Author: James Rowles

James Rowles is a writer, teacher, international lawyer, and international development expert.

He is particularly interested in the Epistemology of Truth, and how mass propaganda, social media, and other phenomena shape the nature of consciousness and the ascertainment of facts in the world today.

James holds an undergraduate degree in History (Modern Europe) and law degrees from Stanford University, and a Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) in International Law from Harvard Law School, where he has also taught as a Lecturer on Law.

James is a polyglot, who speaks fluent French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, and also knows other languages. His regular if not daily reading includes U.S. newspapers, the Guardian, die Welt, Le Monde, El País, and Veja.

Categories
Academic freedom Freedom of Speech Reading and Thinking

Free Speech at Stanford: Associate Dean for DEI urges “balancing test” between free speech and diversity, equity, and inclusion

See

Tirien Steinbach, “Diversity and Free Speech Can Coexist at Stanford; We have to stop blaming, start listening, and ask ourselves: Is the juice worth the squeeze?” Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2023 (2:00 pm ET);

Tirien Steinbach, the Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Stanford Law School, offers a defense of her controversial intervention in the conflict over Judge Duncan’s speech at Stanford Law School recently.

At the same time, however, her article reveals the fundamental flaw in the approach of university administrators to the relationship between DEI and free speech.

She writes,

Diversity, equity and inclusion plans must have clear goals that lead to greater inclusion and belonging for all community members. How we strike a balance between free speech and diversity, equity and inclusion is worthy of serious, thoughtful and civil discussion. Free speech and diversity, equity and inclusion are means to an end, and one that I think many people can actually agree on: to live in a country with liberty and justice for all its people.

The fundamental flaw in this reasoning is the assumption that free speech should be “balanced” against diversity, equity, and inclusion, or any other societal goal.

Balancing free speech against any goal of society (Who decides what are and ranks societal goals? Who balances? What standard or test is used to balance?) is a slippery slope that leads very quickly to the curtailment of free speech.

The only balancing test that is necessary or desirable is that administered by judges between the near absolute value of free speech in a free and democratic society, on the one hand, and the likelihood of speech producing immediate physical violence or other physical harm, on the other.

The classic tests are still valid: “Don’t cry ‘fire’ in a theater” or give directions for arson in the middle of a riot.

Our legal system has carefully defined the few limitations on free speech that exist in our constitutional democracy.

Free speech is not only a societal goal, it is a constitutional right.

There is no need for university administrators or anyone else to introduce any new “balancing test” for limiting free speech.

The Spirit of Voltaire

See also,

1) Tunku Varadarajan, “DEI at Law Schools Could Bring Down America; After the Stanford episode, Ilya Shapiro sounds a warning: The threat to ‘dismantle existing structures’ is an idle one in English class. But in legal education it targets individual rights and equal treatment under the Constitution,” Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2023 (6:50 pm ET);

Categories
Freedom of Speech Identity Politics Race wokery

What is the meaning of “woke”?

See,

Thomas Chatterton Williams, “You Can’t Define Woke; The word is not a viable descriptor for anyone who is critical of the many serious excesses of the left yet remains invested in reaching beyond their own echo chamber, The Atlantic, March 17, 2023 (7:00 a.m. ET).

Thomas Chatterton Williams seems to have been reading my mind.

I’ve been thinking over the last few weeks about how the Democrats have been ceding the ground and issue to the Republicans by not criticizing some of the positions taken by leftist extremists who want to control speech, or cancel professors who express views they disagree with.

Where is the full-throated defense of freedom of speech one might expect to hear from liberal Democrats?

Are they afraid to criticize excesses by their own followers the same way Republicans are afraid to criticize the excesses of Donald Trump?

Is it simply fear of the Internet mob?

What the Democrats are losing is the support they might receive from Republicans or Independents if they made clear that most Democrats don’t agree with these extreme views, which are often lumped together as being “woke”.

Thomas Chatterton Williams points out that the term “woke” is now useless as a tool of argument or persuasion. He calls on us to be more precise in our arguments, which may help us all focus on the real issues.

The Spirit of Voltaire

Categories
Reading and Thinking

The crisis of free speech in America: Recent events at Stanford Law School

The following comments are by a Stanford Law School graduate

See,

1) Conor Friedersdorf, “What Stanford Law’s DEI Dean Got Wrong; Tirien Steinbach’s approach to a recent free-speech conflict on campus disempowered students,” The Atlantic, March 15, 2023 (5:25 PM ET);

2) “Free speech: Yale law students are lost. They are the new Stalinists. And if they are lost, we may all be lost,”
The Eighteenth Century Club, March 16, 2022;

What is going on? The events at Yale and Stanford Law Schools should be a warning of flashing red lights and sirens for all those who are concerned about the practice of democracy in the United States, and elsewhere.

Where has this intolerance of free speech come from? What is causing many of the best and the brightest of our students at top elite institutions to turn away from one of the cornerstones of democracy?

We had better find out, and take corrective action soon before “the new Stalinists” take over the the intellectual “superstructure”, as Karl Marx would put it.

Have these students read Marx, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Hayek? Have they read Thomas Paine, or Voltaire? Have they studied the Enlightenment in Europe and the philosophical underpinnings of democracy?

Have they studied the history of socialism and communism since 1848? Or spent time in a country where there is no free speech? What are their views on free speech in Iran, Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia?

Something is fundamentally wrong. Those who believe in democracy and know a little history need to pay attention and to start taking corrective action.

Stanford Law School has been the home of great constitutional law teachers and scholars. I had the privilege of studying Constitutional Law with Gerald Gunther, who grew up as a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany. I remember Gunther recounting at a small informal lunch his experience in his small town on Krystallnacht, November 9-10, 1938.

Stanford also has hosted outstanding visiting professors, like Leon Lipson from Yale Law School, a preeminent expert on Soviet Law. I recall taking Lipson’s seminar on Soviet Law, and studying the Soviet show trials of 1936-1938. Lipson knew all about free speech in the Constitution and practice of the Soviet Union.

Mauro Cappelletti, another Stanford Law Professor (and concurrently professor of Comparative Law at the European University Institute in Florence) was the leading expert in Comparative Constitutional Law in the world. I recall taking his class in Comparative Law, and the critical role assigned to freedom of speech in modern civil law constitutions and legal systems.

Stanford Law School has a proud tradition of supporting freedom of speech.

Given the gravity of the situation represented by recent events at Stanford and Yale Law Schools, Stanford Law School should consider establishing an endowed chair for the teaching of Freedom of Speech Law, and establish a Freedom of Speech Program which would bring together scholars who could also address the subject from comparative and historical perspectives. Such a program could serve as a focal point for the study and teaching of the subject throughout the university.

Categories
Reading and Thinking

A liberal’s critique of woke jargon

See,

“Nicholas Kristof,”Inclusive or Alienating? The Language Wars Go On,” New York Times, February 1, 2023:

Categories
Freedom of Speech Race racial equality of opportunity

“The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males.”

See,

Sherelle Jacobs, “The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males; ‘Anti-racist’ hyperbole has become a convenient excuse not to properly examine our own history,” The Telegraph, January 30, 2023 (9:00 pm).

Few seem to have the courage to denounce the excesses of “anti-racism”–which tragically and ironically sometimes assume the characteristics of racism itself.

While some in the class of victims of racism may at times obtain important advantages (e.g., academic posts or television news jobs) as a result of anti-racism policies which discriminate on the basis of race, in the long run racism will not be overcome by adopting measues that are racist in themselves.

Members of “the white race” and their ancestors are not the only human beings who can be guilty of racism.

Moreover, it is worth recalling the fact that “race” is not itself a scientific concept.

Sherelle Jacobs of The Telegraph draws attention to ssome of the “anti-racist” excesses that obscure an accurate view of history, and discriminate against others on racist grounds.

She herself, she recounts, was denied an opportunity to speak at a recent conference at her alma mater. She, being of mixed-race background, was prohibited from speaking on account of her “proximity to whiteness”.

Jacobs writes,

We should never deny or downplay the dark side of Western history – nor the strangely double-edged story of Western freedom.

But here’s the thing. The evil “whiteness” stuff is getting out of hand. Everywhere one looks there are excesses. Take the decolonised university courses that seek to purge Dead White Men (the intellectual cousin of the Evil White Male) from the curriculum. Or the obsession with toppling statues of figures such as Cecil Rhodes. That’s before we get onto the full-blown anti-white discrimination. When I attended a colourism workshop at my old university not long ago, mixed race women, including me, were prohibited from speaking on account of our “proximity to whiteness”. Even worse is the trend towards barring white people from black spaces altogether. Two Canadian theatres have sparked an outcry by limiting performances to an “all black-identifying audience”.

As loathsome as racism is and has been in the past, we need to understand that there are many forms of racism, which becomes particularly evident when we look at the wide range of societies in this world and its some eight billion people.

Perhaps we would do well to focus less on the past and more on the present and the future, which we ourselves are responsible for shaping, and to continue our pursuit of a world in which, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., individuals “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”.

The Spirit of Voltaire

Categories
Academic freedom Freedom of Speech Religion

Academic freedom versus blasphemy; Showing a copy of a painting of Mohamed costs a Hamline University lecturer her job

1) Vimal Patel, “A Lecturer Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job; After an outcry over the art history class by Muslim students, Hamline University officials said the incident was Islamophobic. But many scholars say the work is a masterpiece,” New York Times, January 8, 2023 (Updated 7:38 a.m. ET);

Analysis

Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, co-signed an email that said respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” At a town hall, an invited Muslim speaker compared showing the images to teaching that Hitler was good.

Spirit of Voltaire

Categories
Epistemology of truth Propaganda Race Reading and Thinking

“Wokeness” at Princeton and Stanford: Who will fire these university administrators, who out of cowardice, coddle students attacking the fundamental purposes of a university?

George F. Will describes one of the latest university skirmishes with “wokeness”.

George F. Will: “Wokeness in all its self-flattering moral vanity comes for a statue at Princeton,”Washington Post, January 6, 2023 (7:00 a.m. EST);

The madness he describes, of “woke” students demanding this statue be removed or that name removed from a building on the basis not of reason but of their uninformed infantile rage, is a welcome reminder that freedom must be defended not only at the gates against outsiders, but also in the inner sanctums where future leaders are groomed and basic attitudes toward democracy and its essential freedoms are forged.

Who is really at fault when ignorant student mobs demand this or that action by a university administration in subservience to some mindless incantation of a higher cause, like opposing racism?

In the French Revolution, the higher cause was “Reason” and the enemies were the Church, the aristocracy, and those opposed to Reason. Ultimately “enemies” included anyone who disagreed with the zealots. Many heads were chopped off by the new machine called the guillotine.

To be sure, the “woke” themselves are at fault, for it is their obligation to get an education and to free themselves from their own ignorance and prejudices.

But professors are also at fault, to the extent they fail to stand up to the demands of Unreason in their classrooms. They have a duty to foster the development the Enlightenment values of their students, from freedom of expression to the defense of diverse opinions held by individual students.

“Woke” students make their demands from a position of overweening self-righteousness. They demand that they be protected from views that might make them uncomfortable.

But surely it is the duty of the professor to protect all of hus or her students from the stunting intellectual effects of enforced conformity.

Many a professor wants to do just that, but without strong backing from university administration officials they often cannot perform this most essential function of their jobs out of fear that their jobs or prerogatives (e.g., teaching the courses they want to teach) may be adversely affected.

So, in the end, winning on the battlefield of ideas ends up being a question that is decided by university administrators.

How tragic this situation has become, even at our best universities, is revealed by the recent Stanford University administrative guidance on “appropriate” speech.

See,

1) Sheila McClear, “Stanford Releases ‘Harmful Language’ List of Hurtful Words to Eliminate; The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative seeks to rid Stanford, and perhaps the world, of troubling terms like ‘American’,” Los Angeles Magazine, December 29, 2022;

.

Categories
Identity Politics Race wokery

The decline of Christianity and wokery and other dangerous nonsense that may fill the void

See,

1) Charles Moore, “Christianity’s retreat has left the West vulnerable to harmful new beliefs; Our societies are in a severer muddle, which makes for fertile ground for woke zealotry,” The Telegraph, December 23, 2022 (9:00 pm);

Charles Moore points out how absurd wokery’s obsession with controlling speech is given the other things going on in the world.

Categories
Epistemology of truth

History and the “woke ” onslaught

1) Robert Tomns, “Western civilisation is surrendering to the woke totalitarian onslaught; This year has given little reason to hope that the push to rewrite our history might soon be defeated,” The Telegraph, December 21, 2022 (9:00 p.m.);

Robert Tombs is co-editor of the website History Reclaimed

Robert Toombs describes examples of what he describes as rhe “woke” onslaught on history andcWestern Civilization. The examples he cites are extraordinary. He makes a powerful casevthatnwe all need to be vigilant and resist thevrewriting of historybto conform to the precepts of a new “woke” orthodoxy.

Categories
Epistemology of truth Identity Politics Race Reading and Thinking Social media

History, activists, and the truth

See,

1) Megan McArdle, “A fight among historians shows why truth-seeking and activism don’t mix,” Washington Post, August 29, 2022 (7:00 a.m. EDT);

2) James H. Sweet, “IS HISTORY HISTORY? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present,” Perspectives on History August 17, 2022;

3) Bret Stephens, “This Is the Other Way That History Ends,” New York Times, August 30, 2022.

Further evidence of the weakening belief in freedom of speech is provided by Megan McArdle, who recounts the latest brouhaha over an article by James H. Sweet, the president of the American Historical Association, who warned against the excesses of “presentism”, an excessive preoccupation with the present and the influences of current beliefs on the writing of history.

His basic argument is that it is a mistake for historians to allow themselves to be overly influenced by current debates and current views of what are right or permissible opinions.

It is distressing to have our attention called to this phenomenon, which one might term the infinite expansion of the present moment, which obscures the realities of the past and perhaps also the potential and some of the possibilities of the future.

One suspects that the phenomena is related to the growth of social media and its extreme focus on the present, and the increasing focus of television media on what is happening at this very moment, with all the excitement of the latest “breaking news”.

What is most disturbing in McArdle’s report is her account of journalists being criticized not for telling the truth, but rather for telling a truth which does not support the conclusions which activists want to support.

We need to build support among the younger generations for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and the free play of ideas–all ideas. One might start with classic texts, like those of John Stuart Mill, and some history of what advocates of the Enlightenment like Voltaire and the Encyclopedists were pushing for in the eighteenth century.

Indeed, we are in great need of a renaissance of the eighteenth century mind, as its devotion to liberty and freedom of thought has come down to us in the last three centuries.

We have experience with Soviet and Nazi systems of thought control, and other examples on the Left and the Right, and the excesses and crimes to which they have led.

What is called for is a renewed and robust system of civic education, in the schools, in churches and other places of worship, and in colleges and universities at every level and in every corner of the land.

The Spirit of Voltaire