In Order to Persuade You Would Need What You Lack: Reason and Right

Recently, there’s been a concerted effort by various “conservative” (read: fascist) groups to “go after” college professors who are “too liberal.” A lot of it has been below the surface of the tv news (can’t take valuable time away from talking about the missing white woman de jour), but it has received some blog coverage.

I think it’s terribly dangerous and deserves a lot more attention than it’s gotten. Movements like this are designed not so much to route out the one or two professors that they highlight, but to intimidate all professors, to get them to self-censor out of a desire to avoid trouble. And that’s not a good way to educate America’s young adults.

By the time a young person gets to college, they’re ready to have their cherished notions -- generally the notions they received from their parents -- challenged. And that’s as true of red diaper babies at Brown as it is of blue-blooded Muffy (funny how those colors now mean different things than they once did!) at Princeton or of the child of NASCAR fans who is attending community college. Being exposed to new ideas, new ways of living, and new people is one of the major benefits of college. Examining your unexamined premises, learning how to support your positions, becoming able to understand how and why others have adopted positions with which you don’t agree -- those are as important as any specific course of study that a college student takes. Gotcha goons reporting back to their fascist masters when a professor doesn’t toe their prescribed party line puts an end to this important aspect of education.

Which, even more than imposing their particular party line, is what fascists are really upset about when they begin these attacks on education. An educated populace, well versed in the ability to reason and argue, sophisticated enough to accept a diversity of opinions, and unwilling to simply accept the word of an authority because the authority “says so” is not the sort of populace that a fascist government can easily control.

I once was privileged to write about this at Eschaton, but I think it bears repeating. Fascists have always had to go after professors and educators. Roger Housden has a series of books (Ten Poems to Set You Free, Ten Poems to Open Your Heart, etc. ) that are fantastic, especially for people who never “got” poetry or had it ruined for them by an uninspired high school English teacher. Each book has, not surprisingly, ten very well-chosen poems and then a short discussion of what the poem is about. In Ten Poems to Set You Free, Housden includes an amazing poem: Throw Yourself Like Seed by Miguel de Unamuno:

Throw Yourself Like Seed

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit;
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
the man who wants to live is the man in whom life
is abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
but to live is to work, and the only thing
which lasts
is the work; start then, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your
own field,
don’t turn your face for that would be to turn it
to death,
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead
in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group
of clouds;
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

Here’s what Housden tells us about de Unamuno:

When the fascist General Milan-Astray stormed into the University of Salamanca to confront the elderly professor and poet-philosopher Miguel de Unamuno over his criticism of Franco and the fascist cause, Unamuno said to him:

At times, to be silent is to lie. You will win because
you have enough brute force. But you will not con-
vince. For to convince, you need to persuade. And
in order to persuade you would need what you lack:
reason and right.

The general shouted, “Death to intelligence! Long live death!” and drove the ailing poet out of the university at gunpoint. The poet suffered a heart attack and died within the week. It was 1936, soon after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

Mieguel de Unamuno was right. The reason why the fascists must fight college professors with the intimidation that we see today and with the brute force that we’re likely to see before this is all over is that they cannot convince. For, in order to convince, you must persuade, and, in order to persuade, you need what fascists lack: reason and right. If their ideas were truly persuasive, if their ideas were truly better, the free market that this group of fascists fetishizes would surely ensure their gradual adoption by society in general and college professors as well. The blind poet Milton himself remarked that, ”And tho all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?” Their ideas -- that we live in a perpetual state of attack by dangerous brown people, that women and gays are inferior, that George Bush was picked by the xian god to lead the world, indeed, that the free market is the solution to all of our country’s problems -- suck. They are not based upon reason and they are not right.

At times, to be silent is to lie.