The Neo Inquisition: Stifling Freedom of Thought
Jet lagged from my recent journey to Ireland/UK, where there is an 8 hour time difference, and up at 3:30 AM, I decided to see what I had missed at The Corner and ran across an entry by Jonah Goldberg discussing a debate between two philosophers, Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Dennett. Plantinga apparently claims that Darwinian theory is compatible with faith and theism, while Dennett is one of the new atheists who believes science has proven religion to be wrong.
I don't know the work of either man, and since that is not my field and is beyond our scope here at SHS, and I don't want us to get into the religion versus science, science versus religion controversy here. But what caught my eye was a plea made by a "live blogger" of the event who is terrified at being identified by peers and colleagues as someone who tends to sympathize with Plantinga's approach. From the account of the anonymous blogger:
I was at the talk. It was packed with professional philosophers and graduate students in philosophy, most of whom sided with Dennett. I wrote live comments on the debate/session. I prefer to remain anonymous for various reasons, in particular because I am inclined towards Plantinga's position over Dennett's and were this to become well-known it could damage or destroy my career in analytic philosophy. This is something I prefer not to put my family through. I almost didn't publish these comments at all, but as far as I could tell, this would be the only public record of the discussion.If the blogger is correct about the impact of colleagues knowing his or her world view--and can there be any doubt that his or her fear of consequences is reasonable in the current atmosphere?--we are in an era of the neo Inquisition. There may not be burnings at the stake, literally, but the careers of anyone straying from certain Orthodoxies will be subjected to searing pain and being reduced to ashes. And the perpetrators will always find some other excuse than their utter intolerance of diversity of opinion and lack of respect for truly free thought.
Friends, if you can identify me, I request that you keep my identity secret. I am sharing my thoughts as a service to the philosophical community and all those who have an interest in such debates. But I prefer not to suffer at the hands of my ardently secular colleagues. This is not to say that all secular analytic philosophers are this way; they most certainly are not. But enough of them are that I cannot risk being known publicly.
We have seen the same kind of McCarthysim that the blogger worries about in analytic philosophy directed at life scientists who oppose human cloning and ESCR for ethical reasons. Ditto the screeds against climate change skeptics, etc. And imagine what would happen to the most erudite and astute bioethicist seeking tenure at a major university if it became known she she was pro life.
The Left still screams about McCarthyism and the blacklist, and that's fine. A lot of injustices were perpetrated in that era based on what people believed or on their past associations. If that was wrong--and I sure think it was--how is this any different?
The atmosphere of fear on our campuses and within our professional societies hurts freedom and undermines intellectual integrity by making the open exchange of ideas too costly for those holding minority views to speak out. And the irony is that free thought is being snuffed out by the very people who call themselves free thinkers and who screamed the loudest about the importance of free speech and respecting dissident views in the 60s when they were the in the minority.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 3:47 AM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
I am an analytic philosopher, but not one affiliated with any school, which is what makes me free to say whatever I wish. I have not had time to follow the flap over the Plantinga-Dennett debate, though people have been sending me links about it and such. I have become involved in another fight in philosophy which is also beyond the scope of SHS concerning the rights of religious institutions to ask their faculty not to engage in particular sexual acts.
The person who is probably in the mind of this live blogger as one who might ruin his (the blogger's) career is Brian Leiter. I know, it sounds crazy that I should name one particular person like that, doesn't it? But it's true. Leiter is a political philosopher at Chicago. He used to be at UT. He has enormous influence in the philosophy world, particularly in analytic philosophy, and he has no qualms whatsoever about trying to ruin people's careers. The anecdotes people will tell you about him are numerous, and some have left a paper trail. For example, some years ago he openly tried to get a law student blacklisted from future jobs because the law student had argued that it was not unconstitutional to teach intelligent design in the schools. You may have heard about that flap, Wesley.
I have had several people--e.g., graduate students, who are the most vulnerable--e-mail me in this controversy I am involved in, where I am trying to convince people to sign a counterpetition to a petition Leiter is involved in (sorry this sounds so complicated), telling me that they would like to sign but lack the courage to do so. Some have "signed" the counterpetition as "anonymous," which I tend to discourage, as it rather ruins the point of signing. Leiter, naturally, discounts "anonymous" signatures altogether, even though he and those like him are the reason for them.
Lest analytic philosophy get a special bad rap here, let me hasten to add that its alternative, continental philosophy, has for many years been _much worse_ about discriminating against people for their political views. Analytic philosophy was always better about this, and I have been especially disturbed of late years to see this changing.
It's like the plight of Galileo. Well, that's "liberals" for you. That's why it's conservatives who are actually more liberal. These are fascists. These are the same stripe whom McCarthyism was going AFTER. If a moral society is desireable, then there is reason to appreciate the button-down, shoelaced FBI of J. Edgar Hoover. This is really bad; it's not academic freedom; it's not the academy; it's academic fascism. It's going on, of course, at the same time as we're moving headlong and stunned into fascism under the new "liberal" administration, and at the same time the death culture is marching forward. Try being an astrologer and working in academia. Or a Republican or a Conservative, for that matter. But science has always been messed up in the head, and been getting involved in religion and religion getting involved with it, etc. Both are more concerned with what they shouldn't be concerned with than what they should be concerned with, and the day science has sese and morality, that will be the day (that animal experimentation ends). And academics, don't get me started on how some of them can be. It's a nice life, and they want to protect their turf and livelihood, God forbid they should have to go out into the world and do actual work, which might happen if there were actual academic freedom, which would result in their being exposed as the actual nincompoops, incompetents, tyrants, and marmalukes that they are, and then they'd starve because they couldn't do an actual job right. One faculty meeting where all they wanted to talk about was their pensions was enough for me. All too many of them couldn't figure out how to use a can-opener if their life depended on it, and pretend to be above such things. Naturally they are incapable of thinking. And they're the ones who taught and are teaching the ones who have made and are making a mess of everything.
And the one thing they DO believe is that they are entitled not to starve. Everybody else should do that, according to them; leaves their places at the table intact. No wonder people are being starved to death in hospitals and hospices. These are our "intellectual leaders," after all.
I don't see persecutorial behavior as being associated with any particular ideology. I see it as more having to do with whoever's currently in power trying to stifle opposition and preserve their position. And on college campuses, I will concede that's usually the self-proclaimed free thinkers.
The recent movements to force public schools to teach "intelligent design" have, in my opinion, led to folks like Dennett really digging in and taking fairly extreme views. Meanwhile someone like Plantinga who would normally be seen as moderate and even conciliatory is pressured to move the other way.
I believe that most of the "conflict" between science and religion is needlessly generated by people who occupy one extreme or the other, and stand to benefit by the conflict. The religious extremists get more people in the pews, the intellectuals get quoted in Newsweek.
But yeah, there is a lot of irony in the pointy-headed professional thinkers demanding intellectual freedom from the world while stifling dissent in their grad students. But anyone who hasn't seen that before has never been a grad student or, horror of horrors, a Ph.D. candidate.
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