My Serve

First of all, you quote Mill out of context. In the letter to which you link, Mill argues that Christianity need not persecute heresy in order to prevail, since, as a “true doctrine,” it is destined to prevail over the falsehood of skepticism. But we know from Mill’s other writings that he did not consider Christianity to be a true doctrine, and fully expected Christianity to be replaced by a secular civil religion. In fact, when he writes in the letter you cite, “one of the strongest feelings in every uneducated mind is the appetite for wonder, the love of the marvellous. Witness the rapid progress of so many religions, which we now think so unutterably absurd that we wonder how any human being can ever have given credit to them. This passion is gratified in the most eminent degree by the Christian religion,” he is characterizing Christianity not as a true doctrine, but as the superstition of an “uneducated mind.” Certainly, Mill didn’t think that Christianity should be allowed to persecute unbelief, but that’s because he thought Christianity was wrong and a threat to intellectual freedom. “Liberty,” for Mill, worked in tandem with a system of social control to quash false opinion. Since this is a digression, I would refer you to Joseph Hamburger’s seminal book on the subject.

In any case, even the quotation from Mill you make, “doctrines which, if left to themselves, have no chance of prevailing, may be saved from oblivion by persecution,” implies that some doctrines deserve to be consigned to oblivion. Among these are the teachings of the Ku Klux Klan, most people would agree (except, perhaps, you, who is interested in some “grain of truth” you might find in them). Mill’s position, which you adopt, is that these doctrines would more quickly be defeated through toleration rather than persecution, and I would agree that that is sometimes the case. Often, persecuting some doctrine makes it more important or widely known that it would otherwise be. Yet this is manifestly not the case with the Ku Klux Klan or Tom Paulin. Students are not sitting around saying, “Gee, maybe whites really are the master race,” or “Suicide bombings are great! Jews do deserve to die.” All hosting such views at Harvard can do is give them an academic respectability they would not otherwise enjoy. And Mill, who would also count these teachings as “so unutterably absurd that we wonder how any human being can ever have given credit to them,” would agree that we should leave them where they belong: oblivion.

And this is, by the way, a question of academic standards. If I taught students that the moon is made of green cheese, I think you would agree that I should be fired from the astronomy department. Similarly, if I taught that American Jews living in Israel are Nazis, or that suicide bombings are justified and constructive, or, for that matter, that whites are the master race — views that are just as absurd, and just as wrong — I should not be teaching at a serious university. Calling my belief that the moon is made of green cheese “a viewpoint” does not make it any less false. Tom Paulin can rant about killing Jews to his lunatic friends, but it has no place at Harvard.