speech-codes

Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger__ syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression. But now he__ subject to Harvard__ speech codes that prohibit any __isrespect for the dignity of others_; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard__ Inquisition (the __ffice for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion_). Newton also wants to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to explain the laws of motion governing the universe. But his literary agent explains that he can__ get a decent book deal until Newton builds his __uthor platform_ to include at least 20k Twitter followers _ without provoking any backlash for airing his eccentric views on ancient Greek alchemy, Biblical cryptography, fiat currency, Jewish mysticism, or how to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse.Newton wouldn__ last long as a __ublic intellectual_ in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say __ffensive_ things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he__ drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn__ have Newton__ Laws of Motion.

Today pluralism operates as a court religion, while having less and less intellectual credibility. Betraying the plastic terminology in which its directives are framed are the additions to the __uman Rights Code_ passed in the Canadian province of Ontario in 1994. The Code cites __uman dignity_ to justify the criminalization of __onduct or communication [that] promotes the superiority or inferiority of a person or class because of race, class, or sexual orientation._ The law has already been applied to prosecute scholars making hereditarian arguments about social behavior, and its proponents defend this muzzling as necessary for __uman dignity._ But never are we told whence that dignity is derived. It is certainly not the one to which the Bible, a text that unequivocally condemns certain __exual orientations,_ refers. Nor are we speaking here about the dignity of nonengineered academic discourse, an act that the supporters of the Ontario Human Rights Code consider to be criminal if judged insensitive. Yet the pluralist advocates of human rights codes that now operate in Canada, Australia, England, and on the European continent assume there is a human dignity. Indeed this dignity is so widely and passionately accepted, or so it is asserted, that we must criminalize unkind communication. In the name of that supposedly axiomatic dignity, we are called upon to suppress scholarship and even to imprison its authors.