Drawing the line

One of the things I've liked the most about my seven years writing here at Skeptophilia is that it's given me the opportunity to think, learn, and reconsider my own views.  The point of skepticism, it seems to me, is to be open to revising one's stance if presented with new information or better arguments, and thus refining one's own perceptions.

Yesterday's post, about a couple of incidents in colleges where speakers with unpopular views were harassed or threatened with being banned outright, elicited a couple of comments from loyal readers that got me thinking about what I'd written.  And while I won't say it's completely changed my mind, it has made me realize that the topic is far more of a minefield than I'd realized.

[Note: I am quoting them with their permission.]

The first wrote:

While a person who makes up part of a vulnerable demographic for whatever reason absolutely has the right to avoid going to an event where they might be exposed to hate speech, simultaneously, allowing others on a campus to hear opinions that confirm them in thinking that hate speech against other people is a thing that is acceptable in society today seems overly affirming to people that perhaps don't deserve any audience at all. 

Not every campus speaker speaks hatefully, or on hateful topics, and you're right that unless we are exposed to all sides of an argument, we cannot develop informed opinions on that argument.  It's also incredibly difficult to draw a line in the sand that says 'these words are hateful, these words are just provocative, and these words are fine' - and I'm not sure that we should. 

So how do we listen to all sides of an argument that involves hate speech without making the victims of the hate speech feel that we are supporting the existence of said hate speech against them?   

I'm not sure there's an answer to this out there, but figured I would see what you thought.

I responded:

It's a tough question. I agree that to the disempowered, even having speakers who hold those kinds of views feels like tacit acceptance.  But I still think that the way to combat that is to work toward empowering the disempowered -- the professors encouraging them and supporting them in speaking up, even helping them to formulate questions and criticisms, or showing up with them to a talk -- is much better than denying the speaker the right to speak.  Like in the case with Stanger [the professor at Middlebury College who was assaulted after inviting Charles Murray, a political scientist with controversial views about the genetics of race and intelligence, to speak at the college] -- she was up front that she disagreed with Murray, but wanted him to present as an opportunity for her students to engage in reasoned discussion (and, perhaps, refutation of Murray's arguments).  It didn't work out that way, and the violence that ensued proved nothing.

She wrote back:

But that assumes that the students who feel disempowered by the topic of the speech will be able and stable enough to attend, listen to a speech that denigrates and attacks them (politely), before being able to disagree or question someone with which they disagree...  [You] might liken it to sitting down to listen to an hour of your worst childhood bullies argue about why they should have bullied you, or even to sitting down to listen to an hour of explaining why you shouldn't exist as a person at all. 

Some people are strong enough to do that, but not all of them are, no matter how much empowerment their professors try to share with them, which is why they would be the ones that don't attend - but then we have no one to question and debate.

And it turns out that the views of Laura Kipnis, whose talk at Wellesley prompted a group of faculty to draft a letter suggesting that such speakers be barred from presenting on campus, are not as academic and dispassionate as she claimed.  In a recent essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Kipnis makes some statements that would strike many of us as ethically questionable -- that sexual relationships between professors and students are okay because when she was in college, "hooking up with professors was more or less part of the curriculum...  We partied together, drank and got high together, slept together."  She scoffs at the idea that such relationships could result in a more powerful individual victimizing a less powerful one, or using that power differential for their own gain.

And she doesn't hesitate to engage in low blows against people who disagree with her.  About a man whose attitudes about inappropriate humor and unwanted sexual advances Kipnis considered puritanical and overly delicate, she even went so far as to suggest that his nervous coin-jangling in response to her questions was masturbatory.  In an academic journal.  Kipnis writes:

I recalled a long-forgotten pop-psychology guide to body language that identified change-jangling as an unconscious masturbation substitute. If the leader of our sexual-harassment workshop was engaging in public masturbatory-like behavior, seizing his private pleasure in the midst of the very institutional mechanism designed to clamp such delinquent urges, what hope for the rest of us?

So it seems like Kipnis is dancing pretty close to the line herself.

Another reader commented:

I'm generally with you on this topic, but I think we have to take off our privilege blinders.  Neither you or I would ever be compelled to take time from our schedules and prepare/engage in a "scholarly debate" with someone who says we are part of a genetically inferior race, or that our family members should be immediately locked up and deported. It's very easy for us straight white dudes to keep things civil when our humanity is never attacked.

Which is also spot-on.  My own attitudes about speakers being denied the right to speak based upon controversial viewpoints would probably be very different if I myself was a minority.  As the reader commented, being a white straight male makes it awfully easy for me to be on the side of free speech -- since that free speech is seldom used to harass or demean me.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So I'm left with the conclusion that this is a great deal harder than it seemed at first.  To fall back on the basic rule of banning only speech that promotes criminal acts or violence is to ignore the fact that free speech has been used many times in the past to incite hatred, discrimination, and marginalization.  And ignoring that fact is only one step away from tacit acceptance.

On the other hand, where to draw the line is problematic.  I still believe that colleges do students a terrible disservice by insulating them from controversy; prohibitions against hearing speakers or reading books or papers that voice dissenting opinions are, by and large, antithetical to the reason we have education in the first place.  But the complexity of this issue, and the spectrum of where those controversial views might fall, make it a far thornier decision than I had realized.

Many thanks to my readers who took the time to respond to yesterday's post -- especially the ones who challenged me on what I wrote.  After all, having written a piece about how important it is to be pushed into reconsidering your preconceived notions, it would be a little hypocritical of me not to be willing to engage in a bit of that myself.

Fear talk and bad decisions

I've always been curious about why politicians spend so much time trying to make their constituencies afraid.

A scared person, you would think, is likely to behave unpredictably.  Faced with a raging tiger, some of us would run, some fight back, some piss their pants and faint.  (I suspect I'd be in the last-mentioned group.)  But the point is, you'd think that as a political strategy, making people fearful would backfire as often as not.

But it seems to be all you hear these days.  "Obama is coming for your guns, to leave you defenseless."  "The illegal immigrants are stealing our jobs."  "The economy is going to crash."  "Public schools are failing."  "The terrorists are winning."

A study released last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may give us a perspective on why that is.  In a paper called "Power Decreases Trust in Social Exchanges," by Oliver Schilke, Martin Reimann, and Karen S. Cook (the first two from the University of Arizona, the last from Stanford University), we find out that being low in the power structure makes people more willing to trust authority:

How does lacking vs. possessing power in a social exchange affect people’s trust in their exchange partner?  An answer to this question has broad implications for a number of exchange settings in which dependence plays an important role...  Over a variety of different experimental paradigms and measures, we find that more powerful actors place less trust in others than less powerful actors do.  Our results contradict predictions by rational actor models, which assume that low-power individuals are able to anticipate that a more powerful exchange partner will place little value on the relationship with them, thus tends to behave opportunistically, and consequently cannot be trusted.  Conversely, our results support predictions by motivated cognition theory, which posits that low-power individuals want their exchange partner to be trustworthy and then act according to that desire.  Mediation analyses show that, consistent with the motivated cognition account, having low power increases individuals’ hope and, in turn, their perceptions of their exchange partners’ benevolence, which ultimately leads them to trust.

Scary result, isn't it?  The politicians have a vested interest in making us fearful not only to push a particular political agenda; they make us more likely to blindly trust whoever is saying, "... and I have a solution."

And look what it does to our ability to process facts.  We are told that social programs (read: welfare cheats) are bankrupting the United States, and the way to balance the budget is to end what opponents like to call "entitlements," when the actual situation looks like this:

I'd like someone to explain to me how we can balance the budget by eliminating social services, when social services account for only around 13% of overall expenditures.  In fact, you could argue that our disproportionate military spending -- 718 billion dollars, 20% of the federal budget, accounting for 41% of the military spending worldwide, and four times higher than the country in second place (China) -- is also motivated by fear and a perception of being in a precarious position in the power structure.

It's amazing how blind you become to reality when you're motivated by fear and anxiety.  Remember the idiotic thing that was going around last year, about how we should balance the budget by eliminating salaries for the president, vice president, and members of congress?   Apparently scared people also really don't understand math, because I fail to see how stopping the paychecks of 537 people is going to offset a $426 billion budget deficit.

So if fear accomplishes one other thing besides making you trust whoever you believe to be an authority, it makes you ignore all the evidence to the contrary.  Consider the conviction with which the pro-gun faction believes that gun ownership makes you safer -- while a Boston University study found two years ago that there is a "robust correlation" between the rate of (legal) gun ownership in a state and the rate of violence.

But instead of reasoned debate on the topic, just about all we see is inflammatory rhetoric.  Since when is "Passing laws restricting gun ownership is stupid, because criminals don't obey laws" a logical argument?  No one is suggesting that we make rape and murder legal, because after all, "rapists and murderers don't obey laws."  These sorts of statements aren't meant to engage your brain; they're meant to grab you by the fear centers and swing you around.  "I'm being left defenseless against the criminals" is a powerful motivator.

And as the study by Schilke et al. shows, once we're in a state of fear, we're more likely to trust whoever it is that claims to have a solution.

Look, it's not like I have all the answers myself.  My difficulty with politics is that I find most of the problems they wrestle with so complicated and multi-faceted that I can't imagine how anyone could find a solution that works.  But succumbing to fear certainly doesn't make you more likely to make good decisions, either about what to do or about who should lead us.

As Dave Barry said, "When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command.  Very often, that individual is crazy."