All We Need to Do is Talk

Two weeks ago I wrote an article for The Campus about how certain brands of leftist activism, especially those on this campus, have created a hierarchy of classes, which dictates admission into our collective discourse (see: “Jared Leto and the Thought Police”). A week later an article was published in response (see: “We Too Are Angry”). It didn’t contradict what I had written so much as confirm what I had thought, that this brand of activism doesn’t want a conversation. It doesn’t want to branch out; it simply wants to preach to the choir.

This tendency to divide manifested itself especially acutely this past weekend. Blake Shapskinsky, President of the Collective Mind SuperBlock, reached out to one of the authors of the response article to ask if they would be willing to participate in a debate over the topics raised by the two pieces. The offer was declined. More than the student’s simple refusal to engage in conversation, what really shocked me was the student’s assertion that such ideas should not be the topic of discussion. It’s not that the student believed such subjects too trivial for elevated discourse. To the contrary, the student thought them too important to be at the heart of dialogue. This is both misguided and irresponsible.

To refuse to engage in conversation is antithetical to the academic tradition; it can never be an option. Man’s closest encounters with greatness have not come by way of complacency. Rather, such accomplishments have been the product of a restlessness of thought and being. From Galileo’s reimagining of the solar system to Marie Curie’s isolation of radioactive isotopes, comfort was never enough. The Olympic motto, “Faster, Higher, Stronger”, gets at this human urge to perpetually expand the boundaries of what we know to be possible. Indeed, peer-review sits at the heart of the academic system for a reason. To join in critical dialogue with another is to embody this appetite for growth.

In The Common Good, Noam Chomsky says, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” If you want to talk about a false consciousness, there it is. We let ourselves believe that we’re cutting edge, that our eyes and ears are open to change, but more often than not our conception of intellectual novelty is looking at the idea we entered the room with painted a different shade of grey.

If we were to follow the precedent set in “We Too Are Angry,” we would never stop drawing the limits Chomsky describes. We would draw them between blacks and whites, men and women, cis and trans, homo and hetero, and so on and so forth. We would acknowledge that everyone comes here with a different base of experience and belief, but never challenge ourselves to think outside our own.

Consider this anecdote told by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “I recently spoke at a university where a student told me it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had recently read a novel called American Psycho, and that it was a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.” We cannot reduce people to their lowest common denominator. Fifty years after the March on Washington it should go without saying that the tone of one’s skin or the sex of one’s lover should not be the determinants of the worth of one’s opinion. Only in respecting everyone’s intellectual capacity can we realize the dream that is the marketplace of ideas.

The success of democracy is that it allows the dissemination of ideas to affect tangible changes in people’s lives. For millennia such transformation was only possible by way of violence, but the revolutionary notions of free speech and association have changed that. Appeals to the mind are the liberal’s weapon of choice; it’s the ballot not the bullet. From the regulation of industry to the deregulation of the female body, these appeals have had success when they reach across the aisle to convince others, not condemn them. I ask that we all treat our time here at Middlebury with the respect it deserves. It is a lucky thing to be surrounded by minds like these, eager not just to teach but also to learn.