A silo mentality
William Brown at the Mancunion talks to Manchester University alumnus David Aaronovitch.
Toward the end Brown asks Aaronovitch about Murdoch’s influence on him as a Times writer.
“Over me? None whatsoever.
“The most important thing about where I work, is for me to be arguing with people. It’s pointless being at a paper arguing with people who already agree with you. If what you’re looking for is an echo chamber, then what you’ll do is work for a paper whose readers have views that already agree with yours. But what kind of challenge is that?”
Today, according to Aaronovitch, you see a “silo mentality” all over the place—a refusal by many people to talk to others who don’t share the same political opinions as they do. Nowhere is this trend more apparent in than the student body. As a close friend of the feminist campaigner and writer, Julie Bindel, who was recently blocked from speaking by Manchester’s Students’ Union, David Aaronovitch turned his guns on the student movement.
“Why are students blocking people from speaking who they don’t like? Well it looks to me as if we’ve brought you up to be such a nice bunch really. You don’t sod off out of the house at 18 and not come back like our generation did. And you don’t think your parents are a bunch of shite, you actually quite like them.
“It’s a bit like the argument that we haven’t let our children play enough in the dirt because that actually effectively inoculates you against viruses. Have we been so incredibly protective, are you so precious, that whether or not you feel slightly bad at any one moment matters more than whether or not something is true?”
That might be a little unfair. I think the core idea is that some ideas can inspire persecution of relatively powerless people, and that therefore it’s better not to give those ideas publicity. I don’t think that idea is completely wrong – in fact I don’t see how it can be completely wrong, given what we know about Nazi Germany, the Balkans, Rwanda, Mississippi – you get the idea. But of course that idea can balloon out until it makes people afraid of almost all ideas, and there’s your silo mentality.
This tension plays out constantly. It’s all over that encounter between Sam Harris and my dear friend Maryam Namazie last week – Maryam thinks groups like Pegida and people like Douglas Murray are dangerous to refugees, Muslims, immigrants, but she also thinks the way to deal with that is to argue. Harris thinks Douglas Murray is “pre-stigmatized”…and Harris’s fans think Maryam deserves their verbal abuse. It’s complicated.
“Somebody coined the term ‘vindictive protectionism’,” he continues. “It’s where people claim to be active on behalf of other people who they think are being offended or denigrated. They use this as an opportunity to get pleasure from condemning someone else. The only time you can legitimately be very nasty to someone else is when you accuse them of being offensive or morally wrong. You can be really horrible [to] them, whilst pretending to be the virtuous one.”
And you can have a good time doing it.
Mentioning the recent case at Goldsmiths University where Iranian exile, feminist and ex-Muslim, Maryam Namazie, was shouted down by protestors from the university’s Islamic Society, Aaronovitch laughs at the absurdity of one protestor who cried out “safe-space, safe-space!” when confronted by Namazie.
“Look, the men were behaving very badly at the front of the show. But when they’re kicked out, the women protesters at the back start off trying to be really offensive. But actually, Maryam engages them in debate and suddenly there is something going on there which is outside everybody else’s control.
“There’s a dialogue going on. They are talking to an older woman who actually has been a victim of Islamic extremism. Free speech allows things to happen which you don’t expect.”
Especially when Maryam is around.
Fair enough, but…I did learn a ton when I was a young PoliSci major (yes, I know I’ve outed myself as a Biologist and a Playwright already – it took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. So now I’m a professional eccentric)…anyway, to get back to the sentence – I learned a lot from the speakers of opposing, even obnoxious, views that my instructors brought in to introduce us to, well, to obnoxious ideas, because they understood what the wide world was like. When my Political Sociology instructor brought in the head of the local John Birch Society, the students didn’t walk out in offense. We listened politely, challenged him with rigor in Q&A, and had a very long, fruitful discussion in the next class session. This turned out to be crucial for me. This jerk ran for office in our state a few years later. If it hadn’t been for that exposure, I wouldn’t have known about his odious views. I probably wouldn’t have voted for him, because he was clearly a Grover Norquist-like Republican, but there are much worse things than being anti-tax. Being anti- anyone not white, Protestant, male, and wealthy counts among the things that are worse.
So I hesitate to say where we should draw the line. I have heard many such odious speakers, and did not see them converting the audience, or inciting them, unless the audience already agreed with them. Most college students are fully capable of holding their own in a Q&A with this sort of person, and it does prepare them better for the people they’ll meet in the real world.
Oh, I too hesitate to say where we should draw the line. Thass what I’m saying. I never know where to draw it.
Still, it’s easy to support not giving some of the true haters a platform; but at the same time, I sometimes think that makes them more dangerous, because then they claim we’re scared of their ideas because we can’t offer anything against them.
It’s the same problem we have in Biology – to debate evolutionists or not to debate evolutionists. In the end, it always seems to be a situation of heads they win, tails we lose.
“. But actually, Maryam engages them in debate and suddenly there is something going on there which is outside everybody else’s control.”
Ah, free, ex-Muslim woman talking to Muslim women who are suddenly not being directly supervised by the men. I can see that that would lead some interesting places.