... here is Pinker's speech.
... more here.
... and here's Nat Hentoff on Obama's euthanizing of 4th Amendment.
I am the son of a police officer and one of my nephews is a police officer. The primary function of the police is not to prevent crime, which can only be done by policing society, which can only result in the deprivation of freedom. Police are supposed to restore order and bring to justice those who have disturbed that order. A police state is by definition not a free society.
It's hard not to see this, though, as extremists of one ideological bent confronting extremists of their opposite bent. I think both sides of the issue have valid points to make, and both use overblown rhetoric (oh! if we allow this it's the end of the world!) that does more harm than good.
ReplyDeleteAs much as I respect Prof. Pinker, he's missing a few points about his psychology of taboo. The most important one is that taboos are not merely about who you offend in your spirit of free inquiry; they are also about those in power having final say over those not in power. The academy has never been a democracy, it's always been a hierarchical institution. That affects discourse, too. In other words, there have always been limits to free speech in the academy—and yes sometimes those must be rebelled against. But sometimes those limits were there for a sound reason.
A lot of this seems to me about making the academy into a political arena, which in itself seems counter to the idea of free inquiry.
Well, a further problem, I think, is that the academy has become a political echo chamber, and also something of indoctrination center. I think you and I, Art, are on the same page when it comes to free speech -- the more of it the better, the freer the better. But surely, the idea that our security is so fragile that we can only protect it by giving the government free and complete access to our private communications is not merely a bad idea; it is an evil one.
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