"Institute Encounters" with Dr. Daniel Bonevac

[Music] hi there I'm Steve Balch director of Texas Tax Institute for the Study of Western civilization we do interviews with guest speakers who the Institute brings to campus this is one of them one of our Institute encounters and today our guest is Professor Daniel Bona back the University of Texas a professor of philosophy an author of five books on a variety of subjects one of which which is pertinent to a colloquium presentation will be making later today too the philosophy department is on world philosophy so that's a subject of course that's that's very interesting and maybe we can approach it in a roundabout way by talking about something that most people regard as sort of rather special to the anglo-american tradition in in Western civilization and that is free speech and intellectual freedom it's also quite relevant to our campuses in that they arguably have a good deal less of it than the society at large kind of ironically I suppose how did you become concerned with issues pertaining to free speech and which are philosophic take on this whole area I I got involved in these issues I guess initially because I was teaching a course called contemporary moral problems and I taught that for many many years sometimes team teaching it with other faculty who had a different ideological perspective and sometimes doing it on my own but I always structured it so that one day on any given issue we would discuss arguments for of that position and other day arguments against and we read a lot of classic philosophical texts on ethics and political philosophy to give us background for thinking about questions of liberty justice and so on and one of the issues I often did there was freedom of speech we'd read Mills on Liberty we would read Aristotle talking about paternalism and the need for the government to protect people and look out for good on the other side and there were a lot of nice discussions on both sides of that question and we would read contemporary authors as well including Jonathan ROG and uh Stanley fish and you know this type of thing but it was all rather theoretical issue in those days and then um I guess it started almost 10 years ago I had a student well not a student in my class mind you but in a lecturer that with about 400 students the very last day someone way in the back raised their hand to ask a question I thought and so I called on them and they proceeded to give a five-minute rant about my course and then stormed out of the room and that was the last five minutes of the semester I had no chance to respond the bell rang a bunch of students came up and said who was that person that wasn't a student in this class we've never seen them before but that was the first I had seen somebody really tried to shout down speech on campus at Texas we had a long tradition of having controversial speakers on all sides and there was really occasionally some people would hold up a protest sign but there was letter via speak whether this ranchers denunciation consists of my course was supposed to be terribly biased and so on but of course they hadn't been there though it was a rather bizarre attack out of live appealed but then later I had some students appear in the back of my classes and they clearly weren't students in my class I recognized people by then this was in a later semester they stood there until they were sure that I was not going to say anything of any particular interest to them evidently the stories of Jorge Luis Borgess and the philosophy of the manual caught were not interesting enough so they left but that was rather baffling and shortly after I had published an editorial yeah in The Washington Post that they clearly disapproved of and so I suddenly and in fact I was kind of informally informed by someone in our diversity and inclusion office that complaints had been filed against me because I had published this editorial and they regretted to tell the student the First Amendment protected my right to do that but then I began to realize I could no longer teach this course where I presented both sides of questions on issues like free speech or immigration or affirmative action or abortion or a variety of other questions our university now has a an office with a staff of about a hundred people costs over ten million dollars a year and their main job is to investigate bias reports about once a month we get emails urging us to fill out a report if we have witness to any bias against us or against anyone or even if we've heard about bias against anyone and they will dispatch a bias incident response team to investigate this process they complain that they get so many of these complaints that they need hire even more stop doing it us together though of course they constantly soliciting them but in that kind of environment I feel as if I can't teach these kinds of controversial subjects anymore at all and so I've stopped teaching that course even though I taught it for more than twenty years and now that that whole system has been found unconstitutional the University of Michigan had a very similar thing but I think my university and probably many others are not going to give that up until directly forced to by the court this assumes you're not unique and in having these experiences of surveillance teams coming into your well no effect that I I've been very fortunate a way that people have not directly disrupted my class to a greater extent that has happened here Kali it has happened sir I know it's happened at various other universities and I I think it has happened that at my own University though the faculty members did whom it's happened have have not been very willing to talk about it try understandable reasons there is an extraordinarily radical group of students on our campus that who puts professors on a target list sometimes because those professors are conservative but it seems to be most of the people on the list aren't actually I have no idea why they're on the list except that somebody in that group took one of their courses and didn't like something that happened and essentially that group of you know maybe 50 students on campus of 50,000 would just be ignored but now they have a staff of 100 people to in effect give them oxygen and encourage lot of active disruptions occurred of people's classes beyond what's happened to me I know that there have been situations where students have have sort of gotten up and walked out of class and that kind of thing not really shut it down in the sense of preventing the person from continuing the class there have been incidents like that however with visiting speakers where people have been prevented from speaking or have been loudly protested once they they did that a few years ago we sponsored a talk by christina hoff sommers and there were protesters out in the hallway some hostile questions asked in the room but it was orderly and nobody the talk itself and the question period were not disrupted but now I can't imagine that kind of thing taking place situation is the deal better year we've had a variety of controversial speakers there been some protests but no effort to shut them no effort in most cases to shut them down Angela Davis came to campus some years back Amelia innopolis came and spoke to several hundred people and you know there was some unhappiness voice but nothing nothing occurred and I had a speaker come fellow named Bruce Gilley I don't know if you know I remember the little contra comp involving him it pertained to an article that he wrote which he was begged by the editor of the journal to withdraw called the case for colonialism oh yes that's it right so we had him down here to speak on the very same subject and there was a good deal of faculty unhappiness but in the end the talk went on and it was an entirely polite interesting discussion so you know I happy to say that that Texas Tech does better and we're always trying to do better than UT that's up on this issue that's not too difficult uh what are the main tactics lately by the radical group has not been to disrupt things but simply try to Docs the people who go to the talk so in a recent case what they did is simply take photographs of all the students and faculty who were going into the talk and leaving it and then putting them on a web page and identifying them say this is so-and-so this is a sociology major senior who lives on West Campus the plow and the the general idea was you know these people are fascists so stay away from employers and all of this kind of thing does anybody listen to them I have no idea I don't I'm not aware of anything negative happening to any of these people does anyone speak out against that practice besides yourself uh a handful of people who mark Pulliam has put together a group stop the insanity and has something like 10,000 followers on Facebook so he publicizes and protests these things routinely and I think that pressure has helped alumni have exerted a lot of pressure when I appeared on Tucker Carlson show talking about the difficulties I faced and the fact that I feel as if I can't teach certain courses anymore because you cannot give a balanced presentation a lot of alumni called in and the Dean called me personally and guest you know pledged his support to to me and this type of thing so I think alumni involvement is a is a key factor here I think most students don't pay any attention to these people they recognize this is a fringe group but nevertheless there's a kind of where there's smoke there's fire type of you nothing really know and putting something of a scare into people you know the threshold of scare is often very low you change behavior that's right you change behavior and as students begin to complain about all sorts of things I mean if students are told look you're you're about to be treated very unjust ly be on the lookout for the cases of unjust treatment all of a sudden every disappointing grade every comment by a professor you don't understand or don't like gets reported as something Tobias and and I've heard about some of the cases that have been reported and in in a number of them I'm surprised because I think for example to for a professor to request a teaching assistant to pick up his dry cleaning is inappropriate I think the proper thing is for the Chairman to say that's not their job don't ask them to do that is this an incident of bias that should trigger some sort of title 9 investigation I doubt that and so there is a lot that gets swept under this sort of heading and is treated as some kind of issue where it's really a different kind of ability what do you attribute this changed and more repressive climate to well that's a hard question I think ironically ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union the dreams of the radical left for a kind of utopian vision have faded in a in that they didn't find there were direct political actors too cheerful anymore but it got directed more inward and so suddenly the people who had been teaching about how wonderful Cuba or the Soviet Union or East Germany were as models for the United States of Hollow all of a sudden they turned toward the things around them immediately and began to complain so I noticed suddenly there was there were fewer courses of the kind there had been before on Marxism from a theoretical point of view or Marxism and practice or this type of thing and suddenly got turned into this identity politics attack on freedom of speech and so forth there was a burst of this in the early 90s and then for a while it seemed like there was coexistence but now the war seems to have started in full again so I'm not sure really exactly why I think I think some of it is that the coexistence was misleading movie what happened is these groups just took over a large part of the humanities and now they're gunning for the rest of its head so philosophy for a long time seemed to me pretty immune to these kinds of political pressures it's not anymore the sciences seemed fairly immune from all of this I don't think they are anymore so I think you know if you look back through Western or human history more generally there's always been some degree of tolerance for debate and discourse but the general principle strikes me in most times in places certainly in in Christendom and Islam say the monotheistic parts of the world was that era had no rights you know if you were espousing on religious questions or anything touching on that a view that might lead to someone's eternal damnation or you know to blaspheme God you did not have a right to do that most people I think are probably would find it easier to believe that if someone is clearly wrong in their mind about something and their views are harmful in some way they really shouldn't be allowed to express them not believing that I think requires some some activity of mind and some depth of philosophic conviction and some transference of that philosophic conviction from one generation to another do you have any views on if you wouldn't assume you make arguments at students and colleagues about the importance of free speech and academic freedom as well related idea what do you say well well good I think you're you're right that in those moments theistic traditions there's often been hostility or freedom of speech it's interesting that in India in ancient times anyway this was not so much of a problem you had not only the contrast between the hindus and the buddhists and various other groups like the chinese but you also had within Hinduism six different schools vaginas preached the kind of intellectual non-violence and tolerance thinking that in a sense nobody had the whole truth but everybody had some part of the truth and so the quest was always to encounter and listen to your opponent's just try to find out what part of the truth were there any people that tradition who argued that you should be a free to politically criticized to kind of denounce the the reigning Raja Raja well what's what's intriguing I think is that in those days whatever in a way it wasn't that big a question because the ability of that person to know what you thought was so limited I think part the reason all of this has become highly contentious now is that we know what other people think Twitter and Facebook heads fought are partly to blame here not only because they've established a kind of surveillance state but because people do say a lot of things and put them in writing that they would never have done before so suppose you did criticize the Shah back in those days how would the Shah ever find out it was unlikely and what would the shot do about it when you marched on his palace with your followers I don't think he would have said he has a First Amendment right but finding out that ten years ago yeah you know muttered something about this or I'm thinking of Solzhenitsyn going to the gulag for saying calling Stalin man with the moustache a letter to a friend these things would never have been discovered and so in a sense you could grant more absolute power to the ruler because the ability of the ruler to exercise that power of review is pretty remote um but now that's not true so the finger reaches you might say much more extensively than it used to but yeah philosophically speaking there's been a skepticism these days expressed most recently in a Washington Post editorial by a former editor of time arguing against freedom of speech saying that we shouldn't trust the marketplace of ideas to leave the truth that can be manipulated in various ways in a way it's Russo's argument that look freedom of speech can be manipulated and the people can be manipulated so the will of the people as actually expressed in elections even does not reflect the general will what is really in the public interest and so forth but the classic arguments in favor of freedom of speech don't depend on that at all look at the arguments in Mills on Liberty he says look your opponent might be right but secondly suppose they're not right they might have part of the truth it's a point related to that point of the Chinese he said you know it's rare that you have the entire truth and it requires a kind of assumption of infallibility on your part to think that you know that there is nothing of the truth and what they say but then he makes a point that I think is very nice and easily forgotten which is that even if what they're saying is completely false it's nevertheless valuable to hear it because it reminds your supporters number one of why they believe what they believe they have to know the arguments if they don't know the arguments their beliefs are gonna be knocked out very easily but the second point is it's not just that they won't know how to defend their position they won't remember what it even means they won't know what the words mean they might mouthed the words but they won't understand them any longer because they don't understand the case to be made for them they don't understand what's at issue and I think that happens in a lot of religious traditions where people are willing to fight and die and kill over certain issues like the criteria of justification let's say in Christianity that goes on for centuries now ask the average Christian so what do you think is the real criterion of justification you know is it is it good works is it faith is it you know what what some combination of those things what exactly is it I think that in most traditions now get a tharok some exceptions but a lot of Christians I don't know gonna be a good person who believing in God and you know it'll be a guy something in that bacon all apart too much effort and they've really forgotten why anybody cared in fact if you tell them people fought wars over this they'll say why what what on earth was the stake so I've and I'm not saying they're entirely wrong to think that but that that indicates something about how the issue loses vibrancy it becomes as no puts on a dead dogma now John Milton in Areopagitica gives us a different kind of argument saying we'll give God himself from on high we're able to beat the censor and say I'm sorry but this this is wrong and it's pernicious and harm of letting someone save us far outweighs any good that you come from this then he said maybe it would be alright but who's gonna in fact be the censor who is going to dedicate themselves - then he was thinking sitting down all day and reading through these long tomes and deciding whether they're acceptable in today's world who is gonna watch hundreds of YouTube videos a day to decide which ones express inappropriate idea just set up an algorithm and you don't have to watch at all well some of them they do buy ugly but actually I know a guy who is a sensor for for YouTube he works for Google and he sits there all day and watches YouTube videos and rules out some of them as pornographic and rules out other says not acceptable and so I know the kind of person who actually does this I wouldn't trust him to feed my cats for the weekend he can't quite manage his Pokemon go account and I think look he's a nice guy I like him but that is the job that's who's deciding what gets to be sent or what's not if he said um and mountains point is look that's always gonna be the case the people you get to do this are not going to be the wisest people they are going to be people who either have nothing better to do which was one of milton's main concerns or they're the busy buddies who want to assert their own views on things my friend is not he's not one of those busy buddies he doesn't have a view he's just one who has nothing better to do but that's something that I think is a real worry worry about the will the marketplace of ideas always produce the truth well probably not will the marketplace of censorship sense of the right ideas certainly not and so Melton's point is that the moment you try to implement this whatever your theoretical justification you're gonna find it doesn't do it all what do you think it's going to do so I have I mean most people who want to restrict freedom of speech nowadays will usually give lip service to the principle and then talk about the particular harms of certain kinds of speech and one fears of course that you know if you allow the first exception more will prop up but that's generally what they say now if you take a look at I'm not sure about no noise I can yes I know in John Locke's case where he talks about toleration of religion he accepted Catholics and why did he accept Catholics because he's what they were a subversive danger their loyalty being to Rome and all that so he was willing to make some exceptions I suspect Milton might have felt the same way about Catholics that's right they said right except for the papacy so as we extirpate he says those we extricate so if that's the case here in the world we have now those similar types of exceptions in your mind ever apply well certainly I have no problem with sort of time and manner exceptions so it's not based on content but you know you can say whatever you want but you can't say it in the middle of my classroom you can't say it's on a loudspeaker in my neighborhood 3:00 a.m. with that kind of thing otherwise I think it's well the exception that John Stuart Mill mentions his people shouting down with corn merchants and he says can they do that as a public protest sure can you publish article newspaper saying down with foreign merchants sure can you shout it to a mob with porches in front of a corn merchants house maybe not in other words he had a clear and present an alter yeah I went below exactly them the fire in a crowded theater exception and it seems to be fair enough to say that what I find deeply disturbing on campuses these days is that people try to put everything under that they'll say this is a there's a danger of violence created by the speech well certainly not in the sense that mill was talking about there's no mob in front of which you know this is being shouted the idea is rather that gosh somebody might hear this and get upset and either that itself as a wound that caught that is enough to justify a harm Mill was clearly talking about direct physical harm during person or to property not to a harm to someone's feelings but the other thing is you know the remote possibility of someone hearing something and getting upset and doing something violent is very different from the imminent probability of violence and so they take this probability and turn it into a remote possibility here they take physical harm and turn it into well potential psychological harm and often nobody is even claiming psychological harm just something could experience or psychological harm and so suddenly this justice divides restriction of anything once you think there could be a person who has suffered some kind of trauma and gets upset by your mentioning something um it's not clear that anything can survive that I was at a restaurant last night that had a photograph of a scoreboard that's at Texas Tech 39 Texas 38 imagine a long hard drive looking at this and being triggered and feeling psychologically wounded and so on obviously that's absurd but especially this year I suspect but that's the kind of thing that is suddenly opened up all of a sudden that somebody has no idea what they're allowed to say and not allowed to say uh and so I think that that exception was meant to be extremely narrow or a reasoned and a good reason you don't want people inciting people to direct physical violence in a highly vulnerable context like that but but to think that basically anything falls under that is is absurd so there was a very I think this movement started in legal academia about 30 years ago there was a paper that became well-known called words that wound and Jonathan Roush did point out the problem with that if you say that words can wound and words are the equivalent of bullets then I speak words you respond with bullets and you think that's fair and his point is words or words bullets are bullets and it's vital that we maintain a difference so I think that it's fine to make an exception of the kind that Mel had in mind you're gonna make sure that's all that's on the bullet side of that that's not on the word side words don't count as wounding it anything like that sense and the moment you accept the metaphor and think that there's a philosophical point underlying it you've made a grave mistake that raised anything so should we as a matter of academic practice on our campuses and in our schools - should we teach free speech I don't mean teach the debates about free speech I mean work in what mine and some other contacts seem to be a propagandistic way to inculcate the maxims of free speech in the minds of people for whom that's probably not the default intellectual mechanism I think absolutely yes it's what Chicago does not only has the chart Chicago faculty approved the Chicago statement is a town owned on freedom of speech but that institution tells freshmen as soon as they get there look we're dedicated to free speech we want you to hear ideas that oppose yours that's what this place is all about and don't basically if you are going to be offended by that if you're gonna hear something you disagree with and think that you've in some way been wounded don't come here that's that's our job so say you're talking to a professor of philosophy say you're you're you're in the market for a new hire in the philosophy department and the particular philosophy candidate who's otherwise very bright and well credentialed has some some postmodern view about free speech in which he does or she does believe that words wound and that we have to be sensitive to the kind of feelings of people who are marginalized etc etc and it's kind of clear that you know that's gonna come across that view in a variety of ways in here teaching and in her writing would would that be a good reason not to hire this person in my opinion yes and now I'll be accused of trying to shut down speech I don't like I think there is a deep problem here about whether one should tolerate intolerance whether one of the things that you were willing to have people say is that free speech is itself bad I'm certainly willing to have them say it I don't really want to pay them to say it is my point and I think that you don't want them to say it in quite in their classrooms is really it's not so much whether you're picking them as foes you're giving them to young and malleable minds is that is what worries you here well that's part of it but part of it is just that that person is going to try to change what the university is about so they're going to try to argue in general that the things that the rest of the faculty are saying might not be legitimately saleable in the classroom and so I basically I think the university has a mission it has a mission of Education and a mission of research but also it is supposed to be a place where the free exchange of ideas can take place in a relatively what cloistered environment separated from some of the direct practical interests that are at stake and if someone comes in saying no there are a whole bunch of things that we should not be saying it should not be even be asking and investigating at the university I think that really is incompatible with the university's mission so is wrong to hire Herbert Makuta at the University of California I think so and when Nicolas Murali Marie Butler at Columbia welcomed the refugees the Frankfurt School refugees to to Columbia he he was making an error I think I think that was a mistake I think what those people stood for was really antithetical to the mission of the University I don't want to put any of them in jail the free to say it's fine I don't think that the universities however should have said you know come welcome say that within us because I think it would be as if someone was were arguing that education is pointless and that everything that was being said in a certain field was meaningless and then was hired in that field we it's something that happens in philosophy we have some people who really think philosophy is pointless and so forth followers of victim Stein or sometimes in this camp but I've always found that strange if you really think that everything philosophers say is meaningless why would you want to teach philosophy and why would we wanna hire you to tell all my students that everything everybody's doing is you're placing a limit on academic freedom here in a way in a way I'm has a test for hiring and maybe as a district continued employment that's right because I'm in effect saying look we we do have a mission at the University and if you're not in tune with the mission then you're gonna work against the mission you don't belong in this organization I don't want to silence you but I also don't what you working from within against us anymore than if I were the head of General Motors and I felt that somebody was trying their best as my vice president to undermine General Motors and sell more Ford's I want them hiring you know continuing to work for General Motors following Mill in his illustration of the mob gathering outside the rain made merchants house if there's a big active anti freedom movement in your country communist or fascist movement repressing them is a possibility if you're able to do it well that's that's a different question because it's not really a question about the mission of the universe no but it's what Mill was talking about about the imminence of violence in this case right minutes of the overthrow of the Liberal government and its replacement by an illiberal right well no that's true Churchill urged that Lenin be taken out by the Western powers in Russia the moment he seized power and in retrospect I think that was pretty good advice that the the Western powers should have listened to Britain and France were in no mood to write you know do that kind of thing against a former ally but I think it would have been wise and similarly if the moment Hitler had begun his moves in violation of the Treaty of Versailles France and Britain or some combination of allies had simply gone and removed him from power it seemed or demanded his removal as a condition of not responding militarily but if Hitler were here in the United States and had a powerful movement you could make an argument for shutting him down if you could do it yes bill at what stage right what stage TV but he'll do it when he's too weak to be the imminent danger and when he is the imminent danger he's probably too strong to do it without a civil war or something like that right well that's true in April of 1940 gurbles gave a talk in which he said to me it's absolutely amazing what's happened we wanted to seize power legally but we didn't want to use it legally we managed to get around all internal barriers and then once we had absolute power we began to do what we wanted internationally they said amazingly they could have stopped us at so many places said if I had been the French Prime Minister I would said you know the man who's who wrote Mike off is now in power we can't tolerate this remove him or we March they didn't do it step after step they didn't take any action and they said now that the balance of powers on our side now they start the war and there is something remarkable that there were so many places for one thing the arrest at the Munich Beer Hall Putsch that was direct action but he didn't serve in jail for very long he was released the newspapers all said he's fired his lesson there will be no more hurt from him and then as the movement grew as there was example after example of illegal use of power no one did anything and so I think it's a hard question to say at what point is one just a fool you worry about that here with you know anti foul on the streets of Portland and other places well absolutely authorities turning what seems to be a blind eye toward them totally that sort of thing was happening in Germany in the late 20s and 30s and it's something that I think is a kind of street violence that creates an incredibly volatile atmosphere not only is there the harm to the direct individuals who are affected by that violence but it creates a kind of structure in which people begin to think that political violence is okay and that sort of thing did happen increasingly it was part of what left the Nazis seize power now they weren't able to do it they were really a fringe group until the smoot-hawley Tariff shut down international trade and unemployment in germany went to close to 45 percent suddenly they became a powerful party at that point out of desperation I think from the German people but it creates an environment where something that makes people desperate enough turns them toward extremist movements so so yes I think it's enormous ly dangerous to allow groups like that to engage in violence on the streets and there's a basically what I want to argue is the very there's a very big difference between the kind of protest where people march in the streets they may even shut down business and so forth I'm not in general in favor of that but that's one thing it's another thing to attack people to hit them with by clocks to do the various things that an Tifa has done important than in other places and that I think is is really dangerous and it's shocking if the police just stand by and do nothing so you know there's an old type of argument that Marxist used to use about the the contradictions in society and those contradictions sort of coming to the surface and creating crises and and I wonder if that's not applicable to the to free speech I mean it's true that you can value free speech in and of itself for all the reasons that you and others have given but there is a kind of mentality that arises when discourse is really funny trammeled and it's sort of mentality of you know heightening equivocation about everything there are so many views on the table there are so many clever people making arguments for them you know you end up like Pontius Pilate what is what is truth and if you end up in that position then somebody gets up and says well we need to defend free speech as an idea well you know it is one ideal among many right now there are people who have very different most people know that most people have had very different views on that so how do you how do you prevent that kind of contradiction from developing in a free speech culture right yeah that's a difficult question I think it's hard to do that may be a useful analogy would be with the rules of football let's say it's one thing to say look there are different teams with different strengths different fans have different ideas about which teams are best let's take the college football rankings for example who's the number-one team in the country blah blah blah you can fight about all with that you can argue about whether that game really showed the strengths the two teams and so forth but it's quite enough another to turn to the rules themselves and say well the rules themselves are up for grabs so really it's a question of well you know yeah because you allow forward passes that the rules of the rules and then we conduct to the rest of inquiry within those rules that there are but everybody would admit that they're arbitrary constructs in football and you have to have them if you can have any kind of game at all right whereas with respect to free speech they have value in themselves and people have to believe that they have value and yet if everything is up for debate and this is great swirl of ideas you end up in some kind of relativists posture and you know it's you don't feel strongly perhaps about anything anymore well right I mean that is partly the danger of relativism I think there are other dangers but yes this this idea that everybody's got a part of the truth nobody has the whole truth so hey you know it doesn't really matter you can construct an argument for anything I worry about that as a philosophy teacher because I think sometimes I don't so much bolster people's ability to think critically has to give them an excuse not to think critically just to say hey you know you can argue anything so who knows what's what's true and a lot of our students do come into the university with kind of built in relativism in fact my most recent homework assignment is to ask them to consider a classic skeptical argument the argument for variability that people's perceptions on various kinds of things differ there's no neutral way to tell who's right so there's no way to know anything about these questions and a surprising number of students have come to my outfit into this and said I I like the argument I don't want to criticize it and so I've got said that's why I told you to criticize that I want you to think about what might be wrong with it but it is true that there's a big difference I think between that sort of position and the position of Tolerance that says as mill said that you were really assuming your own infallibility to want to rule out certain things why do I want to say I want to rule out someone who would ban free speech not rule out listen they can't present the argument but as institutions and as a culture we have to defend that line it's partly because it so radically changes the nature of the game that it's not inquiry into truth anymore something else so you're right there's a conventional character to football rules so it becomes not exactly football but something else who cares in this case we really care our job is to inquire into the truth and to the extent that we say well we're not in the truth business anymore we're in the social justice business which I think a lot of universities are now saying something huge has been sacrificed there it isn't just oh well you know that's a that's a thing too it's like no no it's really important that you understand what's true about the world I see us increasingly as a culture not just in academia but much more broadly to use a metaphor corrupting our own database allowing in as not only acceptable opinions but unquestionably correct opinions things that are just false and the more you base decisions on false conceptions in the world I think the worse off you're going to be as a person as a culture as a civilization so so I think there's something deeply not just conventional about what the university is doing and what the value of free speech is it's about keeping us directed toward truth as opposed to some other goal and as universities if that's not our job then I don't know what it is there's really no reason for us to exist if you want to pursue social justice this seems a very strange way of doing it you ought to go out there and help the homeless you ought to go out there and work in medical care you should you should find a way of her promoting justice and go do it so this is this isn't why you should be and if you think you know what justice is without bothering to inquire into the truth of anything but without dedicating yourself to that that I think you're also making a grave mistake so the search for truth is really what underlies all the rest that you might find desirable and corrupting that seems to me just to corrupt things in a very very basic level well that's a very eloquent way to end our discussion thank you very much for being here and thank you for doing so much during your visit here you're aware we're really working you hard and I appreciate that oh thank you happy to do it

Channel: Western Civilization, Texas Tech University

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Length: 45min 36sec (2736 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 04 2019