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dcnovice -> RE: Curiouser and Curiouser (5/28/2014 5:08:47 PM)
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quote:
I'll hold out for DC swinging back through.
Well, damn. Who can resist an invitation like that? [:)]
In my maddening way, my thoughts on thoughts are complex and probably contradictory. Let's see if I can make sense of them in a way that might make sense to others too.
MR. JEFFERSON'S MANDATE
One of my favorite inscriptions in a town rife with them circles the rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial: "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Jefferson wrote that in a September 23, 1800, letter to Benjamin Rush. To me, that's the paramount purpose of the First Amendment and perhaps even liberty itself. If our minds can't be free, neither can anything else. People have the right to believe in the Trinity, the superiority of men, the evils of same-sex marriage, the merits of Celine Dion, the folly of white shoes before Memorial Day, and so forth. I think a free society needs to do its damnedest to let its members minds' roam freely, even at the risk of landing in bad neighborhoods.
So far, so good. Many of us are probably on the same page about this.
AND YET . . .
The tricky part, for me, is that some thoughts are truly toxic--to the thinker, to those thought about, and perhaps even to society at large. The desert monks, whose spirituality played a huge role in shaping the faith and values of the West, were endlessly vigilant about harboring "bad thoughts"--impulses that led to sin. Indeed, what we think of as the seven deadly sins began as a list of "evil thoughts."
More recently, folks in recovery programs have learned to be on guard against "stinking thinking" that can yank one back into the quicksand of self-pity, self-centeredness, and assorted forms of self-destruction. In a socioeconomic context, a key example of stinking thinking is the destructive mindsets that trap people in poverty and dependency. On a larger scale, the 20th century served up example after brutal example of how truly stinking human thinking can get: "Jews deserve death"; "Bolsheviks deserve death"; "Counter-revolutionaries deserve death"; "Uppity Negros deserve death." The heart-rending list goes on.
"What then must we do?" as the photographer kept asking in The Year of Living Dangerously. (I think he was quoting Tolstoy, but I'm too lazy to look it up.)
WHAT THEN?
Step one imho is to resist the allure of easy answers. Step two is to distinguish between the government and other parts of society.
In theory, the government's role should be simple: Ensure freedom of expression for all. In reality, things are much trickier. In the U.S. we accept various legal constraints on free expression: copyrights, libel laws, truth-in-advertising requirements, restrictions on pornography, rules against violating national security, and I'm not sure what else.
Even trickier, I think, is that we expect/allow government at various levels actively to promote certain thoughts. We fund VOA and various other tools for spreading American values. We mandate warnings on cigarettes. We run schools that spend a dozen years per kid imparting thoughts galore to students. We even put words into kids' mouths via the Pledge of Allegiance, which disquiets me. Each of these actions could be a lively thread on its own.
All this to say that legislation about hate crimes is not the sudden, dramatic departure from U.S. tradition and law that it's sometimes portrayed as. It's yet another facet in the thorny question of the government's role in world of ideas. That doesn't, of course, mean that such laws are good policy. Indeed, I'd say they aren't--at least in general. I do, as ever, see two important nuances.
The first is that we've largely forgotten a key reason for hate crime laws: the sad fact that bias crimes were sometimes minimized or even excused when folks in authority shared the prejudices of the perpetrators. Crime Library reports that no white man in the U.S. was ever punished for lynching before 1915. I've read variations on that elsewhere. In my own lifetime, I remember reading about a judge who declared from the bench that he'd given the guilty defendants the minimum sentence because their victims were gay. Hate crime laws, by giving federal prosecutors a legal foot in the door, were designed to remedy this.
The second wrinkle is crimes, such as lynching, that are intended to terrorize and subjugate whole classes of people. I can see the logic in punishing them more severely; the crime's effects ripple far wider.
MRS. OBAMA'S MESSAGE
As the First Lady specifically noted, she was talking about "hearts and minds" rather than laws. Nowhere did she suggest that those making bigoted remarks be policed or prosecuted or punished. Her focus was on individual actions, not governmental policy. Encouraging students' to challenge others' thinking strikes me as the opposite of Orwellian.
What she advocated, in fact, was a classic remedy for foul speech--more speech. She encouraged the young adults before her to speak up, to offer a different perspective when confronted with bigotry. That may, she noted, mean ruffling a few feathers, but surely free speech is worth that. Liberty gives Aunt Agatha the right to opine about "those people"--and others the right to call her on her prejudice. A key question I have for the First Lady's critics has remained unanswered in this thread: How would you advise fledgling citizens to respond to expressions of bigotry?
Dear God, I don't think I've ever gone on quite this long before. Maybe about my health. Thanks to anyone who made it to the end!
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