Willful Ignorance

By Daniel Balserak | Sunday, April 11, 2004

As I ate lunch one day late last term, I tried to read the "Roomies" strip in the Daily Dartmouth, but when I got to the last panel, someone had torn it out. All other things aside—and I mean no offense or criticism towards author and artist Kevin Pedersen '05—this would not distress me enough to warrant the effort of getting up and scrounging around Collis for an intact copy. Something about the opening panels of the strip, though, gave me a feeling it would be worth it: in the first, a panicked student sitting at his computer yells, "I don't like the words used in this mass blitz! Angry reply!"—a reference, I suppose, to those students so offended at Sheba's use of the bizarre phrase "booty-popping handstand" that they demanded that the group apologize publicly. Next, the character exclaims, "I don't like the words used on this poster! Tear it down!" After a short search, I found the whole strip, last panel included: the other 'roomie' asks the first "Hey, why'd you throw away my copy of the Review?" and a pair of eyes cowering under the bed reply "Because they're too closed-minded." Although the frequency of incidents such as these may make the assumption dangerous, I do not feel the need to make explicit to a sophisticated audience the various levels of hypocrisy and foolishness involved in such a self-indicting act. The perpetrator did, however, shed some light on the sort of minds that threaten the livelihood of this College. We are engaged in a fight against some who are willfully ignorant, but also against some who seek to impose their ignorance on others. The comic-strip vandal falls into the second category.

Among these, there are a few who have decided to take it upon themselves to facilitate others' efforts to be ignorant—witness a recent mass blitz entitled "Recycle Your Dartmouth Review!" in which the author proudly proclaims he has organized a service that will, at your request, pick up the latest copy of the Review at your doorstep and toss it in the recycling bin for you. At the very least of its faults, this service panders to the politically active student afflicted with tremendous physical apathy—would it really be so hard to just recycle it yourself? In its totality, though, this service is symptomatic of something much more sinister than mere laziness. It displays an active disrespect for the exchange of ideas. Sure, the fatalist could argue that if a student isn't going to read the Review, he just isn't going to read the Review, and thus the recyclers are doing nothing more than a favor for the environment. But to request that our publication be whisked away from the door before it can assault one's sensitivities is to distance oneself deliberately from ideas different from one's own. It is an attempt to expel and ignore ideas that might make one uncomfortable—a consummate display of intolerance. Wait a second, isn't tolerance what Dartmouth is all about?

In retaliation, an opponent might likewise charge the Review with hypocrisy; we here on the staff are often accused of intolerance as a result of our railings against the administration's excesses in pursuit of "diversity." For the sake of argument, let us grant our critics their charge.

What, then, is wrong with being intolerant of intolerance? Well—everything, frankly. All of us are familiar with the slippery-slope argument against censorship, and given our administration's alarming propensity for it, the slope here at Dartmouth is slippery indeed. On a more basic level, however, it is worth pointing out that by matching our supposed intolerance with theirs, the recyclers have simply stooped to our level—surprising, when so many of our detractors claim to hold us in ideological contempt.

Willful Ignorance

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