Thoreau’s post on the potential pitfalls of advertising our presence to aliens who may be unfriendly reminds me of Robert Nozick’s morbidly delightful short story RSVP. It’s behind the subscription wall at Commentary, but can also be found in the collection Socratic Puzzles.

The Templeton Foundation has discovered that if you want to create the appearance of a lively exchange of divergent views, just ask a dozen people to answer a short question so insanely vaguely worded that you can be assured no two of them will actually be answering the same question. For instance: Does science make belief in God obsolete? With a dizzying array of potential values to plug into this function for the variables “science,” “God,” “obsolete,” and possibly also “belief,” you can generate countless hours of amusing pseudo disagreement!

Just to get a small flavor of the range of actual-questions that might be extracted from this sort of question-formula: Is the “God” in question here any type of “higher intelligence” or “higher power”; some sort of Einsteinian label for the underlying order of the universe; an entity defined by omniscience, omnipotence, and benevolence; or the much more determinate sorts of deities the majority of the faithful purport to believe in, who are said to have acted in a variety of specfic ways over the course of history?  (I add the “purport to” here because quite a few people who are nominally members of some denomination or another seem centrally committed to one of the more abstract definitions and more ambivalent about how literally the various historical claims are to be taken.)

How about science, then? The specific findings of physics or biology? Or the broader enterprise of seeking naturalistic explanations for events? The tendency to demand hypotheses be formulated in testable ways? Or even the much broader disposition to question, and to insist on apportioning one’s belief to the strength of arguments and available evidence?

Finally, what about “make … obsolete”? Does this mean rule out entirely, or decisively disprove? (Of course not: An omnipotent deity could create the illusion of his own non-existence as a “test of faith” or some such thing.) Or is the imagined incompatibility here a sort of “crowding out,” insofar as science appears to make God an unnecessary hypothesis as it begins providing rough solutions to mysteries we once turned to religion to explain? Is this a logical or philosophical question about how one ought to respond to contemporary science, or a psychological and sociological one about the empirical effects of wider scientific education?

So which is it? Beats me! Just bask in the wonderous diversity of views, almost as numerous as the potential readings of this meaningless question!

Via PJ Doland, you really cannot make this stuff up:

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”

[....]

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful,” she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. “They’d argue with your ideas.” This caused “subversiveness,” a principle English professors usually favor.

I think this and the Smith incident I wrote about below are both cases where in the background you’ve got something akin to the Foucauldian idea of power/knowledge, warped and applied in a way that I’d guess would have appalled Foucault himself. The basic idea, which I’m going to horribly bastardize, is that social power is exerted not just through obvious physical or economic coercion, but also in the ways information is categorized and used. One sense in which this is true is that a state’s ability to control a population is a function of the information (stat-istics) it can gather; another is that public discourse is conditioned by a framework that necessarily exists outside the discourse itself. Who gets to count as an “expert” whose views must be taken seriously? What forms of difference are expressions of a dissenting opinion, and which are treated as mere symptoms of a pathology? (Troublesome kids are now sometimes classified as suffering from “oppositional defiance disorder.”)

There’s obviously something to this notion, though Prof. Venkatesan’s professional specialty appears to be taking it to autoparodic extremes. Often, though, we see the idea deployed to argue, in effect, that speech is (often? always?) just coercion by other means; the traditional liberal distinction between speech and action is illusory. Speech that serves to marginalize a disfavored group, or to rationalize their unequal status, is therefore just disguised violence, and silencing the speaker just a form of self defense.

I doubt anyone will be surprised to learn that I think this is a pernicious and self-defeating line of argument. Truth has always been a powerful weapon in the arsenal of the oppressed; treating “truth” as nothing more than a weapon, however, saps it of that power.

Update: Oh dear… the face of harassment, from a Dartmouth Review interview:

Priya Venkatesan: One of the things that she did, this is also really interesting, was that she would always ask me how to spell things. That was her thing. She would say how to do you spell this? How to you spell that? I mean—what am I supposed to do?—so I would tell her. One time Tom Cormen was sitting in the class, and she asked me, how many T’s are in Gattaca. This was the kind of question she was asking, “how many T’s are in Gattaca?,” and I was about to answer her and Tom Cormen pre-empted me, “two t’s.” I’ll leave you to interpret it.

TDR: No. No, I don’t understand that.

PV: I have to tell you: it means tenure track.

TDR: Oh, okay.

PV: Because I wasn’t tenured track.

TDR: Oh, okay, yes.

PV: They were trying to intimate that I wasn’t ready for tenure track.

TDR: Yes, okay, I didn’t realize that’s what that meant.

Well, I’m sold:

It’s got to say something about the hypersensitivity of the contemporary American right that Iron Man—Iron Man fer chrissakes—can be cast as a piece of anti-American leftie propaganda. For those unfamiliar with the plot—which nobody should be, because the movie is awesome and ought to be viewed immediately—let me sum up without, I hope, spoiling anything important. The hero of this movie is brilliant American businessman and inventor Tony Stark who uses his genius to make weapons for the military. He builds his iconic suit after being kidnapped by unambiguously evil terrorists, in order to escape.  He then proceeds to kick a lot of terrorist butt, for which the Afghanis he liberates from various warlords are clearly grateful. The military at one point mistakes him for an enemy bogey, but is clearly portrayed as essentially on his side. (His best friend in the film is his military liaison, an Air Force Lt. Col.)

So, what’s the awful lefty anti-American aspect? Well, as a result of a certain betrayal I won’t give away, the terrorists are getting hold of large quantities of Stark’s incredibly powerful weapons and using them to inflict terrible suffering on civilian populations. Note that, even though this is inevitable in war, we are not directly asked to confront the suffering that the United States, too, must be causing: It’s the terrorists who are the problem. In any event, a newly reflective stark decides to stop making weapons, at least until he has a chance to rethink his company’s future direction.

Aaaand… that’s it.  That’s the big problem. Not any sense that the U.S. or the military is somehow fundamentally part of the problem as well—we’re left with the implication that the hero’s going to work arm-in-armor with the military. What’s intolerable is any hint of ambiguity, any hint of doubt. This is the fragile insistence of a movement that has lost its confidence.

Addendum: That said, this is also spectacularly silly, for pretty much the reasons Jim Henley lays out.

It’s a little depressing, on multiple levels, to see Jessica Valenti and Pam Spaulding celebrating because protesters at Smith College managed to shout down some bigoted halfwit who’d been invited to give a speech to the College Republican group on campus. Apparently, the “awesome feminists of Smith forced [anti-gay speaker Ryan] Sorba out after a mere twenty minutes of speaking, when he was drowned out by protesters.”

It’s sad first at a principled level, because two women who student feminists around the country look to as guides are endorsing the utterly illiberal idea that the proper response to bad speech—and after skimming a draft of Sorba’s preposterous forthcoming book, I can confirm that his remarks were destined to be both loathesome and stupid—is to silence the speaker. The man’s views may be repulsive, but the students who invited him were entitled to have an opportunity to evaluate those views and come to their own conclusions about their merits. Indeed, had the protesters sent in a couple of halfway-bright students from the biology and philosophy departments during Q&A, I’m confident they could have made the poverty of his reasoning embarrassingly clear to all in attendance. It probably would have made a hell of a YouTube clip, as well. Instead, by choosing bullying over persuasion, they handed this jackass the moral high ground, for what I can only assume is the first and last time in his life.

It’s also sad at the tactical level, because it shows how little some folks have learned from a decade of David Horowitz’s antics. Congratulations, guys: You’ve just elevated this obscure clown into the online right’s celebrity du jour. I’m glad you enjoy the video clip of the students shouting Sorba down so much, because you’re about to see a lot of it, on a hundred conservative blogs, as proof that those awful boorish feminists are so afraid of Sorba’s “ideas” that they’re unwilling to engage him in debate, or indeed, to even let anyone hear whatever “devastating” case he was planning to make. How many times does this scenario have to play out before people start to recognize that it always ends up as a PR coup for the supporters of the silenced speaker?

Addendum: The comments at Feministing show this to be an interesting Rorschach blot. Plenty of folks took more or less the position I did, provoking a variety of responses.

A number of people appear to think that showing up at an event for which a student group has properly reserved space, then making it impossible for anyone to hear the speaker, simply counts as countering his speech with theirs. I’m curious how many would take that view were the situation reversed; I suspect few.

A few think that “free speech” is not at issue because the government wasn’t censoring the speaker. Of course the First Amendment is not at issue for just that reason, but “free speech,” the broader concept, surely is. Some of those folks made a similarly confused appeal to private property. But, of course, the property belongs to Smith, which had allowed the College Republicans to use that property to host a speaker.

Most common, though, was some variant of the idea that free speech and open debate are wonderful, but this particular fellow is so hateful or so irrational or so beyond the pale that his remarks don’t count. But the value of endorsing “free speech” as a general principle is precisely to avoid having to make these kinds of decisions about the merits of the speech, barring some very specific exceptions like “incitement to riot.” Speech that isn’t controversial, that isn’t going to occasion protest, will never require us to invoke free speech as an ideal. Conversely, speech that is controversial—the kind of speech that might actually need the protection of that principle—is always going to be regarded as “beyond the pale” or “too much” by somebody. (Fill in the blanks yourself for the variant where this case is different because he’s not a “scientist” or an “expert.”)

Conservatives think Jeremiah Wright’s sermons are “hate speech”. “Men’s rights” activists say feminists regularly engage in hate speech. Presumably they, too, would like to send a message that those speakers are unwelcome on their campuses. You can say “well, their view is wrong and the Smith students’ view is correct,” but insofar as the disagreement is still there, this is pretty unhelpful: Everyone thinks they’re right, and so everyone feels entitled to drown out the speech they dislike. You end up with the meaningless principle: “Free speech, except when we feel strongly enough about how terrible and wrong it is.”

I suppose that works out fine in Northampton: If someone’s invading your safe space, someone whose ideas and way of life are not just wrong but deeply abhorrent, an assault on your identity and community by their very presence, then the community can hound them out—at least if enough people feel strongly enough about it. But I’m guessing LGBT folks in the rest of America might be less sanguine about living under that set of rules.

I wonder how many hard-line Republicans are going to Google “Operation Chaos” looking for information about Rush Limbaugh’s plan to bolster Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and instead discover that—back in the golden age before we passed that awful, restrictive, un-American FISA law—”Operation Chaos” was the CIA’s clever name for the practice of systematically spying on the correspondence of American citizens whose politics it disliked?

A judge in Canada has ruled to sustain a sexual assault charge against a man whose wife says she consented to being choked to unconsciousness before sex. Apparently rough play of this sort was a routine part of the couple’s sex life. There is some question as to whether she actually consented or is only saying so now, but according to the ruling, it doesn’t matter:

However, Crown counsel Mihael Cole successfully contended that an individual cannot consent to bodily harm, such as being choked to the point of unconsciousness. [....]

“Even if she had consented previously - or on that night - she cannot legally consent to sexual activity that takes place when she is unconscious,” the judge said.

Citing a line of case law involving voluntary whippings, brandings and canings - some from England - Judge Nicholas said the courts have generally ruled that individuals cannot voluntarily invite violent acts against themselves.

Really, now? Does this principle apply to boxers and rugby players? To patients under anaesthesia? Or only to couples whose sexual practices a judge finds unsavory?

Some libertarians out there think Larry Lessig, whatever his faults, might have a few ideas deserving of serious consideration. And that seems to have sent at least one supporter of strong IP hurtling over the edge. Over at Ars Technica, I take up the question: Is the creative commons really a Soviet gulag?

Addendum: I should probably add here that there are many areas where I don’t agree with Lessig—net neutrality springs to mind—and think he’s certainly due a critique. And even within Free Culture, the Fisher proposal to compensate rights holders harmed by file-sharing via a tech tax sounds like it’s probably a bad idea, though I should probably suspend judgement until I’ve read Fisher’s book. But it seems signally counterproductive, especially if you’re interested in seeing those legitimate criticisms aired, to have people screaming a lot of nonsense about Lessig as the reincarnation of Stalin. He’s an interesting thinker who makes lots of sharp and interesting arguments, many of which are on point, many of which I think ultimately fail. Pretending he’s a wild-eyed Red just repels sane people who can easily see that this is false. Some of those people are probably perfectly open to measured arguments that this or that view Lessig advances gets things wrong, but the tact PFF has taken creates instead a silly debate about whether one is “pro-Lessig” or “anti-Lessig”.

Andrew Sullivan notes this bit of news from the Netherlands:

The Dutch cabinet has proposed a ban on the sale of all hallucinogenic “magic” mushrooms because they could induce life-threatening behaviour. A bill will now pass to the Dutch parliament, where a majority of lawmakers are expected to back a ban after a teenage French girl who had eaten mushrooms died jumping from a bridge in 2007.

That is, of course, tragic, but I’m not sure why the answer is a ban, as opposed to more stringent enforcement of age restrictions; nor is it clear to me that this sort of awful occurrence is more likely with mushrooms than, say, alcohol.

On the other hand, I can testify that mushrooms may prompt stupid, risky behavior. I took a trip there (uh, a vacation, that is) some years back and figured I may as well give them a shot where they were legal. I then got the bright idea to go play some blackjack at the Holland Casino. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to cash in my chips when the pips on the cards began floating about.  I left $50 up, but would not, in general, recommend them as a performance enhancer for gambling. Or, really, almost anything else.