Jonathan Rauch forcefully defends freedom of speech and liberal science in his short and crisp "Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought". Originally published in 1993, the book is even more relevant today than it was back then, resulting in an expanded edition in 2013. With brisk and efficient clarity, Rauch exposes the authoritarian intellectual underpinnings of the nominally liberal thought police that hold sway over America's universities. He goes further and argues that these initiatives - although carried out with the best of intentions - pose a grave danger to the very foundations of the liberal system. Ultimately, he says, "The answer to the question “Why tolerate hateful or misguided opinions?” has been the same ever since Plato unveiled his ghastly utopia: because the alternative is worse."

The book's tone is captured nicely by one of Rauch's incendiary passages:

If you are inclined to equate verbal offense with physical violence, think again about the logic of your position. If hurtful opinions are violence, then painful criticism is violence. In other words, on the humanitarian premise, science itself is a form of violence. What do you do about violence? You establish policing authorities — public or private — to stop it and to punish the perpetrators. You set up authorities empowered to weed out hurtful ideas and speech. In other words: an inquisition... It is bad enough to have to remind people that there is no right not to be offended, and that criticism is not the same as violence. It is deeply embarrassing to have to deliver this reminder to people at the center of American intellectual life.

The core of Rauch's argument is that "Epistemology — one’s view of who can have knowledge and when — is politics." That line could very well be the tagline for my 2017 reading theme on the integrity of Western science. This book gifted me a clear statement of how all of the philosophy of science reading I've been doing relates to larger political questions. Rauch has an explicitly Popperian view on the philosophy of science: "you may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it." For Rauch, skepticism and empricism are the pillars of the liberal system. I'm a bit concerned about how his overall argument holds up in the face of the holes that the modern philospher Godfrey-Smith pokes in Popper's theories, but to be fair, none of the critiques of free speech that I've ever heard have contested Popperian epistemology!

The book is full of little gems like those above - sentences that crystallize ideas that have been amorphously floating around in my brain all year. Rauch writes beautifully, tracing the genealogy of liberal thought and synthesizing millenia of Western history to make the case for why we must prevent restrictions on free speech and free thought. He recoils in horror from Plato's intellectually authoritarian regime. He rejoices in the skepticism of Montaigne. He whips us through a tour of major Enlightenment philosophers and ends with our good friend Sir Karl Popper.

Rauch then extends our intellectual journey up to the controversy over Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses". Rushdie's searingly controversial novel earned him a big target on his back - in the form of a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. For Rauch, this represented a defining moment in Western intellectual history:

It showed how readily Westerners could be backed away from a fundamental principle of intellectual liberalism, namely that there is nothing whatever wrong with offending — hurting people’s feelings — in pursuit of truth. That principle seemed to have been displaced by a belief in the right not to be offended, which was quickly gaining currency in America.

Rauch covers an astonishing amount of ground in this book and I felt like I highlighted about half the book as I tore through it. His principled, clearly argued position on free speech was just the antidote I needed for the philosophical morass I got sucked into during undergrad. I'll close with another one of my favorite quotes - some practical advice for free-speech campaigners in the hostile territory of the modern academic postmodern left:

The standard answer to people who say they are offended should be: “Is there any casualty other than your feelings? Are you or others being threatened with violence or vandalism? No? Then it’s a shame your feelings are hurt, but that’s too bad. You’ll live.” If one is going to enjoy the benefits of living in a liberal society without being shamelessly hypocritical, one must try to be thick-skinned, since the way we make knowledge is by rubbing against one another.

Full review and highlights at https://books.max-nova.com/kindly-inquisitors

Kindly Inquisitors - Likewise Book Reviews

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