By Brian Stewart
Thursday, March 28, 2024
TED — the popular “ideas organization” devoted
to the pursuit of knowledge “without an agenda” — has never been known for its
modesty. It is hosting its annual conference in Vancouver in April under the
banner “The Brave and the Brilliant.” This is a large claim, but there can be
little doubt about the brilliance showcased on the TED stage. The bravery at
TED, however, is another question.
This year’s TED conference comes at a time of crisis in
the realm of ideas. Institutions and organizations that were supposed to be
bastions of free thought have become strongholds of ideological conformity and
monoculture. Nowhere has this been truer than in academia. The condition of
free thought and free speech on America’s college campuses has gone from bad to
worse with unnerving velocity. Illiberalism and identity politics were
incubated in American higher education for decades before culminating — especially
in the most elite and expensive schools — in a mushy culture of “safetyism.”
This has nothing to do with the physical safety of students and everything to
do with suppressing dissenting opinions.
Worse still, the surly and stultifying culture on campus
has migrated beyond the university walls to the wider world of business,
entertainment, media, and politics. “We all live on campus now,” to borrow
Andrew Sullivan’s wry description of our predicament. Behind this new
discipline is a reactionary body of thought in which the whole idea of Western
civilization and American history is assumed to be racist and oppressive. Over
time, these pseudo-intellectual tropes congealed into a species of open and pervasive
antisemitism that has been on perpetual display since Hamas’s savage attack on
Israel on October 7. In every major American city, protests outside
Jewish-owned businesses and calls for the elimination of the Jewish state have
proliferated — not in response to any Israeli policy, but rather in support of
a jihadist death cult that launched a vicious pogrom against Israeli Jews.
In the world before this latest explosion of Jew-hatred,
ivory-tower administrators spared no effort in prosecuting every offense, real
or perceived, against other minorities. Bans of the Confederate flag, to cite
one example, have been the coin of the realm. In pointed contrast, expressions
of antisemitism have now been met with insipid disavowals of “violence” and
“hatred in all its forms.” Three elite university presidents, testifying before
a congressional committee, couldn’t explain why their institutions suddenly
jettisoned their refined sensitivities and permitted virulent antisemitism on
free-speech grounds. Apologists for antisemitic mobs wish to benefit from free
speech but not to the point where it allows the expression of views contrary to
their own.
This double standard — one for a protected class of the
politically and culturally ascendant, another for those at the mercy of the
protected class’s favored opinions — produced a backlash.
And this is where we return to the pusillanimity of TED.
In January, TED caused an uproar by announcing that it would host Bill Ackman
as one of the main speakers at its April conference. Ackman is the
controversial hedge-fund manager who was instrumental in pushing out Harvard’s
president, who was forced to resign from her office (though she still teaches
at Harvard) over her record of plagiarism and also allegations that she was
insufficiently concerned about antisemitism. Another person invited to be a keynote
speaker at the conference was the journalist Bari Weiss, editor of the Free
Press and a prominent defender of the Jewish state. A handful of TED
fellows promptly resigned, accusing the organization of taking an
anti-Palestinian position and aligning itself “with enablers and supporters of
genocide” in Gaza.
It is not clear how TED will navigate the situation if it
becomes more dire, but there is little reason for confidence that it will stand
for principle. Anyone familiar with the breakdown in the culture of free
speech, and the way that “anti-racism” has merged into latent or blatant
antisemitism, will not be surprised by the controversy over the demonization of
Israel. And anyone familiar with TED’s travails of late will not be surprised
that hostility to free speech has arisen from within its ranks. A precedent had
recently been set by high-ranking TED officials proving that certain ideas, no
matter how respectable, could be justifiably curtailed in the face of a mob.
At the TED conference in April 2023, Coleman Hughes, an
independent podcaster and author, was invited to lay out the case for
color-blindness — the quaint notion that people should be treated equally
regardless of race, both in their personal lives and in public policy. Hughes
had a forthcoming book on the subject, so TED had summoned him to British
Columbia. But a curious thing happened once Hughes left the TED stage. His talk
was suppressed after a small but vociferous band of the most intolerant TED employees
objected to the idea that human beings ought to be judged not by the color of
their skin but only by the content of their character.
This episode was further proof that many elite
institutions have been captured by an illiberal successor ideology known to its
critics as “wokeism.” It’s no exaggeration to say that the commanding heights
of American life — prestige media, social media, entertainment, academia, and
the current majority party in Washington — have enforced a stifling conformity
that borders on political religion. Formerly venerated repositories of liberal
thought have been converted en masse to a theological vision that permits
little if any dissent. The creed of individual freedom and equality of
opportunity that defined American liberalism in its heyday has been swept away,
not only on campus but across the cultural and political landscape. Erstwhile
liberal institutions and foundations have been transformed into hotbeds of
reactionary progressivism where racial progress is held to be a myth and the
ideal of racial equality is given rude, short shrift.
The Hughes controversy warrants more attention than it
has received. The day after the writer’s lecture, the head of TED, Chris
Anderson, informed him that an “employee resource” group called “Black@TED” had
taken issue with his remarks. After the conference, Anderson told Hughes that
the internal “blowback” had developed into a firestorm. The faction at TED that
took umbrage with Hughes’s talk was aghast that there would be any contemporary
support for a color-blind society — the animating philosophy of the American
civil-rights movement. The objective success of that movement in smashing white
supremacy and achieving official racial equality is largely forgotten. In its
place has grown up an ideology that casts the United States as fundamentally
evil. Rigid racial categories are invoked and said to reflect an irreducible
conflict between oppressor and oppressed groups. From this perspective,
color-blindness is an insidious principle inhibiting racial progress. As Hughes
has summarized his critics’ view, color-blindness is little more than “a Trojan
horse for white supremacy.”
The upheaval at TED would have been an excellent
opportunity for Anderson to stand up for Hughes and insist on letting him air
his views. But instead Anderson yielded to the mob. At first he wavered. Then
he proposed publishing Hughes’s speech, but only after insisting on a moderated
conversation between Hughes and a prominent critic of color-blindness that
would be distributed around the same time. Even after this highly unusual
condition was met, TED chose not to promote Hughes’s talk.
This capitulation received a rebuke from Hughes, who
meticulously exposed TED’s betrayal of its professed mission to be a neutral
arbiter in the battle of ideas. (Full disclosure: I have a slight social
acquaintance with Hughes and favor airing his argument, as a matter of both
principle and public interest.) In response, Anderson twice took to X, formerly
Twitter, in a vain attempt to defend TED’s craven conduct. In these mawkish
posts, Anderson acknowledges that Hughes’s talk set off an “intense debate” at
TED. By the looks of it, however, the debate was not nearly intense enough. The
TED employees angered by a remarkably mild argument sought to prevent its
circulation on the grounds that, as Anderson put it, the principle of
color-blindness is “not just wrong, but truly dangerous.”
If any TED employees found it preposterous to call the
philosophy of color-blindness “dangerous,” Anderson made no attempt to speak
on their behalf. Nor did he show his team or the wider world
that Hughes is not, in point of fact, propagating dangerous ideas. He might
have noted that anyone who claims otherwise is likely to be in the grip of an
odd and extreme ideology and free to resign, but he didn’t do that, either. A
major purpose of the Enlightenment was to substitute the criticism of ideas for
assaults on people. In this instance, TED employees, with the help of Anderson,
obliterated that essential distinction. In the process, a brilliant young
writer has been vilified as an intellectual maniac who brings harm on society.
This is nonsense on stilts. For starters, no one is made
unsafe by the thoughts in your head. Moreover, Hughes appealed to the
color-blindness principle that originated in the struggle against slavery and
was refined during the struggle against segregation. Providing a lucid
explanation of the philosophy undergirding the abolition of slavery and Jim
Crow, Hughes urged people to think and act without regard to the color line and
to do everything in their power to transcend it. He castigated race-based affirmative
action, which he seeks to replace with government support for those who,
regardless of skin pigment, used to be called the “deserving poor.”
Those in the business of promoting ideas should be
expected, at a minimum, not to go berserk in the presence of such an argument,
even if they disagree with it. But Anderson chose to discard the essence of
TED’s mission and placate those who elevate emotion above reason.
Instead of pushing back against the mob and upholding the
cause of free thought and free speech, Anderson bowed to those who don’t
tolerate views contrary to their own. Instead of jealously guarding the moral
space for true argument, he endorsed the notion that liberal ideas pose a
danger to individuals. Instead of firing those who conspired to squelch a TED
talk and defame its author (whom Anderson had personally invited), Anderson
caved to the heckler’s veto.
It would have been less astonishing if Anderson had come
clean and confessed that TED is no longer a values-neutral platform for ideas.
He might have argued that TED was set to become a different sort of
organization, explicitly aligned with the needs of the “social justice”
movement. But instead he pretended that those who hounded Hughes “believe in
the importance of ideas and in TED.”
To justify this risible claim, Anderson cited the “rich
debate” that has erupted in recent years on the subject of race. This is sheer
fantasy. If the conversation about race had indeed been so rich, Hughes’s TED
talk would have struck his audience as moderate and even banal rather than
shocking and dangerous. The strident and condescending response it generated is
proof that the debate is impoverished. It has been pitifully deficient of
imagination, nuance, and intelligence — the very hallmarks of Hughes’s style
and argument.
Anderson appears to understand that the cultural Left has
veered into extremism. He noted that Hughes’s views on color-blindness, once
typical among leftists, are today “generally regarded as right of center.”
Exactly so. But this is where Anderson, who concedes that his ostensibly
nonpartisan organization has fallen into the Left’s orbit, loses the plot.
TED’s mission, he insists, is “to offer powerful ideas to everyone in the
world, not just those from within one political group,” and he regrets the “storm
that has blown up” over Hughes’s talk. Nonetheless, he assures us, “we want a
growing diversity of ideas at TED.”
Alas, this does not withstand scrutiny. Hughes was
prepared to risk calumny to dispel what he regards as pernicious myths about
race in America. For his trouble, he was used and abused by an organization
billing itself as a platform for thinkers to disseminate their ideas. Hughes’s
defenestration will have a chilling effect on all those who venture to share
heterodox views.
Anderson’s statements on l’affaire Hughes demonstrate a
failure to understand his role and responsibilities as the custodian of an
institution devoted to intellectual freedom and excellence. At the end of his
meandering missive posted on X, he confesses, “I really long for a shift in our
culture.” But he doesn’t spell out what is wrong with the culture, what he’d
like it to become, or how he — as the head of a supremely influential cultural
organization — might help effect such a transformation.
Fortunately for the rest of us, the way to build a
culture of tolerance and liberty is no mystery. An example from Victorian
England reminds us that the madness of crowds, especially when combined with
backing from the wider society, is inimical to freedom. When John Stuart Mill
campaigned for the right to protest and speak in London’s public parks — the
famous Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park is a tribute to his triumph — his primary
concern was not government censorship but the enfeebled culture of free expression.
It was not “the tyranny of the magistrate” that chiefly suffocated the
conscience but rather the fear of social obloquy and ostracism for heterodox
thinking. “There needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion
and feeling,” he warned.
The failure to defend and maintain culture against such
powerful forces, especially in the upper reaches of our society, has been
evident for some time. As a result, old verities no longer claim many
supporters, and vast swaths of society can no longer think straight about
rightful authority. In 1975, Robert Nisbet argued in Twilight of
Authority that there was a critical diminution in “the traditional
institutional authorities that for nearly a millennium have been Western man’s
principal sources of order and liberty.” Nisbet spoke darkly of “twilight ages”
and “processes of decline and erosion.”
A vacuum obtains in the moral
order. . . . Retreat from the major to the minor, from the noble to the
trivial, the communal to the personal, and from the objective to the subjective
is commonplace. There is a widely expressed sense of degradation of values and
of corruption of culture. The sense of estrangement from community is
strong.
This degradation has been painfully demonstrated, in
microcosm, in the TED fiasco over Hughes’s views on race. It may surface again
in the dispute over antisemitism. On each of these questions, the progressive
cognoscenti now extol preposterous and sinister ideas. TED used to extol what
every genuinely free society requires: the art of conversation and disputation,
of giving both sides their say and listening to each with an open mind. Until
it commits once again to that mission, it will be an organization that tacitly
encourages the worst trends of modernity that put the entire architecture of
liberal culture at risk: the use of taboos and stigmas to enforce conformity;
the unwillingness to examine contrary threads of evidence and entertain
opposing points of view; the facile conflation of accusation with guilt; the
interpretation of thoughts and words as weapons; the failure of nerve by
leaders entrusted with preserving free institutions.
Until it returns to that mission, TED will be a useless
organization and ought to be treated as such.
No comments:
Post a Comment