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| Dante death mask |
Monsieur l’Abbé, I detest what you write, but I would
give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write -- Voltaire
The trouble with
bad manners, Bill Buckley used to say, is that they sometime lead to murder.
The late Charles Manson and his maenads, we can agree, had deplorable manners.
Anyone who has met
President of UConn Susan Herbst will tell you she has exquisite manners. And
the author of “Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics,”
also is an authority on political manners. Unfortunately, there are no
mandatory courses on good manners at UConn.
And so when Lucian
Wintrich, a provocative speaker invited by UConn’s College Republicans to give
a talk that nearly everyone on the left has deplored at length, attempted last November to deliver his address to university students, he was shouted down by
disrupters, and his speech was stolen by a professor attached to a different college.
Wintrich’s address had been successfully censored, and there was little
indication that those deploring the speaker as an intolerable incendiary, had
actually read his undelivered remarks, which later
were printed by Gateway Pundit sometime after the speaker had been
suppressed.
The
Courant reported at the time: “The incident brought a swift end to a speech marked by continuous
interruptions from the audience of 350 people, including chants of “Go home,
Nazi,” and shouts of outrage when he made certain statements, such as that the
country was ‘run by illegal-immigrant, tranny communists.’ That and other
inflammatory moments of his talk were meant to push boundaries and poke fun at
people who consider certain topics off-limits, Wintrich said. And the talk
overall was meant to end with a message of anti-racism.”
Wintrich did not
succeed in saying the unsayable. The thrust of his address was not very much
different than Voltaire’s stinging satires.
Some college
presidents who subscribe to Herbst’s view – “… it’s censorship that leads down
a slippery slope to authoritarianism and the crushing of freedom of
expression” -- have in the recent past paid lip service to the brave
declarations of Voltaire and John Milton, the author of the “Areopagitica,” a
defense of freedom of speech delivered to the English Parliament, subtitled,
“For the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing, To the Parlament of England."
Neither Voltaire, a
provocateur routed from country to country by proto-totalitarians, nor Milton
tempered their remarks when protesting the want of free speech. Here is Milton:
“This is true Liberty -- when free born men having to advise the public may
speak free; which he who can, and will, deserv's high praise; who neither can
nor will, may hold his peace. What can be juster in a State than this?” And
then again here -- and remember these were words, flaming oracles I should say,
addressed IN parliament TO parliament: “We can grow ignorant again,
brutish, formall, and slavish, as ye found us; but you then must first
become that which ye cannot be, oppressive, arbitrary, and tyrannous, as they
were from whom ye have free'd us. That our hearts are now more capacious,
our thoughts more erected to the search and expectation of greatest and
exactest things, is the issue of your owne vertu propagated in us; ye
cannot suppresse that unlesse ye reinforce an abrogated
and mercilesse law, that fathers may dispatch at will their
own children.”
The lesson we
should draw from Herbst’s defense of free speech is this: unless colleges that
have assented to a speaker are able to provide a sanctuary for free
speech, none are free to speak. The proto-totalitarians who shouted down
Wintrich have a firmer understanding than many college presidents of the
necessary connection between real safe spaces and Miltonian free speech.
Milton was a fierce
republican, but even he stumbled after Cromwell had dissolved Parliament.
Following Cromwell’s death, Milton returned to his ardent defense of republican
government. He twinkles today in the constellation of uncompromising
republicans such as Dante Alighieri, exiled for political reasons by his
beloved Florence. Both Milton and Dante shaped the language of their countries
through their pamphleteering and poetry. Even today, the purist Italian is
spoken in Florence, largely because Dante's "Divine Comedy" was
printed in the vernacular tongue of his day rather than Latin.
The questions
students should put to college administrators and their professors are
these: Right now, here where we stand, what do YOU stand for? Dante
was not permitted to return to Florence; he died in Ravenna, where his bones
still sweeten the earth. Voltaire was knocked about the world like a
shuttlecock. Milton’s politics influenced future generations, not his own.
In the “Paradiso,”
Dante looked back on his exile with a melancholy born of despair:
“You shall leave
everything you love most:
this is the arrow
that the bow of exile
shoots first. You
are to know the bitter taste
of others' bread,
how salty it is, and know
how hard a path it
is for one who goes
ascending and
descending others' stairs ...”
These were large-minded
men who suffered for the truth. And you professor, if you do not defend the
liberty to profess, what do you profess, and is it worth the price of admission
to your university?
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