Jeff Jacoby: Highway to the Danger Zone
By Michael McLaughlin
(Trigger warning: flippant and possibly humorous sentences ahead.)
Following last week’s reaction to Jeff Jacoby, I was left wondering: has our collective sense of subtlety reached so low a point that a single word, “unsafe,” describes both a child without a seatbelt moving at 80 mph and one seated behind a computer screen Zooming into a high-school assembly? It seems a coterie of well-meaning Exonians calling to de-platform Jacoby, a relatively mainstream conservative voice, have bought into the Woke’s linguistic charade. Words can harm. Students are hurt.
Students. Feel. Unsafe.
A quick train of thought, a bit of extraneous punctuation, and poof: Safety deified! And this would be lovely with an apt mythology, a Greek moniker (Krývo), and a slew of other, unseen gods: Exploration, Growth, Thought, Provocation, Subtlety, Freedom, Forgiveness. But Safety stands alone, above all, and the Woke forces us into a most insidious logic trap: I disagree, but you are hurt, therefore I cannot disagree.
A brilliant trap too. It leaves the opposition in a nearly impossible position, framing the argument as if it were a fight with a child; you lose either way, but especially if you lose. And what does it say of the Woke ideology that any opposition is isolated and summarily cast aside as racist, bigoted, or xenophobic?
Lost is the complexity of a caring and considerate dissent. Lost is a deeper understanding of human connection, intellectual adventure, and a goodness that goes beyond a delicate eggshell dance. Lost is nuance; can an anti-racist stand with Black lives and against Black Lives Matter? Consideration of one another’s feelings is a laudable goal. So, too, is giving space to grow, err, reflect, laugh, and challenge. The most diligent hypochondriacs raise children in pristine bubbles with immune systems that never learn from provocative bacteria and viruses. Their children enter adulthood in a state of extreme fragility, unable to explore the world lest even the slightest encounter causes irreparable harm. We, too, do a disservice to our students by slowly adopting a highly sanitized, curated discourse on our campus. Our students deserve better than an echo chamber, even if it is a comfy one.
I am not suggesting speech without boundaries. Safety is likely a deserving god, if one among many. I am merely suggesting that we restrict speech rarely, only in the most extreme circumstances, and with the greatest of hesitancy. It is not a coincidence that our forebearers laid out a freedom-of-speech as the first amendment to our founding documents. Speech provokes thought, and restricting the former generally diminishes the latter. Dissent moves us forward. Perhaps the pendulum has swung a bit too far in the direction of safety and perhaps it is time we dial it back a little. Tear down Jacoby’s logic if you disagree (a few Exonian articles did just that) or criticize a poor performance as you would any bore, but do not silence dissent.
Too often we allow a crackling voice or a few tears (or perhaps a protest or two) to end stimulating conversation, and more significantly, to end self-reflection. A stale air seems to be settling in over the Exeter culture. Voices are silenced, opinions cancelled, careers ended and doors to ideas bolted shut. Division ensues. We hunker down in our respective camps. I label virtue signalers and sanctimonious justice warriors that guard a carefully constructed “safe” space, and they one-up the response with their own labels at the ready—bigot, racist, sexist. Doubling down on repetitive orthodoxy (repeat “I am Woke” five hundred times please) then leaves little room for novel, intellectual encounters; Exeter’s principal purpose, raison d'etre, lost in the pious harmony.
Restricting speech, restricting discourse, restricting thought—these are the ultimate “attacks on personhood,” on our very being. Cogito, ergo sum (Descartes, 1637). Beware the insidious logic trap: I disagree, but you are hurt, therefore I cannot disagree.
