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I’m Sofia Rosenfeld. I teach history at the University of Pennsylvania. You’ve probably heard that universities are up in arms over the discussion of the war in Palestine and Israel. That there is panic and chaos in all directions.
In fact, what you have been reading is not the whole story. And I think that rather than condemning universities as places where kids can’t do well and teachers can’t do well, universities actually offer a kind of model for how to talk about difficult and fraught topics.
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This fall, I have been teaching a course on the history and theory of free speech and censorship. What happened, of course, is that a war in a faraway place, Gaza, Israel, shaped our conversations on campus in a very particular way.
Not only did the students, quite rightly, engage in reflection on this topic, but external forces also intervened.
So, in some ways, it seemed like an odd situation to be discussing free speech with students who were experiencing its changing contours around them. We could have put this aside and tried to keep the real world out of the classroom and return to our beautiful texts from the 17th and 18th centuries. But in fact, it seemed like there was an elephant in the room and we needed to address it.
What I think is really important is that students learn, in a sense, to think with history. Not only think about the past, but apply it in various ways to the present. Generally, I don’t ask students, “How do you feel about this?” I ask them, for example, “What would John Milton, radical poet and author of the first major defense of unlicensed printers,” what we would call freedom of speech, “what would Milton have said about the possibility of banning the speech of hate in the public sphere or on campus?
And then we went from there. I watched students engage in thoughtful conversations with each other. I saw students in my classroom sitting with other students with whom they did not necessarily agree politically. What I didn’t see was thousands of students yelling at each other in public spaces or defacing each other’s property and unable to maintain friendships across political divides. I saw no poisonous anger. And I didn’t see incredible fear.
In fact, when students came to talk to me, I found that they often said, “I’m looking for ways to talk to people about this. I’m not sure what I believe. I want to have a conversation with my friend, but I don’t want to offend her or say something that could be hurtful while we discuss our opinions.” I found students searching, probing, and looking for ways to talk to each other. And I think that’s how, in a sense, we could all think about how to approach conversations in difficult times, whether at the proverbial Thanksgiving dinner table or in the public sphere.
And I don’t want to in any way minimize how difficult it is to talk about war, especially with people you disagree with. It’s emotional. It’s political. It’s moral.
And people’s temperature rises very quickly. I’m not saying they weren’t often difficult. I’m not saying they weren’t hurtful at times. But what we learn in universities is that it’s okay to ask very difficult questions. Sometimes presenting arguments that are very out of place. I think it is a habit of thinking that a student can develop, not just in a history classroom, but can carry into life.
You should say what you want to say and be direct about it. And the other person has a certain obligation to listen to you. And ideally, he will respond to what he just said as a position that they can interact with. It shouldn’t be about: “You don’t know because” or “that’s not a genuine feeling” or “how dare you say that” or “where have your morals gone?”
You say something like, “I hear you say this, this is where I find points of disagreement. Here’s why I disagree.” In reality, you don’t have to end up agreeing. I mean, we’re not looking for consensus. We live in a very boring world. If only people had experiences so similar that they all ended up on the same page.
Our pluralism is one of the wonderful things about our democracy. But pluralism also cannot be just a bunch of warring factions. We need some sense of solidarity with each other. So maybe you agree to disagree, but you agree on some principle that lies at the heart of your disagreement. Or maybe you agree about the moral hazards, even if you disagree about what the political consequences should be.
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This takes us back to Milton in the mid-17th century, which today would seem like a pretty dark place to talk about. But let me say this: Milton had a very interesting idea: we never know what is true without trying it. And you can’t test your ideas without letting them work, introducing them directly into other ideas. And if you lock yourself away intellectually, you have no way of checking the validity of what you’re thinking or saying. You have no way of knowing what a good counterargument might be. And sometimes, you might come away from that kind of combat even more confirmed that you’re right. And that’s fine. But if you don’t test them at all and stay in your own little world and immediately block everyone who disagrees with you, you deprive yourself of the opportunity to think more expansively.
If I want to get rhetorical and sophisticated about this, I would say that democracies need very few basic principles. One of them is some kind of commitment to the truth. The second is some kind of agreement on the rules of engagement, whether in talks or elections. And third and finally, perhaps most importantly, democracies require some form of solidarity with others. Some feel that people’s fate is important to others. If you can keep that sense of norms alive, I think it’s a very nice foundation, upon which 1,000 different opinions can flourish.
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