Free Speech

Rabbi Sacks: Debate for the sake of truth as opposed to victory….


 

Safe spaces for tyranny be damned…

 

H/T: Kay Wilson

The more Christian and Jewish the person, the more conservative (Enlightenment based) they are…

 

God loves those who argue (Shemot, Covenant & Conversation 5778)

JANUARY 4, 2018, 3:26 PM

I have become increasingly concerned about the assault on free speech taking place throughout the West, particularly in university campuses.[1] This is being done in the name of “safe space,” that is, space in which you are protected against hearing views which might cause you distress, “trigger warnings”[2] and “micro-aggressions,” that is, any remark that someone might find offensive even if no offence is meant.

 

So far has this gone that at the beginning of the 2017 academic year, students at an Oxford College banned the presence of a representative of the Christian Union on the grounds that some might find their presence alienating and offensive.[3] Increasingly, speakers with controversial views are being disinvited: the number of such incidents on American college campuses rose from six in 2000 to 44 in 2016.[4]

 

John Stuart Mill likewise wrote that one of the worst offences against freedom is “to stigmatise those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men.” That is happening today in institutions that are supposed to be the guardians of academic freedom. We are coming perilously close to what Julian Benda called, in 1927, “The treason of the intellectuals,” in which he said that academic life had been degraded to the extent that it had allowed itself to become an arena for “the intellectual organisation of political hatreds.”[6]

 

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