Breaking news to hashtag social media sensation to jam-packed Conn event – this seems to be the new trajectory that talks at Conn are catapulted into. I’m thinking Ferguson, events about race, Charlie Hebdo here. This is great. We are becoming more informed, more political, more in touch with life outside the bubble, they say.
I have questioned this perception in the past. Such events at Conn, all involving what are controversies out in the real world, mostly seem to be set up around a very broad and basic group consensus that sets the tone for the talk. This is how events about structural racism turn into events which only leaves students with a general feeling of “racism is bad” instead of the kind of analytical, dynamic story about the world as those of us in elite colleges are supposed to be able to tell.
What is turning divisive political issues from the real world into talks that everyone is supposed to leave with a feeling of camaraderie? Is it just our much acclaimed feel-good door-holdingness here on the hill? Or are these events mostly hot air cloaked as real world politics?
It is with this cynicism that I went to the enormously crowded Charlie Hebdo event, armed with a notebook and a pen but determined not to take notes, interested more in the meta-observations about the nature of the event than content. This was because I went expecting generality and seemingly obvious sentiments to drive the event, such as “we all agree this was a bad thing” and “freedom of speech is a good thing.” I was surprised.
The panel, featuring five professors, seemed to be divided into two camps of arguments. Professor Pessin from the Philosophy department and Professor Rose from the Government department constituted Camp Mainstream. This is the real world camp that denounces the incident as an ideologically driven terrorist attack. Things such as “tolerance, diversity and individualism are profoundly European ideas” were said with straight faces by members of this camp. Other fundamental ideas of Camp Mainstream included questions like, “is it possible to tolerate those who want to kill you?” and the emphasis on terrorism as something only non-state actors engage in.
I’d heard enough to be ardently wishing that the mainstream view would not once again pass unchallenged through the event. Would we once again stop at the consensus that “Islamic extremism is bad” instead of problematizing this assumption by looking at how Islamic extremism came to be or the specifics of it in France?
Fortunately, Professor Sufia Udin from the Religious Studies department and Professor Etoke from the French department, members of the panel, were also members of Camp Non-Mainstream. They espoused arguments that essentially contradicted almost all assumptions of the previous speakers about issues of French-Muslim identity and the boundaries of freedom of expression. Camp Non-Mainstream paid attention to structural factors that give rise to extremist violence, and connected the event to larger themes instead of individualizing it.
I was excited. There was a range of points of view expressed that reflected the world outside. The event was doing what these events were supposed to – getting people to figure out where they stood.
But there was still a certain muddiness to the event’s applicability to the real world debates. I realized that this was because neither camp seemed to acknowledge to itself being constructed in opposition to the other. The professors did not engage each others’ arguments and instead worked in circles to contradict. Even when they were directly disagreeing with the other camp, there was no explicit acknowledgement of it. Thus, polarized groups worked within the event without clear lines between the poles.
When I think about it, this seems characteristic of most discussions at Conn. We always start sentences with “yes, I agree, but…” instead of clearly stating our differences. The fear of offending, the fear of being too controversial, runs through life, academic and social, as a unifying thread. This means that our analytical minds are always constrained by the social necessity of sugarcoating and indirectness. Speaking certainly or with clarity about one’s position is almost a social rebellion.
It is obvious then that the conversations we have will be slowed down and tempered by this requirement of starting from scratch instead of working off of something that has been said. It is also clear that this requirement dictates what conversations are easier to have than others – talking about Palestine, for example, or about the US military-industrial complex as a force of terror also, is not a popular thing. How can it be, where a broad consensus is impossible to establish and where everything threatens to explode in the face of seeming neutrality?
I have experienced my share of sticky moments at Conn, and I cannot say that those have been fun. I understand the instinct to shield social spaces and conversations against violent splintering. But if we are truly on a quest to understand the world and to go beyond ourselves to figure out the way things are – if we are, in a word, political beings – this tiptoeing needs to stop. In addition to being a mechanism for defense against disagreement, social propriety also becomes a silencing tool. The minority opinion needs to be kept under wraps or it creates a mess of an event instead of a neatly packaged one with a finite end.
The Charlie Hebdo event was an outlier in its representation of different camps. It is scary to think about how I would have dealt with Camp Mainstream in the absence of professors legitimizing Camp Non-Mainstream. Would I have tried to disagree in the 3 minute Q&A time? Would I have looked like an ill-informed angry ethnic minority defending bloodshed? Fortunately, Conn’s bravery in bringing a polarized panel means I am spared from finding out. I think we can go one step further and open the doors to more uncomfortable, yet necessary, conversations by letting go of the fear of taking a real stand. •
