Speak the speech, I pray you.

By Nicholas Desai | Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Like the high school kid who taught himself to play his dad’s old acoustic guitar and now insists on hubristically strumming and re-strumming his entire three-song repertoire (often “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Day Tripper,” and “Jumper”) on the senior quad, a certain set of campus commentators also avail themselves to a tediously small arsenal of tunes. They are, in various renditions, “You Ought Not to Have Said That,” “Hey (What About Free Speech),” and, lately, “Does Anyone Have Anything To Say.” (There are others, but they never became standards.) The last one is pretty catchy, though pulling it off needs more chops than the first two.

Lots of ink is spilled over free speech, more specifically the rules that ought to govern it. Part of this has to do with the temperament of the students, who have been bossing people around since their sandbox days. (Having to persuade people is a little pedestrian, a tad bit junior college.) Part of it, though, is that much of what’s written is rhetorically defanged, and all that’s left is to gum the same old bromides.

Here is how it works: if someone hasn’t got the wherewithal to parry a verbal attack, the logical move, if they want to defend themselves at all, is to call attention to rules. If someone says, perhaps in a colorful way, that you’re full of it, and you find yourself sputtering and straightening your tie, something’s got to give, and it’s no surprise that on a campus where we recycle not only Earth’s resources but arguments that there is frequent recourse to rule-making, even if this rule-making is largely self-imposed, ad hoc, and certainly not enforced by Parkhurst. One could, crudely, compare this kind of debate and argument to a game in which the players are constantly whining to referees and winning on technicalities.

It hardly needs saying—or does it?—that the very idea of “free speech” implies that very few public utterances will appeal to everyone, and that criticism of speech that draws on logic and evidence is not censorship. Yet students seem to enjoy discussing the boundaries of speech more than the substance of speech. Excessive propriety—treated not as a means but an end—makes the talk languorous, and vigorous “speech talk” drives out the substantive argument.

Has it gone so far that some students even define permissible speech as that which is not grappling with an opposing point of view? In my capacity as editor, I once attended a singularly soul-destroying panel discussion, at which an audience member and panelist exchanged words and raised their voices. A girl behind me—no small percentage of the audience, by the way—practically gasped and scolded them, “Now it’s getting personal.” That a human could raise his voice over the topic at hand justified a gasp, but she did it because things were “getting personal.” No, no, no. Emotion, sarcasm, irony, and projecting one’s voice (though these, besides the last, were not exemplarily displayed that day, to say the least) should be expected and accepted. If that’s “personal,” in the sense of being out of bounds, then the campus discourse isn’t fit to run a block without its heart bursting.

Consider this hideous specimen, which I removed with tongs and rubber gloves from the darkest recesses of the internets. Sustainable Dartmouth sent a campus-wide blitz pertaining to “Carry Your Trash Week,” which included the following sentence: “We’ll all congregate on the Green on Earth Day (Sunday, April 22) to weigh our individual trash bags, make a big pile, take pictures, sunbathe, have a drum circle, smoke lots of pot...okay, maybe not the last two or three.” Besides the unintentional comedy of the whole affair, apparently the bit about drum circles and smoking pot was intended as a joke. Well, ha-ha, and into the trash can with you, blitz. But for others, this apparently touched a nerve, because soon after having joked so flippantly about drum circles, the king of comedy was pleading for his life. Peruse the full catastrophe, which I predict will become a classic of the genre, in the “Week in Review” section.

I wrote to the author, asking if he had received complaints or had simply been impaled by a five-foot stinger of conscience but received no reply. Well, it was certainly the guy’s prerogative to disavow his former writing. But, if, as I suspect, someone put the bug in his ear, then we’ve entered the world of the referee.

What else can offended parties do besides berate people to follow the understood rules? Well, mock the opposing position, for example. They could smear their wit onto an op-ed. Almost anything, really, other than the usual eyebrows-raised indignation. Now, in this instance, the offended probably knew that if they tried to explain why including the words “drum circle” in a blitz dissolves the social compact, they might end up looking ridiculous, so they sensibly requested that the kid fall on his own sword. But wiser sorts should realize that impiety can ably flush out ridiculousness. Truly serious positions are defensible against mockery, after all; I might go so far as to say that the capacity to withstand mockery is a test of seriousness.

Of course, the following are good, and we should give them our blessing: politeness, decency, kindness, concern for others. But, can we not also say that the following are not only allowable but healthy and effective, especially for students learning to argue: the abilities and willingness to stand one’s ground, to tell and take a joke, to avoid cliché, to appreciate a good argument and a strong opponent, and so forth? Can’t we merge these lists? One doesn’t want to be a boor, but a wilted petunia neither.

Finally, internalizing some irony with regards to one’s own position can also help: consider it the mouth guard of verbal pugilism. You might lose the fight but rarely teeth. Anyway, when we discuss “harm” and “attack” with regards to debate, we are speaking figuratively. I mention this just because it seems to get lost very quickly. This week, of all weeks, we should know what real harm looks like.

Speak the speech, I pray you.

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