Column by George Sibley
Campus Life – May 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
HAVING GOTTEN MYSELF institutionalized these days, in Western State College over here in Gunnison, I am following the Ward Churchill palpitations with a mixture of morbid fascination and dread resignation.
Churchill, a professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder, made some provocative observations back in 2001 about the 9/11 attacks, to the effect that the people of the biggest, pushiest and most imperialistic nation-state on earth should not pretend surprise when other people start pushing back. This was recently dredged up to make him the nation’s poster child for those forward-looking forces of extreme conservatism whose current push is to dismantle public higher education along with Social Security and everything else in the public sector.
A decade or so ago, we invited Ward Churchill to speak at Western because several of us had been using some of his best work in a Core class – some well-researched work on the terrible behavior of major mining companies on the Indian Reservations of the Southwest. But his schtick in his talk here was “the predator culture,” meaning basically all of us Anglo-Europeans unleashed on the continent, including, I guessed, the majority of his own ancestors, who were not Indians.
He is a dynamic speaker, and while much of what he said was grounded in unarguable facts, his aggressive organization of information did give us classroom fodder for some “critical thinking” (a big educational buzzword then) about hasty generalizations, extreme language, “tarring with a broad brush” and other fallacies of logic and expression ever more common in a society whose people – according to media apologists – only want to hear extreme and titillating opinions, which people like Churchill are happy to provide.
The experience did make me wonder, however, whether Churchill’s approach to researching and espousing his perception of truth really belongs in what we call higher education – or belongs, that is, in the sense of holding protected “tenured positions.”
For better or worse, “academics” try (note the “try”) to hold themselves to strict disciplines in what they say, teach and practice — disciplines grounded in developing and testing hypothetical truths that fit all of the evidence available, not just the evidence that fits the hypothesis. And that requires testing the hypothesis against all of the other hypotheses which might fit the evidence, and ultimately taking those findings to the skeptics and opponents within the discipline for a “peer review,” whereupon the peers sign off on at least the process whereby the academic approached his perception of truth — even if the peers maintain reservations on that truth itself.
This disciplined process sometimes leads to dense, heavily documented prose that is often pretty deadly, although certainly not always. Like Churchill, I haven’t gone through that whole formal process or developed that kind of conscious discipline, but 16 years of living and working with academics has led me to respect the intent, if not always the product. And farther than that – it has led me to believe a genuinely democratic society is only going to be possible if we can escape the extremes of rhetorical indulgence and try to bring some kind of discipline to the general public discourse.
Churchill is capable of disciplined hard work, but for the most part he marches to a different drummer. “You make your words your weapons and you say things that you understand to be true,” he said in a public speech at CU in March, “and you never, ever back up!”
Reading that quote in the Denver Post, I couldn’t help but put it beside something said by another campus agitator, David Horowitz. Horowitz, like Churchill, is a rabble-rouser who focuses on campuses, but he’s from the opposite end of the political spectrum. Horowitz stirs up the far right against people like Churchill, while Churchill stirs up the far left against people like Horowitz.
BUT THE EXTENT to which Horowitz and Churchill are birds of a feather is made explicit in words from Horowitz’s book, The Art of Political War: “In political warfare, the weapons are words and symbols because there is no time to reach the electorate with lengthy arguments – or even short ones.”
So with guys like these organizing the discourse, what we get a lot of in our society is word warfare, where words are weapons and the purpose is to raise a larger mob to go kick ass on some other mob, which is similarly armed with its own word-weapons.
One has to wonder what’s happened to the idea of words as implements of communication – a concept which seems absolutely fundamental to this democracy we’re supposed to be spreading. The idea of using words for a give and take of explanation, exploration, and fair argumentation, with some seasoning of humor, pathos and ethos, seems to be obsolete. We no longer stand by the notion that we should listen to each other, even to those with whom we disagree, if we are actually going to ever deal with issues.
I am of course aware that when the powerless try to use reason, the powerful often laugh and ignore them. And sometimes that leads the powerless to cease trying to communicate and start arming instead, with words, stones, guns or whatever. Liberals like me are feeling just that sort of frustration these days, and that’s leading to growing audiences on the left side of the house at the Churchill & Horowitz Roadshow.
I REALIZE THAT these observations raise some questions about free speech that many people feel we can’t even raise without stepping onto a slippery slope that will eventually cost us that freedom. But I think free speech is only half of the communication necessary if we are actually going to address the heavy challenges ahead of us: dealing with our debt, dealing with our swarming status as a species, sustaining our attempt at democracy and eventually learning to live intelligently on earth in intelligent societies. The other half of communication has to be responsible speech, which requires that words and symbols be assembled not to bash our opponents but to actually try to communicate with them. With responsible speech we might actually find that common ground where we can try to work things out in more or less good faith.
A colleague of Churchill’s at the University of Colorado, Patricia Limerick, gave us a model different from the Churchill & Horowitz Roadshow at the Headwaters Conference three years ago. She told us of a late-life effort by two of our founding brothers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who decided to reconcile their long years of political differences in creating our constitution and putting up with each other’s presidencies. They began a long correspondence on Jefferson’s request that “we should try to explain ourselves to each other, before we die.” That correspondence is one of the best things to come out of that first generation of official Americans – and more fruitful, it seems to me, than the Churchill & Horowitz Roadshow will ever be.
Churchill and Horowitz may come to that kind of curiosity in their old age, but in the meantime, if the guardians of higher education won’t stand up for the responsible speech that they impose on students, then things are just going to get meaner, and the word wars nastier.
George Sibley teaches at Western State College in Gunnison, where he also organizes conferences.
