Following up on the idea that many students and administrators are reinforcing bad habits in a vicious circle against the grain of basic cognitive therapy practices:
‘We are not denying that college students encounter racism and other forms of discrimination on campus, from individuals or from institutional systems. We are, rather, pointing out a fact that is crucial in any discussion of stress and its effects: People do not react to the world as it is; they react to the world as they interpret it, and those interpretations are major determinants of success and failure in life. As we said in our Atlantic article:’
The humanities are in quite deep, but the social sciences have more rigor and method in dealing with the world and what we can know of it (empirical research, data analysis, peer review). The turf wars going here on will likely affect all of our freedoms, sooner or later.
Here seems a wiser guide in dealing with differences of thought and opinion, rather than asking individuals to forego their own experiences and understanding by joining collective mass movements which organize hatreds into ideological struggles and which don’t condemn violence:
“First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.’
‘Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. ‘
‘Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. ‘
And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.”
-John Stuart Mill ‘On Liberty: Chapter II-Of The Liberty Of Thought And Discussion’
See the previous post.The Intellectual Cowardice Of The Crowd-Charles Murray At Middlebury College
Charles Murray’s Account Of The Middlebury College Affair
Repost-From The Liberal Bastions-James Baldwin, Often
Related On This Site:From FIRE.org-’Federal Government Mandates Unconstitutional Speech Codes At Colleges And Universities Nationwide’Greg Lukianoff At FIRE.Org: ‘Emily Bazelon And The Danger Of Bringing “Anti-Bullying” Laws To Campus’