E-Pluribus | June 24, 2024
Atlas Censored; exposing antisemitism without violating the Constitution; and putting classical education under the microscope.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Robert Tracinski: Censorship: Local, Express, and Round Trip
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote George Santayana. But let’s face it—even with a clear-eyed view of history, each generation often fights the same battles as its predecessors. And so it is with censorship and “cancel culture.” At his Symposium site, Robert Tracinski reaches back half a century for Ayn Rand’s take on the relationship between public and private censorship.
“Censorship: Local and Express” [by Ayn Rand] was originally delivered as a talk at Boston’s Ford Hall Forum in 1973 and eventually included in a posthumous collection of her essays, Philosophy: Who Needs It.
[. . .]
Rand begins her essay with the complaint that “today’s conservatives share all the fundamental premises of today’s liberals,” specifically the elevation of the collective over the individual. So she worries that the Supreme Court rulings “will serve as a precedent for the liberals, enabling them to determine which ideas they wish to suppress—in the name of the ‘public interest’—when their turn comes.”
“The law,” she warned, “functions by a process of deriving logical consequences from established precedents.” So long as a precedent is accepted, the rest is “only a matter of details—and of time.”
This is true in the courts—but it is also true, in the long run, in the culture.
Who do you think actually took these precedents seriously and put them into practice? Herein lies a big lesson about why we need liberal principles, because restrictions that sound like a good idea when you get to enforce them become precedent to be followed by someone else—and enforced against you.
The people who put the conservatives’ precedents into practice were the left. What else is “cancel culture” but the idea that it is acceptable to suppress speech that you find “offensive” by “local community standards”? The only difference is that the local community is not a small town in the conservative “heartland,” but a college campus—and its standards are communicated and enforced by way of social media.
[. . .]
Ayn Rand predicted that the left would suppress speech “in the name of the ‘public interest.’” They chose a peculiar variant on this justification: the sense of “belonging” on the part of “underrepresented groups.” But the result is the same.
There is a substantive difference between this and the 1973 obscenity cases. As with most examples of cancel culture, the Dorian Abbot affair involves decisions made by private institutions rather than the government. If MIT chooses to disinvite a speaker, it is not a violation of the First Amendment. If the government bans a book or film, it is.
But there is a connection between government censorship and private cancel culture. The standards set in private institutions tend to set the tone for what we allow and eventually expect out of government. If people widely adopt the notion that dissenting views are dangerous and should not be tolerated, they are unlikely to object when those ideas are suppressed by government force—in much the same way that those with conservative religious views on sex were (and still are) very comfortable with Supreme Court rulings declaring an unlimited government power to regulate depictions of sexuality.
Private institutions always can and should set standards of tolerance that are narrower than those of the government, simply because the proper standards for government are so wide. Free speech obliges the government to tolerate absolutely everything, but there is no such obligation for private individuals. Yet the narrowing of standards of tolerance in private institutions tends to be a leading indicator for the expansion of our willingness to use government power to suppress ideas.
So it is an ominous sign when the “culture of free speech” is replaced in the private sphere by a culture of cancellation.
Read the whole thing.
Benjamin Barr: Anti-Semitism and the First Amendment
As he discloses in the opening paragraph, Benjamin Barr is writing at Real Clear Education about his client, Accuracy in Media. But the issue he raises is important nonetheless. Barr says his client’s efforts to expose antisemitism are well within the American tradition of exposing prejudice, and Constitutionally protected to boot.
Across the nation, college students are taking up the cause of Israel and Palestine through protests. Beyond those engaged in honest debate over the Israel-Palestine conflict are hate-mongers: people who use this as an opportunity to spread antisemitism. My client, Accuracy in Media, has been busy exploring and documenting these issues—not without a host of criticism thrown its way.
Recently, some elite college students have labeled Hamas “liberation fighters” and others imagine Israel to be a “settler-colonial oppressor.” Hard to imagine: the same Hamas that massacred babies and children is being compared to the likes of General Eisenhower. As Ezekiel Emanuel noted in the New York Times, some American colleges have failed to give students the “ethical foundation and moral compass to recognize the basics of humanity.” In such a moral vacuum, antisemitism is bound to proliferate.
Throughout American history, certain justice-seekers have stepped forward to expose prejudices and call attention to public wrongs using unorthodox techniques. In 1966, the NAACP of Mississippi moved forward to address racial inequity by proposing a set of demands and then later protesting and boycotting when they were denied. This eventually led to NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. before the Supreme Court—a significant First Amendment victory upholding the right of peaceful boycotting. And it was no less than the liberal lion, Justice Brandeis, who commented that publicity is “justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” Today, it is Accuracy in Media shining that righteous light of publicity on society’s deep-seated prejudices.
Read it all here.
Daniel Buck: Is classical education research-based?
The failures of American public education make public schools a popular target for criticism, and the ready availability of data and test scores make it relatively simple to bolster the case. Writing for the Fordham Institute, Daniel Buck, a fan of classical education, says that field, as good as it is, would still benefit from similar scrutiny.
Classical education has surged in popularity, with 264 new schools cropping up since 2019, a host of think pieces analyzing its growth, and state-level policy shifts that bolster its expansion. I found myself a proponent of classical education via a roundabout path, backing my way into it after following the research on effective instruction.
[. . .]
Each element of a traditional classroom serves a purpose. Raised hands allow classroom discussions to flow without devolving into a cacophony of voices, bells and passing periods allow swift and uniform transitions, while desks in rows keep attention forward and temptations to distraction minimal.
It’s unsurprising then that research confirms that “the way we’ve always done it” actually works pretty well. If it didn’t, people would have started doing it differently!
Accordingly, it amuses me whenever I see supposedly innovative schools try to in fact do things differently, only to revert to traditionalism. As I’ve written about here before, the concept of “open classrooms” crops up every few years, wherein students move from learning station to learning station at their whim in giant rooms with flexible seating. And every time, schools end up rebuilding walls, or failing that, teachers use whiteboards and bookshelves to create makeshift boundaries.
With a foot in both worlds, I’ve noticed that the research-based wing of education reform—such as the systems of “no excuses” charter schools or organizations such as researchEd—and the world of classical education have much in common; they share similar ideas and advocate for similar instructional and curricular norms, even if they use different language. If anything, modern proponents of research-backed instructional practices have merely rediscovered an old-fashioned liberal arts education and rebranded it with philosophically positivist vibes.
That being said, while classical education certainly has all the right ingredients for a research-backed educational initiative, the movement would benefit from studies of their particular systems of schools.
Read it all.
Around Twitter (X)
It took USC seven months to determine that a professor expressing a desire for the deaths of terrorists was not worthy of sanctions by the university:
Cathy Young responds to the idea that concerns about children and sex/gender issues are just “trans panic”:
And finally, via Aviva Klompas, here’s the new White House Associate Communications Director. He certainly can communicate!