The Problem With Empowerment
An allegory on Free Speech
I have a gripe against empowerment. It is that we expect wonders to occur by symbolic acclaim. Merit be damned.
Dateline April 2019
There is a significant difference between the defense of free speech, and the empowerment of random speech.
I was listening to the Joe Rogan podcast with Nicholas Christakis and they briefly discussed his problems with Yale's Halloween debacle. As soon as they started talking about the rights of free speech of 20 year olds, the conversation went right to the matter of them being old enough to serve in war, and I'm thinking there's something terribly wrong with this argument. It seems to me that the point of the rights in the context of free speech in academia in particular is to facilitate the expansion of knowledge. And while you never know where the next groundbreaking argument is coming from, the last place on earth one should encourage babble is in the university.
I should start by pointing out my bias against the state of collegiate education. I am always fond of the aphorism that the British Navy conquered the world without the use of electronic calculators. There is much greatness to be found in the exploits of people who never attended college, but I am convinced that most of that greatness is of the sort not generally found in 20 year olds, or in undergrads. The American middle class is no easy place to survive given our economy and culture, but it also doesn't require a great amount of original thought. What it does require is some respectful attention and understanding of the theories under which America provides its structure that enables its citizens, and this study of Western Civilization has been neglected recently. I think much of that neglect comes at the behest of undergraduates who feel empowered by their very presence on campus. Of course they are empowered, universities empower them by accepting them and by heeding their complaints, mostly those about what their mere presence at university signifies. I tend to characterize this state of affairs as a matter of boorish bourgeois privilege and arrogance unworthy of any meritocracy, and have determined by my own brilliant insight that universities do not provide so much meritocracy, especially in the Humanities. It's rather sad to graduate such children into the harsh maw of market forces, and sad to watch the slow calamity of so many bean bag & ping pong businesses acquired industry by industry into oligopoly. As Pink Floyd said, 'Welcome to the Machine'.
This is not about political left or right, it is about the proper authority of a university as a certifier of knowledge. If you, as an undergraduate, are capable of unseating the intellectual authority of a professor, then fine. But it seems to me that there is only one way of accomplishing that if the process of university education is correct - that is the process of becoming a professor. So are Humanities professors defending or abandoning the process that matriculated them?
Let me use the following analogy. When you are a freshman, you are like a white belt in judo. You are instructed by black belts. If you think you can beat up a black belt, because the human body can assume an infinity of positions, then you are welcome to try and defeat your instructor. If you can defeat your instructor by smashing his head with a crowbar, you don't get a black belt - what you are doing is not judo and cannot be certified by the judo school. There should be absolutely no question about this.
The right of free speech is exactly like the right to challenge your instructor in a judo match. Use of a crowbar is random speech - it is not a credible position in the world of judo. You cannot win that way. And no white belt should be empowered to use such non-judo methods. The point of the right to challenge is so that even black belts can learn. The point of free speech and free inquiry is so that even professors can learn.
If a college professor is fired by the empowerment of undergraduates who in any other context is not considered professor material, then you undermine the very purpose of university. This is what's happening, and this is an abuse of the term 'free speech'.
Dateline March 2025
Six years later, I believe people think we have by dint of a ‘preference cascade’ put the wrongs of the past behind us, or at least off to the back burners of American discourse. I’m not so sure. After all, we’re not talking about the fires in Los Angeles any longer, but what has been destroyed has yet to be rebuilt. There may be a new quiet but a new quiet is not adequate to pass as a new normal. Reconstruction often fails. So let us keep in mind what egregious disruptions we survived, but not to simply put it behind us.
It has become tiresome to me to defend meritocracy and all such matters, not least because I recognize how much slack and corruption there are in our systems that should be meritocratic. Yet there is also the weakness of the human heart that attends to the disciplines of their institutions. How does one even know if adhering to the standards presented to you have any enduring merit? Is our society aligned so coherently? I think not. No such virtue is automatic. So the thinking on our feet must continue and it must be applied deeply.
Comfort is a pretense.
Mahmoud or Edward
In the headlines today is the squirrelly agitation of some micromanagement of immigration policy on the head of a Syrian-born Palestinian who spearheaded a ruckus at Columbia U in New York. We used to have a dude named Khalid Muhammad who was that kind of rabble-rouser who got sick and tired of the soft rhetoric of Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam. He later went on to found the New Black Panthers, got dismissed by the NOI and Congressman Kweisi Mfume distanced himself even further by cutting ties with the NOI. By the time he called for a Million Youth March in NYC, there were plenty of folks mumbling ‘give me a reason’ under their breath.
In those days we didn’t have a Department of Homeland Security, not that many of us understand its charter and what it’s actually supposed to be doing. Are they law enforcement? Are they immigration? Are they a ministry of truth? Anyway, they’re holding him in Louisiana and aim to boot him from America. These days we have some 14 Democrat Reps who are advocating for him.
The Democratic lawmakers who signed on to the memo are: Reps. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Mark Pocan (Wisc.), Nydia Velázquez (N.Y.), Delia Ramirez (Ill.), Ilhan Ohmar (Minn.), Jasmine Crockett (Texas), Summer Lee (Pa.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Lateefah Simon (Calif.), Gwen Moore (Wisc.), Nikema Williams (Ga.), Al Green (Texas), Andre Carson (Ind.) and James McGovern (Mass.).
So you really have to ask the question about free speech. Is this individual telling us anything that Edward Said hasn’t already covered? Is American democracy impoverished by the loss of his voice? I’m just picking a random article and I find the following:
It is difficult to imagine that during Said's lifetime at Columbia, with which he was associated from 1963 until his death in 2003, there would be any restrictions on the activities of pro-Palestinian organisations. Yet, 20 years later, in November 2023, in the context of Israel's very aggressive military actions against the civilian population of Palestine, Columbia University, Said's alma mater, banned two pro-Palestine groups, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace.Footnote5 Said would most likely vehemently protest the university's decision, since he believed that
Our role is to widen the field of discussion, not to set limits in accord with the prevailing authority. I have spent a great deal of my life during the past thirty-five years advocating the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by the way of persecution and genocide.Footnote6
Thus, unsurprisingly, the university ban, issued by the institution housing the Centre for Palestine Studies and Edward Said Archival Collection, was met with a swift response on social media. Quotes from Edward Said and videos featuring his speeches quickly went viral, contributing to a resurgence of interest in his works. Indeed, Moustafa Bayoumi, one of Said's students and co-editor of a significant collection of his texts from 1996 to 2006, noted in February 2024 a notable surge in sales, marking an elevenfold increase since October 7.Footnote7These include essays on the Palestinian issue and the one-state solution. In recent months, the momentum to boycott Israeli activities has notably intensified within American and European academic institutions. However, given Edward Said's well-documented perspectives on the responsibilities of intellectuals and the role of the university, it is plausible to suggest that he would not align himself with these protests. This stance will be explored and substantiated in our analysis.
I am inclined to consider that although few rise to the intellectual distinction of Edward Said (and a pretty good pianist too), it is entirely unfair to put him on the same playing field with rabble. And yet here we go again. How is it that Maumoud Khalil gets to represent free speech in our democracy? Perhaps the same way that Michael Brown got to represent young black men in our democracy, or how Kyle Rittenhouse got to represent young white men in our democracy. It’s the same way we remember BLM and forget SCLC. The same way we dance around our sacred Truffula trees like a mad Lorax, thinking once destroyed they will never grow back. Thus, every once in a while, the powers that write, and the representatives that vote give us a new symbol upon whose fate the entirety of our society’s future depends.
Would you raise your child to be Mahmoud or Edward? George Floyd or George Washington? I know. It’s not fair. It’s not fair to admit that some people are small minded and loud-mouthed - that their aim is to disregard or disturb & disrupt the peace. It’s not fair that some try to use crowbars instead of judo skills. It’s also not fair to those we claim to be intellectuals get dismissed in light of what happens to one poor schlub. But I think this schlub already has 14 of our nation’s powerful elite to author something that will change his green card to a gold card, or something like that.
But here’s an interesting tidbit. Guess how many classes of immigrants we have? We were just discussing this a month ago, remember? I count about 375 mind-numbingly arcane statuses for immigrants, refugees, asylees and various other folks with their unique conditions for entering the USA. Look at it. Consider at length what thought went into making these each a distinct stamp on the conditions under which one gets in or stays out. This is the line for the green card. This is your pass to the blessings of liberty. Obviously millions deserve it. Obviously some squander their opportunity. For example, this small subset is what we have reserved for Cubans:
What kind of persecution might we imagine a Syrian-born Palestinian received? I can’t imagine. I don’t know which provision applies to his case. Maybe news might give us some factual background. All the articles I see go over Khalil’s head. He may be the slippery slope - but if he is, we’ve already flopped ass over teakettle down the stairs on that score. J6, Antifa, how many hundreds more escaped the diligent attention of their respective Executive Branches? What consistency is to be expected?
What are we trying to build? What does this voice contribute? If he is removed from the population who will take his place? If he is returned to the population which path will he choose? I don’t think he has much choice; it doesn’t matter. He has already reached that level at which his symbolism will forever have more reach than his example. It is that myth-making force that is the actual enemy of real democracy.
Mahmoud Khalil is not the voice of the people. The voice of the people is the voice of the people. Empowerment… well it’s always about power. In that regard, the elites are showing their selves in a divided society unclear about the spirit of the law, a foggy state that will continue to the benefit of those fickle elites who think that abandonment of principle is the only way to deal with complexity.
PS. I’ve always believed in a one-state solution, in that I am in agreement with Edward Said, long after he has left the land of the living.
Sometimes you are the pure distillation of wry. Another round over here!
Five critical problems that make this article worthless.
1) No one thinks that "symbolic acclaim" will make merit appear. We think that popular ideas of merit, how to assess it and how to create it are wrong. We think, based on the universally available evidence, that forces like racism, colonialism, and other ideologies and biases distort actual merit. Your article being an exemplar of that.
2) An instructor's authority is based on their expertise. If their expertise is lacking or if they are not properly applying it, they no longer have any authority. They no longer have epistemic authority and they actually no longer have normative authority. This is why the university, despite your irrational biases, works. (And, yes, the British didn't need calculators to conquer the world... but they did need Newton and industrial development. You know, what the academy creates).
3) A student's speech rights is not based on whether they are right, and especially not on whether or not you are right. Students learn by expressing themselves and being mistaken. In fact, even teachers do so. This is how science happens.
4) The universe is not determined by Michael David Cobb Bowen's opinion. Your lack of belief in the merit of Khalil's opinion is as irrelevant as my firm lack that your opinion here is indeed worthless, both fallacious and tyrannical. It is true that free speech is intended to advance a public agenda, but that is not determined ahead of time by an assessment of a lack of value of a particular opinion. Even quite obviously wrong opinions are part of the public discourse. Even if one accepts the idea that some speech is so poisonous as to need to be removed from the marketplace of ideas, Khalil's does not, by any criterion, rise to that threshold, not least because he is right.
Moreover, Khalil is not Edward Said because Edward Said took decades to become Edward Said. Not all speakers need to have the breadth of knowledge and insight that Said had, not even for a healthy public debate. Michael, *you are not Edward Said, so do you not have the right to speak*? You have taken your antipathy to Khalil, without even having the intellectual honesty to quote him and demonstrate that he is not the equal of Said, and worked backwards to a position that would deny the freedom of speech of essentially the entire planet. But the First Amendment did not leave the right of freedom of conscience to geniuses, philosophers and sages. And yet, like most ideological conservatives, democracy and all of its prerequisites are to be binned when you don't like it anymore.
Honestly, how would anyone express their opinion that they dislike a policy under your maxim here? If they could not write at the level of a scholar, they would then not be able to dissent? There is a fascist devil on your shoulder, Michael. Exorcise it.
5) It is not only Khalil's freedom of speech that is being punished, but his right against unreasonable search and seizure, his right to fair trial, and all of his other rights. And it is also the rights of everyone else who agrees with him who are being threatened by extension, with the literal threat of imprisonment. You are almost certainly wrong about Palestine, but that's hardly material.
What happened to the idea that we may disagree with each other but will fight to the death for the right to disagree? Right, it died when a fascist takeover occurred. Shameful.