Author: Ophelia Benson

There is a lot of discussion of the Taboo mentality going on right now – which is good, in the sense that the dangers of the taboo mentality are being pointed out, but it’s bad, in the sense that there is also a lot of Taboo mentality around right now. Is it worth it to have some people thinking badly to give an occasion for other people to explain what’s wrong with bad thinking? Wouldn’t it be better and simpler just to have everyone thinking clearly to begin with? Yes, probably, but since that’s not going to happen, it’s a good thing there are people around to do some nudging.

Salman Rushdie at Open Democracy, for example.

At Cambridge University I was taught a laudable method of argument: you never personalise, but you have absolutely no respect for people’s opinions. You are never rude to the person, but you can be savagely rude about what the person thinks. That seems to me a crucial distinction: people must be protected from discrimination by virtue of their race, but you cannot ring-fence their ideas. The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

There’s a lot of disagreement over that thought, but it seems right to me. Declaring a set of ideas immune from criticism or satire does seem like the one thing you don’t want to do with a set of ideas. You could say that that’s what the word ‘God’ is for – a kind of imaginary rubber stamp or strongbox or chastity belt serving to render a particular set of ideas undiscussable, unchangeable, non-negotiable. Given what human ideas can be and what they can do, that seems like a very risky approach.

Steven Pinker in The New Republic is talking about the same general idea, though in a different instantiation.

To what degree these and other differences originate in biology must be determined by research, not fatwa. History tells us that how much we want to believe a proposition is not a reliable guide as to whether it is true…

And not only history. An easy thought-experiment can show us the same thing. Let’s see…I want it to be true that there is a steaming-hot pizza with feta, pesto and artichokes on the table. But there isn’t, and it isn’t. I guess my wanting isn’t all that powerful, then.

What are we to make of the breakdown of standards of intellectual discourse in this affair–the statistical innumeracy, the confusion of fairness with sameness, the refusal to glance at the scientific literature? It is not a disease of tenured radicals; comparable lapses can be found among the political right (just look at its treatment of evolution). Instead, we may be seeing the operation of a fascinating bit of human psychology. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has argued that the mentality of taboo–the belief that certain ideas are so dangerous that it is sinful even to think them–is not a quirk of Polynesian culture or religious superstition but is ingrained into our moral sense.

As a matter of fact, it was reading Pinker on Tetlock and others on taboo that inspired my colleague to create the ‘Taboo’ game. Of course, some ideas are ‘so dangerous’ – the ideas that swirl around ethnic cleansing, genocide, purity, eugenics, generally cleaning up humanity by thinning it out radically, are an obvious example. But as Pinker puts it –

Unfortunately, the psychology of taboo is incompatible with the ideal of scholarship, which is that any idea is worth thinking about, if only to determine whether it is wrong…The tragedy is that this mentality of taboo needlessly puts a laudable cause on a collision course with the findings of science and the spirit of free inquiry.

Yes. Books published by Taboo University Press are not the ones that promise a searching look at which ideas are wrong for what reasons. I’ll order mine from Free Inquiry Press, thanks.

Norman Levitt has some very pointed things to say about Harvard.

Harvard University, the oldest in the USA and the wealthiest in the world, thinks very well of itself…It is an open secret that [Summers] was handed the helm at Harvard out of a growing sense that the place had grown stale, complacent, and narcissistic. Too many Harvard professors had settled into the habit of assuming that any old doctrine, opinion, or casual observation they chanced to utter was, ipso facto, profound and epochal merely because it issued from the great faux-Georgian citadel on the Charles. In truth, the place had grown somewhat dowdy, intellectually speaking, and, even worse, had proved itself susceptible to the vagaries of academic fashion…In some areas, Harvard had not only tolerated trendy mediocrity, but actively embraced it. Summers’ task, then, was to shake things up and to restore a relentlessly meritocratic ethic to the process of hiring and rewarding faculty where mere piety and sentimentality had previously been permitted to call the shots.

It’s funny how exactly like the New York Times that description sounds – at least to me. Thinks very well of itself; stale, complacent, and narcissistic; profound merely because it is itself; intellectually dowdy; medicrity; piety. The Times has a dreadful habit of announcing that it’s the best newspaper in the world – which apart from anything else simply can’t be true, can it? Surely in the entire world there are better newspapers than the Times – aren’t there? If not I think I’ll have to join the French Foreign Legion.

But that’s a digression – except it’s not entirely: because the phenomenon of the complacently mediocre top of the heap is interesting, and it’s part of what Levitt is talking about. His account sounds plausible to me because I’ve seen the same sort of smugness in other institutions with excessively solid reputations. Or in people with the same things. Remember the Cornel West fuss?

Summers lost no time in taking up the challenge. Early in his regime, he notoriously confronted Black Studies eminence Cornel West, essentially accusing him of goofing off with flashy and trivial projects (like voice-overs on hip-hop CDs) rather than turning out scholarly work of real substance. The touchy West promptly picked up his marbles and headed for Princeton, where a certain soft-heartedness still reigns. Many Harvard students, bred on the platitudes of ‘diversity’ and greatly susceptible to West’s showmanship, were outraged…But though some still blame Summers for ‘losing’ West, the prevailing opinion – most often stated anonymously, of course – is that Summers did the university a favour by cleverly easing out a dubious academic ‘superstar.’

Showmanship. Just so. That’s a serious occupational hazard for academics, you know. It comes of spending much of one’s waking time telling callow ignorant young people what’s what. (We have a joke about it in the Dictionary. ‘Socratic deformation or elenchusitis.’) Men are especially prone to it. Yes they are; don’t argue. Come on, you know they are. It’s the sex thing. They know their students are going to get crushes on them – how can they help strutting a little? Whereas women mostly know their students are not going to get crushes on them, and are mostly not all that flattered if they do. (Why? Because young men are repellent, while young women are attractive. Next question.) Then add some flashy ‘radical’ politics and ‘Indian’ credentials (however bogus), and you’ve got yourself a first-class Che-wannabe. Tweak the ingredients and you’ve got Cornel West. Tweak again and you’ve got Judith Butler (I said men are especially prone, not exclusively). Particularly at a time when there are a lot of people around inexplicably willing to call some academics ‘superstars’ – the temptation is clearly almost overpowering. But how nice it would be if the dears would resist. They kind of discredit the whole enterprise when they preen themselves in public. They feed into the suspicion of people like Fox News anchors that universities are nothing but theatrical settings for people who like to dress up as wevowutionawies and frighten the bourgeoisie.

I was actually going to talk about the substance of Levitt’s article but I got sidetracked by the style question. But that’s just it: in a lot of cases I think the style is the substance. Looking at and reading Ward Churchill, I find myself convinced that he doesn’t really mean any of it, that he just says the most ‘radical’ thing he can manage to think of, for the sake of saying it. To show off, basically. I knew people like that when I was at university – boy, did I. They were so much more into posing than they were into really thinking about what they were talking about. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, saith the preacher. Well he was a showoff too.

This Ward Churchill guy is quite funny. I shouldn’t say that, I suppose, but he is. He’s so…obvious. The hair, the shades, the jaw, the flocks of doting students. You can tell he thinks he’s Nick Nolte crossed with Russell Means with just a dash of Springsteen. Yeah dude you’re just like totally cool man.

Ward L. Churchill has been angry for years, shaking a clenched fist at American power from the streets of Denver and the lecterns of academia.

Where it’s both safe and profitable to do so, one can’t help noting.

Born near Peoria, Ill., Churchill has a master’s degree in communications and is a U.S. Army veteran.

He’s also a full professor. Usually people need a PhD to get to be full professors. The Nolte schtick seems to have paid off. But not everyone buys it.

But others see him differently, including some Native Americans angry over his claims to be one of them. At the top of his resume, Churchill lists his enrollment in the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. Yet the chief of the Oklahoma tribe, George Wickliffe, said they “had no association with Churchill in any capacity whatsoever.” Churchill says he is three-sixteenths Cherokee. Suzan Shown Harjo — president of the Morning Star Institute, a Native American rights group in Washington, D.C. — has Census data showing Churchill as born to parents listed as white. She said he had not shown up on the rolls of the tribes he said he belonged to. “This is not a Native person. He goes around college campuses, saying he was at the occupation of Alcatraz, Wounded Knee and at the Bureau of Indian Affairs takeover in 1972. But no one can remember him being there,” she said. “I was at the BIA takeover as a reporter, and I never saw him.”

Add a dash of Kevin Costner to the mix. You can see why I find him funny. It’s the Walter Mitty stuff, the Billy Liar routine, the Zelig business. He was everywhere, man – Alcatraz, Wounded Knee – Little Big Horn, the Trail of Tears, in the audience when Brando refused the Oscar, aboard the Titanic, at Wat Tyler’s side…

David Bradley, a well-known Indian artist in Santa Fe, earned Churchill’s wrath by championing federal legislation that required those selling their work as Indian art to be able to prove their tribal ties. “In the 1980s, money was flying like confetti around here. You had dozens of people pretending they were Indian and selling their art,” Bradley said. “We had everything stolen from us for 500 years, and I wasn’t going to let them take our art as well.” Churchill, who is also a painter, took issue with the effort. “He wrote this slanderous attack about me. He tried to impugn my motives,” Bradley said. “He ought to be fired. Shame on CU [University of Colorado] for giving this con man a job.” Bradley believes Churchill opposed the law because it affected his ability to sell his paintings. Churchill attacked the 1990 Indian Arts and Crafts legislation, saying it gave rise to “witch hunts” among tribes looking for phony Indians and put undue importance on racial purity.

Oh yeah? Undue importance? Well what are you doing teaching ‘ethnic studies’ then?

The American Indian Movement, based in Minnesota, has called for his dismissal from the university, saying he “fraudulently represented himself as an Indian” to build his career.

Hey, I’m three sixteenths Cherokee, which is good enough, because racial purity is not important, so please can I be a professor of ethnic studies at this nice university, with my MA in communications and all?

To build his career? Oh, surely not!

Timothy Burke has an excellent post here on Churchill.

In that context, it becomes awfully hard to defend the comfortably ensconsed position of someone like Churchill within academic discourse, and equally hard to explain an invitation to him to speak anywhere. There’s nothing in his work to suggest a thoughtful regard for evidence, an appreciation of complexity, a taste for dialogue with unlike minds, a proportionality, a meaningful working out of his own contradictions, a civil ability to engage in dialogue with his colleagues and peers in his own fields of specialization. He stands for the reduction of scholarship to nothing more than mouth-frothing polemic. We cannot hold ourselves up as places which have thoroughly and systematically created institutional structures that differentiate careful or or thoughtful scholarship from polemical hackery and then at the same time, have those same structures turn around and continually confirm the legitimacy of someone like Churchill.

And Margaret Soltan has another – in fact she has a whole series. It appears that the University of Colorado has been covering itself with non-glory for some time.

UD doesn’t want to kick CU while it’s down, but all you need to do is type University of Colorado in that Search thing up there to find in her blog endless accounts of sports and alcohol and academic fuckupery on campus…The spokesperson would then announce a series of real changes that will now take place. Those changes could involve firing the entire board of regents, shutting down fraternities, shutting down the sports programs, and pressuring some of the hundreds of bars adjacent to the campus to leave. They could, more immediately, involve shutting down the ethnic studies program, which, this spokesperson will admit, is a disgracefully shoddy academic unit. “We have been asleep at the wheel,” this person will conclude; “and Ward Churchill was the crash that ensued. I assure you that we at this university are now fully awake. This proud institution, which we love, will shake itself off and find its way home again.”

Very interesting.