Let Coulter Speak

You may not like what she has to say, but that doesn't mean you should stop her from saying it.

Much has been said about the recent news that Ann Coulter, prominent American Barbie doll and conservative commentator, has been blocked from speaking at the University of Ottawa by a mob of angry student activists. This event tells us a lot about the nature of modern culture and the decline of our institutions of higher learning. And what it tells us is ugly.

I'm an atheist and a social democrat. While he was president, I thought that George W. Bush was a dangerous clown. This means that I have no use for Coulter's defence of a proselytizing Christianity, of the invasion of Iraq, or of fiscal conservatism, which in my book simply protects privileged elites in the vicious hierarchies of capitalism.

Yet I also believe in free speech. Not just in speech I "like," or that makes me happy, but in all speech. That means I defend Coulter's right to speak, if for no other reason than people like her make us critically examine and sharpen our own political and religious beliefs – as writing this column is also forcing me to do. And I regret missing her recent talk at UWO, which my students told me about last night, since I always enjoy a good laugh.

Yet as John Stuart Mill tells us in On Liberty, it's foolish to act as tyrants and silence minority opinions, for if the opinion is right, "we are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, [we] lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."

One crazily ironic aspect of this situation is that some of Coulter's critics defend censoring her speech in the name of religion. Do you mean theocratic religions that believe in an omnipotent, omnipresent, invisible Big Daddy in the sky who, from time to time, sends his emissaries to our planet with various ideas and writings that contradict each other? Do you mean those religions that defend mass murder in the name of sectarian schisms? I refer you to the Crusades, the Thirty Years' War, the Irish Troubles, and that hotbed of religiously inspired mass killings, the Middle East.

According to the theistic religions, various animals can or cannot be eaten, killing heretics and non-believers is acceptable, suicide is either a sacred act or a sin, certain days of the week are holy, and the divine being will listen to the prayers of ailing children and football teams desperate for a late-season win.

Surely enlightened people in this day and age are not required to respect the irrational and contradictory beliefs of religious groups while obnoxious conservatives like Ann Coulter are intimidated into silence. This is sheer hypocrisy. At least Coulter has a sense of humour, unlike most religious zealots.

The mindset of the group at the University of Ottawa who shut Coulter's talk down was revealed by a CBC radio interview with one of their leaders. She talked about how the University of Ottawa championed "positive speak," without which campuses wouldn't be "safe." Besides reeking with New Age feel-good narcissism, the Orwellian message here was clear: only the official message counts.

She went on to talk about how free speech is built on a foundation of "mutual respect." Well, that rather depends on what beliefs the person in question is defending. If she believes in a giant invisible Lizard God who follows her around, insisting that she always wears Nike sneakers and refrains from eating pepperoni pizzas on Friday night, then I would say that no degree of belief in freedom of speech will make me respect her ideas. Yet to paraphrase Churchill, I will defend her right to speak or write about them to the bitter end, as long as I have the right to critique and ridicule them. All without violence.

One major reason why this sort of debate even arises on university campuses today is that, more and more, our institutions of higher learning have become extensions of the shopping mall. Students, administrators, and many professors see the university as a consumer outlet along the same lines as the local Wal-Mart or Burger King. Its product is information, or more strictly speaking, degrees. Its customers are students and their proud parents.

This new view of the university as a fast food outlet for the mind leads administrators away from a dedication to reason, debate, and facts toward the idea of universities as degree-granting machines that want to keep their customers satisfied at any cost. After all, those customers pay for the universities (well, partly). Hence the use of class evaluations to hire professors, grade inflation, political correctness, campus speech codes, the graduation of illiterate students, and an intolerance of people like Coulter.

Free speech isn't free if you simply shut down people who don't agree with you. It's also not about feeling good all the time or having your political and religious views rendered immune from attack by the state and its laws. In fact, in real debates, at least some people's feelings and beliefs are shaken: that's the very test of the depth of the debate. Sadly, universities today are more and more reluctant to encourage students to engage in debates about fundamental social, political, and religious issues. Conformity, fear, and unthinking universal tolerance rule the day.

Universities should be temples not to whatever deity is most popular with the student body, but to dialectic, to rational debate. You learn by thinking through a problem, by debating it. You learn exactly nothing by silencing debate: you only narcissistically block ideas that upset your well-entrenched but no doubt fragile worldview.

Of course, there are other groups in history who have used threats and force to shut down democratic debate. History records how one such group enjoyed gathering at night, wearing brown shirts, and throwing objectionable books in a fire to keep their hands toasty warm as they worshipped their Leader and chanted their favourite slogans.

I trust the University of Ottawa will be handing out boxes of brown t-shirts and copies of Ann Coulter's collected works at next year's orientation. Don't forget a few jerry cans of gasoline: things burn quicker that way. Gott ist mit uns.