Knocking about at the academic freedom conference

That's what I've been doing - in Chicago. There was a get-together there, prompted by the decision of DePaul University not to give Norman Finkelstein tenure. As someone who thought that decision looked like it breached principles of academic freedom, I decided to hop along to the conference and sample what the speakers had to say.

OK, not really. But, courtesy of Monthly Review, you can in fact listen to what they had to say, and so I did.

Here are a couple of low points. I began with Noam Chomsky's contribution. Chomsky couldn't actually be there but there was a video message from him. It contained a reference (start 13 minutes in) to the President of Iran's 'silly statement' about homosexuality in Iran; and Chomsky ironized about the media and commentators leaping on this statement...

... that deeply offended Westerners who have such a stellar record in defending gay rights ever since gaining independence centuries ago.

Chomsky went on to add that George Bush had been governor of a state that outlawed sodomy. You might wonder why this should be the benchmark for gauging Ahmadinejad's remark. Elsewhere in the same speech, Chomsky himself spoke of the good effects on American culture that the decade of the 1960s had wrought. And the first response to Ahmadinejad's remark did not come from 'commentators' or the media but from the audience, many of whom, one might think, were the beneficiaries of those good cultural effects. They responded with vocal and mocking disbelief. Isn't that the better response? The man denying there were any gay people in Iran only happens to be the president of a country in which to be gay is to be persecuted and sometimes punished savagely; and so coming from him the remark was more than silly, though silly it was. But Chomsky had to ask how much room 'we' have to criticize 'them'. The answer is, some room - on account of changes that have lately been occurring in democratic societies and which Chomsky invokes when it suits him to do so. To deny people the use of that space is of clear apologetic intent. It says don't judge them by that standard; judge them by this one. And if you always judge by the worse standard...?

Then I listened to Norman Finkelstein defending himself over the charge of incivility (start 17 minutes in). The gist of the defence was that it didn't matter if one was uncivil provided that what one said in an uncivil way was true. If the thought has ever crossed Finkelstein's mind that his views about what is true may be fallible - as is the case for most of the rest of us - and that some of his interlocutors may sometimes be wrong in good faith, and that an opponent can be worthy of respect even when you disagree with what he or she is saying, I must have missed him voicing it. He also gave in his own defence the example of Karl Marx's polemical dispositions. Strangely, Finkelstein confessed to having some reservations about Marx's famous judgement on John Stuart Mill:

On the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

It is not a judgement of Marx's that is especially to his credit, but this circumstance seems not to have had an effect on Finkelstein's thinking.

[Still knocking about...]