In a course I taught last spring, after three months of tracing the development of literary theory from humanism to structuralism to poststructuralism to the dilemmas of the present, I finally asked my students the question: “So, why do you want to study literature, knowing what you now know?” I wondered if studying a century of cynicism had altered their motives in the slightest. They were all considering graduate school, but their answers had little to do with what I knew they would need to write in their application essays…It surprised me that none of my students mentioned a commitment to social justice or to some specific political ideology as a motive. Nearly all of them would have skewed to the left on most of the usual subjects. When I asked about that, one said, “If I wanted to be a politician, I’d major in political science. If I wanted to be a social worker, I’d major in sociology.”

Well exactly. Exactly. How terribly odd it is that Thomas H Benton (presumably not that Thomas H Benton, nor that one either) is surprised that none of his students mentioned a commitment to social justice or to some specific political ideology as a motive for studying literature. Why would they? Why on earth would they? What is the connection? Why, on earth, would someone who is fired up with a commitment to social justice or to a political ideology sit down with a beer and a dish of cashews to ponder what kind of advanced degree to get, and come up with – literature? Literature? Why that? Why not opera, or interior design, or mincing and prancing? Those make just as much sense. That is what I always wonder about these bizarro world people who orate about their concern with social justice instead of actually saying anything about literature despite the inconvenient fact that they are, in truth, teachers of literature. Did they take a wrong turn in the corridor and simply keep going until they had the wrong PhD and it was too late? Why don’t they have exactly the same limpid thought the student offered Benton? If they want to do politics, why don’t they get their degrees in political science instead of literature? Why are they so…lost?

So Katha Pollitt talks a little more about that imbecilic review of her book. Perhaps I’m not the only one who thought it was jaw-droppingly stupid.

Emily Amick: There’s a discussion raging on the blogosphere right now about Wonkette’s ‘post-feminist’ review of your book in the New York Times.

Ah. I rushed over to Google blogsearch to find out about that, and the comments seemed to be running heavily in the ‘jaw-droppingly stupid’ direction. Good. But – what did the Times ever run a review like that for? What is its point? What next? Assigning a stand-up comic to review Amartya Sen’s next book? Assigning Tom Cruise to review a book by John Searle? What is their point? That US public discourse isn’t stupid enough yet, they have to put their shoulders to the wheel and make it even stupider?

Katha Pollitt: You certainly wouldn’t know from the review that the book is not, actually, one long grim fulmination against high-fashion shoes and the young women who wear them. It’s fine that she hated the book (well, not really!), but I wish she had accurately conveyed its contents.

Oh but that wouldn’t do, because that would have been non-stupid, so would have defeated the whole (deeply opaque) purpose.

Katha Pollitt: There are pieces about Republicans, Democrats, Greens, fundamentalists ( of all stripes), creationism in Kansas, sexism in the media…and daycare workers sentenced to long prison terms for sex abuse that almost certainly did not occur. There are pieces about Muslim women’s rights – a topic Wonkette says I’m “fixated” on, which is an odd choice of word, don’t you think? Maybe she’ll tell us someday exactly how much concern is the right amount to have.

Yes, I do think. I very much think, and I’m not the only one. I was telling JS about Cox’s review yesterday via Messenger and he interjected – ‘Fixated?’ Just so: fixated: this is what we have come to. We’ll have to be writing another book about this kind of thing. The grindstone is whirling, the knives are stacked up ready for sharpening.

E.A.: Yet many young women believe the feminist movement doesn’t allow them to wear stilettos and lipstick. So where is the line between “stridency and submission?” K.P.: We’re still on Wonkette, I see. Have you ever heard that word “strident” applied to a man? I can’t believe the conversation is stuck on this idiotic plot point: Feminists with loud voices and hairy legs versus girls who just want to have fun.

Exactly. ‘Strident’ is of course a word largely reserved for feminists, and boring feminists versus fun sexpots is an idiotic plot point. Wonkette should sit on the naughty stool for a very long time.