Over the last few days I have been inspired, and somewhat intimidated, by the discussions at the seminar on Leadership Challenges in Uncertain Times hosted by the wonderful Aspen Initiative UK. I am still trying to integrate what I heard and learned over the week, but one thought keeps coming back for me that I think might be worth sharing. We spoke a lot about some of the features of contemporary identity politics, and particularly the focus on speech acts and signals. Discomfort with attempts to police opinion are not restricted to conservatives, and Mark Lilla, for one, has articulated an anxiety that is widely shared, that the illiberalism of some expressions of these politics will be self-defeating and make it harder rather than easier to create solidarity and understanding.
Personally I have never run into anything more than what I thought were perfectly reasonable requests to be mindful of the variety of people in organisations I was running. To be honest I've always thought I've just been asked to be polite. However this is a real issue, and I have colleagues and people I admire, like Kathleen Stock, who have had a much rougher time and have legitimate grounds for complaint about how they have been treated. When push comes to shove I would stand up for the most extensive understanding of academic freedom. That cuts both ways though; I am always amused when some right-wing scholars demand some kind of special protection for their claim about compelling arguments that somehow aren't winning in open debate.
Coming at this issue through the gate of policing speech, policing the policing as it were, does not strike me as the most creative or interesting way to think about it. I'd like us to be mindful of the work that people involved in these issues of diversity and equality are doing and what motivates them. It may be a mystery to many people why trans issues, for instance, play such an important role in the political thinking of so many people. It may be even more challenging to see why trans issues might or can be aligned with work on migration or cultural difference. However the idea of intersectionality is the driver of much of the work, so such a lack of understanding is no warrant to reject or ignore that work and that thinking.
Somewhere at the heart of this work is a breathtakingly ambitious effort to articulate the conditions of global equality. People working in this mode make even people like Sam Moyn, who thinks human rights are not enough, look modest in their ambitions. They are trying to think and live through the conditions of possibility of democracy for the entire globe. The real risk takers even want to extend that imaginative inclusivity beyond our species and recognise the value and dignity of other beings. And these efforts are having effect, in cases such as the Whanganui River being recognised as a legal person. We live in a world of globalised trade, where attaching citizenship too firmly to nationality flies in the face of the reality of the patterns of movement of people and peoples. It is obvious that global action will be necessary to respond to climate change. So this egalitarianism may be ambitious and utopian, and undoubtedly it lands in odd ways, but it does seem to be posing the right question.
If we come at the phenomenon from this direction, it does not excuse bullying, but it rescues us from the performative contradiction of looking for ways to control the speech of those trying to control the speech of others. It is not surprising that the articulations of this egalitarian desire would be raw, overstated, and uncomfortable. It also helps to understand the attention paid to marginality, since the test of equality arises on the margins. It became clear too in the many discussions during the seminar, that this kind of ambition is really cognitively stressful and demands we be tolerant of ways of thinking that may seem to some of us to be fuzzy and lack evidence. This is stressful, but as one person put it, "it's your turn" on that one. The call to leadership then seems to be to accept the question, especially if one finds oneself at odds with efforts to narrow the space of acceptable speech. Liberal conservatism is too easy, there must be a joyful, robust vision of expansive democracy.
